Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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ItemWhat does 'significance' look like? Assessing the assessment process in competitive grants schemes(Australian Association for Research in Education, 2006)This paper focuses on the writer’s experiences from 2002-2004 as the sole Education member of the Australian Research Council committee that assesses applications across the ‘social, behavioural and economic sciences’. It is drawn from a wider analysis of how judgments about research quality are produced across different spheres of education research activity, drawing particular attention to the characteristics of those who judge, their explicit and implicit criteria, and the textual markers of ‘quality’ that they work with. The article conside rs how the explicit categories for scoring; the characteristics of those appointed to the committee; the histo ry of dominant research traditions, and a slippage between the categories ‘significance’, ‘national benefit’ and ‘national research priorities’ all influence the judgments and scores that eventuate from assessors and pro duce the final rankings.
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ItemInterpretive claims and methodological warrant in small-number qualitative, longitudinal research(Informa UK Limited, 2003-07-01)
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ItemEffectiveness, difference and sociological research(Routledge, UK, 2002-12)For Australian sociology of education, Making the Difference (Connell, Ashenden, Kessler and Dowsett 1982) was not just a major argument, and a ‘classic’ point of reference. It was also an event, an intervention in ways of doing research and speaking to practice, a methodology, a textual style. In some respects its influence on the latter dimensions has been even more pervasive and long-lasting than its influence as argument or theory. It seemed, simultaneously, to mark the high point of Reproduction theories of schooling (though its authors did not see it in this way) and also a thoughtful and orchestrated attempt to intervene in the processes. For a considerable time both before and after the publication of the book itself, the research team was a prominent roadshow in Australia, speaking to and writing for many specific audiences: teachers, teacher unions, parents, press. The book itself was designed to be read by a much wider audience than the standard sociological texts, and it succeeded in this aim. Subsequently it has become more commonplace to see research and writing as constructing and powerful practices, not just neutral paths to knowledge or communication, but Making the Difference helped to show other researchers what different ways of embarking on this might look like.
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ItemWho is “us”? students negotiating discourses of racism and national identification in Australia( 2003)This article explores the political beliefs and the forms of reasoning about racism, national identity and Other developed by young Australian women and men from different ethnic and class backgrounds. The interviews on which the discussion is based are drawn from a larger longitudinal study of Australian secondary school students which examines how young people develop their sense of self and social values over time. The present article here has two overall purposes: to add to understandings of how the cultural logic of racism functions in one national setting, and to consider political reasoning about race and ethnicity in relation to processes of young people’s identity positioning. Three main lines of argument are developed. The first concerns students’ positioning of themselves vis a vis the current ‘race debate’ in Australia, and in relation to us as researchers, including their negotiation of the protocols for speaking about ‘race’ and racism. This includes consideration of the methodological and political effects of white Anglo women asking question about racism and ethnicity to ethnic-minority students who are routinely constituted as ‘Other’: what blindnesses and silences continue to operate when posing questions about racism directly? A second and related focus is the range of emotional responses evoked by asking questions about racism and about an Australian politician [Pauline Hanson], who has been prominent in race debates. Third, we examine young people’s construction of ‘us and them’ binaries and hierarchies of Otherness and whiteness. We argue throughout that reasoning about race, national identity and Others, and the taking up of ‘political positions’, is intimately linked to identity formation and to how we imagine ourselves in the present, the past and the future.
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ItemNegotiating methodological dilemmas in a range of chilly climates: a story of pressures, principles and problems( 2001)This article discusses methodological, ethical and material issues related to the author’s work on a qualitative, longitudinal research project, the 12 to 18 Project. It discusses the difficulty of balancing concerns about reactivity with concerns about obligations to the research subjects; the effects of the current Australian university funding regime on the shaping and conduct of research; and the difficulty of taking up particular research questions in certain political climates.
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ItemSocial justice and the middle( 2000)‘Social justice’ is not a straightforward concept; and nor is the question of what schools do in relation to it. In this article we want to elaborate a little on the first of these claims, and illustrate the second by choosing to talk about two ‘middle’ or ‘ordinary’ high schools and their apparent impact on the students in them whom we followed in a longitudinal study from 1993 when they were in grade 6 to the present year, when most have finished school.
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ItemRepresenting class in qualitative research(Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, 2000)In 1993, with Julie McLeod, I began a seven-year qualitative, longitudinal study of young people in Australia. The 12 to 18 Project1 was intended as a longitudinal study to investigate (i) the development of young people’s gendered identity in Australia now, and (ii) schooling’s contribution to social inequalities: the way in which different schools interact with and produce differentiated outcomes for different types of young people. It was a project inspired by the fact that we had both spent many years studying education, gender formation, inequalities, changing cultural and policy discourse and wanting to design a new type of study to take us further with these interests. It was also a study whose design was influenced by two film series, both of them also concerned, in different ways, with representing social differences and development of individual identity and outcomes over time.
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ItemDoes curriculum matter?: revisiting access and women's rights to education in the context of the UN Millenium Development Targets(Sage, 2006-03)This article discusses the relevance of curriculum to current UN Millenium targets to extend access to education and equality in education for women. It argues firstly, that it is contradictory to be concerned about women’s access to education but leave curriculum out of the discussion; secondly, that curriculum is not adequately seen as a choice between imposing new universal values or leaving cultural traditions untouched, but is about choices within a situation where cultural traditions are neither untouched nor monolithic; and thirdly that attention to who speaks and who is heard in developing and assessing new practices remains important in any initiatives to extend education rights for women.This article has been published in Theory and Research in Education, Vol. 4, No. 1, 85-99 (2006) ) and is available to subscribers in both print and online formats.
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ItemDoes education need the concept of class like a fish needs a bicycle, or is class more like water in the fish-in-water problem?( 2006)Class is not only a dated concept that derives from 19th century industrialization and from old world social formations, but is one that is most at home in attempts to do theory and research in particular ways: to build models, identify causal factors, pin down truths, identify lynch-pins of change. In more recent times, theories and models of class have been troubled by social movements of women and race, by changes to the forms of work and the relationships of labour, and by theories more ready to show how research categories do violence than what they might effect for good. This paper takes the case of Australia in the early 21st century and a longitudinal qualitative study of young Australian students going through different school experiences to revisit the value of working with class and gender and class/gender as conceptual lenses in qualitative research, and specifically in relation to longitudinal identity-making in the context of school. The paper argues that in the light of feminist theories, and of major social and work changes in countries like Australia, there is no way to have a model of class that is adequate, and that there are multiple issues rather than a single question which theorists concerned with class work on. Nevertheless, it is argued, that to omit some concept of class in our discussions and research is to deprive research of categories and a history of discussions that can usefully feed what is noticed and attended to and taken as sources of concern. The paper illustrates a perspective on education research which argues against reducing research debates to searches for one perfect model, and for attending to the effects that particular and imperfect ways of doing research can have in particular situations and times.The paper takes up two aspects of the use of ‘class’ in education research and policy. The first concerns class as a tool of policy analysis, where it illustrates some problems of working without or with this concept,
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ItemWorker knowledge and the work of schools: a case-study and some issues for further attention( 2005)The rhetoric of the new vocationalism is about creating a new type of person: enterprising, flexible, lifelong learner, portfolio-oriented. The rhetoric of contemporary Australian government policy is that schools should be more vocational. This article focuses on schooling and a case-study of a site where two vocational ‘dual accreditation’ subjects are being taught. It argues (1) that different visions of schooling and vocational knowledge are evident at different levels of the system, but also between teachers involved in the same formal structure and between students within the same classes; (2) that the dual assessment regimes observed here embody not only different epistemologies, but different imputed identities of the learner-worker; and (3) that class and gender attributes matter but are not adequately acknowledged in the new agendas for school. The article illustrates ambiguities in what teachers and students are expected to do, and, in particular, a mixture of different ideas about what knowledge counts, and what attributes are valued within the school-based vocational subjects.