Hawke Research Institute
Presenter 1: Sam Sellar
Taking thought seriously: Deleuze’s challenge to ‘critical pedagogy’
Presenter 2: Claire Ralfs
Un-fixing professional development: Deterritorialising skills
This seminar offered two contributions towards extending aspects of critical education theory by means of conceptual tools provided by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The first paper argued that ‘critical pedagogies’ often attempt to make thought critical through modifications of content or method. Such approaches risk failing to consider implicit presuppositions about what it means to think and the potential complicity between thought and the organisation of State power that may impair attempts to render thought ‘critical’. The second paper explored the ways Professional Development in community services is tethered to the skills agenda and reflected on the response-ability of educators to inspire a becoming-skilled. The two papers engaged with different aspects of a common theoretic. Overlaps and resonances between them were also explored.
In a climate of intense debate over boys’ participation and achievement in school literacy, how does a team of researchers with a critical socio-cultural orientation design and carry out research in this contested field? In this workshop we describe how we worked pedagogically, dialogically and analytically both alongside and at a distance from teacher researchers. We also highlight some of the challenges and rewards of working across multiple categories of data generated by teachers, students and researchers.
top^In a climate of intense debate over boys’ participation and achievement in school literacy, how does a team of researchers with a critical sociocultural orientation design and carry out research in this contested field? In this workshop we describe how we worked pedagogically, dialogically and analytically both alongside and at a distance from teacher researchers. We also highlight some of the challenges and rewards of working across multiple categories of data generated by teachers, students and researchers.
Audio File:
June Research-at-work Seminar
This session considered the work in progress on an Australian Research Council funded project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN): a collaboration including a UniSA research team, Adelaide’s ten northern suburb public secondary schools, the Australian Education Union and the SA government’s Social Inclusion Unit. Drawing from RPiN data sets, we present and compare students’, teachers’ and principals’ perspectives on middle schooling in ‘the North’. Difficulties for broaching such analysis within the representational politics of schooling will also be considered. That is, increasing system and media pressures to ‘achieve’ competitively – according to a ‘market’ logic – make it politically fraught for staff from ‘less advantaged’ schools, and researchers of these schools, to call attention to difficulties these schools face and to argue that such difficulties have ‘root causes’ in broader social-structural inequalities.
The student data shows that students of ‘the North’ are indeed ‘uncanny theorists’ with substantive insights about curricula and pedagogies that do and don’t work. Teacher data highlights how teachers analyse their emotional labours in conditions of intense and complex workload, and lack of time for professional planning and reflection. Principals reveal their struggles with staffing complexities, resource shortfalls, central accountability requirements and other dilemmas of leadership in a climate of managerialism and devolution of responsibility (but not power) from government to schools. These issues and struggles of students, teachers and principals are of course linked; and yet perspectives tend to be positional and thus partial, without sufficient communication across positions to construct a ‘bigger picture’ that can fuel action toward institutional and system change. In seeking to put such a ‘bigger picture’ together, this session will raise certain questions for audience participation:
In this paper, I will explore the ways in which the notions of movement
and stillness are mediated by a sense of journeying as expressed through
the heroic stories and monologues of asylum seekers in Britain. Stories
that recount traumatic experiences work as a way of reconciling a past
that can no longer exist, with a new sense of being in the world. I will
explain that through storying, movement is a reflection of the
existential journey. Stories about journeys are journeys in themselves
which, through the telling, change our perception of experiences
(Jackson 2002, p. 30). Stories are therefore, coping strategies – they
assist one in coming to terms with one’s experiences ‘making words stand
for the world, and then, by manipulating them, changing one’s experience
of the world’ (Jackson 2002, p. 18). Jackson, who incorporates a Heideggerian (1967) perspective, reminds us that when people experience
‘desperate’ and ‘overwhelming situations [they] seek imperatively to
wrest back control, to reassert the right to govern their own lives, to
be complicit in their own fate’ (1998, p. 30). This is both the search and
the struggle for authenticity (see Heidegger 1967). I endeavour to
critique the qualities of stillness as concretising and binding the
identity, label and related experiences of ‘asylum seeker’ that one may
never transgress. As Camus (1955) inadvertently shows us in The Myth of Sysiphus, movement is the eternal toil that allows one to work through a
static existence. Stories then become the arena in which one searches
for understanding and authenticity of one’s predicament. This can only
be found in the acceptance of both stillness and movement. In this
paper, I argue that asylum seekers experience the stillness through
their entrapment in this liminal period, but movement, evident in their
speech-acts, assists them in affixing ways to overcome such a
predicament. Movement in a seemingly motionless context is itself enough
to generate the possibility of future happenings.
Danielle Every
Using critical discourse analysis to contribute to refugee advocacy and
anti-racism (PowerPoint 150 kb)
My research focus is anti-racist and pro-refugee/asylum seeker
discourse. My interest in this issue was piqued by the lack of
discursive work examining counter-discourses: in general, discursive
work on racism has been concerned to make oppressive and exclusionary
discourses visible. In applying discourse analysis to
counter-discourses, several issues have arisen. Two amongst these, which
I am grappling with at the moment, is, firstly, the question of whether
discourse analysis provides similar tools for constructing and building
anti-racist and refugee advocates’ discourses as it does for
deconstructing racist discourse. Secondly, it seems that in applying
discourse analysis to counter-discourses, it is possible, and often
useful, to use this as a tool for examining where these discourses
actually reproduce, rather than challenge, racism and anti-asylum seeker
policies and practices. However, where this is the only way in which
discourse analysis is used, I’ve found that it engenders paralysis – if
anti-racist discourses ultimately reproduce racism themselves, what can
be done or said differently? This issue is raised for me particularly by
work such as that of Ghassan Hage on whiteness, and his dichotomising of
white discourse into good white nationalism or bad white nationalism,
both of which he argues are essentially the same. In seeking ways out of
this dilemma (and ways of building anti-racism and pro-asylum seeker
discourse), I am exploring possibilities for discourse analysis,
particularly seeking to combine or extend such analysis with more
contextualised and embodied analyses. What that might look like, or even
what that means, is the subject of my current thinking on this topic,
and the subject of this seminar.
November 16th 2007
3.30pm to 5.00pm
C1-60, Magill campus
Presenters: Dr Stephen Atkinson and Professor Bobbi Hammett, visiting scholar from Memorial University, Canada
Bobbi Hammett
Learning and Critiquing ‘Official’ Assessment Practices in English Language
and Literacy (PowerPoint 1.7Mb)
Notions of expanded literacies or multiliteracies are still somewhat new to some
teachers and certainly are new to education students, particularly when it comes
to ways to assess them, both at the school and provincial levels. For this
reason educational partners in Newfoundland and Labrador have developed an
electronic learning environment/interactive website (www.learnrubrics.ca)
through which experienced and prospective teachers, parents, K-12 students and
others can learn about the rubrics (analytic scales) that are used for assessing
students’ progress in language arts (including reading, writing, viewing,
representing, speaking, and listening).
This presentation will have two parts. One part will introduce the website and demonstrate possible uses by education instructors and professors. The second part will focus on the theoretical underpinnings and research potential of the website. This will include discussion of criterion-referenced assessments, professional development of teachers, and changing language arts/literacy curriculum, particularly in regard to new literacies.
Audio File:
Bobbi Hammett
Stephen Atkinson
Digital Storytelling (PowerPoint 16Mb)
Digital storytelling has emerged as a ‘grassroots’ form of techno-social
community building around personal, first-person narratives. In recent years it
has been called upon to serve a range of purposes: as a teaching tool, for
example, or to counter the domination of large ‘impersonal’ media companies, or
as a means for large media organisations themselves to amass ‘user generated
content’ for online platforms. Despite this diversity of uses, an important but
often forgotten feature in common is that the production of digital
storytelling, and the new media publics of ‘produsers’ it proposes, are founded
on an ethic of listening to the stories other people tell about themselves, and,
even more importantly, on the principle of reciprocity.
In this seminar I will discuss the potential of digital storytelling as a resource for social and educational research, with a particular focus on reciprocity; its complication of the role and status of the researcher; and the proposal to reframe research as creative collaboration.
Audio File:
Stephen Atkinson
Video file:
Life wasn't always noisy (NB this file begins with a blank screen in
silence!)
