Patrick Alan Danaher

Learning and Teaching Styles

An ongoing challenge for instructional and syllabus designers and teachers and facilitators who seek to implement these curricula is finding and maintaining an appropriate balance between differing learning and teaching styles. Differences in cultural and language backgrounds, previous learning and teaching experiences, and the personal characteristics of learners and teachers create an extremely complex milieu at the intersection of learning and teaching in contemporary educational contexts. This chapter explores this issue through an analysis of three different data sets: the experiences of male Saudi nursing students at an Australian university; the role of children, parents and peers, and the natural environment as educators in an alternative school context; and the interaction between a teacher and student in an Australian senior secondary art classroom.

Students, Staff and Academic Mobility in Higher Education

Review of Mike Byram and Fred Dervin (Eds.), Students, Staff and Academic Mobility in Higher Education (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, 2008). Includes references.

The student departure puzzle: do some faculties and programs have answers?

University attrition prevention strategies are typically generic, centrally managed, whole of university strategies that have emerged from an examination of whole of university attrition data. This paper takes an intra‐organisational comparative approach, through the examination of faculty and program attrition rates of students who joined an Australian university in the first term of 2004. The faculty with the highest attrition had a rate two‐and‐a‐half times that of the faculty with the lowest rate, and in programs with 40 or more students enrolled the program with the highest attrition had a rate over five times that of the program with the lowest rate. The paper identifies five practical implications of these findings and concludes that investigating the causes of these differences will help in understanding student attrition. It also suggests that universities wishing to reduce student attrition may benefit from adopting integrated and situated strategies that take into account faculty and program differences.

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.

Indigenous, pre-undergraduate and international students at Central Queensland University, Australia: three cases of the dynamic tension between diversity and commonality

While diversity and commonality are not necessarily contradictory aspirations in relation to contemporary teaching in higher education, they exist potentially in a state of dynamic tension, fostered by market-based and government-induced policies that strive to have the largest and widest possible client- or customer-base, while reducing costs by standardising delivery and assessment. This paper explores this dynamic tension between diversity and commonality through three empirical cases of different types of students at Central Queensland University in Australia: Indigenous, pre-undergraduate and international students. The paper presents an analytical synthesis of the particular teaching strategies developed by academic staff working with students in each case: experiential learning, transformative learning and culturally-situated pedagogy. The authors argue that these strategies constitute a potentially effective means of helping to resolve the dynamic tension between, and of unravelling the Gordian knot linking, diversity and commonality in Australian contemporary higher education.

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.

“Power/knowledge” and the educational experiences and expectations of Australian show people

Abstract A Foucauldian perspective reveals how “knowledge” can be complicit with “power” in privileging some individuals and groups while marginalizing others. This crucial point should alert educational researchers to the ethical and political implications of recording itinerant peoples reflections on their educational experiences and their expectations of alternative forms of schooling. Thus, the Australian show peoples general dissatisfaction with the learning opportunities available in the past has fuelled their determined lobbying for a separate school for show children; here the demand for a specific form of knowledge provision articulates with the show peoples engagement with state and institutional power. The chapter illustrates this argument by drawing on the senior authors semi-structured interviews with show children, parents, home tutors, and teachers in five sites between 1992 and 1996.

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.

Theorising Open Learning for Researching Home School and Itinerant Settings.

In this article Patrick Danaher, Doug Wyer and Leo Bartlett of Central Queensland University, Australia, apply a range of social theoretical perspectives in the open learning field, with particular reference to the remote primary classroom and the itinerant primary classroom. By examining the situation of rural learners and peripatetic learners on the Queensland circuits of the Showmens Guild of Australasia, the authors are able to probe notions of centre/periphery and mobility/immobility in radical and innovative ways.