Hawke Research Institute
March 14th 2008
Presenters: TESOL Researchers Group
The Globalization of English: Implications for Research-at-work (Video
file)
TESOL Researchers Group PowerPoint presentation
LPLC Research@Work audio and video recordings
Over the past several decades English language use has expanded rapidly across the globe, and English has become a true world language. As a consequence, the field of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) has experienced massive changes. It has gone from an apparently cozy place, where amateur linguists could exercise their assumed superiority of native speaker status, to an extensive community of researchers and practitioners operating in a highly competitive industry, where international political and commercial interests often overshadow local concerns and cultures.
Since the start of its fortnightly meetings over a year ago, the TESOL Researchers Group, with members from Thailand, Vietnam, China, Korea, Indonesia, Israel, Scotland and Australia, has been engaging with this dynamic context of globalization and the issues it presents for learners and practitioners. Our Research-at-Work presentation reviews the work of the Group in developing its own research culture, and provides a sample of some of the research being undertaken by individual members.
May 9th 2008
Presenters: Jenni Carter and Sam Sellar
Pedagogy and policy in education: The ineptitude of calculation (Video
file)
LPLC Research@Work audio and video recordings
Policy and pedagogy – policing and leading – are both modes of address produced to order and (trans)form the Other. Such ordering and (trans)formation always entails a certain violence. This violence cannot be mitigated through calculation of a normative ‘good’ as this will lead to erasure of the Other’s singularity. In this paper we follow Derrida by arguing that policymakers and educators with aspirations toward an ethical horizon must premise pedagogies and policy upon a certain ‘unknowing’ with regard to how these formative processes should proceed. Educational policy that narrowly defines practice, and tightly framed pedagogies that constitute a method or technique, risk the ‘ineptitude’ of calculation by not attending to the singularity of both the Other and the event of teaching and learning. It is irresponsible, however, for policymakers and educators to forgo the ethical demand upon them to (trans)form and develop the capacities of the Other in a manner which, in their best estimation, is for the Other. Through consideration of exemplary instances of policy and pedagogy it will be argued that negotiation enables educators to maintain the openness toward undecidability that is demanded for the pursuit of ethical educational practice.
June 13th 2008
Presenters: Lyn Kerkham and Brenton Prosser
Narrative poesis: Embracing narrative ways of knowing and troubling the 'strip-mining' of participant stories
(Video file)
LPLC Research@Work audio and video recordings
The recent rapid expansion in the use of narrative methods in social science has not been matched by new considerations of aesthetics, poetics or methods of analysis. As a result, there is a danger that narrative inquiry can be used as a means to ‘strip mine’ participant experience through coding, while neglecting the ways of knowing that are central to the narrative form. The first presentation will trace one researcher’s journey to narrative inquiry, their response to the emerging tension between aesthetic and pragmatic renditions, while discussing the use of a critical narratives approach with secondary students to write a novel that resists deficit identities in Adelaide's northern suburbs. The second presentation will present work-in-progress on transcripts of four interviews with one of the teachers in the study ‘Teacher in their place: teachers at work in an environmental communications curriculum’. This presentation will outline an approach to analysis, a combination of aspects of narrative and poststructuralist analysis, and the process of constructing the transcript poem to consider a representation of narrative and spatial identities. Together these presentations explore the application of narrative inquiry methods in different educational contexts, the narrative nature of identit(ies), and the importance of aesthetic ways of knowing for deeper understanding.
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July 25th 2008
Presenter: Chris Davis
(Management) consultants at work (Video file)
LPLC Research@Work audio and video recordings
Well there’s gurus - they can make >$50,000 a day for a seminar where you’ll probably get a collection of maybe 50 powerpoint slides from a bank of several hundred they’ve accumulated over the years. But you’ll get a good performance. If you like Billy Graham.
And there’s the accountants who gained so much information about organisations when they audited them that they started to provide strategy advice. But some of them are in gaol.
And there’s the strategy advisors like McKinseys who will come in and do anything you want for a large price - or you could work for them which gives you the best chance of being a CE of a Fortune 500 company - none of this working your way up the ranks!
And there’s all those smaller operators who pick up a multitude of contracts in all parts of the South Australian public sector because it’s been ‘downsized’ and everyone is so busy that they can’t do it all.
But what are all of them doing in the public sector? Because they are. Ubiquitous. So what is the work consultants are doing towards the construction of South Australian public sector managers as neoliberal managers? And what are the connections between consultants, business schools and rightwing think-tanks?
And what difference does it make?
top^August 15th 2008
Presenter: Katherine Hodgetts and Philippa Milroy
Should I stay or should I go?: Media representations of teaching
and new teachers’ career decisions (Video file)
LPLC Research@Work audio and video recordings
Across the Western world it is well established that between 25% and 45% of all newly recruited teachers leave the profession within three to five years of commencement (OECD, 2005). Concern about such statistics has led to numerous studies investigating the causes of early career teacher attrition. These studies have identified a broad range of contributing factors, including those related to wages, working conditions, and the experience of stress and burnout. Significantly, studies in this area have also identified the development of a positive professional identity as central to the maintenance of a long-term teaching career.
In the context of research into early career teacher attrition, relatively little attention has been paid to the impact of media representations of education on new teachers' negotiation of professional identities. This seems a significant absence given research suggesting that (increasingly negative) media representations of teachers impact upon educators' capacity to make sense of themselves and their work. This session reports will report initial findings from a small study seeking to address these issues, drawing together an analysis of print media data and focus groups with current, and former, 'new teachers'.
top^September 19th 2008
Presenters: Phil Cormack, Sue Nichols and Katherine Hodgetts
Investigating the impact of practitioner inquiry on professional identity, professional practice and organisational knowledge (Video file)
LPLC Research@Work audio and video recordings
At a time when ‘evidence-based practice’ has become a mantra in educational circles, there is considerable encouragement for studies into the impact of educational interventions. Practitioner inquiry undertaken by teachers initially emerged as a challenge to positivist, external and decontextualised educational research approaches. Now, as Practitioner Inquiry has become an element in academic programs and system-wide professional development initiatives, there is pressure to provide evidence of its effectiveness as an intervention into teachers’ practice. In this session we discuss how we have designed a study into the impacts of practitioner inquiry in the context of debates about the value of teacher-generated knowledge. We look at how other researchers have approached this question and the knowledge which different approaches have generated. We zoom in on moments in the design process to show how decisions of detail in the construction of research instruments reflect larger issues of ethics, knowledge generation and representation.
LPLC Research@Work audio and video recordings
There have been many and diverse projects – some well funded and widely known, some seeking safety in the shade or unheralded except locally – aimed at redressing systematic ways in which the modernist project of mass schooling (and especially secondary schooling) remains unjust. This presentation draws reference to projects that have gained some resourcing and traction: the Queensland New Basics, the ACT High Schools for the New Millennium and others. We offer stories from these projects which illustrate systemic characteristics that co-opt and limit the ways and degrees in which these projects have been able to redress inequitable schooling experiences and outcomes, teasing out ‘intractabilities’ for stronger justice efforts. From this examination of projects, we abstract a set of methodo-logics that can be linked to well-known programmatic approaches in the history of pursuit of stronger social-educational justice. We place these approaches and their logics on an analytic continuum that highlights a core tension across them all: between (1) a redistribution impulse to provide cultural capital needed for ‘mainstream’ academic success to learners who do not inherit such capital from families and communities; and (2) a recognition impulse to build teaching-and-learning around ‘funds of knowledge’ from learners’ cultural lifeworlds. Drawing on Derrida, we argue that, within a social space/time that is powerfully structured by ‘capitals’, these two impulses are both inseparable for a serious approach to justice through education, and irreconcilably contradictory, making pursuit of justice through education necessarily a ‘mad’ project, requiring a philosophical level of difficult wrestling. At the same time, these twinned ‘irreconcilables’ require wrestling at a pragmatic level, both through policy and by concrete institutional means.
