Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemUnravelling management practices in vocational education and training : identity at the frontline(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemFactors influencing the vocational decision making of high-ability adolescent girls( 2003-06)The current study is the first of its kind in Australia. It is breaking new ground therefore and is exploratory in nature. Attention is focused on the variables influencing the vocational decision-making of highly-able adolescent girls in Victoria, Australia. This is a complex study and the design incorporates both quantitative and qualitative data collection spanning a six year period. The importance of this study lies in the of research strategy of identifying and examining different educational settings and application of the findings from the first two studies (n=112) to a very specific educational setting in Study Three (n=14). The external socializers of family, friends and the media as well as the internal dimensions of self-esteem, aspirations and interest have been investigated systematically through three interrelated but independent studies. A combination of methodologies has been employed to identify those variables that might, over time, influence the vocational decisions of these young women. It is an accumulation of the young women’s perceptions and self-report using questionnaires, formal inventories and interviews. The data collection was progressive and the information gathering procedures included inventories of self-esteem and vocational preference, questionnaires completed by the subjects, interviews as well as anecdotal comments made by the students. Overall the analysis in this study depended on an interpretation of aggregated data employing simple frequency counts, cross tabulations and t-tests which described observations, explored relationships and identified differences between the two groups, high-ability and control, on the variables selected. A matrix enabled a triangulation of the data, both quantitative and qualitative. The data were coded to determine constant themes and to identify important influences and trends across a time frame. Different cases were compared and patterns which emerged were then analysed. In Study One the high-ability cohort differentiated from the controls in three major areas. These were in their aspirations, self-esteem and the relative influences of parents, especially father. Although the high-ability girls in Study Two had made vocational choices commensurate with their interests identified in the VPI these choices were by no means stable over the six-year period. Both the home and school environment were found to have impacted on these collective factors as they modified and developed vocational interest. In Study Three the findings of the earlier studies were applied to a very specific cohort with important differences identified in the areas of self-esteem and subject choice. The environmental contexts of home and school again proved to be salient. The dissimilar contextual experiences of the high-ability cohort were found to impact on their vocational choices and their subsequent career trajectories in a different way to that of the non-gifted schoolgirl. Based on this study, a model of vocational choice informed by the findings has been proposed.
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ItemSocial justice and rural education in Australia( 2009)This thesis is an exploratory study of what social justice means to rural school participants within their school contexts. While social justice is usually invoked as an explicit concept, research has rarely looked at how rural school participants construct and make meaning of it. Without this understanding, policy makers, educators and researchers alike risk continuing to adopt an insufficient or limited model of social justice, a one-size fits all approach to issues of social inequality. Moreover, exploring the subjective element of social justice can make an important contribution to understanding how social injustices are experienced, tolerated and perpetuated in disadvantaged settings. This is a qualitative study based on focus group and semi-structured interviews with rural school participants - students, teachers, principals and parents - in two government schools in rural Victoria, and documents (mostly school reports and community newsletters). In this thesis I apply three dimensions of social justice to rural education. The dimensions in which I am interested are distributive justice (e.g. the distribution of resources), associational justice (e.g. participation in policy-making and decision-making), and recognitional justice (e.g. recognition of different social groups and individuals in schools). My theoretical framework draws on the work of political theorist Iris Marion Young. Like Young, I search for a position that offers a plural model of social justice — one that overcomes the shortfalls of the liberal-egalitarian model that equates social justice solely with distributive justice. The concepts of space and time play an important role in this thesis. I argue that structuring social justice in space and time provides a more nuanced understanding of the context for rural school participants' responses. In the institutionalised space and time of rural schooling –the present– the participants favoured the dimension of distributive justice, expressed as equality of opportunity or access to resources. In considering postschool options, the scenario and expression of social justice changes within a context of greater uncertainty. Young people and adult members of the communities are aware of the need for youth to migrate to gain further and higher qualifications to gain access to meaningful employment opportunities. In the scenario of youth out-migration to metropolitan and regional centres, my participants hold closely to notions of self-reliance, hard-work and seizing opportunities to confront a future of uncertainty. I argue that these individualised notions over-determine their agency to dictate their own future overlooking structural barriers, inadvertently making participants themselves solely responsible for their successes and failures. Moreover, the prevalent principle of social justice is desert, where the concept of merit justifies unequal outcomes, creating a danger of a normalisation of inequalities in society. Further to these limited conceptualisations of social justice, I look for discourses and experiences of plural social justice and social change in the rural schools. That is, I look for possibilities of hope and social change. Some teachers mediate it through the relational process of teaching and learning; focusing on social inclusion by recognising and giving a voice to all students, including those that did not fit within the mainstream school and community population. These examples demonstrated how rural school participants can be agents of social change. This possibility of becoming agents of social change, I claim, can only be sustained if we adopt a plural framework of social justice, one that gives the actor resources, recognition of his/her condition and spaces of participation. This thesis argues that a good quality of education that contributes to redress issues of social injustice in society needs a better and greater distribution of resources but it also fundamentally requires an understanding of issues of recognition and participation in areas of schooling, such as policy-making, curriculum issues and teachers' professional needs.
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ItemJourneys of adaptation of Chinese and Vietnamese international students to academic writing practices in higher education( 2007)The study reported in this thesis explores how Chinese and Vietnamese international students exercise personal agency and mediate their academic writing to adapt to disciplinary practices at an Australian university. It also examines academics' attitudes toward student writing. The study employs a trans-disciplinary framework for interpreting student writing practices and lecturers' views within the institutional structure. This framework has been developed by infusing a modified version of Lillis' heuristic for exploring students' meaning making in higher education with positioning theory. The study documents the complexities and multi-layered nature of the adaptation processes that the students go through in their attempts to mediate their academic writing. A prominent finding of the study indicates the emergence of three main patterns of adaptation, committed adaptation, surface adaptation and hybrid adaptation, that the students employ to gain access to their disciplinary writing practices. The students' process of adaptation arises from their intrinsic motivations to be successful in their courses and to participate in their disciplinary community. However, where they differ is in their internal struggle related to what they really value amongst the possible disciplinary writing requirements they adopt in constructing their texts. The findings of the study show that the students' journeys of adaptation appear to be much more complex than what is often described in the current literature as being largely related to language and cultural factors. The analysis or the students' practices shows that they exercise personal agency by drawing on various strategies to facilitate their understandings of disciplinary expectations. In particular, the students have transformed their own practices through seeking ways to contact their lecturers to deepen their understandings of the disciplinary expectations, ask for feedback on draft versions of writing assignments and go through the redrafting process. The students are quite successful in using different ways to increase their understandings of the disciplinary expectations and even find the process rewarding. This shows that contrary to popular belief, international students in this study are able to demonstrate initiative and problem-solving skills. They actively exercise their own power as students, which allows them to participate in their disciplinary written discourse. The findings also indicate that what is of paramount importance to students' success is the interaction and dialogues they establish with their lecturers. The students' varying practices in spelling out what is expected of them establish a case for the importance of individual factors of each student and that success or failure is likely to relate to the possession of certain dispositions, regardless of one's ethnic background. The positioning analysis of the four lecturers involved in the study shows that they appear to be aware of the needs of international students and are determined to accommodate them in many ways. There are however a number of mismatches in the display of disciplinary knowledge among the academics themselves and between the academics and the students. Yet, in the relevant literature, what challenges international students is often attributed to such factors as English language, study skills and cultural adaptation, which arise from international students themselves. The study reported in this thesis reveals that the inconsistency and subtlety of the lecturers' explanations of the academic expectations makes it more challenging for international students to make sense of what is required of them in specific disciplines. Even though the lecturers attempt to find ways to facilitate students' understandings of the conventions, there is little mutual transformation occurring in terms of negotiating different ways of constructing knowledge. The findings of the study give insights into ways that a dialogical pedagogic model for mutual adaptation can be developed between international students and academics rather than the onus being on exclusive adaptation from the students. The model offers concrete steps towards developing mutual relationships and changes of international students and staff to each other within the overarching institutional realities of the university. Such a dialogical model is put forward as a tool to enhance the education of international students in this increasingly internationalized environment.
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ItemExpeditions, travels and journeys: reconceptualising teaching and learning about indigenous Australians in the early childhood curriculum( 2004)This thesis aimed to explore the terrain of early childhood educator's inclusion of Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures within their curriculum practice. Within this it was anticipated that these explorations would draw from early childhood reconceptualist literature to explore and trouble understandings of curriculum theory and practice. It was also anticipated that my research companions and I would use our beginning understandings of postcolonial theory to theorise, explore and disrupt our constructions and understandings of Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures that were based on the colonial understandings and discourse circulating within Australia and our local communities and that influenced our curriculum practices. In order to explore and disrupt this curriculum practice, my research companions and I set off on an action research journey. We travelled and journeyed within monthly meetings over one year as we located and explored curriculum practice. Action research provided the maps for this journey as we attempted to explore the curricula practices of my companions and locate and explore the issues and challenges that arose as they attempted to disrupt this practice and find reconceptualised ways towards inclusion of Indigenous peoples and cultures. Throughout this journey however, while curriculum practice was located and explored and changes to this practice occurred at superficial levels, discussions around how the reconceptualising of this practice was limited and constrained by the influences of colonial discourse upon our personal understandings of Indigenous peoples and cultures was avoided. As I travelled back into the research meetings after a prolonged absence from the research journey, I became more aware of the silences that existed within our travels that enabled us to resist change in our practices around inclusion of Indigenous peoples and cultures in ways that opened spaces for this inclusion in equitable and respectful ways. I journeyed again through postcolonial theory and while this provided me with important and useful waymarks in which to locate and understand the research travels and moments within it, this theory did not provide me with pathways to explore the resistances. Early childhood reconceptualist literature also provided and guided my reflections on curricula practice in important ways, however, similar to my struggles with postcolonial theory, did not provide for waymarks to understand and locate the silences within the research travelling group. Silences that ensured discussion of personal understandings of Indigenous people and how these understandings were constructed was avoided. Within my searching of alternate theories and ways of exploring the terrain of this research journey, I stumbled across whiteness theories and found that the silences in the research could be located, positioned and explored through and within these theories and understandings. The thesis journey then followed white pathways that led into explorations of whiteness within the research and made it possible to see how both the research companions and myself had constructed ourselves, Indigenous Australian peoples and curricula theory and practice through and within these white understandings. As I located and explored my experiences through narrative and mapped and traced whiteness within the research travels and journeys, it became possible to view how strategies of whiteness operated to discourage the explorations and locating of our personal within our professional understandings. Given this, the possibilities for shifts in personal understandings, and as a consequence, professional and curricula practice, were limited and constrained within this journey into reconceptualising Indigenous inclusion in early childhood curriculum. The journeying within this thesis into reconceptualising early childhood curriculum around Indigenous inclusion and the drawing from both postcolonial and whiteness theories, however, has resulted in more complex understandings of how this work could take place. Mapping postcolonial viewpoints and waymarks and tracing white viewpoints and waymarks within these can allow early childhood researchers and educators to view how these discourses intersect and overlap to silence Indigenous Australian peoples and cultures as well as work to avoid and limit discussion and awareness within white communities about the existence of prejudice and discrimination. Further, the effects of these colonial and white discourses on both personal understandings and the influence of these on curriculum practices aimed at including Indigenous peoples and cultures can be uncovered, located, explored and disrupted in order to create spaces and places for Indigenous voices within early childhood curricula practice.
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ItemAn examination of how Australian art gallery educators perceive their role: two case studies( 2003)This study investigates six art educators working in two Australian art galleries at the turn of the millennium. The study examines how they perceive their role as reflected in the beliefs they hold, the type of lessons they present, and the kind of techniques they use to teach secondary school students in a gallery environment. The study also explores the influencing factors and institutional processes that have acted to inculcate existing attitudes and practices or to instigate change. Research in the area of gallery education indicates that whereas gallery educators twenty years ago felt obliged to analyse and explain artworks for viewers, gallery educators today see the viewer as an active agent in the construction of meaning. This implies that gallery educators seek to empower students by encouraging them to interpret artworks. This notion is based on the premise that knowledge is socially constructed, determined by the individual's respective background and experiences. The six case study subjects explain their roles as complex and demanding. Each offers a different account of the strategies they use to 'engage' students and to involve them in the process of interpretation. All utilise a 'floortalk' approach but with considerable variation. Different approaches such as drama, humour, stories and questioning are used by the teachers. However, the key link between all six case subjects is that they perceive their key role as being to 'engage' students and to stimulate them to actively construct meaning for themselves. In Bourdieu's terms this involves a process of providing students with "cultural capital', namely the kind of knowledge pertaining to the field of art education, its language, content, logic and aesthetic "grammar'. Such art language is needed for students to think, act and talk in relation to the social orthodoxies and heterodoxies established by the field. It was therefore these objectives and the strategies each case subject used to achieve them that are the focus of this study.
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ItemOn being an academic: a study of lived experience( 2003)To be an academic and work in an Australian university at the beginning of the twenty-first century is to be caught in a web of change, contradiction and turmoil. Amidst this tumult, academics are experiencing increased pressure to maintain high levels of performance, and university life is expected to continue as normal. However, to describe what normal means for higher education today (indeed for any age) would be to answer a great vexed question. As Australia awaits the blueprint for reform of higher education that is to be released with the May 2003 budget there is much hope that things in the future will be different, that the pressures on the higher education system will lessen, and that academics will be able to focus on the core elements of being an academic. Regardless of the outcome of this or any reform there is inevitability that life for the academic will continue to follow paths that are coloured by traditional understandings of what constitutes the life and work of the academic. Admittedly, the time and place where academics live and enact their academic work will influence the lived experience of each academic thus rendering it extremely difficult if not impossible to offer a simple or unified description of what it is to experience life as an academic. However, understanding the meaning of such experiences is important to shaping the future directions in academic life. One vehicle to achieve this understanding is through researching lived experience. This study seeks to uncover the points of unity that academics experience in their daily work, to identify the similarities and differences amongst academics as they face the challenge of working in a university at this period of time, and to provide academics with the voice to define and describe what rests at the core of their professional being. Ultimately, this study provides the opportunity for academics to comment on the uniqueness of their lived experience of academic life and to move towards defining the essential nature of being an academic. This study is located in a large, established university in a metropolitan capital in Australia. Academics from varying disciplines and at different levels of academic appointment participated in the interviews for the study conducted in the closing years of the twentieth century. Fifteen academics were interviewed on a bimestrial basis over a sustained period of time (over two years for most participants) and three academic managers from the university chancellery participated in a single interview. The focus of each of these interviews was to describe the lived experience of being an academic and to determine the meaning of what it is to be an academic in today's world. The theoretical framework for structuring this study is that of hermeneutic phenomenology and the guiding objectives for the study were to identify meaning in the lived experience of being an academic and to understand how being an academic is experienced today. The study draws heavily on the existing knowledge of higher education and academic life. The literature review addresses the phenomena influencing higher education and examines the responses of higher education to accommodate such globalising trends. Policy decisions in Australia that have shaped higher education and influenced the direction of academic life and work are also explored in this review. Clear from this review is that the extant body of knowledge reports strongly and offers significant commentary on the influences shaping academic life. What is missing in this body of knowledge is clarification of the meaning of what it is to be an academic living and working in today's world. Accordingly, in identifying the essential elements of what is required for an academic to be an academic, this study attempts to bridge this gap in the literature by presenting and re-presenting that matter that constitutes the phenomenon of being an academic. The analysis of data and findings of this research utilise strongly the voices of the participants in this study. The integrative themes of the Boyer scholarships (1990) have been employed to present the elements identified as essential to the phenomenon of being an academic. A phenomenological narrative is included to capture the lived experience of the participants in the study and to describe the phenomenon of being an academic. The study concludes with an overview of the significant outcomes of the study presented as challenges to the key stakeholders influencing academic life and also includes suggestions for further research.
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ItemPathways to work: a micro-study of young people through post-compulsory education to work( 2009)Social background and gender have long been recognised as factors which shape the quality of post-school outcomes. The children of professional families and girls have stayed longer in school and achieved better than the children of non-professional families and boys. Governments, both in Australia and around the world, use policy to counter this persistent problem. The focus of these policies on preventing school dropout presumes that the longer a young person is engaged in school the better the post-school outcome. This is still not always the case. One such policy was the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) which, amongst other things, increased the breadth of post-compulsory school curriculum to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student body and act as a conductor of relevant learning through these years. The aim of this work is threefold - A better understanding of both the pathways, including curriculum, taken through school taken by each of the members of the Class of ’95 and the work outcomes of the school experience, including academic achievement, of each of them. - A better understanding of the connection, if any, of these pathways and outcome with individual family background and gender. - An appraisal of the contribution of the school in neutralising social origin as a factor determining the quality of post-school outcomes. In order to explore the quality of post-school outcomes this research follows the pathways through secondary school to work of one hundred and sixty-three young people who commenced their secondary school journey in Year 7 together at the same college. A longitudinal case study, this work explores the journey of these students for thirteen years by which time all were established in work. The secondary education of this cohort was provided by a non-selective co-educational Catholic Regional College located in the outer urban fringe of Melbourne. The cohort was socially diverse and dominated by children from the families of non-professional white-collar workers. This dominance increased over time since students from this social background were the least likely to drop-out of school for work. It was found that social background permeated all aspects of school experience from Year 7 to Year 12 academic achievement to the decision to stay on in school and choice of subjects in the post-compulsory secondary school years. The latter influenced competitiveness for university and TAFE course places. All in the cohort who stayed in school passed the VCE. But competitiveness for university and TAFE course places was again aligned on social and gender grounds which favoured the traditional users of education who studied the traditional VCE. This meant that school policy of providing a broad based curriculum aimed at meeting needs of the very diverse student population was in tension with the limiting policy of university course selectors.
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ItemEthnicity and educational inequality: an investigation of school experience in Australia and France = Ethnicité et inégalité scolaire : une enquête sur l'expérience lycéenne en Australie et en France( 2008)This thesis examines the contribution of ‘ethnic’ background to the school experiences of educationally and socially disadvantaged students in the senior years of high school (n=927). To investigate the role both of ethnic identification and its interplay with institutional factors, a comparative analysis of secondary student experiences in two national settings was undertaken. The case of Turkish-background students in Australia and France suggests that the influences of ethnic identity are thoroughly transformed from one setting to the other by distinctive pedagogical structures. Streaming and severe academic judgement in France lower academic self-esteem, while creating resentment and social distance between students and teachers. By contrast, the deferral of selection and judgement in Australia allows, temporarily, for a more convivial classroom atmosphere, but fails just as surely to successfully navigate students through the curriculum and achieve academic success. The accommodations of both systems to students in ‘peripheral’ locations constitute logics of marginal integration which enable and legitimise ‘exclusion from within’. Student efforts to make meaning of school life through peer cultures which share many similarities across institutional and national boundaries emerge as what I have called strategies of marginal integration. Ethnic-minority students appear to be particularly susceptible to those logics and strategies, which reinforce their position within the system as marginal. This study therefore identifies the difficulties facing both systems as emerging from common overarching structural qualities. Cette thèse examine, au niveau lycée, la contribution de l’origine ethnique aux expériences scolaires d’élèves désavantagés (N=927). Elle a pour objectif d’étudier les rapports entre inégalité sociale, expérience scolaire, et structure institutionnelle. Afin d’enquêter sur le rôle de l’identification ethnique et sa relation aux facteurs institutionnels, une analyse comparative a été menée dans deux pays. L’étude du cas des élèves d’origine turque en France et en Australie indique que les influences de l’ethnicité sont transformées d’un contexte à l’autre par des structures pédagogiques distinctives. En France, les filières et les jugements académiques sévères en réduisent l’estime de soi, en créant de l’aliénation et de la distance sociale entre élève et professeur. En Australie, au contraire, le différemment de la sélection et du jugement permet, de façon temporaire, une atmosphère plus conviviale en cours, mais ne réussit pas à assurer le succès académique des élèves. Les efforts des deux systèmes dans les sites périphériques constituent des logiques d’intégration marginales qui permettent l’exclusion de l’intérieure. Les efforts des élèves pour donner un sens à la vie scolaire à travers des cultures de pairs qui se ressemblent dans les deux contextes font partie des stratégies d’intégration marginale. Les élèves d’origine immigrée semblent particulièrement concernés par ces logiques et stratégies, qui renforcent leur position subordonnée dans le système. L’étude identifie alors les difficultés auxquelles sont confrontés les deux systèmes comme résultant de caractéristiques structurelles.
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ItemIndigenous self-determination and early childhood education and care in Victoria( 2008)This thesis explores how Victoria’s early childhood community negotiates colonial constructions of Aboriginality around dualisms such as Indigenous/non Indigenous and intersecting constructions of the child as ignorant or innocent of race and power both in concert and conflict with the non Indigenous early childhood community. It found a need for a reconceptualisation of Aboriginality around complexity and multiplicity as well as continuity and uniformity. Such a reconceptualisation can better address those issues of race, culture, identity and racism that see Indigenous communities marginalised within non Indigenous early childhood programs. These negotiations around the colonial and the implications for Indigenous inclusion within the early childhood field are framed within post colonial theory which unites and connects major themes across tensions and contradictions. These themes act as a basis for each data chapter.