Marie Brennan

Educating for futures in marginalized regions: a sociological framework for rethinking and researching aspirations

Abstract ‘Raising aspirations’ for education among young people in low socioeconomic regions has become a widespread policy prescription for increasing human capital investment and economic competitiveness in so-called ‘knowledge economies’. However, policy tends not to address difficult social, cultural, economic and political conditions for aspiring, based in structural changes associated with globalization. Drawing conceptually on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Arjun Appadurai and authors in the Funds of Knowledge tradition, this article theorizes two logics for aspiring that are recognizable in research with young people and families: a doxic logic, grounded in populist–ideological mediations; and a habituated logic, grounded in biographic–historical legacies and embodied as habitus. A less tangible third ‘logic’ is also theorized: emergent senses of future potential, grounded in lived cultures, which hold possibility for imagining and pursuing alternative futures. The article offers a sociological framework for understanding aspirations as complex social–cultural phenomena, and for capacitating emergent and hopeful aspirations through school- and community-based research and dialogue.

Re‐imagining doctoral education: Professional Doctorates and beyond

Portents of the demise of the Professional Doctorate have emerged in some recent policy and institutional circles in Australia, raising questions about the meaning and relevance of the Professional Doctorate in an era of ‘league tables’ and research assessment in Australia. This article argues that such portents, based largely on narrow market‐driven arguments, are premature, reactive and unhelpful, in that they foreclose on a set of critical questions concerning the future purpose, scope and practice of doctoral education. The article argues that the simple re‐assertion of the PhD as the default award represents a restoration of the logics and imperatives of disciplinarity and of older notions of so‐called ‘real’ research. Further, questions of the changing economies of knowledge and practice within, between and beyond the reach of the university, are subordinated and disavowed. The article presents a re‐reading of the emergence of Professional Doctorates, from the perspective of a decade‐and‐a‐half of development and change. It suggests the need to revisit that history critically in the light of the current developments in doctoral education, in knowledge production and in developing different relations around knowledge between universities and different social and professional domains. Such revisitings can bring out emerging issues for doctoral education at a time when anxieties may inhibit taking up opportunities for innovation and linking with new kinds of knowledge production that go beyond Euro‐centric and university‐centric traditions.

The suppression of ethical dispositions through managerial governmentality: A habitus crisis in Australian higher education

‘Fiscal’ and other so‐called ‘crises’ in Australian universities are more fundamentally, it is argued in this article, crises of government decision and ‘governmentality’. Using an illustrative ‘morality tale’ drawn from their working knowledge of the Australian university sector, the authors take a critically reflexive perspective, working from the sociological concepts of Pierre Bourdieu, to explore the significance of shifts in governance practices in the field of universities. The paper examines the crisis as it is lived and experienced at an inter‐subjective level: what Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’. It is argued that new ‘rules of the game’ are creating severe conflict within the dispositional constitution of professional identities, especially in the suppression of dispositions to be ethical agents in the everyday life of our own field of work. It is suggested that this analytical approach offers important directions for further research in the area of understanding organizational change, with implications for educational leadership.

Researching for Social Justice: Contextual, Conceptual and Methodological Challenges.

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary schooling contexts that, in current times, are beset with ‘crisis’ conditions and constrained by policy rationales that make it difficult to pursue issues of justice. Within the project, university investigators and teachers collaborated in action research that drew on a range of conceptual resources for redesigning curriculum and pedagogies, including: funds of knowledge, vernacular or local literacies; place-based education; the ‘productive pedagogies’ and the ‘unofficial curriculum’ of popular culture and out-of-school learning settings. In bringing these resources together with the aim of interrupting the reproduction of inequality, the project developed a methodo-logic which builds on Bourdieuian insights.

Steering teachers Working to control the feminized profession of education

Changes in public sector management need to be unpacked for different sectors to understand their impact in a particular country. This article focuses on the governance of the feminized profession of teaching in Australia, the single largest professional grouping in the country. Neoliberal assumptions have been built into teachers’ work through policy change in three related ‘waves’. The first wave in the 1980s installed managerialism in public education by recentralizing curriculum policy, establishing ‘self-managing’ schools, and downsizing infrastructure. The second wave in the 1990s steered teachers’ work through federal intervention into curriculum, and individualization of teachers’ work in contexts of marketization; this wave consolidated a national political role in education. The third wave in the 2000s emphasized the codification of knowledge through establishment of standards and criteria for teacher employment and promotion. The article concludes that the governance efforts to steer teachers’ work by neoliberal assumptions have been significantly, but not totally, effective.

Can Social Realism do Social Justice? Debating the Warrants for Curriculum Knowledge Selection

ABSTRACTSocial realism (SR), as a movement that argues for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ to curriculum (Young 2008a), is significant globally, especially in South Africa. This article examines arguments from SR proponents that curriculum selection should privilege specialised disciplinary knowledge – as ‘powerful knowledge’ – over ‘everyday knowledge’, and how this is warranted through Durkheims distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ social bases for knowledge. The article asks how adequately curriculum based on SR warrants can do social justice. This inquiry stages debates between SR and three alternative approaches. The first is standpoint theories that knowledge – including that of scientific disciplines – is always positional and ‘partially objective’. The next is Vygotskian arguments for curriculum that, dialectically, joins systematising powers of scientific knowledge with rich funds of knowledge from learners’ everyday life-worlds. Third, SRs philosophical framing is contrasted with Nancy Fras...

Sites of contestation over teacher education in Australia

Teacher education in Australia is subject to a great deal of policy interest at both Federal and State levels; it is also part of education policy shifts for the whole university sector. This paper explores Australian teacher education policy in terms of its governance, focusing on three current ‘sites of contestation’: university policy, budgetary policy, and Federal–State relations. In considering the ‘Australian case’, the authors aim to provide a case study of the ways in which ‘globalising trends’ are played out in particular cultural, historical and political contexts.

Negotiating university ‘equity’ from Indigenous standpoints: a shaky bridge

Indigenous presence in the Australian university is a relatively recent phenomenon, initially framed by policies of equity that were, and continue to be, problematic in their assumptions – what they say and don’t say – about cultural difference, justice, sovereignty and more. From the lead author’s Aboriginal standpoint, the paper analyses the repercussions of ‘equity’ thinking that have intersected with Indigenous experiences of higher education activity in Australia, covering the range of aspects of university life and work: staffing, teaching, curriculum, governance, research and community engagement. The paper critiques how dominant notions of ‘equity’ subordinate or cannibalise possibilities for what higher education could mean for Indigenous peoples; and it gestures towards what might emerge from a standpoint of Indigenous agency to re-imagine the university.

Meeting Literacy Needs of Pre‐service Cohorts: Ethical dilemmas for socially just teacher educators

Australian teacher education, like the rest of the university sector in Australia, is under significant pressure and highly politicised. In this paper, we examine ethical dilemmas facing teacher educators who, in a context of difficult and eroding work conditions, grapple with literacy needs of pre‐service students. We focus particularly on building an analysis and a broad framework for improving university literacy work, encompassing ethical commitments to our students, our employing institutions and, most importantly, to children and youth from families less powerfully positioned in the social structure and in Australian schools. Our analysis is informed by the conceptual framework of Pierre Bourdieu and by critical literacy work, especially that of African‐American educator Lisa Delpit. The paper concludes with suggestions for framing literacy work within a teacher education programme designed explicitly around social justice ethics.

Lost in production: the erasure of the teacher educator in Australian university job advertisements

This paper seeks to understand how persistent categories of written language in institutional texts support the cultural-historical production and re-production of teacher educators as kinds of academic workers in Australia. Fifty-seven job advertisements and allied materials produced by Australian universities were downloaded across a seven-month period. These texts were understood as key cultural artefacts not only for the recruitment process but in conveying what it means to be a teacher educator. A surprising finding was the almost complete absence of the ‘teacher educator’ within these texts. Analysis revealed, instead, textual distinctions between the advertisements (shown to be preoccupied with the image and positioning of institutional priorities and the supporting materials) which were characterised by the language of Human Resources. Ambivalence around the work of research within teacher education was another notable feature, which is interpreted in relation to institutional anxieties about the Australian government’s Education in Research for Australia initiative.