Lise Bird Claiborne

Supporting students with impairments in higher education: social inclusion or cold comfort?

This paper uses a discursive analysis to examine the experience of ‘inclusion’ from several stakeholder groups in one university. The research team included disability support staff at the institution, external disability consultants and academic researchers. A critical focus group investigation centred on four groups: students who were identified as having an impairment (SWIs), academic staff (teachers), administrators and students who did not identify as having an impairment (non‐SWIs). Interviews had facilitators with both research and disability expertise. Groups recounted different experiences of inclusion. SWIs, drawing on a rights discourse, emphasised a lack of resourcing and barriers created by the teaching staff. In contrast, teachers, administrators and (to a lesser extent) non‐SWIs emphasised the importance of social inclusion, reflecting discourses around needs and humanist notions of care and support, which largely seemed to miss the core of SWI concerns about recognition of their technical competence. For all groups, questions around disclosure of disability were of greater concern than tensions between needs and rights or the recent publication of a Code of Practice for the higher education sector. The findings challenged some of the researchers’ own assumptions, with unexpected implications for practice.

Vygotsky from ZPD to ZCD in moral education: reshaping Western theory and practices in local context

This article explores Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in the Malaysian context to support local reform of the Moral Education (ME) classroom. Small groups of students in three different types of school were involved in a participant action research (PAR) project. Such classrooms in Malaysia bring together students from various ethnicities aligned with Hindu, Confucian and Christian beliefs and understandings. Using the Malaysian multicultural ME classroom as a case study, we offer some examples of group conversations around moral dilemmas that illustrate ways that collaborative processes beyond the individual might expand an individual student’s ZPD and the consensual as well as divergent views of each group as a whole. This suggests possibilities for an extension of the ZPD into a zone of collaborative development (ZCD).

Participatory action research in culturally complex societies: opportunities and challenges

Abstract One of the aims of participatory action research (PAR) is to bring realities of lives closer together through dialogue and ‘conscientization’, raising critical awareness among participants from all backgrounds. Promoting participation often assumes a power shift from the decision-makers to the majority of society, who can be the end-receivers of decisions made. Once some kind of awareness is achieved, the participants should be able to challenge the causes of their perceived oppression, or resolve the suffering that is endured, if that is what they hope to achieve. However, the situation is more complex in many contemporary societies, in which there are not only differing cultural beliefs related to religion, but different ontologies about being and living in the world. There is much contemporary debate about the possibilities of critique that take on board divergent sociomaterial realities within the same classroom. Practical and structural differences can pose challenges to conducting PAR research. In this article, we address the distinctive nature of PAR in relation to a culturally diverse group of participants. We argue that research using a PAR framework can result in subtle ethical challenges, which also provide insights for opportunities and strategies. Drawing from the authors’ experiences in multicultural education and working with culturally diverse youth and postgraduate students, opportunities and challenges of applying a PAR approach are discussed. We conclude with the suggestion that PAR remains consistent with its original transformative goals, but also remain open to further explorations of activism that address pressing contemporary concerns within culturally complex societies.

Review: Erica Burman: Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 356 pp. £21.50 ISBN 978—0—415—39562—5 (pbk) Erica Burman: Developments: Child, Image, Nation, London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 328 pp. £21.50 ISBN 978—0—415—37792—8 (pbk)

it is a real treat to hold, in either hand, a copy of erica Burman’s extensively revised edition of her 1994 Deconstructing Developmental Psychology and her new set of essays, Developments: Child, Image, Nation. These two books make a very satisfying combination, as they consider the complexities and conundrums of development from two rather different angles. The updated Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (DDP) presents further dissection of a field that has experienced only an occasional hard-hitting critique. The first edition of DDP tackled child-rearing advice, the missing father and discourses of childhood, bringing the work of feminist scholars into the orbit of readers of the avowedly gender-‘neutral’ discipline of developmental psychology. This new edition is an important update of key debates within child studies. However it goes further in challenging the limitations of developmental psychology in a global environment where economic questions about ‘development’ seldom intersect with its foundational claims. A central thesis of the book, repeated from the first edition, is its questioning of racist and sexist foundations of the empirical study of development:

Collaborative Research to Support Reflexive Feminist Professional Work.

Abstract Possibilities for postmodern emergence [Somerville, M. (2007). Postmodern emergence. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(2), 225–243] in professional practice were explored by a group of tertiary educators working together on a collaborative memory project. This allowed new possibilities for informing and extending practice beyond taken-for-granted norms circumscribed by the neoliberal university environment. Each author branched off from an initial study to work further with their constituent professional groups: early childhood educators, teachers, counsellors and educational psychologists. The collaborative method involves theoretical provocations for analysing positionings within dominant discourses that shape contemporary educational practices, providing support for reflexive insight into professional work. Findings indicated the fruitfulness of collaborative support for theoretical explorations into diverse domains of inquiry relevant for practice. There were also challenges associated with collaborative theorising in the individualistic setting of the university, including difficulties in embracing group coherence without homogenising intra-group differences. This process could be used in other settings to renew the research, discoveries and future becomings of academic or professional selves.

Shaking up human development: A reflection from Aotearoa New Zealand on Erica’s Burman’s contribution

This paper describes the influence of Erica Burman’s book Deconstructing Developmental Psychology in one university department over two decades. To illustrate, three colleagues describe their separate geographical and theoretical journeys towards critical study of human development. Ongoing influences of Burman’s work in Aotearoa New Zealand are outlined. In particular, Burman’s view—that development is socially constructed within particular cultural, economic and historical circumstances—has become central to our research and university curriculum.

The Potential of Critical Educational Psychology Beyond its Meritocratic Past

At the start of the millennium, I described possibilities for a critical educational psychology beyond those of the “bewildered traveller at the crossroads of Psychology and Education” in a field that “is in many ways one of the furthest from the critical project in psychology” (Bird, 1999, p.21). This chapter continues the conversation, asking how much influence there has been from Michel Foucault’s theoretical work on the discursive constructions of power relations.

Partnership among Multicultural Peers in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), partnership among student peers is becoming increasingly popular, especially in the digital era. In this chapter we provide a pedagogical case for peers learning and working in partnership through a process of engagement that involves collaborative work in knowledge co-construction to enhance learning and influence teaching. Our specific focus is the potential for innovative partnerships in settings in which diverse students from a range of cultural groups work together both face-to-face and at a distance, via online communication.