Lifelong education,space and the spirit of place

This paper begins by stating that adult education is facing two challenges. First, adult educators need to help people learn to live in harmony with the environment. Second, adult education must assist people in identifying ways to live peacefully with diversity. It is then argued that currently the field of adult education is characterized by a tension between those who subscribe to the professionalization of adult education and those who subscribe to radical adult education. This tension, it is argued, can be better understood as a shift in the structure of human consciousness. This perspective is then explored using as examples the agrarian and scientific/industrial revolutions as historical turning points in the evolution of new organizing structures of consciousness. This is then followed by an in‐depth discussion of the new emerging structure of consciousness and vision‐logic, and a brief discussion of the implications for adult education.     

Reframing quality and impact: The place of theory in education research

In March 2004, Stephen Ball and others presented a symposium at the conference of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) on the necessity of theory in educational research. Like Ball, I have observed that theory, not just social theory, is a difficult space and one that divides researchers (those comfortable with theory and those less so), within educational research. It is an aspect of educational research training that rarely receives the attention essential for ‘quality’ educational research. In the context of the contemporary research assessment exercises, it is worth reflecting on the relationship between research informed by social theory and expectations of quality and impact. In this paper I revisit the argument made by Ball and others for the necessity of theory, and discuss its role in framing research questions, informing analysis, and promoting reflexivity on the significance and relevance of research. I illustrate this process by discussing the ways theory can assist in the generation of research agendas and questions. I conclude the paper with an example of how a team of educational researchers from Australia, UK and New Zealand have made use of social theory to inform an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project investigating the recontextualisation of health knowledge in schools.     

Taking place: the social construction of place,time and space,and the (re)making of distances in distance education

This paper endeavours to link the notions of distance and place to distance education, using social scientific theories of distance. A selection of the work of geographers, historians and sociologists concerning theories of distance and place are related critically to the administration, management and practices of distance education. Distance and place are presented as a concept which individuals construct for themselves in relation to the broader social contexts of their lives. The relationships between students and their distance education institutions represent encounters between a variety of distance relations which are rarely considered by distance educationists.

It is argued that distance education institutions play a part in ‘choreographing’ the existences of their students. In effect, a series of movements in time‐space are choreographed in order for people to be ‘distance students’. Such a choreography is founded on unstated assumptions about place and distance and is constructed through the bureaucracies and processes of distance education, particularly through the use of non‐dialogic forms of communications.     

Putting working-class mothers in their place: social stratification,the field of education,and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice

This article explores how a small sample of working-class mothers encounters the field of education. In the management of family and their children's schooling, mothers bring to bear and replicate ways of knowing that are embodied, are historical and that offer many-sided insights into profoundly stratified societies. Here I draw on Bourdieu's theory of practice as a heuristic device and focus only on the field while leaving in suspension his other conceptual arsenal. Bourdieu argued that understanding the social space in which interactions occur is pivotal, characterised as it is by ‘permanent relationships of inequality'. This study shows that mothers bring to the field their embodied history, their habituated practice, and their access to capitals. The women I interviewed know the precariousness of how they occupy the field of schooling, negotiated through a matrix of intersected positionings and classifications that are embodied.     

Native science,intercultural education and place‐conscious education: an Ecuadorian example

This paper explores ways to bring together local and global knowledge systems in the context of education. It first discusses the concepts of native science and of intercultural education, key ideas in Ecuadorian indigenous education today. Both of these concepts seek to unite the local and the global in new ways. It explores the views of Ecuadorian indigenous educators and leaders around issues of education and science. The primary need voiced by these individuals is that of defending their communities against various kinds of encroachment, economic as well as cultural, and the enterprise of education is viewed within this reality. Finally, the paper discusses the paradigm of place‐conscious education, which the author argues is a unifying conceptual framework that speaks to the concerns voiced by these educators as well as those of educators elsewhere.     

Knowing,researching, and reporting science education: Lessons from science and technology studies

Recent research in science and technology studies changed the way we understand science as it is practiced—that is, how scientific knowledge emerges from social, natural, social, political, cultural, historical, and economic contingencies of scientific work. Many science educators agree that students should learn not only science but also about science. In this article, we (a) outline important findings, research methods, and ways of reporting research that emerged from science and technology studies; and (b) show how familiarity with science and technology studies research can provide science educators with valuable insights about curriculum design and research on learning. We conclude that science and technology studies can serve as a resource to science education and that there is a potential for conducting collaborative work between science education and science and technology studies. Such collaborations have the potential to yield better theories about how people become competent in science from childhood to adulthood. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 35: 213–235, 1998.     

Land education: Indigenous,post-colonial,and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research

This editorial introduces a special issue of Environmental Education Research titled ‘Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspectives on place and environmental education research.’ The editorial begins with an overview of each of the nine articles in the issue and their contributions to land and environmental education, before outlining features of land education in more detail. ‘Key considerations’ of land education are discussed, including: Land and settler colonialism, Land and Indigenous cosmologies, Land and Indigenous agency and resistance, and The significance of naming. The editorial engages the question ‘Why land education?’ by drawing distinctions between land education and current forms of place-based education. It closes with a discussion of modes and methods of land education research.     

The researcher as teacher: constructing one's place in the story of events of preschoolers

This article focuses on the author's work as a researcher‐teacher, examining storytelling activities of preschool children in her own classroom. By examining ways in which one university‐based researcher dealt with the demands of being both teacher and researcher, this paper proposes that university‐based researchers who take on the role of teacher both construct and define an enactment‐of‐self in the classroom. In a Janus‐faced kind of interplay, the researcher draws on teacher skills, and the teacher draws on the research perspective and continuously walks the line between the moment‐to‐moment demands of each role.     

Knowing through reflective practice in higher education

This article explores the use of reflective practice statements as sources of data. Under certain conditions reflective practice statements can be interpreted as providing insight into the underlying mechanisms at work in organisations. The article presents an analysis of reflective practice statements produced by lecturers in higher education who have participated in a course for research supervisors. Reflective practice in higher education has not yet become institutionalised as a form of professional socialisation and the article argues that participants were actively engaged in meaning making. Such statements can be seen as productive of real insight. The data is analysed in terms of the craft skills involved in supervision, the contradictions of maintaining a sense of expertise in modern universities, the significance of emotion at work and in terms of institutional power relationships. The article concludes that properly contextualised reflective practice can produce knowledge of the mechanisms at work in the contemporary academy.     

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.     

Time,space and distance education

This paper challenges the lingering tendency to understand distance education in terms of the ‘real thing’, that is, face‐to‐face, classroom teaching. It critiques distance education's implicit theory of text, space and time, ontology and epistemology, and examines its connections to the current practice of teaching‐at‐a‐distance. These arguments are developed in response to the questions: who teaches? who is the student? and who or what is ‘distant’ in distance education? On this basis, drawing on the philosophy of critical realism, an alternative model of distance education is presented and its implications for course design, and the role of editing, are considered.     

Knowing,performing and holding queerness: LGBTIQ+ student experiences in Australian tertiary education

Abstract

This paper explores LGBTIQ+ students’ experiences of knowing, performing and holding queerness in a tertiary educational environment. Through interviews conducted with LGBTIQ+ students at a large Australian metropolitan university, we examine the students’ engagement with other LGBTIQ+ students in the tertiary educational space. Although originally intending to explore LGBTIQ+ students’ experience of violence, harassment and abuse on campus, the study identified a number of themes concerning the normalisation of a set of beliefs, practices, presentations and performances. Drawing on frameworks of hetero/homo and trans-normativity, we explore how LGBTIQ+ students articulated concerns in knowing, performing and holding ‘authentic’ queerness. We find LGBTIQ students experienced barred access to knowledge, hostility and dismissal by other LGBTIQ+ students when they were either perceived as too queer, or not queer enough. Behind these interactions and at the heart of these tensions is the notion of an authentic queer identity in a post-gay era and the continuous challenges all LGBTIQ+ students face within a heteronormative society. New insights into how LGBTIQ+ students negotiate, manage and shape their interactions in a higher educational settings are provided, and the implications for tertiary educational institutions, in particular the need to support a diverse LGBTIQ+ community, are discussed.