Tania Ferfolja

Schooling cultures : institutionalizing heteronormativity and heterosexism

This paper explores how some schooling cultures in New South Wales (hereafter NSW), Australia, police and silence non‐heterosexuality through a number of institutional processes which enable homophobia and heterosexism to flourish, while normalizing and constituting heterosexuality as the dominant and only valid sexuality. The discussion shows that despite an apparent broader societal ‘tolerance’ for non‐heterosexuality, as well as legislation that condemns anti‐‘homosexual’ discrimination in education in NSW, homophobic prejudice — often in the form of silence, omission and assumption — prevails. It illustrates that schools need to be much more aware and proactive in addressing issues pertaining to this social justice issue to ensure a safe and equitable learning and teaching environment for all members of the school community. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.   (Foucault, 1978, p. 27) Lying is done with words, and also with silence.   (Rich, 1980/84, p.186)

Fatal flaws: The acquisition of imperfect mental models and their use in hazardous situations

This paper is concerned with the relationship between poor learning processes and the acquisition of imperfect mental models, and their consequences in workplace situations which are hazardous. Seven different factors which may influence mental models to become flawed are proposed. The links between these flaws and three recent Australian industrial disasters are then explored. The paper concludes by discussing the benefits of a greater understanding of poor learning processes as a basis for more focused and contextualised approaches to organisational development.

Supporting refugee students in school education in Greater Western Sydney

Rarely do refugee students entering Australian schools possess the multiple forms of social, linguistic and cultural capital that are taken for granted in mainstream classrooms. While refugees of high-school age are assisted initially through Intensive English Centres (IECs), the transition from IECs to mainstream classrooms presents substantial challenges. This paper outlines the perceived impacts of a partnership program known as Refugee Action Support (RAS) that assists secondary school students, predominantly African humanitarian refugees, as they seek to make the transition from IECs to mainstream settings. Implemented by the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation, the University of Western Sydney and the NSW Department of Education and Training, the program is based on school-based tutoring centres that use pre-service teachers as tutors. The paper explores the perceived effects on refugee students participating in RAS from the perspectives of teachers who assist in the coordination of the program at the various school sites.

Teacher negotiations of sexual subjectivities

Discrimination often silences and marginalizes those who do not conform to the dominant gender and (hetero)sexual discourses that operate in broader society. This discussion addresses the ways that seventeen self‐identified lesbian teachers working in New South Wales (NSW) Australia negotiate their sexual subjectivities at work in order to pass or cover as heterosexual. Despite anti‐discrimination legislation aimed at protecting some basic rights of ‘homosexuals’ in NSW, many lesbian teachers still feel compelled to ‘manage’ their sexuality in the workplace. This paper examines how the discourses of privacy, heterosexuality and motherhood are strategically and at times powerfully used by these women in various contexts. Additionally, it explores the complex intersections of sexuality with age and space and their impact on passing.

Discourses that silence: teachers and anti-lesbian harassment

This paper examines the way lesbian identities are silenced in schools particularly through anti-lesbian harassment. Based on research with 30 self-identified lesbian teachers working across high schools in New South Wales, Australia, the discussion illustrates how various responses to anti-lesbian harassment silence the recognition of such harassment, contributing to the invisibility of lesbian identities in schools generally. The argument highlights the shifting nature of both the subject and power. It illustrates how discursively (re)positioning harassers re-establishes and reinforces the harassed teachers personal and professional power; however, this simultaneously serves to rationalise the harassment. This silences the awareness of the prevalence of anti-lesbian abuse by individualising the behaviour and pathologising the harasser, while ignoring broader socio-political discourses that maintain the frequently subordinated location of lesbian subjectivities.

The Refugee Action Support Program : developing understandings of diversity

In a world increasingly globalised, it is crucial that preservice teachers are equipped with a range of pedagogical knowledges, understandings and practices related to diversity and difference. This paper reports on the implementation and learning outcomes of a teacher preparation initiative in an Australian university called Refugee Action Support, which seeks to develop and enhance such awareness. The initiative provides targeted training to preservice teachers in the vital areas of literacy and numeracy tuition, with the specific aim of preparing them to tutor humanitarian refugee students in high schools in Western Sydney, Australia. Drawing on key principles of academic service learning, the program promotes a context for reciprocal learning where young students are supported in their development of academic skills and sociocultural understandings while, simultaneously, preservice teachers gain an appreciation of the complex dynamics related to teaching, students and diversity.

Institutional Silence: Experiences of Australian Lesbian Teachers Working in Catholic High Schools

ABSTRACT This article, based on the authors doctoral research, examines the ways in which some religious schools in New South Wales (NSW), via institutional practices, maintain and perpetuate discrimination in relation to lesbian teachers and lesbian sexualities. These institutional practices, which included threats of dismissal, forced resignations, implicit harassment, monitoring and surveillance, curriculum silences, and censorship, silence lesbian sexualities and impact the teachers daily operations and freedom of speech. Vicarious witnessing of these forms of punishment (in the Foucauldian sense) further ensures the silencing of lesbian identities. Moreover, statewide anti-discrimination legislation, which excludes some private institutions from compliance in the area of sexuality, serves to reinforce discriminatory practices, and ultimately silenced the various violence perpetuated against many of the participants in this research.

The complexities of workplace experience for lesbian and gay teachers

Discrimination against lesbians and gay men has been endemic throughout Australia’s history. However, in twenty-first century Australian society there are signs of growing sophistication and acceptance of sexual diversities. Despite this, schools continue to be organisations where sexual ‘difference’ is marginalised and silenced, having ramifications on the professional lives of lesbian and gay teachers. This article, based on qualitative research with 14 lesbian and gay teachers working in metropolitan Sydney, explores the ways in which schooling micro-cultures and systemic practices affect participants’ working lives. In particular, it highlights the ways in which these teachers negotiate the complex discursive fields in schools to perform their ‘professional’ teacher subjectivities in ways that are personally functional and effective, and simultaneously organisationally ‘acceptable’ in what has been for lesbian and gay teachers, traditionally hostile workplaces.

Bureaucratic constructions of sexual diversity: ‘sensitive’, ‘controversial’ and silencing

National research illustrates the high degree of discrimination that prevails against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students resulting in diminished educational outcomes, both academic and social. This phenomenon is influenced by the prevalence of whole-school silences around LGBTQ topics in many Australian schools. This paper presents an analysis of the New South Wales (NSW) homophobia in schools policy, as well as both NSW state and Australian federal curriculum and syllabus documents in the health and physical education key learning area. This analysis illustrates how contradictory framing and messages; silences and omission; and various discursive constructions of the LGBTQ subject together produce silencing technologies that have critical implications for the implementation of education, both in this key learning area and across the schooling sector.

Beyond a command performance: reflections on Classmates as a new teacher preparation initiative

This paper reflects on a new pre‐service teacher education initiative, Classmates. Classmates is a collaboration between the University of Western Sydney (UWS) and the New South Wales Department of Education and Training (DET), South Western Sydney Region. Classmates aims to prepare pre‐service teachers to work in challenging, hard‐to‐staff schools. These contexts typically have socially disadvantaged populations and annually experience teacher shortages and high teacher turnover, particularly amongst beginning and early career teachers. Classmates seeks to produce beginning teachers who are highly prepared for, confident and mentally and emotionally equipped to work in such environments. This discussion focuses on some of the positive attributes about the initiative, particularly its practicum structure; its nurturing of pre‐service teachers to work in challenging contexts; and its strong focus on networking and development of ongoing support structures.