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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ItemA qualitative study of developing problem solving competence in students of a food technology diploma course( 2000)This thesis is a qualitative study of developing students' problem solving competence or ability in a Technical and Further Education (TAFE) Diploma course. The problem solving ability has been identified as highly desirable by the Australian food processing industry. Its development in students has been specified in the Course Aims Statement as a requisite learning outcome of the Food Technology Diploma course. The thesis research aimed to explore the situation if the development of problem solving ability happened as envisaged by the major stakeholders of the course and how it was accomplished in the classroom. To facilitate the thesis research, ethnographic methods, including observation, interviews and document analysis were used. Activities of teaching and learning in classrooms and laboratories were observed and recorded on videotapes. Semi-structured interviews with stakeholders including Industry Representatives, Course Designers, Course Administrators, and Module Teachers were conducted. Document analysis included review of approved Accreditation Submissions for the course (accredited by the Food Industry Training Accreditation Board in the Victorian Department of Education), review of students' written work of practical reports and answers to test questions. From the interviews, two divergent views emerged that might be regarded as 'aspirant' and 'practitioner' stances. The 'aspirant' stance represented the views of industry representatives, course designers, and course administrators, whereas the practitioner stance those of the module teachers. The 'aspirant' view concurs with the industry's desire and expectation of developing Diploma students' problem solving ability in the classroom. It did not however stipulate to what standard or level this development should attain. The practitioner side on the other hand maintained that the development of problem solving ability is not their job but it belongs to other educators including teachers of degree courses in higher education. Also the practitioner side maintained that as bona fide TAFE teachers, they know what and how the course should be taught. The TAFE teachers in this particular case believed what they do is appropriate because there has not been any complaint from the industry regarding the quality of the Diploma graduates that they produced. In terms of improving students' problem solving ability, the official stance in the approved Accreditation Submission is that the Diploma course should be delivered in a manner consistent with the constructivists' problem based and situated learning approaches and presented in a holistic, integrated manner based on predetermined learning objectives. In their classroom practice, the Diploma course teachers in this particular case simply delivered what they considered necessary in a ' teaching as telling ' mode, without attending to the recommendations described in the approved Accreditation Submission or an objective-based plan, which incorporates strategies for developing students' problem solving ability. There was no apparent modeling or benchmarking by the teachers of attitudes and dispositions, attributes acknowledged to be required for superior problem solving ability, including reflection, metacognition, self-directedness in learning and construction of individual meaning from knowledge learned, as well as thinking critically or creatively. On the contrary, their delivery and assessment of learning was tuned down, encouraging students to learn in a 'surface approach'. The teachers' practice thus affected adversely the quality of students' reports of experiments. The review of students' reports of the three applied science modules, Food Chemistry, Food Technology, and Microbiology, established that students (1) did not understand the theoretical bases of the experiments, (2) did not show critical reflection or objectivity on the conduct of the experiments or the validity of the results obtained, (3) tended to exert minimal effort in the reporting, and (4) were generally unable to articulate and communicate their thoughts and knowledge. Another parcel of data supporting the conclusion of students' poor state of professional knowledge and inability to apply it came from their answers of test questions. Review of their answers showed that they did not understand the knowledge. Although the test questions of the three applied science modules did not really test them for the application of knowledge in resolving some industry-related issues that is solving industry related problems, the students' answers demonstrated that it was highly unlikely they could do so because of their lack of understanding of the fundamental concepts and theories underlying many of the current or contemporary industry problems/issues. The triangulation of the data from three sources, that is observation, interviews, and document analysis, converged to illuminate this particular situation showing (a) the teachers did not teach in a manner conducive to the development of students' problem solving ability and (b) students did not learn effectively to improve their problem solving ability. In explaining the occurrence of this situation, it has been rationalised in terms of teachers' low expectation of their students, the teachers' inadequacy to teach problem solving skills, and the failure of those in authority to properly communicate this specific course aim to all those who need to know, the students and teachers in particular. Based on this explanation, this thesis made the suggestion whereby improvement in the development of students' problem solving ability can be effected for the Diploma course in the short term by attending immediately to the teachers' practice in the classroom.
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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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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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ItemAustralia's online censorship regime: the Advocacy Coalition Framework and governance compared( 2000-04)This study assesses the value of two analytical models explaining particular contemporary political events. This is undertaken through the comparative evaluation of two international models: the Advocacy Coalition Framework and Rhodes’s model of Governance. These approaches are evaluated against an single case study: the censorship of computer network (“online”) content in Australia. Through comparison evaluation, criticism, and reformulation, these approaches are presented as useful tools of policy analysis in Australia. The first part of the thesis presents the theoretical basis of the research and the methodologies employed to apply them. It begins by examining how the disciplines of political science and public policy have focused on the role of politically-active “interest”, groups in the process of policy development and implementation. This focus has lead to ideas about the role of the state actors in policy making, and attempts to describe and explain the interface between public and private groups in developing and implementing public policies. These, largely British and American, theories have impacted upon Australian researchers who have applied these ideas to local conditions. The majority of this part, however, is spent introducing the two research approaches: Paul Sabatier’s Advocacy Coalitions Framework and Rod Rhodes’s theory of Governance. Stemming from dissatisfaction with research into implementation, Sabatier’s framework attempts to show how competing clusters of groups and individuals compete for policy “wins” in a discrete subsystem by using political strategies to effect favourable decisions and information to change the views of other groups. Governance, on the other hand, attempts to apply Rhodes’s observations to the changing nature of the British state (and by implication other liberal democracies) to show the importance of self-organising networks of organisations who monopolise power and insulate the processes of decision making and implementation from the wider community and state organs. Finally, the methodologies of the thesis are presented, based on the preferred research methods of the two authors. The second part introduces the case serving as the basis for evaluating the models, namely, censorship of the content of computer networks in Australia between 1987 and 2000. This case arises in the late 1980s with the computerisation of society and technological developments leading to the introduction of, first publicly-accessible computer bulletin boards, and then the technology of the Internet. From a small hobbyists’ concern, the uptake of this technology combined with wider censorship issues leads to the consideration of online content by Australian Governments, seeking a system of regulation to apply to this technology. As the emerging Internet becomes popularised, and in the face of adverse media attention on, especially pornographic, online content, during the mid to late 1990s two Federal governments establish a series of policy processes that eventually lead to the introduction of the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999, a policy decision bringing online content into Australia’s intergovernmental censorship system. The final part analyses the case study using the two theoretical approaches. What this shows is that, from the perspective of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, debate over online content does not form a substantive policy subsystem until 1995, and within this three, relatively stable, competing coalitions emerge, each pressuring for different levels of action and intervention (from no regulation, to a strong regulatory model). While conflict within the subsystem varied, overall the framework’s analysis shows the dominance of a coalition consisting largely of professional and business interests favouring a light, co-regulatory approach to online content. From the perspective of Governance, the issue of online content is subject to a range of intra- and inter-governmental conflict in the period 1995-7, finally settling into a negotiated position where a complex policy community emerges based largely on structurally-determined resource dependencies. What this means is that policy making in the case was not autonomous of state institutions, but highly dependent on institutional power relations. Overall, in comparing the findings it becomes apparent that the approaches lack the capacity to fully explain the role of key sovereigns, defined here as those individuals with legal authority over decision making in the policy process, because of their methodological and normative assumptions about the policy process. By showing these individuals as part of wider networks of power-dependencies, and exploring the complex bundle of real, pseudo, symbolic, and nonsense elements that make up a policy, the role of Ministers as “semi-sovereign sovereigns” can be accommodated in the two approaches.
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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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ItemFrom ‘tech’ school to academe: personal narratives and the history of technical education, 1931-1988( 2002)'From "tech" school to academe: personal narratives and the history of technical education, 1931-1988', explores technical education at junior, intermediate, trade, post-trade, diploma, and degree levels, including technical and TAFE teacher education. The methodology is autobiography-as-history and history from documents: the narratives convey life stories of men and women - my technical education people - who have had a significant technical education involvement, their transition through primary, secondary/technical and trade/post secondary education to higher education. Emergent documentary themes include: affirmation of technical education during the Great Depression, notwithstanding the 1931 McPherson 'Economy Committee'; the very important contribution to the war-effort, 1939-45, the Commonwealth Technical Training Scheme, to post-war reconstruction and ex-service rehabilitation, the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, and a program for the war-wounded; the 1950s, extension of Commonwealth Government involvement in university education through the Murray Committee report (1957) and initiatives in senior, apprentice and junior technical education, the latter including psychology and guidance and school chaplaincies; the 1960s, the Martin Committee binary system report, leading to the Victoria Institute of Colleges (1965), in apprenticeship, the introduction of block release and a reduced term of training, and in junior technical education, trends to a liberalised curriculum; 1972-75, the Whitlam Reforms, including the Karmel Schools Commission and needs-based funding, Commonwealth full-funding of tertiary education, the abolition of student fees, and the Kangan Report, its recommendation of capital and recurrent funding of the new TAFE sector with its philosophy of open access, broad-based, vocationally-oriented recurrent education; in apprenticeship, introduction of the modular curricula, and in junior technical education, developments which made it the most comprehensive sector under flexible, autonomous administrative arrangements; the 1980s, the ending of the binary system of tertiary education with the Dawkins' program of 1988, expansion of TAFE's utility function, and closure of the secondary technical schools, an outcome of the 1985 Blackburn Committee recommendations, their passing part political, part technological, part social, part economic and, at official levels, barely acknowledged. Emergent narrative themes include: the antecedent work-ethic and underdog culture; family resourcefulness, resilience and moral integrity; puzzles of childhood; school experiences, for example as a junior student during the 1940s or as an adult in post-war rehabilitation training; employment experiences, for example in sheetmetal during the 1930s; trade teaching in the 1940s and Special Method lecturing in the 1950s; mentoring and role modelling; trainee resourcefulness; diverse pathways to technical education; system flexibility; enabling school leadership; chronic resourcing deficits; teacher professionalism; the vital 'acco' -'tradie' mix; innovations in technical curricula, including co-ed, pastoral and welfare initiatives, for example work experience and the alternative techs; the dynamism of the 1970s, including Kangan and TAFE, university accessibility, and introduction of the new technologies; the 1980s, concern for the loss of the technical schools and their comprehensiveness, inclusiveness and egalitarianism; ambivalence about TAFE - accessible, occupationally relevant yet doctrinaire and narrow; concern for the demise of dedicated technical teacher education; and the personal integration of my technical education people. In the light of the narrative and documentary evidence, I conclude that technical education has delivered clear personal and social benefits.
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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.