Understanding the complexity of social issues through process drama

Middle level teacher Joanne O’Mara uses process drama as a means for her students to explore multiple perspectives. In the teaching vignette she shares here, her class challenges their understanding of deforestation through dramatizing Judith Nichol’s A Poem for the Rainforest.

The Australian class structure and Australian politics 1931 - 40

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the class structure of interwar Australia based largely on the 1933 Commonwealth census. It reviews previous analyses by academics but although contemporary journalists and political strategists. It develops an estimate of the class composition of the electorate as distinct from the general population and attempts to define the class position of voters outside of the paid workforce. It considers the question of to what extent Labor needed non-working-class votes to secure an electoral majority and how the differing social composition of the Australian states impacted on electoral outcomes and Labor strategies. It employs the method of bounds to develop some preliminary conclusions about the electoral behaviour of different social groups and concludes with some observations on the divided nature of the Australian working class and the competing strategies that parties developed in their search for an electoral majority.

External public piano examinations in Malaysia : social and symbolic significance

The thesis investigated the social and symbolic significance of acquiring a 'music education' through the taking of piano tuition and external public music examinations. It aimed to discover why the learning of the piano and the certification of musical attainment are so prevalent and revered among Malaysian music students. Its purpose was to unravel the socio-cultural raison d'etre of this approach to music education through the creation of a metatheoretical schema, which is premised upon the theories of symbolic interactionist, George Herbert Mead, music analyst, Heinrich Schenker and social theorist, George Ritzer. Central to the argument in this instance is the symbolic significance associated with the act of playing the piano. The investigation attempted to determine if this 'act' conveyed a symbolic meaning that is peculiar to a specific cultural vista. It further examined the degree to which this practice represented both a validation and a sense of conformity to social norms in the continuity and stability of an expanding middle class society in Malaysia. The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) is the largest of the five main external public music examination boards that operate in Malaysia. Since 1948, over one million candidates have enrolled for ABRSM examinations in Malaysia and a team of approximately thirty ABRSM examiners visit Malaysia for three months every year. The majority of the candidates are pianists. Given such large numbers of piano candidates, one might expect a healthy development of musical talent in the country with aspiring pianists eager to demonstrate their musical prowess. However, this does not seem to be the case. On the contrary, there appears to be a curious lacuna between the growing number of students who enrol for external public music examinations and the seemingly lack of interest in public music making and the honing of general musicianship skills. The thesis hence examined the symbolic meaning of this socio-musicological phenomena.

Computing in a social context : gender difference in participation

The thesis reviews the literature relating to girls and computing within a framework which is structured around three specific questions. First, are there differences between girls and boys in their participation in class computing activities and/or in non-class computing activities? Second, do these differences in participation in computing activities have broader implications which justify the growing concern about the under-representation of girls? Third, wahy are girls under-represented in these activities? Although the available literature is predominantly descriptive, the underlying implicit theoretical model is essentially a social learning model. Girl's differential participation is attributed to learned attitudes towards computing rathan to differences between girls and boys in general ability. These attitudes, which stress the masculine, mathematical, technological aspects of computing are developed through modelling, direct experience, intrinsic and extrinsic reinforcement and generalisation from pre-existing, attitudes to related curriculum areas. In the literature it is implicitly assumed that these attitudes underlie girl's decisions to self-select out of computing activities. In this thesis predictions from a social learning model are complemented by predictions derived from expectancy-value, cognitive dissonance and self-perception theories. These are tested in three separate studies. Study one provides data from a pretest-posttest study of 24 children in a year four class learning BASIC. It examines pre- and posttest differences between girls and boys in computing experience, knowledge and achievement as well as the factors relating to computing achievement. Study two uses a pretest-posttest control group design to study the gender differences in the impact of the introduction of Logo into years 1, 3, 5 and 7 in both a coeducational and single-sex setting using a sample of 222 children from three schools. Study three utilises a larger sample of 1176 students, drawn from three secondary schools and five primary schools, enabling an evaluation of gender differences in relation to a wide range of class computing experiences and in a broader range of school contexts. The overall results are consistent across the three studies, supporting the contention that social factors, rather than ability differences influence girls' participation and achievement in computing. The more global theoretical framework, drawing on social learning, expectancy-value, cognitive dissonance and self-perception theories, provides a more adequate explanation of gender differences in participation than does any one of these models.

Envisioning Indochina : the spatial and social ordering and imagining of a French colony

The emergence of Indochina in the French imagination was articulated in both representational and institutional modes. Representation involves the transmission of colonial ideals through more obtuse means; that is, through literary texts, travelogues, exhibitions, film and advertising. However, these textual sites feed from and invest in a material situation, which was the institutional arm of colonialism. Indochina was institutionally articulated in cartographic maps and surveys, in the new social spaces of cities and towns, in architectural and technological forms, through social technologies of discipline and welfare and in cultural and religious organisations. The aim of this thesis is to analyse, across a number of textual sites, the representation and institutionalisation of Otherness through the politics of space in the French colony of Indochina, Indochine in this sense becomes a spatial discourse. The French constructed a mental and physical space for Indochina by blanketing and suffocating the original cultural landscape, which in fact had to be ignored for this process to occur. What actually became manifest as a result of this projection stemmed from the French imagination. Just as the French manipulated space, language also underwent the same process of reduction. The Vietnamese script was latinised to make it more 'useable' and ‘accessible’. Through christening the union of Indochina; initiating a comprehensive writing reform; and renaming the streets in the colonial cities, the French used language us another tool for 'making transparent'. Furthermore, the colonial powers established a communication and transport network throughout the colony in an attempt to materialise their fictive (artificial) vision of a unified French Indochinese space. The accessibility and design of these different modes of transport reflected the gendered, racial and class divisions inherent in the colonial establishment. At the heart of representing and institutionalising Indochina was the desire to control and contain. This characterised French imperial ordering of space in the city and the rural areas. In rural areas land was divided into small parcels and alienated to individuals or worked into precise grids for the rubber plantation. In urban centres the native quarter was clearly demarcated from the European quarter which functioned as its modern, progressive Other. The rationale behind this segregation was premised on European, nineteenth century discourses of race, class, gender and hygiene. Influenced by Darwinian and neo-Lamarkian theories of race, this biological discourse identified the 'working class', 'women' and 'the native' as not only biologically but also culturally inferior. They were perceived as a potential, degenerative threat to the biological, cultural and industrial development of the nation. In the colonial context, space was thus ordered and domesticated to control the native population. Coextensively, the literature which springs from such a structure will be tainted by the same ideas, and thus the spaces it formulates within the readers mind feed on and reinforce this foundation. Examples of gender and indigenous narratives which contest this imaginative, transparent topography are analysed throughout this thesis. They provide instances of struggle and resistance which undermine the ideal/stereotypical level of architectural and planned space and delineate an alternative insight into colonial spatial and social relations. The fictional accounts of European women and indigenous writers both challenge and reaffirm the fixity of some of these idealised colonial boundaries. In various literary, historical, political, architectural and cinematic discourses Indochina has been und continues to be depicted as a modern city and exotic Utopia. Informed by the mood of nostalgia, exotic images of Indochina have resurfaced in contemporary French culture. France's continued desire to create, control and maintain an Indochinese space in the French public imagination reinforces the multi-layered, interconnected and persistent nature of colonial discourse.

Construction of social difference in mathematics education

This study investigated the social context in which the learning of mathematics occured. It examined the practices of schools and mathematics in order to identify the ways in which they contributed to the construction of social difference. Accordingly, this study was concerned with how schools and mathematics classrooms contribute to working-class students lack of success in mathematics. The differences that occurred in these practices could be seen to contribute to the different outcomes likely to occur in the later years of schooling. It was argued that these differences mean that students from middle-classes would be more likely to undertake and be successful in the study of mathematics than their working-class peers.

Governing individualized risk biographies : new class intellectuals and the problem of youth at-risk

An apparent crisis of youth at-risk is a key marker in contemporary debates about young people among a range of intellectuals, social commentators and experts in various domains and centres of expertise. Drawing on aspects of the reflexive modernization, governmentality and feminist literatures, this paper explores how risk discourses emerge as a means for rendering reality knowable—a technique that facilitates the management of individual biographies in institutionally structured risk environments. In this context there is intellectual work to be done in the social sciences that takes as its object the possibilities and limits of institutionalized intellectual abstraction for problematizing youth via rationalities of risk—and the limits of these rationalities for providing resources for governing our thoughts, actions and dispositions—our freedom.

Towards discovery of influence and personality traits through social link prediction

Estimation of a person’s influence and personality traits from social media data has many applications. We use social linkage criteria, such as number of followers and friends, as proxies to form corpora, from popular blogging site Livejournal, for examining two two-class classification problems: influential vs. non-influential, and extraversion vs. introversion. Classification is performed using automatically-derived psycholinguistic and mood-based features of a user’s textual messages. We experiment with three sub-corpora of 10000 users each, and present the most effective predictors for each category. The best classification result, at 80%, is achieved using psycholinguistic features; e.g., influentials are found to use more complex language, than non-influentials, and use more leisure-related terms.

Profiles of language development in pre-school children : a longitudinal latent class analysis of data from the early language in Victoria study

Background Pre-school language impairment is common and greatly reduces educational performance. Population attempts to identify children who would benefit from appropriately timed intervention might be improved by greater knowledge about the typical profiles of language development. Specifically, this could be used to help with the early identification of children who will be impaired on school entry.

Methods This study applied longitudinal latent class analysis to assessments at 8, 12, 24, 36 and 48 months on 1113 children from a population-based study, in order to identify classes exhibiting distinct communicative developmental profiles.

Results Five substantive classes were identified: Typical, i.e. development in the typical range at each age; Precocious (late), i.e. typical development in infancy followed by high probabilities of precocity from 24 months onwards; Impaired (early), i.e. high probabilities of impairment up to 12 months followed by typical language development thereafter; Impaired (late), i.e. typical development in infancy but impairment from 24 months onwards; Precocious (early), i.e. high probabilities of precocity in early life followed by typical language by 48 months. The entropy statistic (0.84) suggested classes were fairly well defined, although there was a non-trivial degree of uncertainty in classification of children. That half of the Impaired (late) class was expected to have typical language at 4 years and 6% of the numerically large Typical class was expected to be impaired at 4 years illustrates this. Characteristics indicative of social advantage were more commonly found in the classes with improving profiles.

Conclusions Developmental profiles show that some pre-schoolers' language is characterized by periods of accelerated development, slow development and catch-up growth. Given the uncertainty in classifying children into these profiles, use of this knowledge for identifying children who will be impaired on school entry is not straightforward. The findings do, however, indicate greater need for language enrichment programmes among disadvantaged children.

The class/teacher effects distortion : a critique of purely positivist teacher effectiveness research and inquiry

The current educational context, with its emphasis upon outcomes and accountability, explicitly centralizes the work and role of the classroom teacher in the learning process. This paper argues that the teacher effectiveness debate increasingly represents an intensified incursion into the classroom in the belief that social and educational disadvantage may be overcome if improvements to the effectiveness of teachers and classroom instruction and practice occur. 

The Role of TAFE as an Equity Pathway to Social Inclusion, Employment, and to University : a submission from The Deakin University Social Work/Gordon TAFE Community Services Work, Geelong Based Project Team

Executive Summary

The Deakin University Social Work/Gordon TAFE Community Services Work Geelong Based Project Team (the Project Team) was assisted by Higher Education Partnership and Participation funding made available through Deakin University Participation and Partnerships Program (DUPPP) to carry out research and project work in 2012/13.

In the following submission to the House of Representatives Inquiry into the role of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) system and its operation, this Project Team seeks to establish a case for:

1. Funding to enable TAFE to continue as:

a) an equity pathway to social inclusion, employment, and to university, particularly in regional areas.
b) an integral complement to the University education sector to deliver on the ambitious objectives of the Federal Government’s widening participation agenda, as a mechanism to deliver the skills, knowledge and workforce needed now, and in the future, in the Australian economy.
2. Increased resources for separate and joint sector development
a) Publicly funded TAFEs need funding to be restored and increased to enable them to maintain the high quality education they provide and to maintain their successful work in supporting communities, regions and disadvantaged individuals to gain skills, training and employment.
b) Universities need increased funding to increase staffing levels and therefore free up teaching staff to spend the necessary time to develop relationships with and provide support to students. This is important for the achieving the goals of the widening participation agenda of increasing access without increasing attrition at the same time.
c) TAFEs and Universities need funding to do the work required to further develop and formalise diploma-degree pathways so that disadvantaged individuals can exit into employment at the diploma level or be supported in an efficient and seamless way to undertake further study.
3. Active use of localised and nuanced partnership approaches by education institutions. This includes:
• Cross teaching by TAFEs and Universities in courses that can be articulated, such as professional practice diplomas and degrees
• Programs negotiated and designed according to the needs of students in each location. TAFEs and Universities need resources in order to do this work
• Focus on regional centres where there is a particular opportunity for government to make an impact on TAFE pathways to employment and/or further education
• Workforce development in regional areas due to new industries is a particular area of need
4. Recognise and capitalise on the complementary and symbiotic nature of each sector’s skills, strengths and capacities.
The submission responds to the second, third and fifth points of the Terms of Reference of the Inquiry and is based on the research work carried out by the Project Team in 2012/13.

We provide evidence of Gordon TAFE in Geelong working as an equity mechanism in the particular case of the welfare/ community services diploma to social work degree pathway. The project team considers that there is a strong case for additional resourcing of TAFE to enable it to continue what it does well. TAFE is the key training and education sectorthe ‘education and social hub’that can successfully attract, retain, and graduate people who may not otherwise access education due to one or more combinations of:

1. having a low SES current or past background;
2. living in regional areas;
3. receiving interrupted primary and secondary education;
4. having disabilities;
5. being sole parents;
6. being from refugee backgrounds;
7. having English as an additional language/culture;
8. retrenchment from employment in dying industries;
9. short, medium and long term unemployment;
10. past and/or current caring roles;
11. marriage/relationship breakdowns;
12. domestic violence;
13. gender, class, age, race/ethnicity and dis/ability discriminations; and
14. socialised expectations and fears.

The recommendations in this submission are based on research findings about important similarities and differences between Gordon TAFE welfare and Deakin University social work students in Geelong, and their respective institutional organisations and contexts. The two institutions employ a repertoire of diverse administrative, teaching, learning and support approaches to meet different mission goals, requirements and needs.

The musical and social benefits of community choir membership in Melbourne (Australia)

class="MsoNormal">Melbourne is the second largest city in Australia with a diverse, multilayered society that reflects its rich musical life. There are many community choirs formed by various cultural and linguistically diverse groups. This paper is part of an ongoing project, well-being and ageing: community, diversity and the arts (since 2008), undertaken by Deakin University and Monash University, that explores the cultural diversity within Australian society and how active music engagement fosters well-being.

The singing groups selected for this discussion are the Skylarkers, the Bosnian Behar Choir, and the Coro Furlan. The Skylarkers and the Bosnian Behar Choir are mixed groups who who respectively perform popular music from their generation and celebrate their culture through music. The Coro Furlan is an Italian male choir who understand themselves as custodians of their heritage.

In these interpretative, qualitative case studies semi-structured interviews were undertaken and analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. In this approach there is an exploration of participants’ understanding of their lived experiences.

The analysis of the combined data identified musical and social benefits that contribute to participants’ sustained well-being. Musical benefits occurred through sharing, learning and singing together. Social benefits included opportunities to build friendships, overcome isolation and gain a sense of validation. Many found that singing enhanced their health and happiness. Active music making in community choirs continues to be an effective way to build community, and cognitive, affective and physical well-being.