Questioning pedagogies : Hong Kong pre-service teachers' dialogic reflections on a transnational school experience

There are increasing opportunities in many countries for pre-service teachers to engage in a transnational school-based experience as part of study abroad programmes. The transformative potential of such transnational teaching experiences is recorded in research studies, often supported by data from participant surveys. However, there has been a lack of evidence investigating how shifts in professional understanding derive from such experiences. This qualitative study addresses this issue by exploring the perspectives of 16 pre-service teachers of English as a Second language from Hong Kong, who engaged in transnational teaching activities with primary school pupils in Australia, during their study abroad program. Discourse analysis of participants’ dialogues traces how they encountered conflicting Discourses of ‘student-centredness’ in the Australian classroom. Reflecting dialogically on their experiences led participants to negotiate and reframe their understandings of language teaching pedagogy and themselves as language teachers. The findings demonstrate the importance of both peer and lecturer feedback into the process of dialogic reflection and the need for more longitudinal research into the impact of transnational school-based experience in pre-service teacher education.

Resisting innovation talk in higher education teaching and learning

The exhortation to innovate is a pervasive one that occupies a central position across university mission statements, strategic plans, marketing literature and job titles. This paper locates a discourse of innovation within a history of Australian federal higher education policy, a history that may bear similarity with other national contexts. This paper names this discourse as an innovation talk that influences our teaching and learning practices, a discourse that can be reconfigured in a way that opens up the possibility for change. As such, this paper presents an analytical process used to resist taken-for-granted views of what constitutes valuable teaching practices. Suggestions for re-conceptualising how universities govern and support teaching and learning innovation are drawn from analysis of key federal policies that have influenced university practices in recent years.

Using digital storytelling as a change agent for women’s participation in the Turkish public sphere

This thesis builds on the scholarship and practical know-how that have emerged from digital storytelling projects around the world with diverse groups of participants in a range of institutions. I have used the results of these projects to explore the opportunities Digital Storytelling workshop practice may hold for women’s participation in the public sphere in Turkey. Through theoretical discussion and practical experimentation, I examine the potential of Digital Storytelling workshop practice as a means to promote agency and self-expression in a feminist activist organisation, focusing in particular on whether Digital Storytelling can be used as a change agent – as a tool for challenging the idea of public sphere in ways that make it more inclusive of women’s participation. The thesis engages with feminist scholarship’s critiques of the public/private dichotomy, as well as the concept of gender, to seek connections with narrative identity in the light of the analysis of the Digital Storytelling workshops and the digital stories that were created in a feminist context. The study on which this thesis is based saw the introduction of Digital Storytelling to Turkey for the first time through workshops in Istanbul and Antakya, conducted in partnership with the feminist activist organisation Amargi Women’s Academy. Applying the principles of feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis as used by Judith Baxter (2003), I examine two sets of data collected in this project. First, I analyse the interactions during the Digital Storytelling workshops, where women from Amargi created their digital stories in a collaborative setting. This is done through participatory observation notes and in-depth interviews with the workshop participants and facilitators. Second, I seek to uncover the strategies that these women used to ‘speak back to power’ in their digital stories, reading these as texts. I conclude that women from the Amargi network used the workshops to create digital content in order to communicate their concerns about issues that can be classified as gender-specific matters. During this process, they also cooperated, established new connections, and at the end of the process even defined new ways of using, circulating and repurposing their digital stories for feminist activism in Turkey. My research thereby contributes equally to feminist discourse analysis, the study of new-media usage and uptake among non-professionals, and the study of media–public sphere interactions in a particular national setting: Turkey. My conclusion indicates that the process of production is as important as the product itself, and from that I am able to draw out some strategies for developing digitally equipped women’s activism in Turkey.

Worthless and undeserving? : problematising the subjectivities of single parenthood

A considerable body of knowledge has been constructed perpetuating the notion single parenthood is a significant problem for society, and while this is supported by specific research designs and sampling practices, it is also maintained by two key discourses. The first constitutes single parenthood as a deficit, while the second identifies it as a risk. In both cases, these discourses are operationalised by the philosophy of neo-liberalism, which envisions good citizenship as economic autonomy. Historically, it has been the convergence of the risk and deficit discourses that has constituted single parenthood as a social problem. More recently, however, risk discourses have come to dominate thinking about single parenthood. As a result, this thesis terms risk discourses as dominant discourses. As dominant discourses, risk sidelines or discounts other ways of thinking about single parenthood. While a few exceptions are notable, including some feminist, poststructural and family resilience scholars, most researchers appear unable to see past the positioning of these discourses and envision another way of being for parents who are single. This means that alternative subjectivities are obscured and have limited influence in this field of research. Because this thesis aimed to problematise dominant subjectivities of single parenthood, a poststructural Foucauldian framework has been utilized in order to document the discursive constructions of single parenthood through literature, insider discourses, and outsider discourses. For the purposes of this thesis, outsider discourses are constituted as those outside the subjectivities of single parenthood, such as media and research discourses. An examination of the Australian media has been undertaken over a one year period, the results of which form the basis for the analysis of media discourses of single parenthood. Parents who are single were also targeted for self selection into this project to provide insider discourses about single parenthood. This analysis explored how respondents negotiated the discourses of single parenthood and how they themselves used or rejected the subjectivities constructed for them via these discourses to constitute their own subjectivities. This thesis aimed to explore the role of discourses in the construction of individuals' subjectivities. Specifically, it draws attention to the way in which knowledge and power work through discourses to emphasize what is allowable, both publicly and privately, in relation to single parenthood. Most importantly, this thesis offers alternative subjectivities for single parenthood to facilitate new ways of thinking about parents who are single.

Teacher decision making in early childhood education

The study investigated early childhood teacher decision making at the preschool level in the state of Victoria, Australia. Victorian teachers at the preschool level were in an interesting position in 2004. Unlike most other Australian states Victoria did not have a curriculum framework guiding educational content and pedagogy. Consequently, this study was able to take advantage of this situation and examine teacher decision making at a time when early childhood teachers were relatively autonomous in deciding curriculum content. The opportunity to study teacher decision making in this way has since passed, as Victorian preschool teachers are now regulated by newly introduced state and national curricula frameworks. To identify influences affecting teacher decision making three preschool teachers were interviewed and curricula related policies were analysed. The data were analysed using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) technique. Critical discourse analysis enabled a close analysis of influences on teacher decision making illustrating how discourse is legitimated, marginalised, and silenced in certain curricula practices. Critical theory was the underpinning framework used for the study and enabled taken-for-granted understandings to be uncovered within early childhood policies and teacher interviews. Key findings were that despite there not being a government-mandated curricula framework for Victorian preschool education in 2004, teachers were held accountable for their curricula practice. Yet as professionals, early childhood teachers were denied public acknowledgment of their expertise as they were almost invisible in policy. Subsequently, teachers’ authority as professionals with curricula knowledge was diminished. The study found that developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) was a dominant discourse influencing teacher decision making (TDM). It operated as legitimated discourse in the 2004 Victorian preschool context. Additionally, the study found that teacher directed practice was legitimated, marginalised, and silenced by teachers. The findings have implications for early childhood teacher decision making at the practice, research, and policy levels. Findings show that the dominance of the DAP discourse informing teacher decision making limits other ways of thinking and practising.

Corporate social responsibility and the parameters of dialogue with vulnerable others

This article presents a case study of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others. Dialogue with marginalized external groups is increasingly presented in the business literature as the key to making corporate social responsibility possible in particular through corporate learning. Corporate public communications at the same time promote community engagement as a core aspect of corporate social responsibility. This article examines the possibilities for and conditions underpinning corporate dialogue with marginalized stakeholders as occurred around the unexpected and sudden closure in January 2009 of the AU$2.2 billion BHP Billiton Ravensthorpe Nickel mine in rural Western Australia. In doing so we draw on John Roberts’ notion of dialogue with vulnerable others, and apply a discourse analysis approach to data spanning corporate public communications and interviews with residents affected by the decision to close the mine. In presenting this case study we contribute to the as yet limited organizational research concerned directly with marginalized stakeholders and argue that corporate social responsibility discourse and vulnerable other dialogue not only affirms the primacy of business interests but also co-opts vulnerable others in the pursuit of these interests. In conclusion we consider case study implications for critical understandings of corporate dialogue with vulnerable others.

Defining critical literacy

This article traces the lineage of critical literacy from Freire through critical pedagogies and discourse analysis. The author discusses the need for a contingent definition of critical literacy, as a situated and contextual response to political economies, institutional and cultural relations of power.

Forging the heteroglossic citizen : articulating local, national, regional and global horizons in the Australian Curriculum

This article offers a discourse analysis comparing selected articles in the national press over the consultative period for Phase 1 subjects in the new Australian Curriculum, with rationales prefacing official Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority documents. It traces how various versions of Australia, its ‘nation-ness’ and its future citizens have been taken up in the final product. The analysis uses Lemke's analytic elaboration of Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia and its derivative, intertextuality. It identifies a range of intertextual thematic formations around ‘nation’, ‘history’, ‘citizen’ and ‘curriculum’ circulating in the public debates, then traces their presence in official curriculum documents. Rather than concluding that these themes are contradictory and incoherent, the conclusion asks how these multiple dialogic facets of Australian nation-ness potentially offer a better response to complex times than any coherent monologic orthodoxy might.

Pedagogy and paradox : teaching interpretation in a religious community

A qualitative, discourse analytic study of literate practices in a small religious community in a northern Australian city. The chapter documents how this community constructs religious reading and writing, affiliated ideologies and theologies, and how readers/hearers/learners are positions vis a vis the authority of sacred text.

Fish out of water : refugee and international students in mainstream Australian schools

In this paper, the authors combine Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis (the ‘fish out of water’ experience) with the discourse historical approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a theoretical and analytical framework through which they examine specific moments in the schooling experiences of one refugee student and one international student, both enrolled in post-compulsory education in Australian mainstream secondary schools. We examine specific moments – as narrated by these students during interviews – in which these students can be described as ‘fish out of water’. As such, this paper takes up the concerns of researchers who call for an examination of the lived geographies and the everyday lives of individual students in mainstream schools. We find that our students’ habitus, conditioned by their previous schooling experiences in their home countries, did not match their new Australian schools, resulting in frustration with, and alienation from, their mainstream schools. However, we also note that schools, too, need to adapt and adjust their habitus to the new multicultural world, in which there are international and refugee students among their usual cohort of mainstream students.

Negotiating teacher identities : dialogic reflections on classroom interaction in a transnational context

This study investigates the development of teacher identity in a transnational context through an analysis of the voices of sixteen preservice teachers from Hong Kong who engage in interaction with primary students in an Australian classroom. The context for this research is the school-based experience undertaken by these preservice English as a second language teachers as part of their short language immersion (SLIM) program in Brisbane, Australia. Such SLIM programs are a genre of study abroad programs which have been gaining in popularity within teacher education in Australia, attended by preservice and inservice teachers from China, Hong Kong, Korea, and other Asian countries. This research is conducted at a time when the imperative to globalise higher education provision is a strategic factor in the educational policies of both Australia and Hong Kong. In Australia, international educational services now constitute the country’s third largest export with more than 400,000 students coming to Australia to study annually. In order to maintain Australia’s current global position as the third most popular Englishspeaking study destination, the government is now focusing on sustainability and the quality of the study experience being offered to international students (Bradley Review, 2008). In Hong Kong, the government sponsors both preservice and inservice English as a second language (ESL) teachers to undertake SLIM programs in Australia and other English-speaking countries, as part of their policy of promoting high levels of English proficiency in Hong Kong classrooms. Transnational teacher education is an important issue to which this study contributes insights into the affordances and constraints of a school-based experience in the transnational context. Second language teacher education has been defined as interventions designed to develop participants’ professional knowledge. In this study, it is argued that participation in a different community of practice helps to foreground tacit theories of second language pedagogy, making them visible and open to review. Questions of pedagogy are also seen as questions of teacher identity, constituting the way that one is in the classroom. I take up a sociocultural and poststructural framework, drawing on the work of James Gee and Mikhail Bakhtin, to theorise the construction of teacher identity as emerging through dialogic relations and socially situated discursive practices. From this perspective, this study investigates whether these teachers engage with different ways of representing themselves through appropriating, adapting or rejecting Discourses prevailing in the Australian classroom. Research suggests that reflecting on dilemmas encountered as lived experiences can extend professional understandings. In this study, the participants engage in a process of dialogic reflection on their intercultural classroom interactions, examining with their peers and their lecturer/researcher selected moments of dissonance that they have faced in the unfamiliar context of an Australian primary classroom. It is argued that the recursive and multivoiced nature of this process of reflection on practice allows participants opportunities to negotiate new understandings of second language teacher identity. Dialogic learning, based on the theories of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, provides the theoretic framing not only for the process of reflection instantiated in this study, but also features in the analysis of the participants’ second language classroom practices. The research design uses a combined discourse analytic and ethnographic approach as a logic-of-inquiry to explore the dialogic relationships which these second language teachers negotiate with their students and their peers in the transnational context. In this way, through discourse analysis of their classroom talk and reflective dialogues, assisted by the analytic tools of speech genres and discourse formats, I explore the participants’ ways of doing and being second language teachers. Thus, this analysis traces the process of ideological becoming of these beginner teachers as shifts in their understandings of teacher and student identities. This study also demonstrates the potential for a nontraditional stimulated recall interview to provide dialogic scaffolding for beginner teachers to reflect productively on their practice.

Hypercapitalism : language, new media and social perceptions of value

Using examples from contemporary policy and business discourses, and exemplary historical texts dealing with the notion of value, I put forward an argument as to why a critical scholarship that draws on media history, language analysis, philosophy and political economy is necessary to understand the dynamics of what is being called 'the global knowledge economy'. I argue that the social changes associated with new modes of value determination are closely associated with new media forms.

Qualitative methods in information systems research

Qualitative research methods are widely accepted in Information Systems and multiple approaches have been successfully used in IS qualitative studies over the years. These approaches include narrative analysis, discourse analysis, grounded theory, case study, ethnography and phenomenological analysis. Guided by critical, interpretive and positivist epistemologies (Myers 1997), qualitative methods are continuously growing in importance in our research community. In this special issue, we adopt Van Maanen's (1979: 520) definition of qualitative research as an umbrella term to cover an “array of interpretive techniques that can describe, decode, translate, and otherwise come to terms with the meaning, not the frequency, of certain more or less naturally occurring phenomena in the social world”. In the call for papers, we stated that the aim of the special issue was to provide a forum within which we can present and debate the significant number of issues, results and questions arising from the pluralistic approach to qualitative research in Information Systems. We recognise both the potential and the challenges that qualitative approaches offers for accessing the different layers and dimensions of a complex and constructed social reality (Orlikowski, 1993). The special issue is also a response to the need to showcase the current state of the art in IS qualitative research and highlight advances and issues encountered in the process of continuous learning that includes questions about its ontology, epistemological tenets, theoretical contributions and practical applications.

Australia's disabling income support system : tracing the history of the Australian disability income support system 1908 to 2007 : disablism, citizenship and the basic income proposal

The present study examined the historical basis of the Australian disability income support system from 1908 to 2007. Although designed as a safety net for people with a disability, the disability income support system within Australia has been highly targeted. The original eligibility criteria of "permanently incapacitated for work", medical criteria and later "partially capacitated for work" potentially contained ideological inferences that permeated across the time period. This represents an important area for study given the potential consequence for disability income support to marginalise people with a disability. Social policy and disability policy theorists, including Saunders (2007, Social Policy Research Centre [SPRC]) and Gibilisco (2003) have provided valuable insight into some of the effects of disability policy and poverty. Yet while these theorists argued for some form of income support they did not propose a specific form of income security for further exploration. Few studies have undertaken a comprehensive review of the history of disability income support within the Australian context. This thesis sought to redress these gaps by examining disability income support policy within Australia. The research design consisted of an in-depth critical historical-comparative policy analysis methodology. The use of critical historical-comparative policy analysis allowed the researcher to trace the construction of disability within the Australian disability income support policy across four major historical epochs. A framework was developed specifically to guide analysis of the data. The critical discourse analysis method helped to understand the underlying ideological dimensions that led to the predominance of one particular approach over another. Given this, the research purpose of the study centred on: i. Tracing the history of the Australian disability income support system. ii. Examining the historical patterns and ideological assumptions over time. iii. Exploring the historical patterns and ideological assumptions underpinning an alternative model (Basic Income) and the extent to which each model promotes the social citizenship of people with a disability. The research commitment to a social-relational ontology and the quest for social change centred on the idea that "there has to be a better way" in the provision of disability income support. This theme of searching for an alternative reality in disability income support policy resonated throughout the thesis. This thesis found that the Australian disability income support system is disabling in nature and generates categories of disability on the basis of ableness. From the study, ableness became a condition for citizenship. This study acknowledged that, in reality, income support provision reflects only one aspect of the disabling nature of society which requires redressing. Although there are inherent tensions in any redistributive strategy, the Basic Income model potentially provides an alternative to the Australian disability income support system, given its grounding in social citizenship. The thesis findings have implications for academics, policy-makers and practitioners in terms of developing better ways to understand disability constructs in disability income support policy. The thesis also makes a contribution in terms of promoting income support policies based on the rights of all people, not just a few.