Josephine May

Discourses of betterment and opportunity: exploring the privileging of university attendance for first-in-family learners

ABSTRACT Much of the literature on university access and participation positions people from disadvantaged backgrounds as those who have not ‘traditionally’ attended university. Certain student cohorts are presented as lacking the skills or requisite knowledges to achieve academic success, requiring additional assistance from institutions to address these gaps. Rather than approach such students from a position of ‘lack’, this article problematises the concept of privilege, particularly as this relates to the perceived benefits of university attendance. Drawing on rich qualitative interviews with first-in-family students, this article discusses the nature of these learners’ expectations of university, particularly those related to the promise of a more secure financial future. In unpacking these constructs and interrogating the ways in which higher education sectors are located within discourses of betterment and opportunity, deep insight is offered into the embodied and experiential nature of university for these students and their families.

Being special: memories of the Australian public high school, 1920s‐1950s

Purpose – The first state high schools in New South Wales (NSW) were restricted to children with high academic ability. The purpose of this paper is to explore the lived experience of over 70 former students from three such schools, one coeducational, the other two single‐sex, with special attention to academic and social curricula.Design/methodology/approach – The study investigates memories of a particular moment in the history of secondary schooling in NSW before the establishment of mass secondary education. The authors utilise theoretical concepts from recent oral history studies regarding memory communities and intersectionality.Findings – In bringing ex‐students’ memories of both single‐sex and coeducational academically‐selective high schooling together, the study reports on the homogeneity of the memories of this type of schooling despite the different sexual structures of the schools. The respondents, it is argued, constitute a “memory community” in that they recalled their selection for high sc...

A field of desire: visions of education in selected Australian silent films

The 1920s was an ambivalent decade in Australia: on the one hand Australians were still reeling from the disastrous effects of the Great War and on the other they were witnessing unprecedented and exciting technological and social changes brought about by modernity. One of the most important modern technologies was the cinema, which Australians embraced enthusiastically from its introduction. In the silent era Australians produced a great many films, some of which concerned the vast enterprise of the schooling of children. This article considers the relationship between cinema, modernity and education in a small selection of Australian silent films. It argues that these silent film visions of education represented education as a field of desire. These examples of silent cinema about schooling mirrored back at audiences, and attempted to allay, their desires (and anxieties) about the state of nation in the interwar period as well as concerns about the shifting gender boundaries exemplified by the young, unmarried and mobile female teacher. The desired future was ordered, fit and healthy, disciplined, prepared for war, and underpinned by traditional gender roles: little boys were soldiers in waiting, little girls were mothers in waiting, and nubile female teachers were destined for marriage.

A challenging vision: the teacher-student relationship in The Heartbreak Kid

Abstract This article revisits the 1993 Australian feature film The Heartbreak Kid, in order to examine three unexplored and interconnecting facets: the representation of the female teacher as object of desire; the classroom as an erotically charged arena; and the outcome of the sexual relationship between the protagonists, the young teacher, Christina Papadopoulos, and her seventeen-year-old male student, Nick Polides. The discussion draws on a recent analysis of a similar real life case, in order to show how the film advances a different reading than the current laws encompass. In showing the students considerable agency in the affair, and in not criminalising the teachers unethical behaviour towards him, the film contradicts the outcomes of the real case in 2004.

Puberty Blues and the representation of an Australian comprehensive high school

In this article I examine one film, Puberty Blues, directed by Bruce Beresford in 1981. According to the Australian Film Commission, the film is number forty four of the top Australian films at the Australian Box Office from 1966 to 2005 having earned over three million dollars. The view put here is that this film throws light on the history of the comprehensive coeducational high school at a particular moment. The article maintains that Puberty Blues pursues a damning representation of the ineffectual and irrelevant nature of school life for the students it features. This unsettling film shows the comprehensive coeducational secondary school, itself a product of a middle class vision of the civil society, to be failing in its promise of extending ‘respectable’ and materially aspirant middle class values to youth. It is suggested that the decline in patronage of the public coeducational comprehensive school by the middle class and aspiring others may in part be attributable overall to the powerful negative images of schools such as those in Puberty Blues that have widely circulated in Australian and Anglophone popular culture, especially in feature film. It also hypothesises that the middle class flight from the comprehensive high school may be in part attributable to the fact that some of their children may have ‘deserted’ the schools first.

Imagining the Secondary School: The ‘pictorial turn’ and representations of secondary schools in two Australian feature films of the 1970s

This paper aims to engage with the cinematic history of Australian education by examining the historical representation of secondary schools in two Australian feature films of the 1970s: Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975) and The Getting of Wisdom (Beresford, 1977). By what narrative strategies, metaphors and understandings were Australian high schools encoded into images and how might these interpretations differ from written accounts of the secondary schools? The discussion focuses on the social and material worlds of the schools. It reflects on the types of education depicted and the characterisations of teachers and students, including consideration of gender, class, and sexualities. The paper asks: what was the historical understanding of secondary schools that made them so attractive for cinematic explorations of Australian national identity in the 1970s?

A child of change: The establishment of the Open Foundation Programme in 1974

In 1974 the University of Newcastle, Australia, established a mature age access programme called the Open Foundation. Since that time, thousands of adults have entered university through the Open Foundation portal. This article explores the layers of context for the establishment of the Open Foundation in the early 1970s. It seeks to understand the reasons why the University of Newcastle, which already provided the means for direct entry for some adults, sought to widen participation for adults at that time by creating a year long pre‐tertiary programme. Pascoe’s explanation that matureage entry schemes in Australian universities were prompted by ‘pragmatic considerations’ such as the disruption to intakes due to the lengthening of secondary schooling in New South Wales in 1969 and the falling demand for university places in the late 1970s and 1980s, does not satisfactorily account for the establishment of the Open Foundation Programme. Rather this article argues that the Open Foundation was set up in res...

Gender and hyper-linear history in the representation of the female Australian primary school teacher in Marion (ABCTV, 1974)

Abstract Building on the author’s previous work on Australian national cinema and schooling, this article explores the representation of the female primary school teacher in the television mini-series entitled Marion (Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1974). Using narrative analysis, it argues that this representation is disruptive of patriarchal gender relations, demonstrating ‘hyper-linear history’ where an exemplary relationship is created between the disrupted gender relations in school leadership in Australia caused by the Second World War and the ongoing disruption of gender relations occasioned by the second-wave women’s movement in the 1970s. This mini-series shows how history, gender and representation are mobilised to create a unique cinematic historical argument about the gendered nature of Australian primary school teaching. Finally, the article reflects briefly on the situatedness of this reading out of the Global South.

Motivated Men: First-in-Family Male Students

While first-in-family (FiF) women’s experience of attending university has been examined in a growing body of literature, there has been little attention to the experiences of FiF males. This chapter presents an account of the motivations, transitions and participations of FiF male students using a narrative gender framework. The analysis especially privileges the idea of situated and relational masculinities (Hopkins and Noble, 2009). Age was found to be the chief organising category of their experiences structuring their embodied life course. Three main age and relational masculine performances emerged from these men’s stories, namely those of the Fathers, the Self-Starters and the Sons. Working to achieve or enact the breadwinner model of masculinity was found to be the dominant motivator behind their gender performances.

Trailblazing: Motivations and Relationship Impacts for First-in-Family Enabling Students

This chapter investigates the experiences of first-in-family (FiF) enabling students as they reflect on their participation in university. Due to the widening participation agenda, this cohort is increasing annually in Australia although they are little researched. The data have been harvested from interviews and surveys and analysed using biographical method to explore these enabling students’ motivations and relationship impacts. The chapter shows how their motivations are deeply embedded and complexly formulated within temporal and relational contexts as well as within their broader social, cultural and economic locations. Their trailblazing engagement in higher education (HE) is shown to be a social as much as an individual action, having impacts far beyond the transformations that the enabling learner personally experiences.