Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemThe preparation and development of middle leaders in Victorian secondary schools( 2021)Middle leaders in schools provide a critical link between senior leadership and teaching staff. Employing a multi-perspective case study methodology, this study looked at the common themes facing middle leaders at three Victorian secondary schools, Catholic, government, and independent, with regard to their preparation for leadership, their professional and personal development in the role, how their role is perceived by those to whom they report and those they lead, and how they determine if they have been successful in their role. At each school, the following staff members were invited to participate in the study: senior leaders, middle leaders, and teachers. The middle leaders involved in this research were actively involved in leading pastoral, academic, and/or co-curricular departments within a Catholic, government, or independent school. Semi-structured interviewing was used for the purpose of collecting their responses. The participants’ responses were analysed, and emergent themes described. A total of 56 themes with 78 sub-themes emerged from the study, covering the dimensions of preparation, development, perception, and success in leadership. Common themes raised by middle leaders were professional learning, the support provided in their role, career progression, their ability to influence school direction, level of autonomy in the role, departmental management, professional relationships, and their support of students’ achievement. The study indicates that middle leaders’ measurement of success in the role was primarily linked to student achievement in academic and social domains. A leadership development model is offered to support aspiring and current middle leaders.
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Item‘Seidauk sai hanesan ami nia mehi’: a study of lecturers’ responses to multilingualism in higher education in Timor-Leste( 2019)This research is aimed at understanding multilingualism in locally situated institutional contexts in higher education in Timor-Leste. Particular attention is paid to the language planning and workforce development roles played by tertiary educators in the context of postcolonial, social and economic development. This is done through a close study of the beliefs and practices of lecturers teaching in professional fields relevant to the national development of Timor-Leste: agriculture, petroleum, tourism and community development. Guiding research questions focus on these lecturers’ conceptualisations of the communication skills and resources needed by their students for study and work in their respective industries, as well as on their multilingual teaching practices and communication strategies with students. Findings are drawn from empirical data gathered ethnographically from focus groups, interviews and class observations conducted with lecturers from three institutions, one public and two private. A combination of fine-grained sociolinguistic and discourse analysis reveals spectacular diversity in the locally valued and enacted forms and arrangements of multilingualism in these higher education spaces in Timor-Leste. The results of this research detail the specificities of this variation at multiple sociolinguistic scales of analysis: the different industry areas case-studied, the different faculties, departments and institutions where data was collected, and the classrooms of different individual lecturers. Different ‘visions of industry’ are productive of different beliefs about the communicative worlds into which graduates will be entering. Different beliefs about the relative affordances and constraints of the four official and working languages of Timor-Leste (Tetun, Portuguese, English and Indonesian) are productive of different perspectives on the preparedness of students for tertiary study. Lecturers’ own unique plurilingual repertoires, borne of individual educational and biographical trajectories, combined with the material constraints of available teaching and learning resources, limit the multilingual communication possibilities in classrooms. There are, however, powerful examples of lecturers’ significant creative and agentive abilities towards the transfer of expert knowledge in and through a mixture of semiotic forms. This study thus highlights both the hugely challenging position in which lecturers in higher education in Timor-Leste are placed – at the meeting point of diverse and often conflicting pressures – and their role as change agents in the discursive construction of multilingual communication for different fields. Lecturers’ beliefs and practices with regard to multilingual communication are demonstrated to be influenced by a range of competing pragmatic considerations and discursive forces, as well as being themselves productive of particular norms of professional and vocational communication and particular constructions of expert knowledge. Implications of the findings of this study are considered for policy-makers working in language and higher education in Timor-Leste, for those working in workforce development, and for teachers in academic literacies and language support programs in tertiary settings in developing, multilingual contexts.
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ItemInclusive education and school reform in postcolonial India( 2015)Over the past two decades, a converging discourse has emerged around the world concerning the importance of socially inclusive education. In India, the idea of inclusive education is not new, and is consistent with the key principles underpinning the Indian constitution. It has been promoted by a number of educational thinkers of modern India such as Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Azad and Tagore. However, the idea of inclusive education has been unevenly and inadequately implemented in Indian schools, which have remained largely socially segregated. There are of course major exceptions, with some schools valiantly seeking to realize social inclusion. One such school is in Kolkata, which has been nationally and globally celebrated as an example of best practice. The main aim of this thesis is to examine the initiative of inclusive educational reform that this school represents. It analyses the school’s understanding of inclusive education; provides an account of how the school promoted its achievements, not only within its own community but also around the world; and critically assesses the extent to which the initiatives are sustainable in the long term. Methodologically, the research reported in this thesis involves an ethnographic case study of the school. Interdisciplinary in its approach to data analysis, the thesis utilizes both international and indigenous theoretical resources, taking into account both local experiences, as well as transnational processes. It suggests that while the school has been enormously successful in establishing a program of reform that is inclusive in many respects, consistent with both global designs and local conceptions of inclusive education. However, it represents a model that is hard to sustain in light of the changes in its leadership, the context of a highly competitive education system in India, shifting student and parent aspirations, and the emerging neoliberal pressures under which most Indian institutions now have to work.