Investigating homework as a social practice : a qualitative approach

This thesis examines the social practice of homework. It explores how homework is shaped by the discourses, policies and guidelines in circulation in a society at any given time with particular reference to one school district in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. This study investigates how contemporary homework reconstitutes the home as a pedagogical site where the power of the institution of schooling circulates regularly from school to home. It examines how the educational system shapes the organization of family life and how family experiences with homework may be different in different sites depending on the accessibility of various forms of cultural capital. This study employs a qualitative approach, incorporating multiple case studies, and is complemented by insights from institutional ethnography and critical discourse analysis. It draws on the theoretical concepts of Foucault including power and power relations, and governmentality and surveillance, as well as Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, social and cultural capital for analysis. It employs concepts from Bourdieu’s work as they have been expanded on by researchers including Reay (1998), Lareau (2000), and Griffith and Smith (2005). The studies of these researchers allowed for an examination of homework as it related to families and mothers’ work. Smith’s (1987; 1999) concepts of ruling relations, mothers’ unpaid labour, and the engine of inequality were also employed in the analysis. Family interviews with ten volunteer families, teacher focus group sessions with 15 teachers from six schools, homework artefacts, school newsletters, homework brochures, and publicly available assessment and evaluation policy documents from one school district were analyzed. From this analysis key themes emerged and the findings are documented throughout five data analysis chapters. This study shows a change in education in response to a system shaped by standards, accountability and testing. It documents an increased transference of educational responsibility from one educational stakeholder to another. This transference of responsibility shifts downward until it eventually reaches the family in the form of homework and educational activities. Texts in the form of brochures and newsletters, sent home from school, make available to parents specific subject positions that act as instruments of normalization. These subject positions promote a particular ‘ideal’ family that has access to certain types of cultural capital needed to meet the school’s expectations. However, the study shows that these resources are not equally available to all and some families struggle to obtain what is necessary to complete educational activities in the home. The increase in transference of educational work from the school to the home results in greater work for parents, particularly mothers. As well, consideration is given to mother’s role in homework and how, in turn, classroom instructional practices are sometimes dependent on the work completed at home with differential effects for children. This study confirms previous findings that it is mothers who assume the greatest role in the educational trajectory of their children. An important finding in this research is that it is not only middle-class mothers who dedicate extensive time working hard to ensure their children’s educational success; working-class mothers also make substantial contributions of time and resources to their children’s education. The assignments and educational activities distributed as homework require parents’ knowledge of technical school pedagogy to help their children. Much of the homework being sent home from schools is in the area of literacy, particularly reading, but requires parents to do more than read with children. A key finding is that the practices of parents are changing and being reconfigured by the expectations of schools in regard to reading. Parents are now being required to monitor and supervise children’s reading, as well as help children complete reading logs, written reading responses, and follow up questions. The reality of family life as discussed by the participants in this study does not match the ‘ideal’ as portrayed in the educational documents. Homework sessions often create frustrations and tensions between parents and children. Some of the greatest struggles for families were created by mathematical homework, homework for those enrolled in the French Immersion program, and the work required to complete Literature, Heritage and Science Fair projects. Even when institutionalized and objectified capital was readily available, many families still encountered struggles when trying to carry out the assigned educational tasks. This thesis argues that homework and education-related activities play out differently in different homes. Consideration of this significance may assist educators to better understand and appreciate the vast difference in families and the ways in which each family can contribute to their children’s educational trajectory.

Understanding body image disturbance in the promotion of mental health : a discourse analytic study

Health care interventions in the area of body image disturbance and eating disorders largely involve individual treatment approaches, while prevention and health promotion are relatively underexplored. A review of health promotion activities in the area of body image in Australia revealed three programmes, the most extensive and longest standing having been established in 1992. The aims of this programme are to reduce body image dissatisfaction and inappropriate eating behaviour, especially among women. Because health promotion is concerned with the social aspects of health, it was hypothesized by the authors that a social understanding of body image and eating disorders might be advanced in a health promotion setting and reflected in the approach to practice. In order to examine approaches to body image in health promotion, 10 health professionals responsible for the design and management of this programme participated in a series of semi-structured interviews between 1997 and 2000. Three discursive themes were evident in health workers' explanations of body image problems: (1) cognitive-behavioural themes; (2) gender themes; and (3) socio-cultural themes. While body image problems were constructed as psychological problems that are particularly experienced by women, their origins were largely conceived to be socio-cultural. The implications of these constructions are critically discussed in terms of the approach to health promotion used in this programme.

“Lay” theories of anorexia nervosa : a discourse analytic study

Previous studies on lay theories of anorexia nervosa have examined the ‘accuracy’ of lay knowledge, and the identification of factors by family and friends that would encourage early interventions (Huon, Brown, & Morris, 1988, 7, 239–252; Murray, Touyz, & Beumont, 1990, 9, 87–93). In contrast to these approaches, we examine lay theories of anorexia nervosa using a critical psychology perspective. We argue that the use of a discourse analysis methodology enables the examination of the construction of lay theories through dominant concepts and ideas. Ten semi-structured interviews with five women and five men aged between 15 and 25 years were carried out. Participants were asked questions about three main aspects of anorexia nervosa: aetiology, treatment and relationship to gender. Each interview was analysed in terms of the structure, function and variability of discourse. Three discourses: sociocultural, individual and femininity, are discussed in relation to the interview questions. We conclude that, in this study, lay theories of anorexia nervosa were structured through key discourses that maintained a separation between sociocultural aspects of anorexia nervosa and individual psychology. This separation exists in dominant psychomedical conceptualizations of anorexia nervosa, reinforcing the concept that it is a form of psychopathology.

Accounts of experiences of bulimia : a discourse analytic study.

Objectives: To identify the variety of versions of bulimia constructed by participants, to suggest functions and consequences of these constructions, and to examine the sociocultural ideologies evident in participants' discourse. Methods: Ten women and one man were interviewed about their experiences of bulimia. Transcribed interviews were analyzed using a discourse analytic approach. Results: Five dominant ways of talking about bulimia were identified: Individuals were constructed as victims of bulimia, women were constructed as victims of social stereotypes, bulimia was constructed as a damaging action one performs on oneself, bulimia was constructed as a personality trait of individuals, and bulimia was marginalized as abnormal and disgusting. Discussion: Sociocultural ideologies evident in participants' accounts included the valuing of individual will-power and self-mastery and the construction of a mind-body dichotomy entailing the need to control the latter. The analysis emphasizes the importance of considering the sociocultural context within which psychological problems occur.

Qualitative analysis and eating disorders : Discourse analytic research on anorexia nervosa

The absence of qualitative analysis in mainstream research on eating disorders is discussed in the following article as being a weakness in developing theory and clinical practice. This article includes an analysis of interviews with British healthcare workers who manage anorexic patients. This analysis presents an example of qualitative methodology in the form of discourse analysis, which is argued to provide a systematic, yet flexible approach to research on eating disorders. The overwhelming prevalence of anorexia nervosa in women is specifically examined within the context of the identification of the "discourse of femininity. " The research findings are discussed in relation to the use of discursive practices that contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of clinical processes and their relative efficacy.

Multiple Literacies Theory: Discourse, sensation, resonance and becoming

This thematic issue on education and the politics of becoming focuses on how a Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT) plugs into practice in education. MLT does this by creating an assemblage between discourse, text, resonance and sensations. What does this produce? Becoming AND how one might live are the product of an assemblage (May, 2005; Semetsky, 2003). In this paper, MLT is the approach that explores the connection between educational theory and practice through the lens of an empirical study of multilingual children acquiring multiple writing systems simultaneously. The introduction explicates discourse, text, resonance, sensation and becoming. The second section introduces certain Deleuzian concepts that plug into MLT. The third section serves as an introduction to MLT. The fourth section is devoted to the study by way of a rhizoanalysis. Finally, drawing on the concept of the rhizome, this article exits with potential lines of flight opened by MLT. These are becomings which highlight the significance of this work in terms of transforming not only how literacies are conceptualized, especially in minority language contexts, but also how one might live.

Narrative, education policy and the newsprint media : A critical discourse analysis of the construction of young people's participation in education or employment

This thesis used Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate how a government policy and the newsprint media constructed discussion about young people’s participation in education or employment. The study found that a continuous narrative across both sites about government as a noble agent taking action to redress the social disruption caused by young people’s disengagement. Unlike the education policy, the newsprint media blamed young people who were disengaged and failed to recognise the barriers they often face. The study points to possibilities for utilising the power of narrative to build a more fair and rigorous discussion of issues in the public sphere.

A discourse on the non-method

In spite of the activism of professional bodies and researchers, empirical evidence shows that project management still does not deliver the expected benefits and promises. Hence, many have questioned the validity of the hegemonic rationalist paradigm anchored in the Enlightenment and Natural Sciences tradition supporting project management research and practice for the last 60 years and the lack of relevance to practice of the current conceptual base of project management. In order to address these limitations many authors, taking a post-modernist stance in social sciences, build on ‘pre-modern’ philosophies such as the Aristotelian one, specially emphasizing the role of praxis (activity), and phronesis (practical wisdom, prudence). Indeed, ‘Praxis … is the central category of the philosophy which is not merely an interpretation of the world, but is also a guide to its transformation …’ (Vazquez, 1977:. 149). Therefore, praxis offers an important focus for practitioners and researchers in social sciences, one in which theory is integrated with practice at the point of intervention. Simply stated, praxis can serve as a common ground for those interested in basic and applied research by providing knowledge of the reality in which action, informed by theory, takes place. Consequently, I suggest a ‘praxeological’ style of reasoning (praxeology being defined as study or science of human actions and conduct, including praxis, practices and phronesis) and to go beyond the ‘Theory-Practice’ divide. Moreover, I argue that we need to move away from the current dichotomy between the two classes ‘scholars experts-researchers’ and ‘managers/workers-practitioners-participants’. Considering one single class of ‘PraXitioner’, becoming a phronimos, may contribute to create new perspectives and open up new ways of thinking and acting in project situations. Thus, I call for a Perestroika in researching and acting in project management situations. My intent is to suggest a balanced praxeological view of the apparent opposition between social and natural science approaches. I explore, in this chapter, three key questions, covering the ontological, epistemological and praxeological dimensions of project management in action. 1. Are the research approaches being currently used appropriate for generating contributions that matter to both theory and practice with regards to what a ‘project’ is or to what we do when we call a specific situation ‘a project’? 2. On the basis of which intellectual virtues is the knowledge generated and what is the impact for theory and practice? 3. Are the modes of action of the practitioners ‘prudent’ and are they differentiating or reconciling formal and abstract rationality from substantive rationality and situated reasoning with regards to the mode of action they adopt in particular project situations? The investigation of the above questions leads me to debate about ‘Project Management-as-Praxis’, and to suggest ‘A’ (not ‘THE’) ‘praxeological’ style of reasoning and mode of inquiry – acknowledging a non-paradigmatic, subjective and kaleidoscopic perspective – for ‘Knowing-as-Practicing’ in project management. In short, this is about making a ‘Projects Science’ that matters.

Prolegomenon to the study of the concepts of maturity and maturity model : from Black Horse to White Knight?

This paper takes its root in a trivial observation: management approaches are unable to provide relevant guidelines to cope with uncertainty, and trust of our modern worlds. Thus, managers are looking for reducing uncertainty through information’s supported decision-making, sustained by ex-ante rationalization. They strive to achieve best possible solution, stability, predictability, and control of “future”. Hence, they turn to a plethora of “prescriptive panaceas”, and “management fads” to bring simple solutions through best practices. However, these solutions are ineffective. They address only one part of a system (e.g. an organization) instead of the whole. They miss the interactions and interdependencies with other parts leading to “suboptimization”. Further classical cause-effects investigations and researches are not very helpful to this regard. Where do we go from there? In this conversation, we want to challenge the assumptions supporting the traditional management approaches and shed some lights on the problem of management discourse fad using the concept of maturity and maturity models in the context of temporary organizations as support for reflexion. Global economy is characterized by use and development of standards and compliance to standards as a practice is said to enable better decision-making by managers in uncertainty, control complexity, and higher performance. Amongst the plethora of standards, organizational maturity and maturity models hold a specific place due to general belief in organizational performance as dependent variable of (business) processes continuous improvement, grounded on a kind of evolutionary metaphor. Our intention is neither to offer a new “evidence based management fad” for practitioners, nor to suggest research gap to scholars. Rather, we want to open an assumption-challenging conversation with regards to main stream approaches (neo-classical economics and organization theory), turning “our eyes away from the blinding light of eternal certitude towards the refracted world of turbid finitude” (Long, 2002, p. 44) generating what Bernstein has named “Cartesian Anxiety” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 18), and revisit the conceptualization of maturity and maturity models. We rely on conventions theory and a systemic-discursive perspective. These two lenses have both information & communication and self-producing systems as common threads. Furthermore the narrative approach is well suited to explore complex way of thinking about organizational phenomena as complex systems. This approach is relevant with our object of curiosity, i.e. the concept of maturity and maturity models, as maturity models (as standards) are discourses and systems of regulations. The main contribution of this conversation is that we suggest moving from a neo-classical “theory of the game” aiming at making the complex world simpler in playing the game, to a “theory of the rules of the game”, aiming at influencing and challenging the rules of the game constitutive of maturity models – conventions, governing systems – making compatible individual calculation and social context, and possible the coordination of relationships and cooperation between agents with or potentially divergent interests and values. A second contribution is the reconceptualization of maturity as structural coupling between conventions, rather than as an independent variable leading to organizational performance.

Sense-making across space and time : implications for the organization and findability of information

This paper presents the results from a study of information behaviors, with specific focus on information organisation-related behaviours conducted as part of a larger daily diary study with 34 participants. The findings indicate that organization of information in everyday life is a problematic area due to various factors. The self-evident one is the inter-subjectivity between the person who may have organized the information and the person looking for that same information (Berlin et. al., 1993). Increasingly though, we are not just looking for information within collections that have been designed by someone else, but within our own personal collections of information, which frequently include books, electronic files, photos, records, documents, desktops, web bookmarks, and portable devices. The passage of time between when we categorized or classified the information, and the time when we look for the same information, poses several problems of intra-subjectivity, or the difference between our own past and present perceptions of the same information. Information searching, and hence the retrieval of information from one's own collection of information in everyday life involved a spatial and temporal coordination with one's own past selves in a sort of cognitive and affective time travel, just as organizing information is a form of anticipatory coordination with one's future information needs. This has implications for finding information and also on personal information management.

Constructions of asylum seekers and refugees in Australian political discourse

Immigration to Australia has long been the focus of negative political interest. In recent times, the proposal of exclusionary policies such as the Malaysia Deal in 2011 has fuelled further debate. In these debates, Federal politicians often describe asylum seekers and refugees as ‘illegal’, ‘queue jumpers’, and ‘boat people’. This paper investigates how the political discourse constructs asylum seekers and refugees during debates surrounding the Malaysia Deal in the Federal Parliament of Australia in 2011. Hansard Parliamentary debates were analysed to identify the underlying themes and constructions that permeate political discourse about asylum seekers and refugees. This paper argues that a dichotomous characterisation of legitimacy pervades their construction with this group constructed either as legitimate humanitarian refugees or as illegitimate ‘boat arrivals’. These constructions result in the misrepresentation of asylum seekers as illegitimate, undermining their right to protection under Australia’s laws and international obligations. This construction also represents a shift in federal political discourse from constructing asylum seekers as a border or security threat, towards an increasing preoccupation with this categorisation of people as legitimate, or illegitimate.

Adapting an argumentation framework for online discourse analysis : a knowledge building approach

The use of online tools to support teaching and learning is now commonplace within educational institutions, with many of these institutions mandating or strongly encouraging the use of a blended learning approach to teaching and learning. Consequently, these institutions generally adopt a learning management system (LMS), with a fixed set of collaborative tools, in the belief that effective teaching and learning approaches will be used, to allow students to build knowledge. While some studies into the use of an LMS’s still identify continued didactic approaches to teaching and learning, the focus of this paper is on the ability of collaborative tools such as discussion forums, to build knowledge. In the context of science education, argumentation is touted as playing an important role in this process of knowledge building. However, there is limited research into argumentation in other domains using online discussion and a blended learning approach. This paper describes a study, using design research, which adapts a framework for argumentation that can be applied to other domains. In particular it will focus on an adapted social argumentation schema to identify argument in a discussion forum of N=16 participants in a secondary High School.

Organizational reframing : the commercialization of a public sector organization

The purpose of this study is to elaborate shared schema change theory in the context of the radical restructuring-commercialization of an Australian public infrastructure organization. Commercialization of the case organization imposed high individual and collective cognitive processing and emotional demands as organizational members sought to develop new shared schema. Existing schema change research suggests that radical restructuring renders pre-existing shared schema irrelevant and triggers new schema development through experiential learning (Balogun and Johnson, 2004). Focus groups and semi-structured interviews were conducted at four points over a three-year period. The analysis revealed that shared schema change occurred in three broad phases: (1) radical restructuring and aftermath; (2) new CEO and new change process schema, and: (3) large-group meeting and schema change. Key findings include: (1) radical structural change does not necessarily trigger new shared schema development as indicated in prior research; (2) leadership matters, particularly in framing new means-ends schema; (3) how change leader interventions are sequenced has an important influence on shared schema change, and; (4) the creation of facilitated social processes have an important influence on shared schema change.

Rates of radiologically confirmed pneumonia as defined by the World Health Organization in Northern Territory Indigenous children

Objective To determine the burden of hospitalised, radiologically confirmed pneumonia (World Health Organization protocol) in Northern Territory Indigenous children. Design, setting and participants Historical, observational study of all hospital admissions for any diagnosis of NT resident Indigenous children, aged between >= 29 days and < 5 years, 1 April 1997 to 31 March 2005. Intervention All chest radiographs taken during these admissions, regardless of diagnosis, were assessed for pneumonia in accordance with the WHO protocol. Main outcome measure The primary outcome was endpoint consolidation (dense fluffy consolidation [alveolar infiltrate] of a portion of a lobe or the entire lung) present on a chest radiograph within 3 days of hospitalisation. Results We analysed data on 24 115 hospitalised episodes of care for 9492 children and 13 683 chest radiographs. The average annual cumulative incidence of endpoint consolidation was 26.6 per 1000 population per year (95% Cl, 25.3-27.9); 57.5 per 1000 per year in infants aged 1-11 months, 38.3 per 1000 per year in those aged 12-23 months, and 13.3 per 1000 per year in those aged 24-59 months. In all age groups, rates of endpoint consolidation in children in the arid southern region of NT were about twice that of children in the tropical northern region. Conclusion The rates of severe pneumonia in hospitalised NT Indigenous children are among the highest reported in the world. Reducing this unacceptable burden of disease should be a national health priority.