#AARE2021

Do elite private boys’ school alumni have justice politics?

Featured Symposium at AARE 2021: Elite private boys’ schooling, feminism and gender justice: reimagining research in a post #me too world

On November 30 2021, while many of us were in paper sessions at the annual AARE conference, the findings of a review of workplace culture in parliament house were released. The review, led by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins, was sparked by rape allegations made earlier this year by Brittany Higgins. The findings indicated that one in three people working in federal parliament has experienced some kind of sexual harassment there (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2021). What is also true is that a large number of MPs in the current parliament attended boys’ only schools, and recent revelations about the conduct of some boys in high fee-paying private boys’ schools have shone a negative light on them.

In September 2020, a year 12 muck-up day challenge at Sydney’s Shore school was made public which included such challenges as “spit on a homeless man”, “deck a stranger”, “sack whack a complete random walking past”, “get with someone below (age) 15”, and “get with an Asian chick”. In February 2021 Ms Chanel Contos, a former student at Kambala – an elite private girls’ school in Sydney – commenced a petition on social media for consent education to be taught earlier. This also attracted many testimonies from young women across the country regarding sexual assault from young men, many of whom attended elite private boys’ schools. 

A spotlight has therefore been focused on private boys’ schools and the male leaders they produce. All but two of Australia’s post war Prime Ministers (Bob Hawke and Julia Gillard) attended boys’ only schools, as did many men in the current parliamentary cabinet. Many of the men who attend boys’ only schools will come to occupy positions of significant privilege and power. There are crucial questions to be asked about the gender, class and race lessons being learnt by the young men attending such schools, and the way these travel with them as they come to occupy positions of influence in post-school life. Emeritus Professor Jane Kenway calls this the ‘misogyny pipeline’.

Published research shows us that such schools can be environments that are toxic for women teachers (Higham, 2018; Variyan, 2021) and indicates the sense of entitlement that can be fostered in such schools (Gaztambide-Fernández, Cairns & Desai, 2013). However it also indicates they are institutions that frequently engage in practices that are ostensibly about improving society and ameliorating justice (Kenway & Fahey, 2015). Indeed, how might these schools and their current and former students contribute to social justice rather than reproduce virulent forms of misogyny, classism and racism?

In response to such questions, AARE featured the research symposium Elite private boys’ schooling, feminism and gender justice: reimagining research in a post #me too world, at its annual conference. The symposium involved Drs Claire Charles and Lucinda McKnight, and Professor Amanda Keddie (Deakin University); Dr George Variyan (Monash University); Emeritus Professor Jane Kenway (Melbourne University); Professor Adam Howard (Colby College, USA), and Leanne Higham (LaTrobe University).

The symposium identified a range of challenges and opportunities for understanding questions of gender, class and race in elite private boys’ education both in Australia and the USA. A particular challenge identified was the ‘rules of entitlement’ that such schools implicitly teach their boys (Kenway). One such rule is that boys must know how to stay on top of all the hierarchies that matter. Given how strongly invested such schools, and their clients, are in hierarchies it was asked is it even possible to challenge this rule?

A key theme, in line with the conference title, was how we might re-imagine research in politically charged spaces, and in particular in/with elite private school boys and such schools’ alumni. Access to elite schooling for the purposes of research can be difficult. The symposium explored some different approaches to gaining insight into a culture where ‘what is part of the family stays with the family’. The schools were likened to a ‘secret brotherhood’ (Howard) where unsavoury are kept under a code of silence, although can sometimes be revealed to ‘insider’ researchers such as men who also attended elite boys’ schools, or by alumni who actively take up a more progressive justice politics. As part of re-imagining research in this space, the symposium also explored how researchers need to acknowledge their own positioning and investments (Charles, McKnight & Variyan).

A second theme was around how the schools themselves typically respond to revelations about their misogynistic cultures when they hit the media. Their crisis management techniques were identified. For example, they often respond by suggesting that such events are the result of a few ‘bad apples’ and are not representative of the broader culture or values of the school. A further strategy was their ‘dignified determination’ to address the issues. These defensive responses were described as a form of ‘misogyny masking’ (Kenway).

A key question, therefore, is how research, and the schools themselves, might address these problems. In particular, how research and teaching in elite private boys’ schools might seek to involve boys and men in working toward social justice. It is well established in research that involving men and boys in feminist projects can be a challenge yet one that is necessary if we are to change the status quo (Messner, Greenberg & Peretz, 2015). The symposium explored the discomfort and emotional intensities that boys and men often experience when they are invited to reflect on their complicity in perpetuating gender injustice (Keddie). It found that while such discomfort can be difficult, it is a necessary part of gender transformative work because you are dealing with personal violation. Such discomfort and emotions can be channelled in productive was for gender justice (Keddie). The role of researchers’ own relationships and emotions with regard to these schools was also explored (Charles, McKnight & Variyan).

In summary, recommendations arising from the symposium include the following:

·       That researchers continue to work with alumni from these schools to identify and further understand the factors that might assist some men to develop progressive justice politics both at school and later in life;

·       That further research is conducted into what may make elite private boys’ schools different from other elite schools that are co-educational or girls’ only schools, when it comes to addressing the problems outlined above;

·       That research and pedagogy continue to engage boys in working toward gender justice – including boys attending elite private boys’ schools.

Dr Claire Charles is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University. Her research advances understanding of the justice politics of privileged young people in an unfair world.

Dr Charles pulled together this overview of research, including her own, presented at AARE201. The other authors are: Dr Lucinda McKnight is a senior lecturer in pedagogy and curriculum at Deakin University. She conducts award-winning research into curriculum design’s role in teacher identity, autonomy and professionalism, especially in English.  Dr George Variyan is a lecturer in Master of Educational Leadership in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. George’s engagement in research is based on a critically orientated sociology, which explores human agency in the relationship between education and society. Amanda Keddie is a Professor of Education at Deakin University. She leads the program: Children, Young People and their Communities within the REDI (Research for Educational Impact) Centre. Her research interests and publications are in the broad field of social justice and schooling. Professor Jane Kenway is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences; Australia, Emeritus Professor at Monash University and Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her research expertise is in educational sociology.  Adam Howard, Ed.D., is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Education and Chair of Education Program at Colby College, USA. Professor Howard’s research explores social class issues in education with a particular focus on privilege and elite education. Leanne Higham is a Lecturer in the School of Education at La Trobe University. A former secondary teacher, she is interested in the everyday practices of schooling and how these increase and enhance the capacities of those within schools, and/or limit and constrain them.

How the spirit of lockdown leaders prevailed in the crisis

This report is from the Educational Leadership SIG Symposium – Educational Leadership in crisis across Australia and New Zealand at #AARE2021, presented by Fiona Longmuir (Monash University) , Michelle Striepe & Christine Cunningham (Edith Cowan University), Sylvia Robertson (University of Otago) and David Gurr (University of Melbourne)

The experience of the pandemic is a significant and shared disruption and the ways that education has been led through crisis and uncertainty were explored in this symposium. 

Research has previously considered how educational leaders have guided their communities through crises of many descriptions and Michelle Striepe and Christine Cunningham first presented a scoping review that examined this prior body of work. They found that the evidence was limited and, as one would expect, covered a broad range of contexts and crises – earthquakes, bushfires, hurricanes as well as local crises such as unexpected deaths. The literature suggested that leading during a crisis is different and is tailored to the context and nature of the crisis (Hemmer & Elliff, 2020; Liou, 2015). 

Across this literature there was evidence that educational leadership during times of crisis involves: 

  • Leading responsively, instinctively and virtuously
  • Working through phases of reaction, management and recovery
  • Understanding the immediacy, urgency and complexity of the crisis and the resulting needs of the community.

From their review, emerged questions that were relevant to thinking about educational leadership through the COVID crisis. These are – 1) how we bound the concept of crisis, and the relationships between crises – for example, are we currently experiencing a health crisis within broader crises of environment and equity?  2) Do we see experiences of crisis as linear or are there constant cycles through phases of crisis that are influenced by the intensity of disruption? 3) How do culture, context and language shape experience of crisis?

The emergence, and persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis since early 2020 has been different across the three locations of the studies shared in the symposium- Melbourne and Perth in Australia and Dunedin in New Zealand. 

From Perth, we heard about a large Independent school that experienced 17 days of lockdown early in 2020 and the work of a school leader who brought a risk management disposition to his work (Striepe & Cunningham). 

In New Zealand, Harry, the principal at the centre of the case, shared his rapid responses and attention to the hauora (health and wellbeing) of the community as the threat that the pandemic might arrive loomed for many months (Roberston). 

The Melbourne study reported on interviews with eight school leaders conducted in mid-2020, which was in-between two long lockdowns. Here, common messages emerged about the need for care for the entire school community and the importance of timely and clear communication (Longmuir).

From across our three contexts, and in reflecting on the review of crisis literature, we saw some commonalities and some areas that raised more questions. 

Inequity

The experiences of the pandemic were inequitable even within each school. Individual circumstances and situations came to the fore and leaders needed to understand and respond in supportive ways. Across our three locations, we noted that issues of social and economic advantage and disadvantage were important, and we know from emerging research across a broader range of contexts, that COVID-19 has laid bare the intensity and variety of inequalities, and the ways that education is involved in these.

Relational leadership

In most of our cases we noticed that the relational aspects of educational leadership came to the fore. It seemed that during a crisis, core purposes of human sociality were foregrounded – people cared about each other and educational leaders noticed a “coming together” of their communities in the face of the shared experience of adversity. 

Phases of crisis response 

The idea of phases of response was evident in the literature review and the factor of time is a really important one in any further thinking about how educational leaders have responded, managed and survived such an extended crisis. Reacting, responding and recovering stages were evident – but how has the rollercoaster of the pandemic experience blurred what might normally be thought of as a linear crisis journey through these stages

Crisis leadership practices

Many leadership practices that are thought to be important at any time were still identifiable in the work of the leaders we studied – what changed were the ways that these practices were combined in order to respond as needed for the unprecedented circumstances. 

In reflecting on some of the key messages across our research, Sylvia Robertson left us some important questions:

  • Are we seeing a shift from instructional leadership to a more relational approach with a social justice focus?
  • Has the pandemic highlighted equity issues to the extent that they cannot be ignored any longer?
  • Moving forward, will there be less concern with measurement of outcomes and greater focus on social inequities, care and innovation?

We agreed that the answers remain to be seen.

Fiona Longmuir lectures in Educational Leadership at Monash University and has over 20 years’ experience as a researcher and practising school leader. Her research interests include intersections between educational leadership and educational change with a particular focus on student voice and agency. She is working on projects investigating school leadership for social cohesion; leadership for unprecedented times; and student voice and agency in alternative educational settings. Find her on Twitter @LongmuirFiona and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fionalongmuir/

References:

Hemmer, L., & Elliff, D. S. (2020). Leaders in action: The experiences of seven Texas superintendents before, during, and after Hurricane Harvey. Educational Management Administration & Leadership48(6), 964-985.

Liou, Y. H. (2015). School crisis management: A model of dynamic responsiveness to crisis life cycle. Educational Administration Quarterly51(2), 247-289.

Papers where some of the research is reported: 

Longmuir, F. (2021). Leading in lockdown: Community, communication and compassion in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Educational Management Administration & Leadership. https://doi.org/10.1177/17411432211027634

Striepe, M. and Cunningham, C. (2021), Understanding educational leadership during times of crises: a scoping review. Journal of Educational Administration, ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-03-2021-0057 

What #AARE2021 meant to me: identity, community, disruption, hope

AARE Conference Wrap: in the shadow of the virus, AARE2021 shines a light (header image from the Acknowledgement of Country at the start of the conference, screenshot by Nicole Mockler)

How can I capture, in a little over a thousand words, such a spectacular conference?

The beauty of AARE conference is that while nearly a thousand delegates come together for the one conference, we all experience a thousand different conferences. So any conference wrap is necessarily a wrap of one person’s conference, and what I offer here are some vignettes from Pat Norman’s conference: a tiny glimpse of a rich and broad week (and I wish I could have got to more).

There are four key themes that I saw emerge from this conference, and I would like to (very) briefly address each of them: identity, community, disruption and hope.

Identity

The question of our identities as teachers and researchers was a recurring motif in many sessions.

The Educational Administration and Leadership SIG held a most civil symposium canvassing the identity of the ‘Pracademic’. Scott Eacott argued that we must be careful to avoid hierarchies that reify one construction of knowledge over others, and Deb Netolicky countered that pracademia is a useful way to conceptualise identity:

“It can create possibilities for reimagining who we work with and how, building connections, strengthening networks, reimagining boundaries. The space matters more than the noun that describes the individual.”

In that same session, as she grappled with her own identity as a researcher and a Steiner CEO, Virginia Moller said that the value of knowledge claims isn’t where they originate, but whether they make sense of the world. Well that sounded just beautiful to me!

Kristina Turner highlighted the way personal experience, lifelong learning, and a heightened sense of accountability animates both social entrepreneurs and teachers – and I’d venture similar drives can be found amongst the attendees at AARE as well!

Community

I think a sense of community also animated attendees at the conference.

How is it possible to create such a sense of community online? I felt like we were actually there together, in the flesh. Perhaps it’s because our community was so clearly excited to see each other, to work together after so long apart. Perhaps it’s because of the brilliant coordination of Amanda Heffernan and Stewart Riddle – thank you both for your incredible dedication!

We saw beautiful collaborations between supervisors and students, academic partners and practitioners, and between friends made through scholarship.

Catriona Mach described her duoethnography with Julie Choi, Nicole Mockler presented her vast corpus analysis of media representations of teachers alongside her honours student Elizabeth Redpath who extended that analysis through the pandemic. 

Jessica Gerrard and Helen Proctor invited us not to think of participatory politics as automatically including a progressive impulse: it is possible for conservative forms of participatory politics to exist, and that democratic citizenship is something that must be worked for.

Jen Clutterbuck and Rafaan Daliri-Ngametua synthesised their PhD data to introduce the concept of ‘zombie data’: excessive, purposeless, and redundant data that we are forced to collect. What a notion! Zombie data spent the next four days roaming the digital conference floor (and so enamoured was I with the notion that I had to add it to my slides).

Perhaps the most wonderful expression of community I saw was the support that scholars like Jess Holloway wrapped around a generation of amazing PhD candidates. What a privilege to hear about the exciting research of Rafaan, Stephanie Wescott, Sarah Langman, Tanjin Ashraf, Madeline Good, Sarah McManus, Pashew Nuri, Sarah Gurr, and so many more. I can’t wait to read more of their work!

Disruption

Many of those researchers just mentioned spoke in a panel about disruption,andhow could we not discuss disruption with the very large COVID elephant in the room (though Bob Lingard literally used an image of an elephant as a metaphor for structural inequality in schools).

Disruption takes many forms. Meghan Stacey apologised for the neighbours drilling through concrete while she and Mihalja Gavin unpicked the disruption of Local Schools, Local Decisions

Babak Dadvand noted that his neighbour liked to start their whipper snipper every time he had to meet someone on Zoom. Fortunately, his neighbour allowed us peace while we learned about the paradoxes and complexities principals face negotiating equity and excellence.

In his Neil Cranston Lecture, Scott Eacott explained that productive disruptions often come from looking outside of our fields, rather than being inward looking and insular. He explained: 

“Society does not have education, society is educative.”

We learn from society, it teaches us, it pushes us to new things, and as Scott reminded us, “education is embedded and embodying of its context.” And those contexts are subject to power and negotiation: policy moments crafted in mobile relations beautifully theorised in a symposium featuring Kal Gulson, Steven Lewis, Glenn Savage, Jessica Gerrard, and Radhika Gorur.

Perhaps another reason disruption was so core to the conference, pandemic notwithstanding, is because research and education are inherently disruptive enterprises. As Jessica Gerrard said:

“The logic of our discipline is a projection of something, a transformative moment, a something in the future that is coming…”

Hope

The notion of the future that we are bringing to life sits nicely with this final theme, and the theme that I think captures the whole of the conference: hope, and the transformative power of research.

Recounting her experiences as a classroom teacher, Catriona Mach explained: 

“My affect has become consumed and exhausted by unhelpful practices of neoliberalism, but there is hope and helpful practices associated with research knowledge and mentor/mentee relationships”

Those relationships extended right through the conference. Scott Eacott, recently promoted to full Professor, observed that soon there will be a generation of professors in the field of Educational Administration and Leadership research who will have studied under scholars who also completed their PhDs in Australia. What does that say, he asked, for the future of Australian research? Good things, I think, if this conference is our litmus.

In his Radford Address, Martin Nakata showed us that change is possible: that we can support and build the capabilities of Indigenous students if we really are committed to it. Showing us the work being done at James Cook University, Nakata has seen the gap close on the pass/fail rate, and now his sights are set on the front-end gap: Indigenous learners in school who want to go to university.

The conference was book-ended by two incredible keynotes: Nikki Moodie’s opening plenary and Raewyn Connell’s closing. Moodie challenged us with the question: “what does it mean to have a purposeful life? A purposeful Indigenous life?” In her stirring imagining of self-determination, Moodie explained: 

“Reimagining education research isn’t just about creating space for Indigenous knowledge, but also asking what Indigenous empowerment of Indigenous lives means.”

Nikki’s keynote reminds me that the acts of teaching and of research are identity-forming ones, at the same time as they are socially transformative. That goes for us as individuals, and for the individuals with whom we work and for whom we care: how do we come to exist in the world, and what does that world look like? Research is also an act of reimagining because it prompts us to ask what should that world look like? Or, to put the problematic in Connell’s words:

“Whose past do we look back to, and which of the possible futures do we look towards?”

Connell ended her keynote with that famous invocation: “Another world is possible”.

Back in April, 2020, Arundhati Roy speculated that the pandemic might be a portal, and we can walk through it without the baggage and prejudices of the past. I doubt I’m alone in wondering whether the transformative potential of COVID-19 has been lost. However, it did show us that another way of living is possible – for better or worse – and it showed us how valued and valuable teachers and researchers are.

In the shadow of the pandemic, whenever it may end, this year’s AARE conference has been a bright reminder of the power of reimagining, the hopefulness that comes with research, and the goodness of community when we come together. That is a portal that is open to us every day, and every day we take our steps towards another world.

Dr Pat Norman is a researcher, teacher and liaison librarian at the University of Sydney. His doctoral thesis explored teacher professional identity, professional ethics, and policy enactment in the context of neoliberalism. He is interested in the politics and sociology of education, social theory, and is obsessed with science fiction. He tweets at @pat_norman

How our messy research journey survived floods, fires and COVID19

See this presentation in real time today (December 2, 2021) in the Schools and Education Systems SIG at 10am

Large research trials are complex and difficult to manage at the best of times. At AARE 2021 this week, around 900 papers have been presented, many reporting clean and tidy findings from research studies. Twenty minutes doesn’t provide enough time to tell the full story.

And it’s not one that researchers are encouraged to tell.

I want to use my experience as the project manager of the largest randomised controlled trial in Australian education research history to expose the messy, unpredictable, challenging, and at times down-right insane rollercoaster of conducting school-based research.

In 2018, the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre was awarded $17.1M in funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation to undertake a comprehensive and rigorous program of research examining the impact of Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR) on teacher and student outcomes.

Our massive, four-arm randomised controlled trial began in 2019 and is in the throes of final data collection right now. Over the past three years we have had to contend with several catastrophes of epic proportions including the Black Summer Bush Fires, state-wide flooding, a global pandemic followed by the local Delta outbreak. 

Now throw in a touch more flooding, and a teachers’ strike to boot.

And yet, despite these challenges, we have (just about) successfully completed this research, gathered incredible amounts of data and published ground-breaking findings. We’ve also learned lessons about the realities of school-based research that I believe would be valuable to share.

We set out in 2018 to recruit 200 NSW government primary schools, with four teachers from each to participate in this research trial. Our first major challenge was recruiting schools. When baseline data collection began in Terms 1 and 2 2019, we had just 125 schools. This necessitated a split-cohort design, with a second cohort of 80 schools planned for 2020.

To manage the huge scale of baseline and follow-up data collection we built up our team of research assistants to more than 50. We almost made it through the follow-up data collection in Term 4 2019 when catastrophic bushfires broke out throughout NSW. 20 of our research schools were closed, which meant constant reshuffling of school visits and monitoring bushfire locations to ensure the safety of our research assistants. Remarkably, we were able to collect data from 124 of 125 schools.

The bushfires continued to hamper our efforts into the start of 2020 as we finalised cohort 2 recruitment and prepared for baseline data collection. Adding to the emergency situation, the fires were followed by significant flooding across many parts of regional NSW, again affecting a number of our research schools (one school was literally wiped off the map).

We’d almost completed baseline data collection for cohort 2 when, in March 2020, COVID-19 forced state-wide school closures. The decision was made to postpone the trial to 2021. However, with the baseline data already collected and comparable control group data from the previous year, we were uniquely positioned to repurpose the data to complete one of the world’s earliest empirical studies on the effects of COVID-19 on student learning

We maintained strong relationships with our research schools throughout this incredibly challenging year and, with support from the NSW Department of Education, we were able to get follow-up data to see what, if any, impact COVID had on student achievement.

As a strong sign of support for our work, most of the 2020 schools signed up again to participate in 2021. Everything started smoothly, baseline data were collected, teachers participated in QTR, then Delta hit on the eve of the Term 2 holidays.

Despite an entire term of remote learning, we are back in the 80 schools right now collecting follow up data. Changing government health orders over the last few weeks meant asking teachers to collect student data on our behalf, then being able to send research assistants to visit schools after all. It’s meant rapid scaling up and scaling down of our team, organising training and support for teachers, as well as organising logistics for research assistants to visit schools.

It has required incredible flexibility, adaptability and coordination in a very short time period, while COVID continues to impact schools. Next week we’re heading to the last of the schools, though right now we are juggling schedules around the planned industrial action.

Since 2019, 205 schools, 757 teachers and more than 10,000 students have participated in this study. To date we’ve visited schools to collect; 1,102 full lesson observations, more than 45,000 PATs, 15,000 student surveys and 1,700 teacher surveys. We’ve published significant findings and world-leading research.

Conducting research of this scale has required constant evaluation and refinement and has led to several important learnings. 

Research with schools is hard and complex. It’s costly and it’s taxing. Both on workloads and on wellbeing. I think it’s important to recognise that.

Contingency planning is critical. Things will go wrong. We could not have anticipated a global pandemic, but having plans for quickly responding to school closures or emergency situations helps when the unexpected happens.

Effectively navigating institutional constraints and regularly refining processes are essential for work of this scale. Our processes look a lot different now to when we began in 2019.

Stakeholder relationship management is crucial. Ensuring buy in from department executives and funding body representatives, school leaders and teachers – and even research support staff – will help when things invariably go pear-shaped. 

Schools do want to engage in meaningful research. It’s important that the research has explicit links to school priorities, has reasonable expectations of participants, provides access to useful data that schools can engage with and, finally, includes a capacity building dimension for teachers or leaders.

We are blessed to have a supportive funding partner and a significant and rare amount of funding which has enabled us to postpone, restart, repurpose data, and persevere. Research is difficult and it is messy. Learning from experience is important.

Wendy Taggart is the senior project manager in the School of Education, College of Human and Social Futures, University of Newcastle. This work is from a paper co-authored with Jenny Gore, Andrew Miller, Jess Harris and Leanne Fray.

‘Act more normal’: what happens now to gender diverse kids at school

From GSCS SIG Symposium: Exploring sexuality and gender diversity throughout school communities: Students, parents and educators

Where schools do a good job at celebrating diverse students, they create a better experience for everyone. However, the confluence of the papers from our Gender, Sexualities and Cultural Studies SIG session showed that this outcome is rare. When we planned this symposium we did so with the aim of holistically mapping the problems that emerge when schools and the institutions that influence them persist in a narrative of sameness- and to do this, we collectively presented four papers that related to the experiences of students, parents and educators, and the policing of gender and sexuality norms that they encountered at and around schools. In doing so, the panel demonstrated that schools continue to act as regulatory institutions that shape individual’s experiences of their gender and sexuality, often negatively.

Jackie Ullman’s research with more than 2300 gender and sexuality diverse students offered clear, empirical evidence that verbal and physical harassment that targeted gender and sexuality diversity in schools is still common, with more than half of the participants indicating that they heard homophobic language more than several times per week, and more than half of these saying that teachers ‘never’ or ‘hardly ever’ intervened in this. Indeed, 10% of participants indicated that teachers actively participated in this kind of marginalising language. Ullman’s research also found that teachers sometimes participated in victim-blaming, suggesting that students could avoid the violence that they were encountering if they only “could try to act more normal”. While these findings show the deep problems faced by gender and sexuality diverse young people at school, they also indicate that students do better at school when teachers are positive in the everyday about these identities- and this includes higher attendance, sense of connectedness, greater academic performance and increased self-concept. Unfortunately, the political context in NSW, including proposed legislation that may prohibit curricular performances such as these, could create a commitment to diminishing these outcomes.

Beyond the experiences of students, Tania Ferfolja and Victoria Rawlings each explored the experiences of parents that encountered the homo-cis-normative institution of the school. Ferfolja’s paper demonstrated the contemporary pressures and scrutiny that gender and sexuality diverse people are encountering, particularly in New South Wales. In her research with Jackie Ullman, Ferfolja captured how this scrutiny played out in the lives of parents of gender and sexuality diverse children, as they encountered schools that were often hostile or exclusionary to these identities. They found that these parents had to undertake time consuming and emotionally taxing labour to prepare their children for potential discrimination at school, monitor their safety, seek external support, educate educators, and agitate school leadership when problems arose. Emails, meetings, phone calls, and letters to schools were a common feature across the parent experience in this study, and were an outcome of a lack of trust in the schooling system broadly. In response to these contacts, parents indicated that they received advice that their children should oppress or deny their sexuality or gender identity at school in order to better fit in, demonstrating the strength of the institutional commitment to cis-heteronormativity.

Victoria Rawlings also explored the experiences of parents, though did not focus on students that were gender and sexuality diverse. Instead, her study included any parent that indicated that their child had encountered gendered violence at school. This included students that had been subjected to homophobia due to having same-sex parents, and those that encountered sexual harassment and misogyny. Her findings showed once more that parents expended significant labour in contacting schools about these events, and that this parental responsibility was borne from schools resisting the consideration of gender and/ or sexuality motivations behind violence- even when these experiences were encountered by multiple students.

Finally, Emily Gray explored the experiences of queer educators, who, within the normative confines of schools, are sometimes required to conceal their sexuality or gender identities. Her work emphasised the ways that normative assumptions about heterosexuality and (cis)gender dominate all aspects of school life, and are keenly felt by LGBTIQ+ educators. Whether someone can live near a school, whether they can disclose parts of their life when asked by students, whether their partners can attend events with them, and whether they can intervene in staff discussions about gender and sexuality are only some of the decisions faced by these teachers. This creates a struggle and constant renegotiation of teachers’ private and professional worlds.

In all these papers, the current political context in Australia and especially in New South Wales emerged as a significant challenge for teachers and schools to navigate when considering students’ wellbeing and school culture. Presenters noted that the moves in NSW to prevent discussions of or allowances for gender diverse young people, if successful, could have years or even decades of implications for school communities, and further entrench the already deep disadvantage faced by this group. In addition, the current media landscape continues to target teachers and schools that seek to redress this disadvantage through confronting harmful practices in their schools. As we continue to explore what conditions are possible in this climate, we also urge colleagues in education to push against these shifts, and in doing so, strive for greater inclusion and equity in and around schools.

From left to right: Tania Ferfolja is associate professor in the School of Education at Western Sydney University, Australia, a member of the Centre for Educational Research and a member of the NSW arm of the national Australia Forum for Sexuality, Education and Health. Her research centres on equity in education with a focus on gender and sexuality diversities in curricula, policy, pedagogy, schooling and employment practices in Australia and internationally. Emily Gray is a lecturer in Education Studies at RMIT’s School of Education. Her interests within both research and teaching are interdisciplinary and include sociology, cultural studies and education. She is particularly interested in questions of gender and sexuality and with how understandings these identity categories are lived by individuals and experienced within social institutions. Victoria Rawlings is a lecturer at the University of Sydney and her research focuses on the intersections between gender, sexuality, youth and social structures. Her PhD investigated the connections between gender, social structures and ‘bullying’ in two high schools in NSW. . in 2021, sge was awarded an Australian Research Council DECRA fellowship to conduct research in partnership with school communities around cultures of gender and sexuality. This research aims to understand how schools can positively and proactively include all students. Jacqueline Ullman is an associate professor of Adolescent Development, Behaviour and Wellbeing at Western Sydney University, where she teaches in the areas of educational psychology, sociology of education, research design and research methods for preservice secondary teachers and educators looking to pursue continued education. Her primary research focus is in the area of diversity of genders and sexualities and associated inclusive educational practices.  She is the AARE 2021 winner of the Raewyn Connell award.

How to reimagine research for self-determined Indigenous futures

An excerpt from Associate Professor Nikki Moodie’s keynote, opening the 2021 AARE conference on Monday November 29.

Indigenous education research – in its broadest sense – is so oriented to addressing the harms that the western schooling system has visited upon us, and the urgent work of attenuating the most immediate challenges – that there is little space to do work that imagines otherwise, or even sometimes to see the answers that Indigenous people have been offering for so long.  The great challenge before us is to imagine schooling futures, education and work futures that in and of themselves are Indigenous. What does it mean to have an Indigenous future? To step into the vision that our ancestors had for us, to be good ancestors to people who come after us, and to have the skills and capabilities to live full, meaningful, contemporary Indigenous lives?

In education, health, economics and policy research overall we see comparatively less focus on self-determination or even cognate ideas of Indigenous Lifeworlds or cultural continuity, and such a prevalence of work either mapping the damage or some small attempt to heal the damage. It is possible that when we turn away from the idea – not just the language – of self-determination, we end up diminishing Indigenous rights as either ‘cultural’ or ‘racial’ constructs. This turning away does little except to depoliticise the basic land-relation that defines both Indigenous and non-Indigenous life on this continent.

Sometimes we might see the language of self-determination in policy and practice, but often only as a euphemism for consultation, as a last-ditch effort to save a failed policy or program. So self-determination as a concept has been off the table for a while, for a myriad of reasons. But self-determination is about Indigenous rights, and Indigenous rights in education require difficult thinking about what it is that schools, universities and governments are obliged to do for all citizens, and what it is that Indigenous people have the right to exert authority over. 

But even if the language is contested, self-determination remains a right enshrined in the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to which Australia is a signatory. And it contains a useful entry point to the nature of the collective self that Indigenous societies mobilise. 

New targets in the new Closing the Gap policy, and the greater involvement of the Indigenous service delivery sector in the development of those targets, may indicate a deepening recognition of the ways in which Indigenous Lifeworlds are different to the lives of White and non-Indigenous people of colour in Australia. Particularly with regard to engagement in education and employment, greater recognition of Indigenous languages and connection to Country may allow deeper conversations about what it means to pursue an Indigenous future in the Australian settler state. Whilst there has been a move away from comparing Indigenous people to non-Indigenous people in the newest iteration of Closing the Gap, and characteristics of the non-Indigenous population are not necessarily established as parity goals, this policy still has some distance to travel before it is able to accurately represent the challenges that Indigenous people face – and the aspirations that we hold to empower ourselves.

Too often, research in Indigenous education begins by establishing the “context” – listing the statistics, describing the government policy, and marking the urgency of the need for reform. 

We lay out some gains that have been made, how Indigenous people are ‘making it work’, how we’re adapting to the system and slowly getting better outcomes. But these inequalities are design features of a system that – in its most benign state – was never focused on our aspirations. Any achievements we eke out of this system are achievements in spite of, not because of settler colonial benevolence. What the research and data on education show is that we are indigenizing, adapting the settler institutions that govern our lives to achieve a best-fit in systems that render participation in society in a very particular way. But that requirement that we ‘make do’ – that we seek a best fit – itself does harm. Other ways are possible, and those other ways of imagining research that supports cultural continuity, Indigenous collective and relational authority, perhaps are yet to see their fullest expression in our research endeavours.

The caveat to that is that Indigenous people – land councils, nations, community groups, businesses – are making decisions on the basis of evidence, are directing research, and are collecting the data they need to govern their own lands and people. How we support those voices, those decision-makers, their aspirations, hopes and pathways for their own children and communities gives us the opportunity to reimagine education research in its rightful place – in service of the aspirations of Indigenous collectivities, in Australia and around the world.

How we educate for self-determination – both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people – opens up possibilities beyond anti-racism and cultural awareness, as we all move towards treatied relations, in recognition of the Indigenous right to determine our own futures. 

Associate Professor Nikki Moodie is a Gomeroi woman and sociologist based at the University of Melbourne. Nikki holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Political Science from the University of Queensland, and a PhD in Sociology from the Australian National University. After an early career in the public service, she moved into research focusing on higher education, social networks and Indigenous governance. Nikki is the current Program Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social Equity, a 20-year philanthropic program focused on Indigenous-led social change.