Bonita Mason

Finding Common Ground: Combining Participatory Action Research and Critical Service-Learning to Guide and Manage Projects with Aboriginal Communities

In this chapter we argue that critical service learning can be a powerful and effective means of developing higher education students’ Indigenous cultural awareness and understanding. When done well, critical service learning also encourages reflection on the socio-political and environmental contexts that influence contemporary culture and contribute to social injustice. We support our argument with the example of a Western Australian service-learning program in which undergraduate media students work with city based Aboriginal community groups over the course of a semester. This project is of special significance because of its use of participatory action research to assist students to develop relationships with their community partners and manage individual projects. The findings expose the common ground shared by critical service learning and participatory action research, and suggest that the principles of action research can contribute to a strong and successful service-learning experience.

Reshaping the Field from the Outside in: Aboriginal People and Student Journalists Working Together

Mason et al. offer an examination of a field struggle in a university journalism project set-up to foster collaboration between journalism students and Aboriginal peoples. The authors employ Bourdieu’s theory of practice as conceptual tool to structure the project as an intervention in the journalistic field, through the sub-field of journalism education, and as analytical and explanatory tool to identify, map and examine power relations, positions and other field structures and dynamics, enacted and made evident through the symbolic challenge the project represents. Through field analysis, the authors conclude that the field struggle operates from the project, via sub-field and field, to society, and that heterodox collaborative practices can contribute to challenging broader, misrecognised power relations of dominance between Australian settler and colonised peoples.

FRONTLINE: Place-makers of the mind: Symbolic reconstruction of an inner city park

In 2016, a specialist unit of study that teaches university journalism students how to report in partnership with Indigenous community organisations extended its story range to an exclusive news feature produced in collaboration with members of the wider Nyoongar community of Perth, Western Australia. The story asked and answered the question of what happened to a stalled proposal to co-badge a major inner city park with a Nyoongar name. In conceiving the story, and producing it with assistance from our students, we intervened to achieve clarity on a local government decision where due process had not been followed. With the help of Nyoongar sources, we sought to explain the cultural importance of the park, and raise awareness of the decolonising potential of Indigenous place names. The story is appended after an exegesis that melds sense of place theory with Bourdieusian field theory to situate the story and its producers in social space.

Service Learning in an Urban Aboriginal Community: “Real Aborigines Don’t Just Live in the Bush”

Service learning is gaining greater recognition in Australian universities as a powerful and effective means by which students can learn about Aboriginal peoples and cultures. Working in and with communities provides opportunities for students to form personal relationships with Aboriginal peoples that can have long-term benefits for all participants. One of the first steps in establishing a service-learning program will inevitably be to decide on a location. Is a service-learning program located in a remote Aboriginal community of more benefit to students than one located in an urban community? This chapter describes a service-learning program that was established for media students in collaboration with Aboriginal community groups in Perth, Western Australia. It discusses why an urban community was the answer to our question of where and how an urban service-learning program might build strong and lasting community relationships and provide a transformative learning experience for students.

REVIEW: Searching for the truth of book-length journalism

Mason, Bonita. (2015). Searching for the truth of book-length journalism. Pacific Journalism Review, 21(2): 200-203. Review of Telling True Stories: Navigating the challenges of writing narrative non-fiction, by Matthew Ricketson. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014. 282pp. ISBN 978-1-742379-35-7 Australian journalism academic and practitioner Matthew Ricketson’s new book opens with two quotes: one from South African writer Nadine Gordimer on the enduring presence of ‘beauty’ in the quest for truth; the other from US comparative literature professor Peter Brooks on the impossibility of separating our own humanity and imaginations from what we write. Gordimer has also written elsewhere of the writer’s responsibility, as a social being, to take part in their world through their writing—to become ‘more than a writer’ (1985, p. 141). The kind of writing Ricketson seeks to define, and describes, analyses and advocates in this book (much of which is also investigative), comes closest to meeting these roles and responsibilities for the non-fiction writer.