Mike Danaher

Situated Ethics in Investigating Non-Government Organisations and Showgrounds: Issues in Researching Japanese Environmental Politics and Australian Traveller Education

Abstract Situated ethics (Piper & Simons, 2005; Simons & Usher, 2000) provides a potentially powerful conceptual lens for reflecting on the research significance and researcher subjectivities entailed in contemporary educational research projects. This is the idea that research ethics is most appropriately understood and enacted in the specific contexts of such projects, rather than by reference to timeless and universal codes. This proposition is helpful in drawing attention to the crucial networks of aspirations and interests that bind and separate stakeholders in those projects. The authors illustrate this argument through a reflexive interrogation of their respective empirical doctoral studies (Danaher, 2003; Danaher, 2001). One study focused on multiple and conflicting constructions of wildlife preservation as a site of Japanese environmental politics and policy&making; the other examined educational provision for mobile show communities as a case of Australian Traveller Education. Both projects required the researchers to negotiate tentative and sometimes uneasy relations with research participants that veered between impartial and disinterested observers and partial and interested advocates. In engaging in those negotiations, the researchers enacted situated and provisional ethical positions derived from increasingly explicit assumptions about both the significance of their particular research and the importance of acknowledging their own subjectivities in making claims about that significance. Thus situated ethics is a vital element of evaluating the value as much as the values of conducting research with non–government organisations and on showgrounds.

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.

Towards sustainable development in Japanese environmental policy‐making

The idea of sustainable development gained prominence in world politics during the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro. Despite the popularity and the fashionability of the concept, it remains a multi-dimensional term as well one that attracts a great deal of political rhetoric. It is increasingly becoming more important to evaluate how successful sustainable development is as an ideology, as a policy objective and as a policy tool. This paper sets out to examine one particular dimension of sustainable development in the context of one particular country. The paper will discuss the biodiversity element of sustainable development in the context of Japanese environmental policy-making and Japanese peoples perceptions of environmental issues. The paper concludes that the value of biodiversity in Japan has not been sufficiently realized, nor has it been included in measures of national wealth. The challenge for the Japanese is to recognize the social, political and economic value of protecting biodiversity, and then it might be possible for them to achieve ecologically sustainable development as an integral part of public policy-making. Copyright

Expanding students' ability to conceptualise the dynamics of changing places in the teaching of environmental geography

ABSTRACT “Research has consistently found that pedagogy informed by knowledge of students’ existing ideas is more efficient in promoting conceptual change than traditional methods of instruction”. Learners in the sub-field of environmental geography exhibit preconceptions that frame and sometimes hinder their knowledge acquisition. Those preconceptions need to be harnessed and where appropriate displaced and replaced with more effective understandings if learning is to be successful. University educators have a crucial role to play in assisting this process. This paper examines a community-based teaching approach within the geography discipline at an Australian university deployed to clarify, then displace learners’ preconceptions and replace them with more empowering capacities. The learning context involves a diverse range of university undergraduates undertaking environmental geography courses for the first time. The examination is framed by the notion of multiple forms of capital, some of which students bring with them to this learning context and others of which need to be acquired during the course of study. The paper employs an exploratory case study design, augmented by a qualitative analysis of students’ and academics’ experiences. The interdependent processes of displacing preconceptions and replacing them with heightened capacities are demonstrated to be crucial ingredients of capitalising (on) sustainable and sometimes transformative learning places.

On Manoeuvre: Navigating Practice-Led Methodology in a Creative Writing PhD for the First Time

Supervisors and their PhD students in the social practices often deal with unfamiliar epistemologies and methodologies. To progress they have to broaden their understanding of ‘new’ methodologies. This chapter explores how both a supervisor and student (the authors of this chapter) have approached a PhD involving a historical romance novel and accompanying exegesis. The student is employing a practice-led research methodology. Using the grand tour question (Leech, Political Science and Politics, 35, 665–668, 2002) of how researchers maneuver through the maze of methodology to make meaning for their research project, the chapter divides going on maneuver into five stages concerning this practice-led methodology (visioning, planning, journeying, reflecting, and evaluating). The insights on how they charted this new territory from their novice standpoints can assist other students and supervisors when going on their own unfamiliar methodological maneuvers.

The benefits of language laboratories for learning Japanese as a foreign language

This article considers the pedagogical benefits of a state-of-the-art language laboratory for learning Japanese. The article argues that, although many believe the language laboratory is anachronistic, it deserves its rightful place as one of the ‘new’ technologies which can enhance foreign language learning. The benefits, however, are subject to the teachers ability to encourage within students feelings of confidence and control about using this technology.

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.