Geoff Danaher

Freire and dialogical pedagogy: a means for interrogating opportunities and challenges in Australian postgraduate supervision

Discussions between new postgraduate students and potential supervisors prior to the formalisation of supervisor–student partnerships serve several useful purposes. One purpose is to explore the expectations that each partner has of the other and of themselves and the anticipated nature of the partnership. This article employs Freire’s perspective on dialogical pedagogy as a framework to identify and interrogate opportunities and challenges in postgraduate supervision. Theorising and clarifying the postgraduate supervisory process in these terms at the outset of candidature and at strategic points along the way can save time and effort that might otherwise be devoted to misunderstandings and less than optimum progress. It also has implications for lifelong education for both supervisors and students that can be realised beyond the period of candidature and the substantive and methodological gains normally associated with successful completion of a thesis.

Three pedagogies of mobility for Australian show people: Teaching about, through and towards the questioning of sedentarism

Abstract Questions concerning the education of mobile groups help to highlight the lived experiences of people otherwise rendered invisible by policy actors. This includes the diverse communities of occupational Travellers—those people who regularly move in order to earn their livelihood. While the category ‘occupational Travellers’ encompasses groups as varied as defence force personnel, specialist teachers and seasonal fruit pickers, the focus here is on the people who travel the agricultural show circuits of Australia to provide the entertainment of ‘sideshow alley’. Drawing on qualitative research with the Australian show people since 1992, this article deploys the concept of ‘sedentarism’ to highlight the ambivalently valorised lived experiences and educational opportunities of the show people. In particular, the article explores the pedagogical and policy implications of efForts to disrupt and transform the marginalising impact of sedentarism, which constructs mobility as the other in relation to fixed residence.

Researching education with marginalized communities

Researching Education with Marginalised Communities brings together two important 21st century themes. The authors consider the what, where and why of marginalisation, that insidious phenomenon whereby certain groups of people are deemed inferior on the basis of factors that they cannot control. Through intensive and extensive research the book also explores the role of education research in enabling those involved, whether on the margin or at the centre, to achieve comprehensive awareness of marginalisation and to combine forces to combat the stigma of discrimination. The six groups of marginalised learners included in the book live in Australia, the UK, Continental Europe, Japan and Venezuela, and include mobile circus and fairground communities; teachers of Traveller children; pre-undergraduate university students; vocational education students with disabilities and their teachers; environmental lobbyists and policy makers; and retired people. All chapters explain how researching education with marginalised communities can be carried out effectively and ethically.

Interrogating learner-centredness as a vehicle for meaning emerging in practice and researching personal pedagogies: transformative learning, self-efficacy and social presence at two Australian universities

Abstract Learner-centredness is a key element of the contemporary dominant discourse pertaining to pedagogies and learning. Yet enacting learner-centredness is far from easy in the increasingly massified higher education system. The authors contend that it is in the intersection between this philosophy and practice that meaning emerges and personal pedagogies can be researched. This paper deploys the authors’ experiences as higher educators covering a diversity of disciplines, encompassing pre-undergraduate, undergraduate and postgraduate domestic and international students and including face-to-face, distance and online delivery modes in two Australian universities. Learner-centredness is interrogated in relation to three key sites: exploring transformative learning with previously educationally marginalized pre-undergraduate students in face-to-face and external modes enhancing self-efficacy with face-to-face undergraduate teacher education students in relation to their mathematical competence experiencing social presence with online postgraduate students learning about educational research methods and ethics. The paper reports examples from each site where learner-centredness is successfully engaged and hence where the meaning emerging in practice is fulfilling and productive. At the same time, interpersonal and structural factors sometimes obstruct the attainment of such positive outcomes. These findings have important implications for the authors’ ongoing research into their personal pedagogies as well as for policy and practice in contemporary higher education more broadly.

Pedagogies and Learning in Cooperative and Symbolic Communities of Practice: Implications for and from the Education of Australian Show People

Abstract Groups and organisations are not automatically sites of effective and transformative pedagogy and learning; such outcomes are most likely to occur when entities become communities of practice (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002). One conception of community focused explicitly on the facilitation of pedagogy and learning is cooperative community, centred on five principles (Johnson & Johnson, 1998). Another productive notion of community is as a symbolic construction, centred on members’ shared consciousness and boundary maintenance (Cohen, 1985). One community that demonstrates the pedagogical and learning potential of cooperative and symbolic communities of practice is the Australian show people (Danaher, 1998, 2001). Following generations of educational marginalisation, this community participated in a specialised program within the Brisbane School of Distance Education between 1989 and 1999, and since 2000 its members have benefited from having their own Queensland School for Travelling Show Children, established under Education Queensland’s auspices. This paper maps and portrays enactments of the cooperative and symbolic communities of practice in the school and on the show circuits. It identifies specific strategies that underpin the pedagogies and learning made possible in those communities of practice, and it considers possible implications of such pedagogies and learning for other educational contexts and groups.

Constructing Knowledge with Marginalized Communities

This opening line from Charles Dickens’ famous novel, David Copperfield, first published in 1850, helps to make sense of the issues at stake in the ways in which knowledge is constructed about members of marginalized communities. David is reflecting on how the manner in which his life is written about shapes whether he will be perceived as the hero or central player in his life, or whether that role will be occupied by others. Such reflection is quite commonplace, in the sense that many people will ponder the extent to which they are free to choose and act out the directions of their lives against the influence of various social forces and structures that to a greater or lesser extent shape the kind of life that one has. Such structures include socio-economic factors, religion, education, gender, ethnicity and so forth.

Framing Marginalized Communities

This chapter describes and explores the effects of the complex interplay between the various frameworks and constructions of marginalization and those who are directly affected by the framing process. Attitudes and expectations emanating from these frameworks are analysed in relation to how education researchers may be able to embrace different and more inclusive methods of research. In particular, as a striking illustration of the argument pursued in the chapter, one example of an alternative means of engaging with Australian Indigenous vocational education and training (VET) students with a disability in Australia is examined. An action research project involving focus groups, observations and active participation was employed in a distinctive way, incorporating a successful interplay among vocational education, planning, a business focus and sponsorship. This project continues to provide relevant material for future research opportunities based around how more effectively to provide inclusive experiences for VET students and to avoid framing participants in negative and marginalizing ways.

Representing the Knowledge of Marginalized Communities

These words from Anne Elliot, the heroine of Jane Austen’s (1998) novel Persuasion, first published in 1818, spoken to a male companion, tell us something about the lives that men and women led during this period. And, although gender roles have dramatically changed throughout the Western world during the subsequent years, the fact that Austen’s books continue to resonate so strongly with female readers in particular suggests that her insights into women’s lives are still pertinent today.

Situating Education Research with Marginalized Communities

The world has been, is now and is likely always to be divided and unequal (Martens, Dreher, & Gaston, 2010; Watkins, 2009). This statement is a truism, but no less powerful and poignant for that. It provides both the impetus for this book and the backdrop against which this and the successive chapters have been written. It generates simultaneously seemingly insuperable challenges and potentially innovative and transformative responses to those challenges. And (perhaps most significantly from the perspective of the book) it mandates and warrants specific kinds of strategies by education researchers attempting to engage with the divided and unequal world that we all inhabit.

Researching Ethically and Responsibly with Marginalized Communities

Research is fraught with ethical dilemmas and sometimes with political consequences. In this chapter, we argue that a self-reflexive consideration of the ethical and political dimensions of research about and with marginalized communities (Basit, 2013), together with advocating research ethics as a set of instantiated institutional and individual practices, will enable researchers to conduct research that is ethically responsible and might even contribute to helping to transform these communities. This means that researchers need to be able to identify, and to be aware of and attentive to, these ethical and political dimensions in their interactions with research participants, and to understand how these issues might manifest themselves as potential risks to those participants. Thus the chapter investigates examples of ethical and political risks while education research is being undertaken with marginalized communities, as well as ways of reducing and managing those risks.