Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemShaping futures, shaping lives: an investigation into the lived experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australian boarding schools( 2016)The role of boarding schools in helping to overcome education disadvantage for First Australian young people has received increasing attention, and funding, from government, the media, and private sector investors in recent years. Notwithstanding policy approaches encouraging, and for some populations even mandating, that students leave home to attend boarding school, little research has sought to understand how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students experience ‘mainstream’ boarding school and what impact it has on later life outcomes for them, their families and communities. It is well understood that a wide range of social factors, ranging from the macro-social to the individual, influence the health of populations generally, and Indigenous populations specifically (Saggers 2007, Anderson 2007). Education attainment levels are recognised as one of the social determinants of Indigenous health (Dunbar 2007). By contrast, in education policy, scant regard is paid to the social factors that underpin education engagement and success for First Australian students in predominantly non Indigenous schools. This thesis uses a narrative, multiple case study method to examine the experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australian boarding schools, and in their post school years. In all, seventy-four interviews were conducted, across every state and territory except Tasmania. These include interviews or focus group discussions with alumni of boarding schools (35); parents or community members (27); and school leaders or staff in boarding schools (12). Interview data were analysed to identify what participants sought to achieve through boarding school; what constrained or enabled positive outcomes; and what were the actual outcomes achieved by alumni in the short, medium and, in some cases, long terms. This research presents the most comprehensive evidence to date on the lived experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in Australian boarding schools. It establishes that as well as being determinants of health, racism, trauma, and social connectedness were also fundamentally important to education success for participants in this study. Data presented here indicate that when schools engaged authentically and proactively with these issues they assisted these young people to maximise the benefits they derived from education. Findings challenge the narrow and exclusively empirical measures currently used to define education ‘success’. Whereas schools and scholarship providers focus on preparing students to fit into school systems, research findings indicate that more critical attention should be paid to the systems themselves.
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ItemPost: 9/11: hidden pedagogy: the positional forces of pedagogy in Victoria, Australia( 2015)This qualitative study charts the lived narratives of twelve participants, six teachers and six students from urban and rural Victoria, Australia. The study examines in detail the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’. 9/11 has become accepted shorthand for September 11th 2001, in which terrorist attacks took place in the United States of America. The attacks heralded a ‘post- 9/11 world, [in which] threats are defined more by the fault lines within societies than by the territorial boundaries between them’ (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 2011, p. 361). The study is embedded in the values that have come to the fore in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the ideological shifts that have occurred globally. These values and ideologies are reflected via issues of culture and consumption. In education this is particularly visible through pedagogy. The research employs a multimethodological (Esteban-Guitart, 2012) form of inquiry through the use of bricolage (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004) which is comprised at the intersectional points of critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2008b), public pedagogy (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010b) and cultural studies (Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1992). This study adopts a critical ontological perspective, and is grounded in qualitative research approaches (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). The methods of photo elicitation, artefact analysis, video observation and semi-structured interviews are used to critically examine the ways in which teacher and student identities are shaped by the pedagogies of contemporary schooling, and how they form common sense understandings of the world and themselves, charting possibilities between accepted common sense beliefs and 21st century neoliberal capitalism. The research is presented through a prototypical form of literary journalism and intertextuality which examines the interrelationship between teaching and social worlds exposing the hidden influence of enculturation and addressing the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’