Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses
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ItemAn exclusive school and an inclusive rule: an Indian elite school's mediations of an equity mandate( 2023-06)This study investigated the ways in which social justice is understood and enacted at an elite school in India subsequent to the implementation of national legislation intended to increase equity and social reform through education. It focuses on Ripon College, a historically elite, independent school, and Section 12(1)(c) of India’s Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (RTE). This provision requires private schools to allocate 25% of their entry-level enrolment places to disadvantaged children and educate them, fee-free, until they are 14 years old. As an elite school is likely to be profoundly affected by such an equity agenda, a rich research opportunity presented. The research literature revealed considerable debate over the efficacy of the provision and its impact on the education system. But it also showed a scarcity of scholarly work on the reception of this legislation at elite schools. Hence, I embarked on a study of the ways in which Ripon College received and rearticulated this equity provision. The research design incorporated two waves of immersive fieldwork, two years apart, analysis of select historical documents relating to education in India and an archived data set drawn from an earlier study of Ripon during the RTE’s initial years (but which focused on other matters) on which I worked. Insights from the fieldwork, and the provision itself, pointed me toward Jacques Derrida’s conceptualisation of hospitality and Iris Marion Young’s theories of responsibility for social in/justice. Young’s and Derrida’s concepts assisted me in understanding the meaning and minutiae of enactments of in/hospitality at this elite school and in seeing how they manifested in various ways and for various purposes. Overall, I argue there is a stubborn asynchrony between the provision’s social reform agenda and this elite school’s enduring commitment to maintaining injustice. In support of this argument, the study showed: how constructions of equity and social justice strategies in education in India have changed with changing historical times; that Section 12(1)(c) can be understood as a mechanism aimed towards social justice at both individual and structural levels; that Ripon’s patterns of exclusivity are so ingrained in the school’s culture that they effectively obstruct the provision’s social justice aims; that the responsibility to address social in/justice was, repeatedly, overtly and covertly rejected at Ripon College; and that the concepts of hospitality and responsibility, together, offer powerful conceptual resources for investigating elite schooling and equity agendas. This study contributes new insights and perspectives to the fields of both elite schooling, and equity policy studies. In particular,it extends scholarship on elite schools and equity, and on elite schools in the Global South. It offers a close examination of how policy processes are enacted, managed and mediated in a specific schooling context, in interaction with the weight of their historical and contemporary circumstances. Finally, the study provides new analytic resources which can facilitate social justice analyses in these and other fields, and it outlines some implications of its contributions for future research in the sociology of education.
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ItemEvolution and resilience of academics in Higher Education ecosystems in Australia( 2023-05)For several decades, higher education has been facing rapid change and successive challenges. This is in part due to global and Australian economic trends which are also experiencing accelerating change and challenges from social-cultural, technological, geopolitical tensions and aggression, climate and environmental factors and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Higher education is seen as key in finding solutions to this diverse array of challenges. First, through creating employable, adaptable, and entrepreneurial graduates who become a key part of the future workforce with the promise to create a more equitable society. Second, through research which produces knowledge to provide the basis for improvements and even solutions to global and Australian challenges. Questions, however, have been raised this century about the extent to which higher education can continue to deliver on the promise of quality outcomes from education and research in the current strained environment and inflexible academic workforce. Many posit for higher education to succeed alternative academic workforce models and changes to the academic role will need to be made. Such alternative workforce models include increased diversity of professional staff to better match activities and differentiation of academic roles which are better fit for purpose in either education or research, the former with an emphasis on teaching and the latter including greater emphasis on academics with entrepreneurial and commercialisation skills. In many higher education institutions, it is now common to have academic roles differentiating into three distinct categories; teaching or education-focused, teaching and research integration (also known as the 40:40:20 traditional academic role) and research focused with education-focused roles growing most rapidly. This growth has not necessarily happened in a systematic and coherent manner. Instead change to academic roles can be seen as largely unplanned local decisions caused by institutional pressures and system wide drivers. Expectations are that these roles will deliver on the promise of educational quality and the student experience and enable higher education to serve communities more ably, but this is not necessarily a given. There are many unknowns about the long-term impact of differentiated academic roles, especially those teaching and education-focused academic roles where disciplinary research has been removed. The theoretical framework of resilience, adaptive capacity and cycles and psychological development and self-determination were powerful heuristics to investigate the responses of academics to these roles. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data collected through analysis and interviews with academics mostly in science, three main findings emerged. First, teaching and education-focused roles have been increasing most rapidly. Second, academics in these roles experienced a range of consequences as a result of moving from disciplinary research to teaching. Third, while all academics undergo adaptive cycles in response to stress, education-focused academics and women were perhaps most vulnerable to stress and loss from the ecosystem, even after their heroic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While theory predicts greater academic role diversity will increase resilience and adaptive capacity, this is not necessarily a given without changes to the higher education ecosystem in Australia in which academics operate.
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ItemThe effects of demographic and dispositional traits on the homework practices of Australian secondary school students and teachers( 2023-01)A wide body of research has identified a range of benefits of homework for secondary school students, including improved achievement outcomes, development of metacognitive processes, and enhanced involvement of parents and carers with their children’s learning. However, research has also identified demographic differences in homework practices and has found that demographic variables moderate relationships between homework and achievement. This thesis examines demographic patterns in Australian students’ homework behaviour and affective dispositions towards homework and learning. Interactions between demography, student attitudes and teachers’ homework allocation practices are also examined with the aim of informing equitable and effective homework policies and practices. Study 1 published in the proceedings of the 2016 Australian Association for Research in Education’s (AARE) Annual Conference, explores demographic patterns in the homework practices of Australian secondary school students. It was found that student gender, location, school type, prior grade repetition, language background, and measures of socioeconomic status varied with reported time spent on homework by Australian 15-year-olds surveyed by PISA in 2012. Study 2, published in the Australian Journal of Education in 2021, examines relationships between Australian secondary school teachers’ homework allocation practices and student demography, dispositions, and teacher expectations. The results for Study 2 showed that the demographic profiles of classrooms affected teachers’ homework allocation practices although they were mediated by teachers’ assessments (or expectations) of their students’ capacities and by their students’ assessments of their own levels of competency and motivation. By drawing connections between the work of Bourdieu, and Eccles and Wigfield, homework is situated within a theoretical framework that attempts to account for the relationships between the dispositions and practices of individual and collective educational actors (students, teachers, schools and systems), and the economic, social and cultural environments in which they operate. Given that it was found that measures of individual and aggregated dispositions of students mediated the relationship between demographic factors and the homework practices of students and teachers, interventions and strategies suggested by the expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation have the potential to minimise relationships between demography and homework practices. However, lower levels of homework support, on average, from low socioeconomic status families will require a range of other supports from schools to ensure that the benefits of homework are more equitably distributed.
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Item(Dis)engagement in the middle: A genealogy of engagement, school, and Australian young people in contemporary times( 2023-03)This thesis is a genealogical study of the influential concept of student engagement. The study aims to understand how engagement has come to hold status as a solution to a range of educational and social problems associated with young people and the middle years (Years 4–10) of schooling in contemporary times (1990–2020). In much of the existing scholarly literature, engagement is used to read, measure, and ameliorate problems associated with young people and schools. In contrast, this thesis makes the role of engagement the object of study. Putting the Foucauldian tool of the dispositif to work and focussing on educational initiatives in Victoria, Australia, the thesis builds a theoretical and empirical analysis of engagement’s form and functions in policy, public, and practitioner spaces. This is achieved through three genealogical investigations into engagement: first, as an organiser of school populations via school (dis)engagement policy; next, as a solution for problematic young people in public discussion; and then, as a driver of pedagogical reform in professional development material aimed at a practitioner audience. The socio-historical contributions pertain to the character of the relationship between engagement, young people, and school. The thesis argues that this relationship has been shaped by a longstanding view of schools and young people as preparatory grounds for instrumentally conceived futures. The study shows how this relationship is inflected by the particularities of the present and the recent past, and registers the ways in which young people and schools are tasked with solving current and anticipated problems, by way of engagement. Conceptually, the thesis contributes a creative and historically precise analysis of engagement as in/commensurable; that is, a concept with recognisably familiar but varying forms, impulses, functions, and uneven effects. Methodologically, the study shows how a genealogical approach—often notoriously elusive as a method—can be operationalised in practical and detailed ways to illuminate what engagement ‘is’, how it ‘works’, and what it ‘does’. Overall, the thesis contributes new insights into the aspirations associated with engagement and new knowledge of how the concept functions to shape and organise young people in current times.
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ItemThe Australian Lexicon: Insights into the Nature of the Professional Vocabulary Employed by Australian Middle School Mathematics Teachers( 2023-04)Teachers acquire a professional vocabulary related to the instructional orchestration of activities that enhance student understanding. The English-language professional lexicon available to teaching communities in Australia has been contrasted less favourably with pedagogical naming systems in other countries. This absence of a documented, well-articulated grammar of practice has implications for the preparation of the teaching profession. Notwithstanding, teachers do talk about their practice and this thesis reports the documentation and analysis of the professional language in current use by teachers of mathematics in Australia (the Australian Lexicon) and its comparison with lexicons from other countries. The Australian Lexicon, consisting of sixty-one terms operationalised with descriptions and classroom examples, represents the professional vocabulary employed by Australian middle school mathematics teachers to describe classroom phenomena. A negotiative methodology, informed by ethnographic research, was employed to identify, develop, refine, and validate the lexicon as one reasonable representation of the vocabulary used by mathematics teachers to describe the events, actions, and interactions of the classroom. It was found that the terms of the Australian Lexicon are characterised by their ‘generic nature’. The terms are mostly expressed as gerunds and participles; name general pedagogical practices; identify more classroom activities involving teacher actions than student actions; and, almost all terms, are highly familiar to teachers. In comparison with other national teacher lexicons the Australian Lexicon has generally fewer mathematical terms. However, most of the mathematical terms in lexicons from other countries are familiar to Australian mathematics teachers. Akin to a cultural artefact of the community of Australian middle school mathematics teachers, this Australian Lexicon, now documented, may prove useful as a resource for teachers, teacher educators and policy makers. It could support the provision of learning opportunities for novices and the promotion of reflective practice amongst teachers. Such experiences and discussions should inform efforts to better equip contemporary mathematics teachers with an increasingly sophisticated lexicon to shape their professional practice.
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ItemTeacher Becoming: Investigating the role of personal core values in the emerging professional identities of preservice primary teachers( 2023)This thesis examines the role that personal core values may have in primary preservice teachers’ professional identity emergence, through their articulation and exploration in a series of reflective, conversational workshops. Debate about how ITE can most effectively provide programs to ensure the graduation of quality teachers, comprehensively prepared to have positive impact on students in today’s primary classrooms, is an ongoing, and highly contested tension-filled space. The mandated requirement for increased emphasis on building curriculum content knowledge—the ‘what’—and pedagogical acuity—the ‘how’—has seen the sidelining of focus on the ‘who’—the identity of the preservice teacher. This is despite increased research indicating the importance of building a congruent professional identity, as a teacher entering the profession. Graduate teachers’ coherent sense of professional identity has been linked with self-efficacy, has been shown to affect professional wellbeing and is a factor in teachers’ decisions to stay in the profession. The purpose of this qualitative study was therefore to explore ways to give direct attention to preservice teachers’ professional identity emergence before graduation through an exploration of their personal core values, considering the role they may play in supporting this development. This three-month long ethnographic, multiple case study project conducted a series of four sequential workshops of facilitated dialogues amongst peers, named the ‘Values in Emerging Teacher Identity’ Conversations (VETIC) program. The recruited participants were at the beginning of their second year of a two-year Master of Teaching program. Three different groups participated, with two primary preservice teachers in each group: six participants in total. The workshop conversations explored participants’ personal values data, supported and facilitated using a variety of ongoing, active metaphors and Appreciative Mentoring. Two key questions were explored: What happens to a preservice teacher’s emerging sense of professional identity when they engage with their personal core values within a program of intentional conversation? How useful is the workshop approach in deepening an understanding of preservice teacher professional identity formation? A Bakhtinian dialogic lens was used for the audio and written data analysis, combined with consideration of the themes generated from the core values data and examined for the specific unfolding of themes of identity emergence through professional discourse. The findings showed that the construction of a discrete space for transformative identity work separate from other curricula supported professional identity emergence. The workshop process revealed important features of the specific professional natures and capacities of these preservice teachers’ identities before they had fully emerged. Findings also indicated that articulation, exploration, and expression of core values has an important role in the activation of professional agency for preservice teachers. These findings usefully contribute to the ongoing discourse about future ITE program design, including advocating for the creation of a different ‘third space’ in ITE, adjacent to coursework and placement, and for finetuning the approach to preservice teacher mentoring. Supporting preservice teachers to teach in classrooms using their unique capacities and underpinned by their valued priorities is another step towards more effectively facilitating the graduation and then employment, of quality teachers.
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ItemRe-engineering education in the shadow of the future: Examining national policy frameworks in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore( 2022)Abstract As a comparative policy study, the thesis explores how practices in education policy making in Australia, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ((HKSAR) – referred to throughout the thesis as Hong Kong) and Singapore, three advanced regional economies, work to re-engineer education in the shadow of the future. A policy sociology approach is taken to examine how education policy is used discursively and influenced by power, regimes of truth, acts of governmentality and biopolitics to administer and shape individuals and societies. Additionally, the thesis investigates the ways in which policy making for education is influenced by a country’s culture and history, globalisation, economic needs, and neoliberal agendas in order to construct the contributing subject-citizen. The sites chosen for analysis, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, were part of a broader study of education landscapes in the Asia Pacific region in a global childhood’s project (see Lee et al., 2023; Yelland et al., 2020). All three sites, subject to regional and global flows, have undertaken schooling reform in order to address wider societal and political needs. Moreover, the improvement and restructuring of schooling in the three sites has been in response to notions of crises or radically shifting times, and these presses have been used as an opportunity for policy reform. The thesis begins with an interrogation of the key policy documents, political speeches and authoritative statements that provided explicit direction to the education sector and launched education policy reform in the three locations. The analysis of policy texts also includes insights from social semiotics as education policy makers around the world increasingly employ a range of modalities and make use of options for dynamic and visually appealing presentation of information and ideas to represent education and its attendant goals. Additionally, the thesis examines the responses of the Singaporean and Australian media to the 2018 PISA results, along with the commentary by policy makers that made its way into newspaper articles and discourse. Finally, the thesis investigates the ways in which policy makers and politicians used the COVID 19 pandemic crisis as an opportunity to reinforce political agendas and to justify new technologies of governance. In particular, the thesis provides new insights into the ways in which policy making functions in the service of broader goals that idealise learner-citizens in ways that align with policy agendas, cultural values and the best interest of national futures to ensure the current and future economy is perpetuated and protected. The three key findings of the thesis are: a) the policies in all three locations reflect the national imaginaries of what the youngest citizens should look like including their capacities, attitudes, beliefs, and capabilities, b) education policy in the high performing education systems of Hong Kong and Singapore have shifted towards constructing more multidimensional learner-citizens than previous policy iterations have allowed for, and c) differently configured education systems in the Asia Pacific region discursively employed policy rhetoric to rationalise and justify national reform agendas with varying levels of success. The findings of this work underscore that reform tacitly reiterates ideological narratives concerned with education’s purposes and potential to primarily produce workers with the skills needed for global economic success and the pursuit of nationalist agendas. However, it is recommended that these ideological narratives must be challenged, and that policy makers should instead look to the intrinsic purposes of education and the opportunity education offers for genuine transformation. Indeed, returning to Foucault’s (1980) theorisations of power and its capillary nature, the prospect for citizens to collectively reject their subject positions and push back on the neoliberal discourses that dominate is entirely possible.
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ItemTowards a Continuing Professional Development Framework for English-as-a-Foreign-Language Lecturers in Vietnam( 2022)This study aims to explore key elements of a continuing professional development (CPD) framework for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) lecturers in Vietnam to support professional identity development for teaching with technology. Such a framework is of significance since previous research indicates that CPD for EFL lecturers in Vietnam has not sufficiently supported lecturers in terms of the competencies required to teach with technology, nor has it supported the development of self, e.g., motivation for professional practice. The literature reviewed here reveals several dimensions of this problem, including (1) the conceptualisation of CPD as a ‘top-down’ approach in Vietnam, (2) the lack of a strong theoretical base to guide CPD regarding teaching with technology, (3) a limited implementation of CPD to support EFL lecturers to effectively teach with technology, and (4) CPD as an under- researched area to guide policy and practice in Vietnamese higher education (VHE). The CPD framework developed here is grounded in Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and the Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework and was used as a conceptual framework to guide the investigation of which elements are perceived to be important in a CPD framework for EFL lecturers in Vietnam. An exploratory sequential mixed methods design was used with two phases of data collection. In the first phase, a focus group was conducted with nine Vietnamese EFL experts in February 2018, to explore their perceptions of the key elements of the CPD framework to support EFL lecturers in Vietnam to effectively teach with technology while also developing other professional qualities. In the second phase, an online survey was administrated to EFL lecturers across Vietnam (n = 434) during October – November 2018 to examine their perceptions of how the elements are evident in their current teaching practice and CPD experiences. Four key findings emerging from the focus group and survey data helped to refine the final CPD framework. First, TPACK competence was considered the most important element of the CPD framework. It is conceptualised in VHE as three competence constructs: non- technological competence (referring to EFL lecturers’ competence in applying CK, PK, and PCK in teaching practice), Simple technological competence (referring to EFL lecturers’ competence in using TK), and Complex technological competence (referring to EFL lecturers’ competence in adopting complex TPK, TCK, and TPACK in their teaching practice). Second, autonomy and relatedness were perceived as additional important elements of the CPD framework, but less so than competence. Autonomy is defined as having (1) freedom and choice in teaching practice; (2) free choice to self-direct professional learning, and to choose what CPD activities will meet needs; (3) confidence to make decisions; and (4) support in terms of guidance and resources to make decisions. Relatedness is conceptualised in the VHE context as (1) having trust and respect from others (e.g., colleagues, students, leaders, the higher education system); (2) being connected to and having good relationships with people at work; and (3) having a sense of belonging to an institution or a community of practice with colleagues who share a profession. Third, context was considered an important overarching element in the CPD framework that impacted EFL lecturers’ CPD. It includes the external context in which the EFL lecturers work (e.g., at a macro, meso, and micro level), and internal context (e.g., lecturers’ motivation, teaching experience, expertise, and qualifications). Finally, statistical tests showed positive correlations between perceived competence, autonomy, and relatedness in both Vietnamese EFL lecturers’ teaching practice and CPD needs. The relationship between perceived autonomy and relatedness is the strongest, followed by perceived competence and autonomy, then perceived competence and relatedness. The proposed CPD framework for EFL lecturers in Vietnam, therefore, includes the following four elements: TPACK competence, autonomy, relatedness, and context (internal and external) as an overarching element. The three elements of competence, autonomy, and relatedness are inter-related. The study makes theoretical, practical, and methodological contributions to the field of CPD. Theoretically, it adds a new perspective to the literature by exploring CPD in VHE through the combined lens of SDT and TPACK, viewing CPD as the process of professional becoming in TPACK competence, autonomy, and relatedness, within the influence of context. It also confirms the relevance of the use of SDT and TPACK in an Eastern context, offering new insights from a Vietnamese case to enrich the SDT and TPACK literature, respectively. Practically, the proposed CPD framework could provide guidance for different CPD stakeholders (e.g., EFL lecturers, CPD program designers, policy makers, and higher education leaders) in developing lecturer TPACK competence, autonomy, and relatedness in CPD. Methodologically, the study develops a survey instrument that could be used in similar settings to explore lecturers’ TPACK competence, autonomy, and relatedness in their teaching practice and CPD. It also contributes to the CPD literature with the findings of a large-scale study that considers attributes other than competencies in CPD for EFL lecturers in Vietnam.
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ItemEffectiveness of computer-assisted instruction to teach vocabulary to students with mild Intellectual Disability( 2022)Students with mild Intellectual Disability (ID) may have significant vocabulary knowledge gaps as compared to typically developing students because of limitations in their phonological loop, the part of working memory that processes language. This limits their academic growth and participation in employment and society post-school. This dissertation investigates the effectiveness of delivering a rich vocabulary intervention consisting of association, comprehension, and generation tasks based on Stahl’s Depth of Processing model delivered via a web-based Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) system designed using Mayer’s Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. The original contribution to knowledge is that students with mild ID can make long-term vocabulary knowledge gains through a rich vocabulary intervention that manages cognitive load and delivered through CAI. A Design-Based Research methodology was used to test and refine an intervention implemented at a special school for students with mild ID in Victoria, Australia. A mixed methods approach captured quantitative knowledge gains from before and after the intervention and qualitative data in the form of teacher interviews, student focus groups, and observation notes. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 compared a rich vocabulary intervention design delivered using CAI versus traditional instruction. Study 2 was designed based on feedback from Study 1 and delivered the rich vocabulary intervention via CAI compared to a blended model of instruction. In the blended model association and comprehension tasks were delivered via CAI and generation tasks were delivered via traditional instruction. This thesis demonstrates that students with a mild ID can learn new vocabulary through a rich and robust intervention that includes deep-thinking tasks delivered via a computer and, importantly, that they can retain new knowledge five months later. Despite the purported benefits of multimedia’s moving images, audio, and interactive games, the intervention design used in this thesis was effective in CAI, traditional, and blended instruction modes. Additionally, qualitative data from teachers and students found positive responses to the interventions. Students particularly responded positively to entertaining animated characters and the natural-sounding voices used in story-telling and definitional videos. Teachers' responses suggest that they should design their own rich and robust vocabulary interventions considerate of cognitive load as they are in the best position to know the unique needs and existing knowledge of their students. As a result of this research, teachers should be encouraged to use more imagery and story context in their vocabulary instruction that challenges students to actively think about the target words, associations, contexts, and how they relate to existing knowledge. Teachers should also incorporate many generation tasks such as semantic mapping, semantic feature analysis, and drawing into their instruction as this research found a positive relationship between the number of these types of tasks and word knowledge gains. Researchers should continue this area of research with larger groups of students with mild ID, as opposed to case study research. The Word Associates Format test should also be studied further as the design used in this study was modified slightly from Read’s original format. Finally, this thesis encourages other researcher-practitioners to study vulnerable populations in authentic environments in order to reduce gaps between them and typically developing children.
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ItemExamining Teacher Knowledge, Beliefs and Practice of Geography Inquiry in Australian Secondary Schools( 2022)Despite an international turn towards using inquiry as a core approach for teaching and learning in school geography, there is limited understanding of how jurisdictions represent knowledge and pedagogy in the intended geography curricula, and what teachers what teachers in these jurisdictions know and believe about geography inquiry and how they actually enact it. This study set out to address these research gaps on teaching geography through inquiry and to explore the intersections between inquiry and subject knowledge in the intended and enacted geography curricula. Taking Victoria one of the most populous states of Australia as a case, the central research question was “What are the knowledge, beliefs and practice of geography inquiry amongst secondary teachers in Victoria?” Employing mixed methods research, the study comprised three phases of investigation. The first phase made use of document analysis to compare secondary geography curriculum documents from six international jurisdictions including Australia. This global context provided the backdrop for understanding the secondary geography curriculum documents from Victoria. The second phase surveyed the state’s secondary teachers about their beliefs, knowledge and practice of teaching geography through inquiry. The third phase employed case studies research exploring in-depth the practice of three teachers in three different school settings in metropolitan Melbourne. An extensive literature review led to the development of an original analytical framework which guided the analyses of the data. In the final discussion, the analyses from all three phases are considered together with the goal of refining and extending existing theory. Overall, this study’s findings suggest that the knowledge for teaching geography through inquiry is a dynamic collection of rich and situated knowledge constructed through experiences and social interactions in and with practice. At the same time, teachers’ beliefs are deeply intertwined in these experiences and interactions. Powerful professional knowledge for teaching geography through inquiry therefore is generated in and through teachers’ curriculum-making of high epistemic-quality geography inquiry lessons. As a contribution to the powerful knowledge debate, this study argues that the nature of knowledge in geography is such that geography inquiry is key to experiencing and developing powerful knowledge in geography. Additionally this study argues that everyday knowledge contributes to the construction of new specialised knowledge in geography. Powerful geography inquiry teaching practices that enable students to make epistemic gains during inquiry learning therefore include maintaining a stance that values and builds on students’ everyday knowledge, providing opportunities for all students for epistemic access, activating students’ commitment towards and effort in assuming epistemic agency, and enabling students to make epistemic ascent through purposeful use of dialogue and questions. This study concludes by proposing a model for ‘enacting powerful teaching of geography through inquiry’ which both augments concepts of pedagogical content knowledge and incorporates concepts of powerful knowledge and knowing.