Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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ItemPencil or Keyboard? Boys’ Preferences in Writing(Nova Southeastern University, 2020)Handwriting is an important subject in primary schools, especially in the Early Years. The importance of writing skill is now seen as a debate with the increasing demand on children to learn technology skills to help them with 21st Century learning—how to write on the keyboard effectively. The topic is important because handwriting is an essential life skill to have with or without technology. In this study, I looked at the importance of both in the context of the qualitative case studies in three schools in Melbourne, Australia. The aim of the research is to explore how do students understand the learning of handwriting and keyboarding in schools? This qualitative case study employed a Thematic Analysis approach in which the central intention was to understand the lived experience of six Year 6 boys across three schools and their attitudes to writing and technology. In this article, I addressed the importance of teaching handwriting to primary school students, especially in the first four years of their school life from Foundation to Year 3. The findings suggest that teachers should continue explicitly teaching handwriting to their students despite the heavy reliance on technology in today’s lifestyle.
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ItemIn Jen’s Shoes – Looking Back to Look Forward: An Autoethnographic Account(Nova Southeastern University, 2019)This paper discusses the monumental events in my life that have shaped my two professional identities, teacher and researcher. I used autoethnography as a research methodology to traverse my personal life narratives across two different countries: Vietnam and Australia to seek and to examine my dual cultural identities, and how they shaped me. I am a passionate teacher who believes that teaching can change the world through the causes that I care about such as anti-racism and equity in education for students from all backgrounds. In this case study, data were collected by semi-structured interview and reflection on journals. Data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings are reported under four themes that reflected the stages of my life: designed in Vietnam, made in Australia was the first phase, growing up in Australia, my schooling years and professional years. By making sense of the narratives and involved, it helped me to understand myself better, who I am as a teacher and the causes that I believe in. As an Australian with hybrid cultural identities, I am the norm in contemporary culture.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableOut of the box and into the 21st century: Digital literacy and human rights for our most disenfranchised students.( 2019-05-04)Conference presentation at the Round Table on Information Access for People with Print Disabilities Conference
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDocumenting, assessing, and teaching digital literacy for students with disability, via an evidence basis of subject matter expertise, teacher knowledge, scholarly discourse, and student ability.( 2019-12-02)A discussion of the development and outcomes of the new digital literacy tool within the SWANs/ABLES suite of teaching resources to support the teaching and learning of students with intellectual disability and/or autism.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableA Critical Review of D’Andrea, F. M. (2012). Preferences and practices among students who read braille and use assistive technology. Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, 106(10), 585-596(South Pacific Educators in Vision Impairment (SPEVI), 2015)Utilising research about the educational use of assistive technology by students with vision impairment to access computers (Corn & Wall, 2002: Farnsworth & Luckner, 2008; Fellenius, 1999) and recognising the importance of technology in school and personal life, D’Andrea investigated the current academic use of paper braille and assistive technology among twelve blind, braille-using students aged 16-22 in the United States, and their practice and attitudes regarding such use. Her results suggest a varying nature to how students used a range of high and low tech tools, and how their approaches to completing class work were largely influenced by their personal opinions and experiences of the technologies. The study also demonstrates the importance of students’ choice-making ability regarding the selection of tools and strategies.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableArviointi ja erityyispedagogiikka [Assessment and special education](PS Kustannus, 2019)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEsteetön arviointi [Accessible evaluation](Santalahti-kustannus, 2019)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableNarrative Language and Literacy Education Research Within a Postcolonial Framework(Springer, 2017)This chapter explores the heuristic value of narrative as it might be applied to researching language and literacy education in postcolonial settings. We focus specifically on the importance of autobiographical writing as a means of enabling educators and researchers to engage with a ‘plurality of consciousnesses’ (Bakhtin MM, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s poetics (Emerson C, ed and trans). University of Minnesota Press, Minneaplois, 1984) and to explore the values and beliefs they bring to their work. In this way we challenge the pretensions to objectivity of the scientific research privileged by standards-based reforms. By locating autobiographical writing in a postcolonial framework, however, we also seek to differentiate our standpoint from the claims typically made on behalf of ‘narrative inquiry’ (Clandinin J, Connelly M, Narrative inquiry: experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass, San-Francisco, 2000). We argue that personal narratives should prompt analyses that investigate how our individual situations are mediated by larger social and historical contexts. This means combining storytelling with analytical writing in order to produce hybrid texts that challenge accepted forms of academic writing. Crucially, this also means embracing ‘trans-lingualism’ (Canagarajah S, Translingual practice: global English and cosmopolitan relations. Routledge, London/New York, 2013), working at the interface between English and other languages, and engaging with issues of language and socio-cultural identity vis-à-vis the globalization of English as the language of science.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableStepping Inside an English Classroom: Investigating the Everyday Experiences of an English Teacher(Taylor and Francis Group, 2018)This essay presents an English teacher’s inquiry into her professional practice in an institutional setting that is heavily regulated by standards-based reforms. Rather than something external to her, she sees those reforms as part of an internal conflict that affects her capacity to be fully responsive to her students. In dialogue with a colleague, she writes stories that reaffirm the deeply relational character of her work, both as an ethically responsive stance and as a means to understand the socially mediated character of her everyday world. She attempts to find alternative ways of seeing and accounting for her work than the reified mentality of standards-based reforms, positing a world that is relational, rather than compartmentalised, where our chief responsibility as teachers is to cultivate a sensitivity towards others around us, rather than continually being compelled to classify and judge them.
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ItemTracking creativity in Arts and Music: A document analysis of national educational goals and curriculum in Victoria(International Society of Music Education (ISME), 2020)An analysis of national educational goals and curriculum documents played an important role in my doctoral study in Victoria, Australia. The study was a mixed methods investigation into teaching for creativity and creative processes for music educators in primary schools. The analysis aimed to explore the place of creativity from an educational goal and curriculum perspective. Documents from a forty-year period were investigated qualitatively to seek the portrayal and contextual meanings of the word “creativity”. The paper is presented in two parts: the influence of three national declarations of educational goals on the changing place of creativity in contemporaneous curriculum, and creativity as communicated to teachers in curriculum documents in Arts and Music. The purpose of the document analysis was to gain a detailed view of creativity within the two specifically selected document types. In doing so, it informed the development of the survey instrument of the study and was distilled to form an adjunct to the literature review. The document analysis showed variation and similarity between historic and recent contexts of creativity in Arts and Music curriculum. The place of creativity in the Music curriculum in Victoria shows a sense of continuity through different iterations of curriculum. Yet, despite this, there are clear shifts in the language that describes or implies creativity in Arts and Music curriculum. Ultimately, the document analysis presented a glocalised and historic perspective of educational goals and curriculum in Victoria and has the capacity to inform future research and teacher practice in creativity and education.