Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemSo near and yet so far: an ethnographic evaluation of an Australian transnational education program.( 2006-10)The multicultural classroom is a phenomenon now found in most countries. As a result of globalisation and the burgeoning transnational education market, university classrooms that span national borders are now commonplace. Within these classrooms the cultures of both the delivering and receiving countries converge, resulting in the creation of a new and complex cultural territory that is often unfamiliar to educators and students alike. Australia has been a key provider of transnational education in the South East Asian region, however little research has investigated the interplay of culture and pedagogy within Australian transnational programs, despite the cultural distance which exists between Australia and its Asian neighbours. This is surprising given the importance of transnational provision to both the Australian economy and the internationalisation agenda of Australian universities. The unfamiliar cultural territory found within these transnational programs places high demands on educators and students, yet the impact of exposure to cultural difference and culture learning seems rarely considered in the development and delivery of such programs. This thesis examines one transnational program that was delivered in Singapore by an Australian university. An ethnographic methodology is employed, applying a ‘cultural lens’ to an analysis of the program. The author provides background information on the Australian and Singaporean education systems and reviews a range of previous research which focuses on culture and pedagogy in the region. Interviews and classroom observations reveal educator and student experiences of the program. The author concludes that cultural phenomena have a profound impact on participants’ experiences of transnational education programs and that this is substantially unrecognised by key actors in the process. Recommendations are made for changes in practice that could be incorporated in transnational programs in order to ameliorate negative impacts of cultural difference.
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ItemYoung queers getting together: moving beyond isolation and loneliness( 2002-07)Over the last decade, education-focused research/studies on young queers (or same-sex attracted young people) have highlighted the many problems or difficulties they face growing up in a homophobic, heterosexist society. Strategies to address these issues (proposed in numerous research articles and reports) have largely focused on the school setting. I argue that these strategies are limited by heterosexual norms, which regulate and contain in advance what is possible (for queers) within the formal school system. I examine the ways in which these heterosexual norms work to constrain the queer subject in education-focused research and studies on young queers. Within this field of study, young queers have largely been characterized as victims: of homophobic abuse and harassment, and neglect by families and schools. They’re said to be lonely and isolated, at risk of attempted suicide, unsafe sex, drug and alcohol abuse, and homelessness. I argue that these representations convey a negative portrait of young queers as wounded subjects. I illustrate how the emphasis on the wounded queer subject can work against the interests of young queers. In particular, it obscures those queer perspectives involving agency: first, queer cultures and communities; second, the knowledge and experiences of those who have gained confidence in their queerness, who have queer social and sexual lives. These (agentic) queers can offer us ways of understanding how young queers move beyond isolation and loneliness. This study highlights the importance, for many young queers, of having opportunities and spaces where they can connect with each other. Socialization and sexualization among young queers involves a certain openness being and doing queer a practice which is unintelligible within most education-focused research/studies on young queers. This is illustrated and explored through comparative analysis of queer subjectivities in two differentiated spheres: on the one hand education-focused research and studies relating to the school context, and on the other gay/lesbian/queer studies and literature relating to queer social and sexual contexts. The key contexts and themes examined here are: early sexual experience and beats, queer cultures and communities, and queer youth support and social groups.
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ItemStories of significance: an investigation into the construction of social meaning in young people’s dramatised stories( 2009)This thesis examines the relationship between narrative and meaning in young people’s dramatised stories and how social meaning is generated in community performance. It is an investigation into drama performance projects with culturally diverse teenagers in an inner city secondary school in Melbourne between 2004 and 2006. The methodological approach is reflective practitioner and case study research involving field based data collection. The study investigates the relationship between narrative content and socio-cultural meaning, the dynamics between performers and audience and the power relations between the teacher-artists and young people. I conceptualise the drama workshop as an intracultural ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) in which young people explored their emergent, hybrid cultural identities. This space was generated through a dialogic pedagogy based on Freire’s theory (1998) and an analysis of power structures underlying the work. The centre of this thesis is an analysis of young people’s use of narrative to construct and negotiate the meanings of their dramatised stories. I have used narrative theory to inform and develop a drama process, drawing on the work of Bruner (1996) and Winston (1998). This approach enabled young people to develop complex, local meanings in their plays. The young people used character to experiment with their personal narratives of identity and to develop dramatised stories containing moral messages that both reflected and commented on their local context, critiquing both their school subculture and the wider society. The plays were eclectic in form and reflected young people’s aesthetics and sense of ‘reality’. In performance, audiences saw the performers simultaneously as fictional characters and as themselves. This complex dual awareness led audiences to infer a relationship between the dramatised story and the performers, generating ‘performative reflexivity’ (Turner, 1986) a state in which both audience and performers entered into deep reflection on social values.