Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemDeepening Australian democracy: what can schools do?( 2000-11)The term, ‘civic deficit’, has been used to describe a situation in which a significant proportion of Australian citizens display low levels of knowledge and understanding of, and low levels of engagement with, Australian political and constitutional arrangements. This civic deficit has attracted increased attention by governments, policy makers, and the broad educational community within Australia in recent years. The Report of the Civics Expert Group (1994) identified school education as a major site in which to address this deficit, and the past decade has seen increased emphasis on civics and citizenship education in Australian schools. The thesis critically examines the role of civics and citizenship within Australia secondary schools. It does this, not purely from an educational perspective, but from within the broader context of the contemporary Australian political system. This thesis regards citizenship as inherently a political concept, and develops the notion of democratic citizenship as the most significant element of this. It is argued that democratic citizens are more than merely knowledgeable about their nation’s democratic traditions, government institutions and constitutional arrangements. While these elements of civics and citizenship education have a role, democratic citizens are genuine members of their political community. It is argues that they are inquisitive participants in that community.
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ItemProvision for the education of Catholic women in Australia since 1840( 1988)An historical perspective of the Religious Orders of women which entered the Catholic education scene in nineteenth-century Australia, and an appraisal of their adaptation to the forces within Australian society which influenced their provision for the education of Catholic women in this country as they operated under the powerful direction of the bishops.
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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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ItemExperiential learning programs in Australian secondary schools( 2010)Experiential programs in special environments are common in Australian education, notably in independent secondary schools. Without overt reference to research, they claim the special features of their program lead to personal development. The study sought to discover the underlying theoretical elements common to experiential learning programs, and by extension, sought to identify the elements of the experiential learning that might be incorporated into mainstream learning. Adopting a constructivist interpretive framework drawn from the work of Dewey, Vygotsky, and Bruner, the study examined six Australian independent school experiential learning programs offered to Year 9 students at dedicated, discrete settings ranging from wilderness to the inner city. The methodology employed in the research design was qualitative, drawing on Argyris and Schon’s notion of theory of action as an overarching framework in the documentation of six case-study programs. A preliminary probe into a single experiential program and an Australia-wide survey of school-based experiential learning provided a base of reference for the main study, which focused on 41 teaching practitioners as the primary informants on the programs. Data sources consisted of public documentation on programs, ethnographic interviews, questionnaire responses and researcher observations. Charmazian grounded theory method and Argyris and Schon’s ladder of interference were used as the primary tools for data analysis. The study found challenging setting, constructed social interaction, tolerance of risk, and reflection to be the essential design components that enable personal learning, and these thus form the model of experiential learning that emerges from analysis of the data. Together with the learner and cognitive dissonance, the spatiotemporal setting of the experience is identified as the defining characteristic and third component of experiential learning transactions. Specific properties of each learning setting interact with learners in ways that afford specific learning opportunities. Individual student status and collective social structures in remote experiential settings that rupture contact with the home community are profoundly altered through the experience. Risk emerges as an indispensible property of novel learning experiences. Reflection, both facilitated and unfacilitated, is the mechanism by which experiential learning is stored in episodic memory and informs the process of knowledge creation. The theoretical model of experiential learning derived from the programs studied describes the essential differences between experiential and mainstream learning. This model offers a basic design template for the development of experiential learning programs in other settings to meet the particular learning needs of Year 9 students in mainstream schools. Finally, these programs provided evidence of close parallels with traditional initiation rites, suggesting that they serve an important socialisation function for adolescents.