Faculty of Education - Research Publications
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Item[Review of the book Knowing women: origins of women's education in nineteenth-century Australia](Cambridge University Press, 1997)The article reviews the book "Knowing Women: Origins of Women's Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia" by Marjorie Theobald.
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ItemConstructing and deconstructing 'girls' as a category of concern in education - reflections on two decades of research and reform(Falmer Press, 1998)In the 1970s, many countries began to initiate projects of reform for girls and women in education. In the decades that followed, a large and diverse body of feminist research on education was developed. And, at the turn of the century, the media and education policy-makers are raising new questions about what has taken place: have the aims of reform now been achieved? have feminist agendas 'gone too far'? is it boys who now deserve special attention? should economic agendas replace social concerns in constructions of education policy? This chapter reviews some of the ways of thinking and types of initiatives that have taken place in Australia since the early 1970s.
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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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ItemExploring positive cross-gender peer relations – year 10 students’ perspectives on cross-gender friendships( 1999-12)Much of the current academic and policy literature on gender and inclusive education calls for schools and teachers to move towards understanding gender as a multi-dimensional process of negotiated social relations that is informed by a range of discursive practices—but how students themselves are able to conceptualise gender relations in these ways is under researched. This paper reports on an aspect of an exploratory study that had as its focus students’ perceptions of cross cultural and cross gender friendships. This project, funded by a small Australian Research Council grant from La Trobe University, began with surveys of year 10 students at two schools that have previously participated in gender reform projects. Those students who indicated they had cross category friendships were then interviewed to elicit narratives that depict their perspectives on these friendships. Teacher interviews were also conducted to enable a fuller reading both of the practices of schools and the ways these practices are read by students as compared with teachers. This paper will consider some students’ narrative accounts of one aspect of this study, the cross-gender friendships.
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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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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,