Robyn Henderson

Classroom pedagogies, digital literacies and the home-school digital divide

Abstract As digital technologies continue to permeate aspects of everyday life, contributing to an increasingly multiliterate world, educators are working to include digital technologies into classroom practices. However, there is evidence that the digital divide between schools and homes continues to widen as more and more technologies become available. This article reports on a small research project that investigated the use of digital technologies in two middle school (young adolescent) classrooms and how the teachers were attempting to bridge the so-called home-school divide. The study explored what the teachers knew about their students’ use of digital technologies and multiliteracies outside of the school context and how the teachers used digital technologies and approached the teaching of multiliteracies within the contexts of their classrooms.

Testimonio and the Idios Kosmos of the Contemporary Academic

This past decade has seen an increasing focus on the effects of academic bullying, workplace harassment, incivility and other disruptive workplace behaviours within the university (Fogg, 2008). Yet despite this growing awareness and charting of the costs of these behaviours – both to the individual and organization – it is evident that flawed and ineffective responses to incivility and the maintenance of organizational structures that encourage negative interpersonal behaviours remain entrenched in the academy (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Giroux 2014).

Using Place and Space to Deconstruct and Confront

This chapter uses two stages of a model of critical reflection to deconstruct and confront aspects of a pedagogy of induction. Drawing on longitudinal research, the analysis deconstructs notions of teacher and teaching through shared experiences and problematises the main tenets of knowledge and practice that have become normalised within the teaching profession. The human geography notion of spatial imaginaries, focusing on space and place, provides insights into how research participants deconstruct collaborative learning experiences which were designed to enable learning, build professional identity and inform new ways of preparing and supporting those belonging to, or about to join, the teaching profession.

Building Workforce Capacity Collaboratively

This chapter presents a framework for a pedagogy of induction based on seven years of design-based research. It suggests a new model of collaborative, critical reflection as a tool for professional learning and induction. The framework of a pedagogy of induction promotes awareness of professional learning from the commencement of university study and continuing across a career. A pedagogy of induction privileges the development of personal and professional agency through collaborative endeavour to build workforce capacity.

Theorising a Pedagogy of Induction

This chapter focuses on the theorising component of a model of critical reflection as used in constructing a pedagogy of induction. It highlights the usefulness of looking beyond immediacy to explore broader theoretical and philosophical debates in relation to teacher professional learning and induction. The chapter demonstrates how, through the process of theorising, the focus becomes one of personal and professional identity building. It also provides a means of exploring relevant educational practice, big ideas and issues that are affecting the teaching profession. The theorising references important outcomes of a pedagogy of induction. These include the building of agency, the construction of professional identities through professional learning, and the enhancement of workforce capabilities and career development learning.

Thinking Otherwise about Professional Induction

This chapter examines the impact of engagement in a pedagogy of induction on the transition of novice teachers to the world of work. It advocates for ongoing research on the effects of induction programs and professional learning on new teachers’ experiences and their sense of efficacy, as these may provide ways of redressing high attrition from the profession in the beginning stages of a career. Poststructural theories offer a foundation for challenging taken-for-granted understandings about education and create spaces for imagining alternative ways of being, knowing and doing teaching. The voices of novice teachers are represented in the research data and emphasise the effectiveness of collaborative critical reflection as a sustaining force in initial induction and transition.

Foundations of a Pedagogy of Induction

This chapter describes the foundational tenets of a pedagogy of induction, which was developed through a design-based research approach that investigated and advanced the effectiveness of five teaching-learning projects. A model of critical refection, which was used to inform the teaching-learning projects as well as the research, enables an unpacking of the pedagogy through a researcher conversation. In doing this, the chapter provides insights into how the teaching-learning projects were established and highlights the multiple ways in which collaborative critical reflection can facilitate a rethinking of practice, a reimagining of future practice and a thinking forward to new projects and new theories.

A Pedagogy of Induction: Building Capacity

Henderson and Noble introduce a design-based research project conducted over seven years in a regional university in Australia. The research was designed as part of five scholarly teaching-learning projects. Some projects were established initially to address the attrition of early career teachers, by creating opportunities for professional induction and transition to the world of work. The projects inform thinking that initial teacher education programs should include a strong focus on professional learning and that such an approach will build workforce capacity over time. The chapter highlights the need for individuals to identify as members of the profession from the commencement of their Education studies, to ensure that their transition to the world of work is well supported and that the teacher workforce is sustainable.

Doing qualitative research: a practical handbook

cultural issues to be taken more seriously (33), whereas aboriginal people in Australia are not. These writing issues aside, Part II, which comprise more than half of the total book, is a very solid, strong, widely readable and useful account of design issues that typically arise in qualitative research in diverse sites and settings, including cultural settings that are not necessarily ‘international’. It comprises five chapters of approximately 20 pages each, the first two of which are devoted to ‘Getting started’. The balance of the chapters in Part II are accurately titled: ‘Doing the fieldwork’, ‘Analysing the data’ and ‘Writing up and disseminating the findings’. My only minor quibble is the use of ‘Worked examples’ at the end of the analysis chapter and an unnecessarily long (five page) ‘Key extract’ in the writing up chapter on ‘Thick description’ from The interpretation of cultures by Clifford Geetz. The final and very brief Part III attempts to identify sources of support for qualitative research. The reference and computer software list in this 2009 book is dated (80% of the references are over 15-years-old) and the software list refers to ‘New (October 2004) freeware’. The provocative ‘pearl’ I was perhaps seeking when I chose to review this book from a list of titles came very late (in fact, in the ‘Notes’ section, on page 138). It is the quote from Thomas (2002) that ‘academics have since the mid-Sixties become so preoccupied with the weighty matters of theory and theorising . . . that they no longer concern themselves with the mundane matters of reform and social justice’. I sense that Stephens is concerned with what Hammersley (1999, cited on page 11) called ‘the four ‘unhelpful’ tendencies operating within qualitative research: empiricism, instrumentalism, postmodenism and ethicism’. As Stephens puts it, instead of concerning ourselves with a rationale for the adoption of a quantitative approach (in international or other research settings), it is more useful to consider ‘the purposes of the research inquiry in relation to the choice of methodology, and then to keep a watchful eye on the various pitfalls like those suggested by Hammersley’ (12).