Garth L Lean

Transformative travel: A mobilities perspective

Physical travel has traditionally been viewed as an agent of transformation. The research conducted on this topic, however, is surprisingly narrow in scope. Few studies have attempted to look beyond a particular tourism/travel segment or discipline and most utilise a restricted range of methods and analysis. These investigations have also failed to consider the long-term impacts of corporeal travel and how changes continue to evolve over time. Drawing upon a holistic and interdisciplinary study of transformative travel, this article argues that in a mobile world, it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to distance themselves from elements that maintain a particular way of thinking and acting. While a traveller may physically remove their body from a specific geographic location, contemporary and historic flows of people, ideas, information, objects, memories and symbols create mobile spaces, places, landscapes and identities, where both familiarity and difference abound. Transformation through physical travel becomes a complex social phenomenon.

Challenging racism through schools: teacher attitudes to cultural diversity and multicultural education in Sydney, Australia

How school teachers act to challenge racism in schools is a vital concern in an immigrant society like Australia. A 10% response from a self-administered online survey of government (public) primary and secondary school teachers across Sydney, Australia’s largest EthniCity, examines attitudes of classroom teachers towards cultural diversity, goals of multicultural education, and strategies to implement anti-racist strategies. Principal components analysis (PCA) of attitudes tease out the varied influence of opinion on multicultural education, diversity, and anti-racism. Classroom teachers are overwhelmingly supportive of cultural diversity, multicultural education and strategies to combat racism and discrimination, and these views hardly vary across the different geographic zones of the city, unlike attitudes within the general community. However, teacher knowledge about the implementation of multicultural policy does vary, and is positively associated with the extent of population diversity and socio-economic status (SES) of the communities surrounding the schools.

Multicultural Education: The State of Play from an Australian Perspective.

This article reports on the first comprehensive survey of public school teachers in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) around issues of multicultural and English as Second Language (ESL) education. While there is substantial literature on multicultural education – what it should and shouldn’t be – there is much that is left unexplored in research in the area, not least of which is the characteristics of the teaching labour force. In this article, we ‘take stock’ of multicultural education, not by engaging with philosophical debates about multiculturalism as an ethical or policy practice, but as an auditing of what exists in the name of multicultural education. Drawing on a sample of over 5000 respondents, the article documents the changing cultural profile of the profession and highlights gaps in pre-service training and professional learning of teachers in terms of meeting the needs of Australia’s increasingly culturally and linguistically complex school populations.

Transformative Travel in a Mobile World

The content of the book Transformative Travel in a Mobile World follows the authors ten-year longitudinal study of travel perceptions. To summarise, the premise is an investigation of how traveller mobility through a lifetime of journeys influences the individual’s outlook and behaviours both during and post-travel. The book continues by investigating how these experiences evolve and develop over the duration of travel experiences of the individual.