Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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ItemCan we find out about girls and boys today – or must we settle for just talking about ourselves?: dilemmas of a feminist, qualitative, longitudinal research project(Australian Association for Research in Education, 1997-12)Question - What does the postmodern ethnographer say to the interviewee? Answer - Enough about you - now let's talk about me. This paper addresses the problems and experiences of engaging in a longitudinal, qualitative project of empirical research while trying to be seriously reflexive about what we are constructing as researchers. The particular project is the 'The 12 to 18 Project' running in Victoria.
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ItemResearch methodology, education and theoretical fashions: constructing a methodology course in an era of deconstruction(Taylor & Francis, 1997)In this article a case is made both for the utility of deconstructive questions, and also for the danger of taking such questions as a sole or over-riding methodological agenda in education. The discussion is mounted by attention to grounded contexts and dilemmas rather than by a commitment to abstract concerns about ‘power’ or ‘Other’ or ‘polyphony of voices’. The framing dilemma is how one might construct a research methodology course that is neither positivist, relativist, nor reifying of current theory as an enduring answer for students. The article takes two substantive fields of inquiry in education (inequality and access in education, and research on gender and education) to argue that following through some substantive issues for educational research can provide ways of thinking about the relative merits, power, pertinence and relationships between quantitative, qualitative and deconstructive agendas. Finally, the article outlines a research methodology course constructed by the author to attempt to put in practical form the assumptions about education and research methodology which are argued in this article.
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ItemTransitions and the year 7 experience: a report from the 12 to 18 Project( 1999)This article discusses students' comments about the experience of shifting from primary to secondary schooling, and of their first year of secondary school. The material was gathered from research carried out in three Victorian primary schools and four Victorian secondary schools in 1993 and 1994 as part of an ongoing qualitative, longitudinal study which is following students through each year of their secondary schooling. This article discusses the meanings students give to their experience of transition against earlier research and policy documents which use different methodologies and which talk of different cultures of primary and secondary schools. It argues that student reactions are more complex than are indicated by methodologies which take comments at face value and that their concerns challenge some common assumptions about the problem of disruption in the break between primary and secondary. The article also notes widespread changes in students' lunchtime activities compared with primary school and discusses ways students assess the new curriculum and teaching styles of the secondary school.
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ItemHow do young people think about self, work and futures(Australian Institute of Family Studies, 1998)The 12 to 18 Educational Research Project, commenced in 1993, is a longitudinal study that is following a number of young people at four different Victorian schools through each year of their secondary schooling. Twice each year, interviews are conducted with 24 students (six students at each of the schools), either alone or with their friends, the interviews are video- and audiotaped. The aim of the study is to follow qualitatively the thinking of these young people, and their pathways as they go through schooling and then enter life beyond this.In this article, we discuss some findings from this work in progress looking in particular at how young people in the early and middle years of secondary schooling are thinking about self, work and futures, and we consider in what ways gender is an issue in their approach.
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ItemGender equity and the boys debate: what sort of challenge is it?(Taylor & Francis, Ltd., 1997)Recently public and policy discussions about gender equity have become strongly concerned with boys. This article discusses some aspects of the form, the context and the implications of these developments in Australia (and notes some points of similarity and difference with developments in the UK). It focuses on three main areas: the ways examination and other 'indicators' have been used in public policy constructions of gender inequality; secondly the issue of what types of reforms constitute gender equity as a project; and thirdly, the issue of research agendas and the entry of masculinity to gender research.
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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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Item'And how would you describe yourself?': researchers and researched in first stages of a qualitative, longitudinal research project(Australian Council for Educational Research, 1996-04)This article discusses methodological issues and some initial substantive findings from the first two years of the 12 to 18 Educational Research Project. The 12 to 18 Project is a qualitative, longitudinal study of girls and boys from the end of grade 6 and as they proceed through each year of their secondary schooling. The article discusses epistemological and ethical issues related to how and with what implications the researchers 'construct' the researched in this long-term empirical study. It then discusses background literature and some initial findings in the three areas with which the project is concerned: the development of gendered subjectivity in the years of secondary school; schools, inequalities, and students' changing relationship to curriculum; and students' changing thinking about their futures.