Sue Middleton

Working at the Interface: Indigenous Students’ Experience of Undertaking Doctoral Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand

Māori (indigenous) 1 doctoral students in Aotearoa New Zealand face challenges not usually experienced by other doctoral candidates. We draw on data from in-depth interviews with 38 Māori doctoral candidates and argue that because of the tensions between academic disciplinary knowledge frameworks and knowledge drawn from te ao Māori (the Māori world) indigenous students have additional cultural, academic, and personal demands placed on them while aiming to produce research theses that meet conventional standards of academic scholarship. Complex methodological and ethical issues also emerge in undertaking doctoral research projects situated at the interface of academy and indigenous communities. Moreover, Māori students experience various degrees of tension between their sometimes strong cultural identities and their emerging and, therefore, less certain identities as researchers and scholars.

The gown and the korowai: Maori doctoral students and the spatial organisation of academic knowledge

This paper draws on 38 student interviews carried out in the course of the team research project ‘Teaching and Learning in the Supervision of Māori Doctoral Students’. Māori doctoral thesis work takes place in the intersections between the Māori (tribal) world of identifications and obligations, the organisational and epistemological configurations of academia and the bureaucratic requirements of funding or employing bureaucracies. To explore how students accommodate cultural, academic and bureaucratic demands, we develop analytical tools combining three intellectual traditions: Māori educational theory, Bernstein’s sociology of the academy and Lefebvre’s conceptual trilogy of perceived, conceived and lived space. The paper falls into six parts. Section 1 is an overview of the research and is followed in Section 2 by identification of intersecting ‘locations’ in which Māori students’ theses are produced. In Section 3, Henri Lefebvre’s spatial analysis highlights connections between students’ multiple allegiances and affinities. Drawing on Bernstein, Section 4 relates the theses to the organisation of ‘Western’ academic disciplines. Section 5 addresses students’ cultural locations beyond the reach of ‘Western’ disciplines. We conclude with implications for supervision.

Research Assessment as a Pedagogical Device: Bernstein, Professional Identity and Education in New Zealand.

Recent restructuring of research funding for New Zealand’s higher education institutions is ‘outputs‐driven’. Under the Performance Based Research Fund, units of assessment of research quality are individuals, every degree teacher receiving a confidential score of A, B or C (if deemed ‘research active’) or ‘R’ (‘Research Inactive’). Despite its relatively high number of A and B rated individuals, Education’s collective ranking was low. I interviewed staff and draw on Bernstein to explore how this process affects professional identity formation, a process involving engagement with changing ‘official’ external identities. I overview Bernsteinian concepts, historicise Education’s changing official identities and illustrate how these enabled and constrained participants’ self‐definitions before, during, and immediately after, the quality evaluation. The imposition of audit culture reproduces old theory/practice binaries.

Schooling and Radicalisation: life histories of New Zealand feminist teachers

Abstract This paper overviews part of a wider study of feminist teachers, born and educated in New Zealand in the years immediately following World War Two. The method used is life history analysis, which explores ‘biography, history and social structure’. The first part discusses the post‐war educational context through analysing contradictions in curriculum policies and expectations for girls’ education and exploring the relevance of these to the resurgence of feminism as a mass social movement amongst ‘educated’ women of the time. The second part presents two case studies of the school experiences of two New Zealand women who have, as adults, become educators and come to identify themselves as feminists. The focus of the case studies is on the strategies those women developed to deal with the contradictions in their lives and to trace the beginnings of their political radicalisation.

The Sociology of Women's Education as a Field of Academic Study

(1984). The Sociology of Womens Education as a Field of Academic Study. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 42-62.

Labourers’ letters from Wellington to Surrey, 1840–1845: Lefebvre, Bernstein and pedagogies of appropriation

Henri Lefebvre suggested that social researchers engage in ‘the concrete analysis of rhythms’ in order to reveal the ‘pedagogy of appropriation (the appropriation of the body, as of spatial practice)’. Lefebvre’s spatial analysis has influenced educational researchers, while the idea of ‘pedagogy’ has travelled beyond education. This interdisciplinary paper combines Lefebvre’s analytical trilogy of perceived, conceived and lived spaces with Bernstein’s ‘pedagogical device’ in an interrogation of historical documents. It engages in a ‘rhythm analysis’ of the New Zealand Company’s ‘pedagogical appropriation’ of a group of agricultural labourers into its ‘systematic colonisation scheme’. The temporal‐spatial rhythms of the labourers’ lives are accessible in nine surviving letters they wrote in Wellington and sent to Surrey between 1841 and 1844. By revealing how their bodies were ‘traversed by rhythms rather as the “ether” is traversed by waves’, we gain insight how bodies, space and the self are mutually constitutive and constituted.

Putting Sylvia in her place: history, geographical theory and the “New” Education

New Zealander Sylvia Ashton‐Warner, a teacher in remote rural Māori schools in the 1940s–1950s, became internationally renowned as a novelist and educational theorist. Earlier commentators portrayed her educational theory as in conflict with those of her time and place, but recent studies conceptualise them as enabled by it. While space/place has often been considered the preserve of the geographer and time that of the historian, Henri Lefebvre and others suggest that: “these issues need to be thought together rather than separately” and that macro‐, meso‐ and micro‐levels of analysis be engaged simultaneously. The author traces how conceptual, linguistic, sensory and intellectual resources of the global “New Education” movement extended into the tiny bush‐encircled Māori communities in which Sylvia taught and wrote in the 1940s–1950s and surfaced in her writing. The article zooms in and out between the “the immensity of the global” (the New Education, the Second World War) and “the intimately tiny” (her classroom and home). The “data” include Sylvia’s non‐fiction education texts and official documents of her time: school curricula, education policy documents, Ministerial and Inspectors’ reports. What Lefebvre terms a “Rhythm analysis” of Ashton‐Warner’s educational writing shows intermingled pulses of domestic life, routines of educational bureaucracy, cycles of nature, and cataclysms of world events. It is important for historians to study “the where rather than just the when with location and landscape central parts of the analysis”.

The place of theory: locating the New Zealand ‘education’ Ph.D. experience, 1948–1998

The year 1998 marked 50 years of doctoral study in New Zealand, and in 1999 I embarked on a history of Ph.D. theses in Education. Influenced by Foucaultian genealogy, this employed a fusion of bibliographic, archival and life‐history interview methods. One hundred and eighty‐three Education theses were identified and 57 of these graduates interviewed. How has New Zealand’s ‘corpus’ of Education Ph.D. thesis production been enabled and constrained by its temporal/spatial location? To address this, I draw on geographical debates on ‘space’ and ‘place’. The first part contextualises thesis topics, theories and methods in discourses of international scholarship, New Zealand politics and social change. The second part narrates a parallel history of the changing circumstances and sites of thesis production—biographical, domestic and institutional. It integrates students’ accounts of thesis work’s epistemological, methodological, spatial and technological dimensions to suggest a history of New Zealand doctoral candidates’ experience.

Towards an Oral History of Educational Ideas in New Zealand as a Resource for Teacher Education.

Abstract Studies of the educational theories which have influenced teachers have traditionally relied heavily on the textual analysis of policy documents and syllabi. While such studies are crucial, they offer a “top-down” view of the educational terrain and can imply that teachers passively absorbed the dominant policy initiatives. This paper is taken from a wider study of the educational life—histories of 150 teachers and former teachers ranging in age from 21 to 98. The aim of the overall project is to map the tides and current of educational thought as lived by New Zealand teachers from the 1920s to the mid-1990s and to produce a resource for teacher education which will help dissolve the “theory-practice split” experienced by many of our students. Life-history methods enable a focus on how teachers create educational theories within the possibilities and constraints of their circumstances—biographical, historical and political, geographical, cultural and discursive. This paper uses three case studies as a basis for discussion of the impact of “neo-progressivist” (or student-centred learning) ideas in secondary schools from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Pedagogy and Post-coloniality: Teaching “Education” online

The academic study of Education1 (as a social, historical, and theoretical phenomenon) is complicated by the fact of our immersion in it. This paper combines Saids idea of “contrapuntal reading” with Bourdieus notion of reflexivity to explore what happens when students on an Education course directly confront the fact of their everyday involvement in their object of study, Education. How do the questions raised by post-colonial and other critical social writers “appear” from such a position? How does the fact of our involvement complicate our theoretical or scientific knowledge of these? By means of an episodic, narrative form of writing, this paper describes a life history pedagogy for teaching a compulsory “social issues” course online to New Zealand pre-service teacher education students. As data I draw on online conversations with and between students as they engage in the production of contextualized life history interview narratives.