Recently, I met with Dr Rick Flowers, my supervisor, for another doctoral meeting. The purpose of this meeting was to consider how my research has been getting on, and to decide what are the best ways forward regarding said research. It was a really good meeting. Once again, as I was reviewing my notes before the meeting, I was pleased with how far I had come. Then again, as soon as I’d had this meeting, I was reminded by how far there is still to travel!

Anyway, there were a few key learning points about for my research from this meeting. Firstly, Rick suggested that I needed to ground my research in a particular issue. This was of vital importance. To be honest, I think this exposes a bit of a lack of understanding on my behalf; I’d got so convinced of the idea of the importance of a completely student-negotiated curriculum that I’d kind of lost sight of the fact that this is precisely what Freire himself had done. For Freire, it was illiteracy that was the grounding for his work on empowerment.

Therefore, it is important for me to consider what kind of issue that I want to ground my work in. It is easy for me to say that I want to look at citizenship education or active citizenship – but these ideas are probably a little too broad if I’m going to be working on specifically active citizenship. In brief, the students I work – and myself, of course – need something to be active about. Fortunately, there are plenty of possibilities for just such a topic. Rick and I brainstormed a few ideas: the environment, specifically water pollution. Substance abuse. Drink Driving. Alcohol fueled violence. Refugees, racism and asylum seekers.

We did discuss one of these at length: the issue of refugees and racism. It must be stated that, considering the headlines of today, it is certainly a very topical issue, with the talk of the Pacific Solution and so on. Even more so, it is particularly appropriate for Western Sydney, which is often identified as a ‘heartland of racism’.  Originally, I had concerns about this kind of project, because, as is clear from even the most limited understanding of Freire’s work, Freire worked with those who were oppressed; he used a kind of bottom up approach. I didn’t see how it would be possible for me to do this, considering my limited access to people who were refugees; my school is pretty uniform, although there are changes taking place pretty slowly.

Secondly, although I had read quite a lot of Freire, it had been quite narrow in scope. Thus, when Rick asked me about my action research project and how it would be based on Freire’s principles, I struggled to explain how it might work. What I need to do know is read more about the ways that Freire’s work has been applied in particular contexts. Rick suggested that I explore two phenomena in particular; photovoice and popular theatre, so these two ideas will be the focus of my reading for a considerable period to come.

Thirdly, we had the opportunity to discuss what my portfolio might look like. Although we didn’t discuss this much, we did talk about the online forum. Here, Rick cautioned me to make sure that I kept this as an intellectual exercise, because it needed to be this if I was going to keep using it as part of my forum. We talked about the best ways to keep it working, and agreed that the use of social media would be a valuable tool, as well as the university mailing lists. Getting this up and running will be one of my key projects over the holidays.

However, the part of the discussion that I thought was the most important focused on what I’m contributing to the academy by my research. In short, what am I doing that is new or unique? What are the particular features of my research that are important?What is the importance of my research? What am I doing that is new or different? I think that it is important to be clear about the benefits of my work. Here are my original thoughts to answer this question:

• It’s the first time (at least, the first time that I’m aware) that educators in Australia have tried to link Freire’s pedagogy with citizenship education.
• The context of the work is vital – it’s intensely practical. It’s not simply a theoretical discussion of Freire and education, but it is using Freire’s pedagogy to challenge the oppression of Racism in Emu Plains, Sydney. Personally, I think that this makes my research vital.
• Finally, unlike may Freirean approaches to education, this particular project is looking at children and Freire. Most Freirean prjects explore adult education. This too makes it valuable to the academy.

I recently had the opportunity to have another informal conversation regarding my research project. In this, I interviewed a member of staff at a school who is responsible for facilitating the Student Representative Council (SRC) at a middle-sized systemic Catholic high school.

I wanted to speak to her (lets call her Miss P) to get an idea of what the SRC’s aims and purposes are – and how effective they are in meeting these aims and purposes. The results were interesting – and also quite heartening. Firstly, I explored the ideas behind how people become members of the representative council. The process is quite convoluted:

1. A student must be nominated by 2 other students, and also a member of staff must countersign this nomination.

2. Then students take a vote on the nominated studenst.

3. The students with the most votes are then interviewed by the teachers responsible for facilitating the SRC. During this interview, they are presented with the SRC role description (more on this below) and asked whether they could uphold the qualities and expectations outlined in the document.

I was lucky enough to get hold of a copy of the SRC role description, and I thought that the fact that one exists suggests an interesting perspective already. The role description generally sets out the expected code of behaviour of a member of the Student Representative Council: for example, one of the statements suggests that students on the SRC need to ‘model behaviours that demonstrate integrity, jusctice and peace’ or ‘be committed to the school community through attendance at reflection days, athletics and swimming carnivals, fundraising events, extra curricular activities and information evenings.’

There is little that is explicitly managed about fostering democratic ideals, but I didn’t expect that. When I asked Miss P about what she thought the purpose of the SRC was, she said that she didn’t really have a role deciding that; rather, the purpose of the SRC was determined by the students – all Miss P did was facilitate what they wanted to do. So, if, for example, there was a really heavy emphasis on sporting and house involvement from the SRC in a particular year, that’s what the focus or purpose of the SRC would be. On the other hand, if the SRC was not a vibrant community, or not particularly motivated, then the SRC would have limited impact upon the school.

I did question what kind of power that the actual SRC had within the schooling environment (linking both to my ideas about empowerment of students and Cogan’s description of Australia’s SRCs as without real power or meaningfulness) and Miss P suggested that, really, the SRC were on their own. Miss P could advise and assist them to run presentations, for example, to deal with issues that they had identified, but they actually had little access to the existing power structures within the school.

This raises a number of important issues:

1. Firstly, I think that the idea of a student-negotiated issues is essential.

2. Secondly, I was concerned that, if this is a typical features of SRCs, they are really more of a regulatory body – responsible for monitoring and addressing behaviour amongst the student body – more than a democratic body aiding in the empowering of students.

So I was lucky enough to have a chance to speak to another person who is on my list of important people – a leading academic in citizenship education, who’s been heavily involved in the development of Discovering Democracy, as well as its evaluation. Let’s call him, for the sake of confidentiality, Professor Y. (I do feel like I’m in a bad James Bond rip-off with all these cheesy nicknames, but nevertheless…)

Unlike my previous informal conversation, my discussion with Professor Y was quite challenging. I had to navigate a tricky line of politeness, because he was involved in Discovering Democracy, and my argument is that Discovering Democracy is pretty ordinary. I broached the subject early on, and Professor Y agreed with me, generally, arguing that while the quality of the materials was high, the implementation left a lot to be desired, mostly because of the mismatch between funding for development of materials and funding for professional development for teachers. In addition, there were issues with the state-federal system nexus, and, in NSW especially, the problem with CCE being spread across History and Geography.

So far, not much new there. Something that Professor Y did say that I found interesting was that there really was very little difference caused by the Howard govt – apparently the finished model was quite similar to what was originally planned in the Keating administration. This is different to what a lot of critics say… He also suggested that CCE was a bit of a wait and see with regards to the National Curriculum – that is, announcements would be made shortly about it.

Anyway, we got to talking about my research project, and Professor Y warned me about taking too much on; he effectively argued that my evaluation of discovering democracy was a separate thesis project to my independent research project. He also urged me to consider what I wanted to do with my finished research – if I wanted to go further with it, then he recommended the evaluation of DD was a much better path; effectively, my IRP was limited in its generalisability.

I was a little put out.

Nevertheless, it does bear some thought. I am going to discuss some of these issues with Rick at our next meeting…

Recently I completed my first ‘informal conversation’ for my doctoral work. The purpose of these conversations, which are part of the exercise of mapping my research field, is to use the expertise of colleagues or people that have been involved in the area of my research. The first conversation that I had was with a principal from the Parramatta diocese who I obviously won’t name for privacy reasons. Although this is not part of my official fieldwork, I believe that it is still important to maintain confidentiality.

Anyway, despite the obvious busy-ness of the principal, I was lucky enough for her to devote 30 minutes of her time to me; I’d already provided her with the abstract for my research, but I found it useful to spend the first part of our time to brief her, especially as I had made some important changes to my research plan. Although I had created a number of different questions to ask each of the interviewees, I found that the conversation simply flowed from the discussion of the abstract and quite naturally

My interviewee – let’s call her Ms X – generally agreed with a lot of statements in my abstract. Firstly, she was aware of how poorly the Discovering Democracy program had been implemented across the diocese. She struggled to remember many HSIE coordinators embracing the idea, and there was a general feeling that it had all been simply left to the individual teachers to incorporate it into History and Geography lessons. I expect that I will hear a lot more of this kind of view. Interestingly, Ms X also suggested that within Catholic schools, the idea of citizenship becomes subsumed into the wider religious and moral education – and that this shouldn’t be the case. The ‘selling point’ of catholic education is that these schools educate the whole child; education there is ‘authentically catholic’ and incldues catholic values and morals. How these morals and values are linked in with the values for Australian school students is not something that I’ve explored in any great detail, but I imagine it would be quite interesting to compare the two.

In addition to that, Ms X was interested in the notion of Active Citizenship and raised a really crucial idea that I might have overlooked; basically, Ms X questioned how many of us were active citizens – in the truest sense of the word? She suggested that there were levels of active citizenship – one could argue that someone who donates to the red shield appeal is an active citizen, but are they as active as someone who goes to East Timor to work in education over there? Clearly not. I agreed with her about this, and we spoke for a little about the different models of Active Citizenship and the ways that they fit together.

Furthermore, we discussed how we encouraged young people to become ‘active citizens.’ Ms X suggested that (and she referenced Dewey here) experience is as vital, if not more so, than simply retaining facts and figures. Ms X argued that lived experience of democracy and education would be more valuable in inculcating citizens to be active than the current limited form of education.

Regarding the methodology, Ms X urged me to be careful with ethical considerations, especially as I would be working with young people. I assured her that I would follow all requirements.

As a result of my reading, I’ve basically come to an understanding that there are three major points of view regarding citizenship education. I don’t think they are really ‘schools of thought’ or ‘theoretical standpoints’, mainly because they are so recent – for example, Westheimer and Kahne only stated their ideas about citizenship education in 2004. One of the most interesting parts of my research is the immediacy and relevance of it; citizenship education is still, very much, a current topic in education, cutting as it does to the heart of the question, ‘What is the purpose of education?’ and standing ideologically opposed to the ‘back to basics’, ‘high-stakes testing’ and ‘accountability’ approach that is beloved of the Australian government, amongst others, at the moment.

Anyway, I’ve identified three different points of view. Firstly, there is Terence McLaughlin, who suggested that citizenship education programs could be placed on a continuum between maximal and minimal.

Next, John Cogan suggested a model of multi-dimensional citizenship, with personal, social, spatial and temporal aspects of citizenship education.

Finally, Westheimer and Kahne suggested that there are three forms of citizenship educaition:

The challenge for me now, I believe, lies in finding some kind of synthesis or composite model of all of these points of view, because I’ve no doubt that they all have implications for citizenship education. Fortunately, I don’t imagine that this will be as difficult as it could have been. I’ve already had a bit of a go:

Personally, I think that an argument can be made that Westheimer and Kahne’s continuum fits neatly into McLaughlin’s – especially towards the maximal end of the scale. One of the traits of maximal citizenship education is that it encourages students to be activists in challenging injustices – there are obvious links between this and Westheimer and Kahne’s justice-oriented citizens. The crucial point of difference between each of the stages is, I think, related to Freire’s levels of consciousness, and the complementary level of activism. For example, a person who is a personally responsible citizen (who has probably learnt this behaviour through a minimal citizenship education program) is probably unaware of the necessity for social action to challenge injustice; rather, according to their limited understanding of citizenship, it is enough to pay their taxes and not break the law. This is the kind of simplistic understanding of democracy and citizenship that minimal citizenship education engenders; a person here is working, according to Freire, at the level of of magical consciousness – he or she ‘apprehends facts and attributes to them a superior power by which it is controlled and to which it must therefore submit.’

To set it out simply: a person who receives only the minimal level of citizenship education at school will develop a naive consciousness about the world and their place in it, and therefore will only ever develop into a personally responsible citizen, assuming that all other influences on this person are negated. Thus, educators and policy makers who advocate a minimalist approach to citizenship education are encouraging the maintenance of the status quo and the injustices that are present therein.

However, a student who receives a more maximal approach to citizenship education is more likely to develop a critical consciousness; that is, they will be able to “to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Pedagogy 35).

These are just ideas at this point; more work needs to be done on developing them, but I think this might be big.

Still have to identify the way Cogan fits in here, as well.

I took the opportunity afforded to em during the holidays to make sure I caught up with both my supervisor (Dr Rick Flowers) and associate supervisor (Dr Nina Burridge). It was a valuable experience, for a number of different reasons – firstly, I was able to get some meaningful feedback regarding my process thus far, but also get some ideas about where to go now.
Firstly, Nina – I skyped (is that even a word?) Nina early on a Monday morning, and explained my thoughts about research to her. She was very interested, especially on the overlap between her work in Human Rights Education and my own (in Citizenship Education.) However, when I came to speak to her about exactly what I intended to do, Nina really cut to the chase – she said that I needed to think with a little more clarity about my action research project – exactly what did I want to achieve, and how was I going to measure it?

On the Wednesday of that week, I met with Paul Vittles, who is the Chairman for the RSA A+NZ, and we discussed my funding proposal for the Passion, Proposal, Progress model. Again, he suggested something a little more concrete.

Taking this and some other thoughts into account, I then thought about how to change my proposal. The result was what I discussed with Rick on Wednesday. See the image below.

Rick made some useful suggestions, which I will try to put into practice.

1. Firstly, while my reading has been good, it has been limited in certain directions. I need to group my references into categories like:

a) Methodology

b) Freire and Popular Education

c) North American Critical Pedagogy

d) Curriculum Samples

e) Policy Documents

and so on. I’ve done this now, but there’s still vast tracts of stuff just located in ‘Citizenship Education.’

2. I also need to start working on building a community of educators that might have similar ideas about Freirean education as I do. To get this rolling, I have now created: Praxis Educators, a ning specifically for Australian (and other) educators to discuss ideas regarding Freire and Popular Education. Now all I need is some content and some members!

3. I also need to continue reading up on 2 things: Firstly, what is the current feeling/ state of Citizenship Education in Australia, and secondly, what exactly is my theoretical perpsective/ methodology etc etc.

Lots to do, lots to do…

On Saturday, I attended my first doctoral conference – the 2nd Annual DoctoRALnet conference at UTS. The funny spelling is because this is a conference that specifically addresses Research into Adult Learning. Here‘s the website if you want. As you can see, it’s an international conglomerate – with universities from countries like Australia, Poland,

I deliberately went along to this conference, not because I thought I would have anything of any great meaningfulness to add, but to get a bit of experience in the whole idea of an academic conference. I mean, I’ve been to plenty of professional education conferences, but I (quite rightly) supposed that the academic conference would be significantly different.

The first difference that I noticed was that there was much less emphasis on ‘wow’ factor things, like fancy presentations and big banners and packs with notebooks and pens. Instead, the focus was very clearly on the meaning of the work that the people presenting had undertaken – this was a huge relief. To be honest, most conferences I’ve been to before this have been pretty much a waste of time – everybody was looking for a snippet to take away that was going to be the universal panacea – either that, or it was just an excuse to get away… and crack onto your colleagues. (Yes, I’ve seen it happen.) *Shudder*.

Doctoralnet was different; another reason for this difference was the respect that the presenters, discussants and participants showed each other. Despite numerous disagreements about methodology or findings, every person who commented on the presenter’s work, made an effort to begin by thanking the presenter for their work, and explaining how they felt it was rich or important.

It was… nurturing. I must admit I liked that side of it. Rather than being exclusively challenged, there was a sense of welcoming and support.

Having said that, I did struggle with a lot of the content of the presentations. Mostly this was from a purely methodological point of view – I still struggle to understand the difference between phenomonology and phenomonography and so on. I’m going to aim to discuss these at the second block activities, which are coming up this Friday.

Lots to do before that, though…

On Friday, I braved Pennant Hills Road during rush hour so that I could attend an information session about a volunteer teacher placement program in East Timor. This program has been running for quite a few years now, and is jointly funded and organised by the Catholic Schools Office of the Diocese of Broken Bay and the Catholic Education Office of Parramatta. Here’s a link.

Basically, teachers who work in the schools of the two dioceses can apply to be considered for a 3 week placement in Timor-Leste. During this time, they will be working in the newly constructed resource center to train Timorese teachers in either maths teaching or English teaching.

It’s a pretty complicated process; despite the fact that the Timorese teachers prefer to speak Tetun or Indonesian, from about grade 4, the teachers must teach in Portuguese, because that is the national language of East Timor (having been a Portuguese colony previously.) During each placement, a team of three teachers will run 2 x 4 day inservices, providing teachers with all the resources and ideas for them to take back to their classrooms.

It’s based in Same, which is about 5 hours drive south of Dili (the capital).

The idea is to help Timorese teachers – who might have only had limited access to education themselves – become more confident teaching their classes.

Overall, it was a very interesting experience; some of the photos were heartbreaking when you look at the conditions that these people live – and are happy in. I’m seriously thinking about going over there sometime in either 2011 or 2012. Time to put my money where my mouth is.

This is exactly the kind of action that we should be taking to address injustice in the world.

I’ll keep you posted.

Originally posted here.

I’ve been reading a lot about education for democracy at the moment, from a variety of interesting sources. For example, I’ve read work by David Kerr, from the UK, articles by Henry Giroux from America and by people like Kennedy and O’Loughlin from Australia. (I mention this in case you’re interested in following up some of the readings that have influenced my thoughts.)

The reason for my interest in this area is that I’ve been curious about the effect that the introduction of a national curriculum to Australia. Previously, I’ve worked in the UK, where there’s been a national curriculum in place since 1996, I believe, and, while politicians might, at times, claim that it has been a vast success, my experience working with teachers suggests the opposite. In fact, the improvements in test scores that are supposedly attributable to the introduction of said curriculum and national testing are beginning to decline, which I don’t find surprising, considering the problems inherent in large scale testing.

Regardless of this, the Australian government has introduced, for next year, a heavily content-led curriculum to be taught in all schools in English, Mathematics, Science and History. Other subjects will follow in the next few years.

Enough background. I’m a firm believer that democracy is not a static process; indeed, to be successful, democracy must be a lived-out experience; that is to say, we don’t have democracy, but we practice democracy. I remember reading somewhere that one of the best judges of how democratic a society is is by seeing how much complaining there is that the society isn’t democratic enough!

If you subscribe to this point of view, then it necessarily follows that, if democracy is a lived out process, requiring active participation from citizens to remain democratic, then those citizens must learn the specfic knowledge and skills necessary to participate in said democracy. These skills can be learnt in a variety of different ways, but the most common way was through participation in political parties, community groups and similar organisations in schools.

However, this participation is in decline; certainly in Australia and the US. In addition, students are not getting the opportunity to participate in these kinds of social movements and learn the skills required for democracy while they are at school, because schools have been forced to abandon these kinds of projects because of the necessity to prepare studenst for nationalised testing. Thus, social studies classes, citizenship groups and social justice action groups have been abandoned in favour of rote memorisation and repetitive exercises in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Therefore, my question is this: if we are de-skilling students of the ability to participate in democracy, and democracy relies upon those skills to survive, where are we heading?

As part of my training in Theology (so I can teach religion at school), I’ve been reading a book by Donal Dorr, called Divine Energy: God within us, beyond us, among us.

I was a little trepidatious before I began reading it; it’s certainly outside my normal genres. At least, so I thought. Imagine my surprise when I found that, during his discussion of the God among us, Dorr quotes the work of Wink, who presents Jesus as a challenger to varied forms of oppression, including the Roman empire and the regime of the scribes and pharisees of Jewish law!

In particular, Dorr argues that Jesus argues for a form of liberation theology in two areas: firstly, by refusing to surrender his human dignity, and secondly by providing his followers with an example of non-violent resistance.

Dorr suggests that when Jesus tells his followers that, when someone takes their shirt, they should give them the rest of their clothes as well, he is not suggesting a passive acceptance of oppression, but rather an opportunity to shame the oppressor; in this case, by standing naked before him. This argument is strengthened by other points, including  who Jesus chose to associate with – the marginalised elements of society. By associating with the poor, the weak and the sick, Jesus is demonstrating solidarity with these people.

Interesting stuff…