Search

In both academic and policy spaces, learning is often cast as lifelong, dynamic, constructive and in particular, agentic. Despite this focus students' voices are rarely privileged in these spaces -- especially in policy. We respond to this oversight by deploying Foucault's theories of knowledge to explore how students understand themselves as learners, considering this alongside dominant political and academic discursive constructions of learning. Using a metaphor card approach, we explored metaphors for learning articulated by students in longitudinal focus group interviews. Conducted over a two-year period with 47 students from four Western Sydney schools, student metaphors for learning were diverse and wide-ranging, frequently reflecting strategic approaches to learning that aligned with requirements of high stakes exit exams. Significantly, student descriptions of themselves as exhausted, passive containers of impermanent learning were at odds with national and international policy and higher education constructions of learning as 'lifelong and agentic'. This contradiction raises critical questions about students' experiences of learning in schools, the role of teacher education, and re-direction of university equity programmes aimed at increasing access and participation for educationally marginalised students.

There is an ongoing need to support students' learning of linear functions, and the study of slope makes up a foundational component of this learning. We applied techniques from systemic functional linguistics to document the meanings that were established through spoken interaction between a student and her tutors during discussions of slope. We found that, while fraction notation gave the student and tutors a common reference point to discuss slope, it also masked important differences in how the student interpreted slope compared to her tutors. The findings of this analysis imply the need not only to attend to how students quantify slope, but also whether students recognize slope as an attribute of a line.

Shame is a 'slippery' concept in educational contexts but by listening to Aboriginal philosophy and Country, we can rethink its slipperiness. This article contemplates how multiple understandings of shame are derived from and coexist within colonised educational contexts. We focus on one positive example of Indigenous education to consider how these understandings can be challenged and transformed for the benefit of Indigenous learners. We discuss a mentoring program run by and for Indigenous young people that is successfully impacting school retention and completion rates: The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME). AIME has a rule, 'No Shame at AIME', with the view to minimising shame as a barrier to engaging with Western education. But is this as beneficial as might first appear? Might this erode important cultural understandings of shame necessary in Indigenous education? Instead, could shame be repositioned to better align with original cultural meanings and purposes? We philosophise about the AIME rule with Yuin Country and stories from Country along with our observational and interview data. We argue AIME does not so much 'remove' shame as reposition it to better align with Aboriginal cultural educational practice, which positively impacts mentees.

The "neoliberal turn" in the higher education sector has received significant intellectual scrutiny in recent times. This scrutiny, led by many established academics working within the sector, has highlighted the negative repercussions for teaching and research staff, often referred to as the "academic precariat" due to their tenuous employment prospects within an increasingly market-driven system. This critique of the modern university can also inadvertently position academics as either resisting or complying with neoliberal governance. This does not adequately account for the nuanced and poetic ways in which professional, personal and gendered subjectivities are formulated, intertwined and negotiated. In this paper we draw on the six overlapping yet distinct narratives of the six female authors, all early-career academics from Australia. We capture and analyse these narratives through collective biography, a qualitative methodology underpinned by the work of Davies and Gannon and others, that helps us to move beyond the "good vs. bad", "resistance vs. compliance" debates about academic life. We identify aspects of our lived subjectivities that offer rupture through poetic and hopeful ways of understanding how academics construct and negotiate their lives.

The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) is a national, extra-curricular mentoring programme that is closing the educational gap for young Indigenous Australians. So what is AIME doing that is working so well? This article draws on a large-scale classroom ethnography to describe the pedagogies that facilitate the teacher-student relationships in this programme. We use Shawn Wilson's theorisation of Indigenous ways of knowing in order to "unpack" how these approaches succeeded in creating the egalitarian and trust-filled relationships reportedly experienced in the AIME programme.

This article explores the unique mentoring model that the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) has established to assist Australian Indigenous young people succeed educationally. AIME can be described as a structured educational mentoring programme, which recruits university students to mentor Indigenous high school students. The success of the programme is unequivocal, with the AIME Indigenous mentees completing high school and the transition to further education and employment at higher rates than their non-AIME Indigenous counterparts. This article reports on a study that sought to deeply explore the particular approach to mentoring that AIME adopts. The study drew upon interviews, observations and surveys with AIME staff, mentees and mentors, and the focus in this article is on the surveys completed by the university mentors involved in the programme. Overall, there seems to be a discernible mutual reciprocity inherent in the learning outcomes of this mentoring programme; the mentors are learning along with the mentees. The article seeks to consider how AIME mentors reflect upon their learning in this programme and also how this pedagogic potential has been facilitated.

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on widening university participation and brings a focus on the classed and embodied nature of young people's imagination to existing discussions. We interviewed 250 young people living in disadvantaged communities across five Australian states who had experienced disengagement from compulsory primary and secondary schooling. We asked them about their education and their educational futures, specifically how they imagined universities and university participation. For these young people, universities were imagined as "big", "massive" alienating schools. The paper explores how the elements of schooling from which these young people disengaged became tangible barriers to imagining and pursuing participation in university education. The primary barrier they described was their relationships with school teachers. Our analysis shows how relationships with teachers can impact the imagined improbability/probability of university participation. We offer suggestions for how barriers to university created by poor relationships with teachers may be overcome.

A strong feature of the widening participation agenda is improving the aspirations of groups that are underrepresented in higher education. This paper seeks to reposition the utility of this as a focal point of educational interventions by showcasing the success of a mentoring program that takes a different approach. The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) significantly and positively impacts Australian Indigenous high school students' aspirations to finish school and continue to further study, training or employment. AIME is not read as a classic intervention program for raising aspirations. Instead, AIME builds upon the cultural wealth of participants and adopts an approach that seeks to inspire individuals rather than remediate them. The paper draws on survey data and fieldwork to present an example case study for resisting the assumption that young people's aspirations are deficit and in need of "improving." The paper describes how AIME works within young people's "windows of aspiration" to positively impact their engagement in school and further education, training and employment.

In both academic and policy spaces, learning is often cast as lifelong, dynamic, constructive and in particular, agentic. Despite this focus students' voices are rarely privileged in these spaces – especially in policy. We respond to this oversight by deploying Foucault's theories of knowledge to explore how students understand themselves as learners, considering this alongside dominant political and academic discursive constructions of learning. Using a metaphor card approach, we explored metaphors for learning articulated by students in longitudinal focus group interviews. Conducted over a two-year period with 47 students from four Western Sydney schools, student metaphors for learning were diverse and wide-ranging, frequently reflecting strategic approaches to learning that aligned with requirements of high stakes exit exams. Significantly, student descriptions of themselves as exhausted, passive containers of impermanent learning were at odds with national and international policy and higher education constructions of learning as 'lifelong and agentic'. This contradiction raises critical questions about students' experiences of learning in schools, the role of teacher education, and re-direction of university equity programmes aimed at increasing access and participation for educationally marginalised students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we interrogate the ways nutrition and health have become increasingly influential to children's everyday life practices and conceptualisations of food. We challenge the orthodoxy of meanings afforded to food that draw a distinct binary between "good"/"bad" or "healthy"/"unhealthy"; ideas widely promulgated in health texts, popular culture and pedagogical practice. Whilst these dominant medico-scientific discourses are pervasive in accounts of food, they are not the only meanings that permeate the popular cultural and pedagogical landscape; for instance, there has been a burgeoning interest in culinary cooking programmes and food sustainability in recent years. In this study, we use Foucault's notion of biopower to trace the various ways food is governed through interventions; pedagogised by popular culture; and, taken up in school policies and practices. We draw on interviews with 32 Year five students from Australian public and private primary schools. Not surprisingly, the analysis demonstrates how students reiterated food as a practice of "temptation" and "risk", similar to nutrition-based knowledge of food circulated in popular culture and health programmes. This suggests that other meanings of food are often socially and pedagogically marginalised. We argue that because of the perceived risk attached to food practices, these young people see food as an object of guilt and a reason for self-surveillance. After discussing the results we consider some of the consequences for young peoples' sense of self and their relationships with food in every day life, particularly in light of the perilous effects of deeming food as "good"/"bad" from such a young age. As a point of departure we explore some of the subjugated knowledges that can be brought to the table of food pedagogies in schools in order to bring about a broader assemblage of food "truths".

A study in an Australian university investigated 150 pre-service teachers' responses to and participation in discourses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Interesting data surfaced around the notion of "labelling" children with ADHD. It seemed that the pre-service teachers did not believe "ADHD" to be a label. Whilst the literature reviewed acknowledged diagnosing a child with ADHD to be tantamount to labelling (that is, "ADHD" is a medical diagnostic label), the pre-service teachers in this study differentiated diagnosis from labelling and cast labelling as occurring "in the classroom" sometime "pre-" or "post-" diagnosis. Speaking of diagnosis and labelling in this way re-defines an object of dominant labelling discourse: "doctor as labeller" is replaced with notions of "teacher as labeller". Using Foucault's "rules of discursive formations" to frame its analysis, this study pondered the pre-service teachers' conceptions of labelling and in doing so revealed a "teacher as labeller" discursive formation. This article provides examples of how this discursive formation features in pre-service teachers' talk and outlines an important implication of the "teacher as labeller" discursive formation, namely that it enables teachers to cement their role in the ADHD medical diagnostic apparatus. (Contains 6 notes.)

Abstract: In May 2013 one of the most profoundly influential books of the late twentieth and early twenty‐first century was released in its fifth edition. Yet, it is not unreasonable to speculate that this newest edition will pass largely unnoticed, even as new diagnoses (and the loss of current ones) seep into the everyday. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM‐5) will undoubtedly be influential in education – defining and re‐defining student maladies. Its list of extensive categories provides, so it is argued, a means to uniformly identify mental disorders. Applied in educational contexts, children and young people can thus be categorized by clinical experts and teachers able to identify an individual's problems, and in theory, respond appropriately. Criticism of the DSM includes debate over its application in cross‐cultural contexts as well as the ways that socio‐economic differences are, to put it bluntly, diagnosed differently. Although these issues of diagnosis do get attention, historical contexts can remain bereft in commentary. In this paper we consider the value that historical perspectives can bring to an analysis of the contemporary effects of DSM‐inspired readings of education and disadvantage. The paper also draws on two projects, one with young people, the other with parents of young children, both of whom experienced disadvantage and precarious relationships with education. In these excluded contexts, people are more likely to come into contact with diagnostic repertoires that originate from the DSM. Drawing on Georges Canguilhem's analysis the ‘concept' as well as Michel Foucault's discussion of Canguilhem's work, this paper considers how attention to school problems is important for disengaging with education's appetite for psychiatric disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) is a national, extra-curricular mentoring programme that is closing the educational gap for young Indigenous Australians. So what is AIME doing that is working so well? This article draws on a large-scale classroom ethnography to describe the pedagogies that facilitate the teacher–student relationships in this programme. We use Shawn Wilson’s theorisation of Indigenous ways of knowing in order to ‘unpack’ how these approaches succeeded in creating the egalitarian and trust-filled relationships reportedly experienced in the AIME programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘neoliberal turn’ in the higher education sector has received significant intellectual scrutiny in recent times. This scrutiny, led by many established academics working within the sector, has highlighted the negative repercussions for teaching and research staff, often referred to as the ‘academic precariat’ due to their tenuous employment prospects within an increasingly market-driven system. This critique of the modern university can also inadvertently position academics as either resisting or complying with neoliberal governance. This does not adequately account for the nuanced and poetic ways in which professional, personal and gendered subjectivities are formulated, intertwined and negotiated. In this paper we draw on the six overlapping yet distinct narratives of the six female authors, all early-career academics from Australia. We capture and analyse these narratives through collective biography, a qualitative methodology underpinned by the work of Davies and Gannon and others, that helps us to move beyond the ‘good vs. bad’, ‘resistance vs. compliance’ debates about academic life. We identify aspects of our lived subjectivities that offer rupture through poetic and hopeful ways of understanding how academics construct and negotiate their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the unique mentoring model that the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) has established to assist Australian Indigenous young people succeed educationally. AIME can be described as a structured educational mentoring programme, which recruits university students to mentor Indigenous high school students. The success of the programme is unequivocal, with the AIME Indigenous mentees completing high school and the transition to further education and employment at higher rates than their non-AIME Indigenous counterparts. This article reports on a study that sought to deeply explore the particular approach to mentoring that AIME adopts. The study drew upon interviews, observations and surveys with AIME staff, mentees and mentors, and the focus in this article is on the surveys completed by the university mentors involved in the programme. Overall, there seems to be a discernible mutual reciprocity inherent in the learning outcomes of this mentoring programme; the mentors are learning along with the mentees. The article seeks to consider how AIME mentors reflect upon their learning in this programme and also how this pedagogic potential has been facilitated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we interrogate the ways nutrition and health have become increasingly influential to children's everyday life practices and conceptualisations of food. We challenge the orthodoxy of meanings afforded to food that draw a distinct binary between ‘good’/‘bad’ or ‘healthy’/‘unhealthy’; ideas widely promulgated in health texts, popular culture and pedagogical practice. Whilst these dominant medico-scientific discourses are pervasive in accounts of food, they are not the only meanings that permeate the popular cultural and pedagogical landscape; for instance, there has been a burgeoning interest in culinary cooking programmes and food sustainability in recent years. In this study, we use Foucault's notion of biopower to trace the various ways food is governed through interventions; pedagogised by popular culture; and, taken up in school policies and practices. We draw on interviews with 32 Year five students from Australian public and private primary schools. Not surprisingly, the analysis demonstrates how students reiterated food as a practice of ‘temptation’ and ‘risk’, similar to nutrition-based knowledge of food circulated in popular culture and health programmes. This suggests that other meanings of food are often socially and pedagogically marginalised. We argue that because of the perceived risk attached to food practices, these young people see food as an object of guilt and a reason for self-surveillance. After discussing the results we consider some of the consequences for young peoples’ sense of self and their relationships with food in every day life, particularly in light of the perilous effects of deeming food as ‘good’/‘bad’ from such a young age. As a point of departure we explore some of the subjugated knowledges that can be brought to the table of food pedagogies in schools in order to bring about a broader assemblage of food ‘truths’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study in an Australian university investigated 150 pre-service teachers’ responses to and participation in discourses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Interesting data surfaced around the notion of ‘labelling’ children with ADHD. It seemed that the pre-service teachers did not believe ‘ADHD’ to be a label. Whilst the literature reviewed acknowledged diagnosing a child with ADHD to be tantamount to labelling (that is, ‘ADHD’ is a medical diagnostic label), the pre-service teachers in this study differentiated diagnosis from labelling and cast labelling as occurring in the classroom sometime pre- or post- diagnosis. Speaking of diagnosis and labelling in this way re-defines an object of dominant labelling discourse: ‘doctor as labeller’ is replaced with notions of ‘teacher as labeller’. Using Foucault’s ‘rules of discursive formations’ to frame its analysis, this study pondered the pre-service teachers’ conceptions of labelling and in doing so revealed a ‘teacher as labeller’ discursive formation. This article provides examples of how this discursive formation features in pre-service teachers’ talk and outlines an important implication of the ‘teacher as labeller’ discursive formation, namely that it enables teachers to cement their role in the ADHD medical diagnostic apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies the theoretical lens of Bourdieu to explore leadership and the distribution of power between teachers and early childhood practitioners in the private voluntary and independent (PVI) sector in a good practice partnership. It questions the effectiveness of such partnerships in bringing about sustained improvements to practice in this sector. Data were collected in three focus groups with practitioners from 10 settings that were recruited by a consortium of schools to the partnership to take part in a 10-week intervention. The findings showed that the power imbalance between teachers and early childhood practitioners cancelled out collaborative pedagogical models of leadership intended to underpin the good practice partnership. Furthermore, this power imbalance contributed to the lack of sustainability of the intervention. In conclusion, leadership practices need to be more closely aligned between early childhood practitioners and teachers by drawing on ideas of moral leadership elicited from a symbolic frame. The article has relevance for leaders operating in collaborative contexts where existing power imbalances are evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The method for determining load resistance of insulating glass in ASTM standards uses a load-share factor equation based only on glass-lite thicknesses to estimate the load carried by each lite. This paper presents an experimental investigation of load sharing of double- and triple-glazed insulating glass units. The major factors varied in the investigation include unit rectangular dimensions, glass-lite thicknesses, and initial airspace volumes. Pressure versus deflection curves are presented for select insulating glass unit configurations. A second testing procedure explores the measured change in pressure within the sealed airspaces while simultaneously measuring applied pressure and associated deflections. Changes in pressures in the sealed airspaces are directly compared to the ASTM standard load-share factors. Figures in this paper show the load-sharing trends of various similarly loaded insulating glass units, and the results presented in this paper suggest many of the neglected factors significantly influence load sharing in insulating glass units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a dearth of scholarly analysis and critique of the Australian newsprint media’s role in the medicalization of child behaviour. To begin to redress this lack this paper analyses newsprint media’s use of metaphors that re/describe and construct realities of ADHD with a medicalizing effect. The interdisciplinary team used theFactivaTMdatabase to locate and review 453 articles published in Australian national and metropolitan newspapers during the decade 1999–2009. Data analysis involved generating statistical descriptions of the dataset according to attributes such as: date, state, newspaper titles and author names. This was followed by inductive analysis of article content. Content analysis revealed pervasive and striking use of metaphor in newsprint media reporting of ADHD content, especially when describing health professionals, educators, parents and children. This collection of metaphors was striking, and while the metaphors deployed were varied, this diversity seemed underscored by a common functionality that increased the risk that child behaviour was explained using medicalized knowledge. We contend that these metaphors collectively and coherently functioned to simplify and delimit meanings of children’s health and behaviour to favour depictions that medicalize problems of children and childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]