Bill Green

Unfinished business: subjectivity and supervision

Within the now burgeoning literature on doctoral research education, postgraduate research supervision continues to be a problematical issue, practically and theoretically. This paper seeks to explore and understand supervision as a distinctive kind of pedagogic practice. Informed by a larger research project, it draws on poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, as well as educational inquiry, to investigate the manner in which postgraduate research supervision is to be grasped as fundamentally a ‘practice producing subjects’, as much implicated in the production of identity as in the production of knowledge. Focusing on the discursive relationship between supervision and subjectivity, it addresses what is described as important ‘unfinished business’ in the field. Specifically, it provides a set of scenes and stories of supervision, drawn from various sources, with a view to illuminating the psycho‐social dynamics of struggle, submission and subjectification, including the role and significance of fantasy, in the practice of postgraduate research pedagogy.Within the now burgeoning literature on doctoral research education, postgraduate research supervision continues to be a problematical issue, practically and theoretically. This paper seeks to explore and understand supervision as a distinctive kind of pedagogic practice. Informed by a larger research project, it draws on poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, as well as educational inquiry, to investigate the manner in which postgraduate research supervision is to be grasped as fundamentally a ‘practice producing subjects’, as much implicated in the production of identity as in the production of knowledge. Focusing on the discursive relationship between supervision and subjectivity, it addresses what is described as important ‘unfinished business’ in the field. Specifically, it provides a set of scenes and stories of supervision, drawn from various sources, with a view to illuminating the psycho‐social dynamics of struggle, submission and subjectification, including the role and signific...

Regenerating Rural Social Space? Teacher Education for Rural—Regional Sustainability

The complex interconnection among issues affecting rural—regional sustainability requires an equally complex program of research to ensure the attraction and retention of high-quality teachers for rural children. The educational effects of the construction of the rural within a deficit discourse are highlighted. A concept of rural social space is modelled, bringing together social, economic and environmental dimensions of (rural—regional) sustainability. This framework combines quantitative definitional processes with more situated definitions of rural space based on demographic and other social data, across both geographic and cultural formations. The implications of the model are examined in terms of its importance for teacher education.

Supervision as metaphor

This article takes up the question of the language within which discussion of research degree supervision is couched and framed, and the consequences of such framings for supervision as a field of pedagogical practice. It examines the proliferation and intensity of metaphor, allegory and allusion in the language of candidature and supervision, which appears to run counter to attempts to bring a contemporary rationality into the intensifying public discourse about supervision. The article examines, not how the problem of metaphorical language can be resolved and overcome, but rather how it defines and shapes dispositions, practices of knowledge making and knowledge itself. Some conceptual tools for expanding the conceptual‐discursive field of supervision are presented. Three ‘arche‐metaphors’ are considered, and supervision itself is discussed as a metaphor of the Enlightenment and the modern university.

Re‐imagining doctoral education: Professional Doctorates and beyond

Portents of the demise of the Professional Doctorate have emerged in some recent policy and institutional circles in Australia, raising questions about the meaning and relevance of the Professional Doctorate in an era of ‘league tables’ and research assessment in Australia. This article argues that such portents, based largely on narrow market‐driven arguments, are premature, reactive and unhelpful, in that they foreclose on a set of critical questions concerning the future purpose, scope and practice of doctoral education. The article argues that the simple re‐assertion of the PhD as the default award represents a restoration of the logics and imperatives of disciplinarity and of older notions of so‐called ‘real’ research. Further, questions of the changing economies of knowledge and practice within, between and beyond the reach of the university, are subordinated and disavowed. The article presents a re‐reading of the emergence of Professional Doctorates, from the perspective of a decade‐and‐a‐half of development and change. It suggests the need to revisit that history critically in the light of the current developments in doctoral education, in knowledge production and in developing different relations around knowledge between universities and different social and professional domains. Such revisitings can bring out emerging issues for doctoral education at a time when anxieties may inhibit taking up opportunities for innovation and linking with new kinds of knowledge production that go beyond Euro‐centric and university‐centric traditions.

Teacher education for rural–regional sustainability: changing agendas, challenging futures, chasing chimeras?

Rural schooling has remained a concern for policy‐makers, employers, teacher education providers and schools throughout our recent history. In particular, the allegedly variable quality of teaching and learning in rural Australia is a major concern for teacher educators and educational leaders alike, with the provision of quality services for rural Australians a major equity issue in social as well as political terms. Working from an explicitly situated perspective, this paper explores these issues in relation to a set of current and recent research projects and government reports, with particular reference to a study currently exploring the articulation of teacher education and rural schooling in New South Wales. This is contextualized within a larger agenda of national and environmental sustainability which raises the key issue of social policy and educational priorities as we look forward into a radically uncertain future for teacher education, rural schooling and rural‐regional sustainability.

Curriculum history, ‘English’ and the New Education; or, installing the empire of English?

The paper takes as its starting point the relationship between the ‘New English’, a curriculum movement commonly associated with the 1960s and 1970s, and the New Education, an influential general educational reform movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It inquires into the discursive‐ideological (dis)continuities between these two moments in educational history, with a view to positing that developments and debates in English teaching always need to be understood historically, within the larger context of the history of education and schooling and the politics of nation and empire. Its immediate reference‐points being Britain and Australia, but with implications more broadly for the curriculum history of post‐Imperial, Anglophone countries more generally as well as the history of educational ideas, the paper seeks to explore why it was that ‘English’ was installed at the heart of the modern(ist) school curriculum.

English, literacy, rhetoric: changing the project?

Abstract In this paper I begin to trace two movements in the curriculum history and cultural politics of English teaching: on the one hand, a shift from ‘literature’ to ‘literacy’, as organizing principles for the field, and on the other, from ‘language’ to ‘rhetoric’. I do so within a particular understanding of history, as embracing past present and future dimensions. My aim is two-fold: to open up questions about the subject’s historical legacy, and to draw attention to some of the emerging challenges and prospects for English teaching today and tomorrow.

Researching Rural Places On Social Justice and Rural Education

This paper explores some of the political and methodological challenges involved in researching rural education. It begins by outlining the situation in Australia regarding the relationship between social justice and rural education. It first describes the disadvantages experienced by many rural communities and presents an analysis of rural educational achievement in Australia. The paper then argues the limitations of traditional and established notions of social justice and, in this context, presents Soja’s proposal that spatiality is a third way of understanding the world. The paper is organized and informed by the principle that what matters, first and foremost, is the nature of the research problem, with decisions about methodology following, and shaped accordingly.

Rethinking the representation problem in curriculum inquiry

The consolidation of reconceptualism as a distinctive tradition in curriculum inquiry is commonly understood to go hand‐in‐hand with the decline and even eclipse of an explicit political orientation in such work. This paper offers an alternative argument, focusing on a re‐assessment of what has been called the representation problem, and exploring this assessment with reference to the ‘modernism–postmodernism’ debate. Knowledge, representation, and praxis are discussed. A case is made for understanding representation in terms of both semiotics and politics, drawing on postmodern political theory and philosophy. This case requires revisiting of the so‐called reproduction thesis, as in effect ‘unfinished business’, and seeking to rethink the relationship between reproduction and representation as organizing categories in and for curriculum and social analysis. The paper thus brings together curriculum history and curriculum theory, as well as an Australian perspective to an important and enduring focus for discussion and debate in the contemporary curriculum field.

The (im)possibility of the project

I want to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet together, today – the Ngunawal people – and by offering my respects to their Elders, past, present and future. I am mindful, too, that it was here, in Canberra, almost two years ago now, that the Prime Minister opened up the new Parliament by issuing an historic Apology to Aboriginal Australians for the legacies of colonialism that we all have lived through, in some fashion, and in which we are all implicated. For that act alone, at the outset of a new federal-parliamentary regime, as a significant moment in nation-(re)building, the Government, to my mind at least, accrued much credit. It remains for history to attest to whether or not that gesture becomes more than merely symbolic, in the most basic sense.