School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemNegotiating masculinities: the experience of male teachers in Indonesian early childhood education( 2017)Since the fall of President Suharto, the New Order’s hegemonic masculinity has been increasingly contested and reconfigured. This thesis expands understandings of historical and contemporary formations of Indonesian masculinities. It focuses particularly on ‘nurturing masculinities’ by examining the gender narratives and practices of men who teach kindergarten age children. Specifically, this research demonstrates how male teachers navigate social expectations about their work and gender identity in a female-dominated and feminised profession. It adopts a focused ethnography research design that combines in-depth interviews with classroom observations. Interviews were undertaken with eight male teachers from five schools and their female colleagues, student’s parents, and the school’s principals and managers. Observations took place in classrooms and the broader school environment in order to record male teacher’s interactions with students and teachers and the alignment with their personal narratives. This thesis shows the dynamics through which hegemonic masculinity is constantly being both defended and challenged by male teachers. The discourse of nurture, which is pervasive in the early childhood profession, is the modality through which the negotiations of masculinity take place. The thesis shows how male teachers reorient both gendered discourses of nurture and understandings of hegemonic masculinity in their self-narratives about their work and in their workplace interactions.
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ItemTaking Indigenous culture into account: a critical analysis of an early childhood education program for disadvantaged families( 2016)Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has gained significant policy attention in Australia as a key to closing the Indigenous education gap prior to the commencement of formal schooling. Yet, Indigenous Australians still attend formal ECEC at lower rates than their non-Indigenous peers. The Home Instruction Program for Parents and Youngsters (HIPPY) is a combined home and centre based ECEC program that works with disadvantaged children and families (including Indigenous Australians) to prepare children for their first year of school. The HIPPY Australia program teaches parents how to be their child’s first educator through the provision of structured educational activity packs that parents undertake with their child over a two year period. Using a mixed methods approach combining content and critical discourse analysis, this research critically analysed the compatibility of HIPPY with Indigenous Australians. Quantitatively, this thesis examines the extent to which the forty-five HIPPY Australia activity packs aligned with traditional Indigenous learning approaches. Qualitatively, cultural compatibility was analysed by examining the assumptions about Indigenous parents and families implicitly inherent in the HIPPY Australia activity packs. It was found that the four and five year old HIPPY Australia activity packs had minimal alignment with Indigenous Australian learning approaches and favoured the use of particular Indigenous learning approaches over others. The critical discourse analysis of the HIPPY program highlighted the manner in which the program privileges Western knowledges over Indigenous knowledges. In this way, the HIPPY program is used as a social policy intervention tool to correct the undesirable behaviours of Indigenous parents and families who do not adhere to Western educational and parenting norms. Deficit-based assumptions regarding the knowledge and skills that disadvantaged families brought to the HIPPY program were also found to be prevalent which limited parent autonomy in educating their children. The findings have implications for engaging Indigenous parents, children and communities in the HIPPY program. In order to improve the cultural compatibility of HIPPY with Indigenous Australians, the HIPPY program should be tailored to local Indigenous contexts through a participatory, community-based approach. This would enable local Indigenous communities to exercise self-determination through the adaptation of the HIPPY program to suit their needs. Future research should focus on obtaining Indigenous parents’ and communities’ views regarding the cultural compatibility of the HIPPY program with Indigenous Australians.