Australian Association for Educational Research
26-30 Nov 2023
The University of Melbourne
Presentations
Rochelle Banks: Culture, Complaint and Confidentiality: Using an autoethnographic lens to explore impacts of sexual harassment in educational institutions.
Areej Yousef: “The only real Australians are Aboriginal Australians”: Reconstructing ethnolinguistic identities in Australian classrooms.
Nina Ginsberg: Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research.
Chair: Associate Professor Jen Jennifer – Griffith Uni (j.alford@griffith.edu.au).
Discussant: Associate Professor Lisa van Leent – QUT (lisa.van leent@qut.edu.au).
Challenging assumptions about getting to the school gate; exposing systemic sexual harassment; resisting racist, colonial attitudes…all in a day’s work for girls and women in schools?
This symposium presents three empirical papers that use divergent feminist theories and/or methodologies exploring how place/places/contexts shape the experiences of girls and women in education, and subsequently make more visible the truths of their experiences and their capacity to make their voices heard. Through investigating practices and entanglements of different kinds, these papers shed new light on critical matters pertaining to women’s experiences within schools, either as teachers or students. Paper 1 excavates the entanglements, tensions and possibilities of a post-qualitative inquiry that foregrounds African landscapes, smells, desires, dynamics, beliefs, practices, and bodies with emerging feminist posthuman ontologies. The significance of this research lies in (re)turning (Barad, 2006) and challenging preconceived notions and habitual relationalities regarding bicycles and educational access for girls in Sierra Leone. By focusing on school trail experiences, this study sheds light on the complexities of traditionally overlooked experiences of schoolgirl journeys. In Paper 2, by using autoethnography and writing from the perspective of the survivor-researcher, the author sheds light on how sexual harassment is enacted through gendered language, the normalisation of sexist practices, and power-relations in ways that inform whose voice is heard and whose gets silenced. Drawing on Ahmed (2021), this paper captures the political life of a sexual harassment complaint to magnify the ways in which harassment works. Paper 3, through narrative inquiry, gives voice to Sham, a young Syrian refugee woman recently arrived in Australia. During high school, Sham encountered low expectations from teachers, linguistic racism and deep-rooted, monolingual biases from classmates for using Arabic. Using ethnolinguistic identity theory and postcolonial theory, the author demonstrates how young Middle Eastern refugee women may be more likely to resist colonial attitudes towards Australian citizenship and the persistent monolingual mindset. These data rich papers privilege frequently silenced voices in innovative and nuanced ways.
ICQI 2021
17th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry
19-22 May 2021
The University of Illinois (Online Conference).
Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research.
This paper traces some experimental and experiential wonderings of researching gendered journeys on bicycles in West Africa. This session shares what is unfolding for one rider-researcher as she works to excavate the entanglements, tensions and possibilities of becoming(s)-with post-qualitative inquiry that foregrounds African landscapes, smells, desires, dynamics, beliefs, practices and peoples with emerging feminist posthuman ontologies. My research puts to work feminist New Materialisms to explore how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education. This undertaking is bold, complex and unsettling. It requires (re)turning (Barad, 2006) and challenging habitual preoccupations about bicycles, embodiment, movement, identity, ecology, sp/pl/p/ace and methodology. There is much about gendered bodies navigating trails that commands attention, yet defies explanation (McLure, 2013). Drawing on key encounters experienced in Brisbane (Australia) and Lunsar (Sierra Leone), I trace the skills, wills, spills and thrills from which a velo-onto-epistemology is emerging.
Read more about this conference session here.
Education Research Beyond the Current Horizons
Education Research Conference
19th November 2020.
Griffith University (Brisbane, AUS).
Title: Doing Theory and Method: Doctoral Dialogues
In this session, Dr Sue Whatman and I presented our work with the Pedagogic Codes/Pedagogic Rights (PCPR) Research Group. The PCPR aims to provide a supportive space for Education and Professional Studies postgraduate students and early career to senior academics to engage with the ideas of Bernstein since his classification and framing paper and other post-colonial and decolonial theory. The group provides a place for participants to explore theory, make mistakes, to experiment with emerging methodologies and to engage collaboratively with complex ideas.
I ran a weekly SIG/research group every Thursday that catered for the needs of students and colleagues based in England, Wales, Cyprus, China, Chile, Brazil and Australia during the COVID-19 #StayAtHome. These meetings are scheduled to continue until the end of 2020. In this presentation, I explained how my role was to raise the profile of the HDR researchers and the group more broadly by developing coherent research ‘soundbites’ of their current writing and projects to release on social media via these EDJEE sites below as well as their own unique researcher pages:
- Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/project/Pedagogic-Codes-Pedagogic-Rights-PCPR
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PCPRgroup/
- EDJEE videos: https://vimeo.com/edjee
I covered how HDRers collaborated using sharing Slack and Google drive sites for joint writing projects with a view to co-authoring two journal articles.
I also shared the Vimeo video I had managed (as part of my PCPR internship) which showcased Henry Kwok’s work as an example of sharing Doctoral Dialogues.
Pedagogies in the Wild
The 3rd South African Deleuze & Guattari Studies Conference 2019
4-6th December 2019.
The University of the Western Cape (Cape Town, RSA).
Title: Cycling-with-through-and-on the edge of the PhD supervisor-candidate relationship: A posthumanist bike ride to a different place.
Abstract: Traditionally, the PhD supervision relationship is predicated on a supervisor as
This session presents insights that emerged when a PhD candidate and her Supervisor shared a bayside bicycle ride in Brisbane, Australia, to see what would happen. While the candidate was an expert bike rider, her Supervisor was far less experienced and somewhat anxious about her (st)ability. The bicycle ride was viewed as a way of deliberately disrupting and displacing traditional notions around academic performances, spaces of learning and who gets to navigate.
What emerged was surprising, revealing and uncomfortable.
The bicycle ride enabled encounters with/in the world/self that worked to queer the way in which both Supervisor and candidate understood their relationship. We contend that the candidate/supervisor relationship is an iterative and dynamic entanglement of forces wherein subjectivities, bodily performances, past experiences, fears, technologies, planned and unplanned encounters are forever and always entangled.
Influenced by Baradian philosophy, this session focuses on the material-discursive-affective phenomena that emerged as the experience of riding-with the candidate/supervisor. In this way “systems of entrapment that manifest power relations in the academy” and “instigate codes of conduct and…exclusionary practices that can limit how academic knowledges…are produced” (Charteris et al., 2019, p. 2) are able to be troubled, re-thought and re-balanced.
Read more about this conference session here.
10th Annual New Materialisms Conference of Reconfiguring Higher Education
2-4th December. The University of the Western Cape.
(Cape Town, Republic of South Africa).
Title: An athlete-teacher-researcher mountain bike race (re)turned: entangled becoming-riding-with.
Abstract In this paper, I share how engaging with new materialist approaches have enabled me to think deeply and disruptively about my
Using as a starting point a ‘moment of rupture’ (Lennon, 2017) during a popular female-only mountain bike race, I problematize how representation, subjectivity and embodiment matters in my research with respect to my own athlete-teacher-researcher-becoming entanglements.
To do this, I draw on Wanda Pillow’s (2003) concept of ‘reflexivities of discomfort’ and Karen Barad’s (2014) diffractive ‘cut together-apart’ to reframe critical becoming-riding-with moments in alternative ways.
This session explains how I productively delve into some messy and destabilizing ways of becoming-to-know and knowing as I continue to experiment with foregrounding the agential force of bicycles within my research unfolding.
Read more about this conference session here.
FreshLines: Productive Tensions 2019
The Eleventh Annual Cultural Research Postgraduate Symposium, Griffith Uni.
23-25th October 2019. Griffith University, QLD.
Symposium Topic
Productive Tensions: Working across Disciplines and Identities
Session Title
Skills, spills and thrills: reconciling bicycles, African girls’ education, materialist cartographies and ethical expert-iments.
Abstract
Academic: I am an athlete-teacher-feminist undertaking a posthuman-educational-emplaced qualitative study. First Date: My PhD explores how bicycles feature in rural African girls’ access to secondary schooling.
This means my study frays the seams of politics, economics, geography, sociology, education and mobility. Instead of using human participants, my PhD positions bicycles as my ‘more-than-human’ research ‘subject’. My choice to advocate greater critical pluralism of nonhuman agency has unearthed myriad gendered, political, ethical and processual im/possibilities.
This endeavour is both exciting and exasperating.
In addition to more apparent critical race and post-colonialist challenges of being a privileged, white, Australian female researcher undertaking embodied fieldwork in rural sub-Saharan Africa, working with feminist New Materialisms further charges me to engage with multi-sensory, ethico-onto-epistemological complexities (Barad, 2003) that continuously require me to (re)question ‘different ways of becoming’ (Colebrook, 2006).
How do you make sense of yourself (researcher-becoming) and your PhD (academic-assemblage), when you/r (re)search is disciplinary promiscuous and actively working to dissolve traditional academic ways of thinking, knowing and being?
Using key examples from my current PhD project and professional INGO work, this session will share some of my ethical and methodological skills, spills and thrills of applying feminist New Materialisms to trans-disciplinary practice.
University English Centres Australia (UECA): Assessment Symposium 2019
13-14 July 2018. University of Queensland (UQ), St Lucia. QLD.
Title: Increasing student satisfaction and engagement with assessments: What emerges when students develop their own assessments. Stream: Assessment.
Abstract: Most programs that teach Academic English to international students are heavily based on teacher-led assessments in order to meet organisational benchmarks and standards. In many University English Language Centres, student feedback on course content, materials, teaching, facilities and services is usually positive. However, student feedback about assessments remains a sticky point. The challenge for teachers and administrators is how to increase student satisfaction of assessments in relevant, measurable, practical and meaningful ways.
The aim of this
The internship was an exploration of how international students could consolidate, progress and apply their English, academic, professional and personal skills in authentic and creative ways. This internship recently won the 2018 English Australia Bright Ideas Award (QLD).
This session will focus on a series of unique and challenging academic and employment-related assessments devised and undertaken by the students themselves. Three student-created assessments in particular that will be unpacked in more detail
National English Australia Conference 2018
19-21 September 2018. Sofitel Wentworth, Sydney, NSW.
Read how this conference went: CLICK HERE.
For this conference, I was attending because I had won the EA QLD Bright Ideas Award 2018. This award sent me to Sydney as a guest of EA and Pearson Publishers (thank you to both!) to present the same session I presented at the QLD state EA PD Fest earlier this year.
My presentation: From EAS to Collaborative Internship: Lessons and insights where Bicycles Create Change
Many international students undertake English and Academic Skills (EAS) and DEP bridging classes to get into university with the ultimate aim of getting a job in their field of study. There is a perception that English classrooms are for learning English, University tutorials are for discipline-specific content, and the workplace is for vocational skills. Internships are one way where students can become more work-ready.
However, a number of studies confirm that current tertiary students are lacking in generic employability skills (ACNielsen Research Services 2000; ACCI/BCA 2002), an issue that is even more challenging for international students. I was curious to explore what a career development program that specifically catered for the academic, vocational and personal needs of the international students in my DEP classes might look like.
This presentation was a brief overview of the origins, activities and outcomes of this exploration: The Bicycles Create Change.com 2016 Summer Internship Program. For more details, see EA PD FEST conference post below. Or use ‘internship’ in the blog search for more details.
Reconciling research paradoxes: Justice in a post-truth world
UQ & GU Postgraduate Research Community Conference
15-16 September 2018. The University of Queensland, St Lucia (QLD).
Read how this conference went: CLICK HERE.
The Conference: 2018 has seen the ascendance of post-truth politics also known as post-factual and post-reality. Post-truth is opposed to the formal conventions of debate, the contestation of ideas and the falsifiability of theories and statements. In a post-truth era what reigns supreme are fallacies, talking points, leaked information, and so-called fake news fueled by unfettered social and traditional media, and a highly-polarised political spectrum.
What are the implications of post-truth to educational research that values social justice, ethical integrity, the search for the good of the community as well as that of the individual? How will research and its tenets of validity, reliability and trustworthiness respond to the challenges brought upon by a post-truth world?
The UQ School of Education’s Postgraduate Research Community and Griffith University’s HDR Community will attempt to interrogate and reconcile research paradoxes where notions of justice, integrity and impact in an increasingly complex post-truth world.
My presentation: The good Samaritan and little white lies: False news, transparency and project challenges of researching NGOs.
Keywords: INGOs, transparency, self-reporting, M & E Mechanisms
Around the world, thousands of International non-government organisations (INGOs) provide much-needed support and aid to those in need. But in the eyes of the general public, perceptions of INGOs are mixed. Some perceive INGOs to be ‘good Samaritans’, while others question project motives and management. INGOs continue to face criticism in a number of key areas: project practices, corruption, hiring policies, salaries of top executives, distribution of donated funds and lack of transparency.
For researchers, who work with INGOs, this adds an additional layer of complexity to the research process and research relationships. This session will explore how factors such as unsourced media reports, the reliability of M & E mechanisms, use of grey literature and the legitimacy of self-reported outcomes has equally enriched and problematized the aid and INGO research space. Using key examples and my own INGO experience, I will reflect on ethical and methodological ‘white lies’ that can arise when researching with INGOs.
Griffith Climate Change Response Project Symposium
Friday 24th August 2018. Griffith University, Southbank, Brisbane, QLD.
Read how this conference went: CLICK HERE.
Abstract: Collaborators Nina Ginsberg (Education & Professional Studies) and Claire Tracey (Visual Arts) use performance and audience engagement to communicate environmental issues. Through community art engagement, they aim to connect with local communities on an immediate level, furthering climate change discourse and action through performative works. Their work links Climate Change and Environment Science themes with performance, design and community-art interaction.
This research explores the intersection of climate change research and artistic interpretations of how to convey complex environmental issues to communities in a proactive and engaging manner. Their work seeks to increase community awareness about climate change issues in ways that are novel, participatory and educational. Their projects are informed by feedback from the engagement of the project itself, creating a direct relationship between the action and the sustainable and environmental issues that affect our immediate society.
The result of each performance interaction is offered with an open spirit- with the reception by the public to be determined in the moment as a collaborative process.
This session will outline a number of climate change projects we have undertaken to explain how theory and practice are enacted, using archetypes such as a feminine ecological shadow warrior, whose presence echoes of hope and perseverance derived from historical ideas of female protection, nurture, power and subversion.
English Australia (QLD) PD Fest 2018
17 March 2018. The University of Queensland, St Lucia (QLD).
Read how this conference went, CLICK HERE and HERE.
My presentation: From EAS to Collaborative Internship: Lessons and
insights where Bicycles Create Change.
Many international students undertake English and Academic Skills (EAS) and DEP bridging classes to get into university with the ultimate aim of getting a job in their field of study. There is a perception that English classrooms are for learning English, University tutorials are for discipline-specific content, and the workplace is for vocational skills.
Internships one way where students can become more work-ready. However, a number of studies confirm that current tertiary students are lacking in generic employability skills (ACNielsen Research Services 2000; ACCI/BCA 2002), an issue that is even more challenging for international students.
I was curious to explore what a career development program that specifically catered for the academic, vocational and personal needs of the international students in my DEP classes might look like. This presentation was a brief overview of the origins, activities and outcomes of this exploration: The Bicycles Create Change.com 2016 Summer Internship Program.
Program background
This Internship was a volunteer, eight-week, collaborative internship that ran from January 4th to February 27th, 2016. It required participants to fulfil 80-110 working hours. The blog Bicycles Create Change.com (which has over 110,000 readers locally and internationally) served as the professional platform for work activities as it was a low-cost, high-exposure, authentic, skills-integrated outlet to showcase work.
The program was semi-structured with space to modify and self-initiative content. Hours were achieved individually, in pairs and as a team. The team met for one full day each week to review tasks, run workshops, refine skills and to discuss progress.
This program integrated key theories including, scaffolding new skills (Vygotsky 1987), the need for authentic vocational guidance, participation and engagement (Billet, 2002), promoting creative thinking and expression (Judkins, 2015) and building on foundational DEP EAS skills and competencies (GELI, n.d.).
Origin and Participants
The four volunteer participants varied in ages, backgrounds and degree levels and disciplines. The 4 volunteers for this program were; Sachie (female, 23, Japanese, Philosophy undergrad), Mauricio (male, 33, Columbian, IT PG), Juliet (female, 37, Indian, Special Education PG) and Gabriel (male, 42, Cameroonian, Social Work PG). All participants had just graduated from the Griffith English Language Institute (GELI) 10-week DEP program in December. Semester 1 2016 did not commence until Feb 28th, leaving a gap of 9 weeks before university started, which is when the internship was undertaken.
Key Considerations
There were are a number of key considerations built into this program:
- Strengthening self-confidence and independent learning
- Experience with unique, transferable and challenging skills
- Fostering creativity and valuing artistic expression
- Emphasis on developing reflection, collaboration and planning
skills - Integrating EAS, vocation and personal skills to a range of
contexts - Promoting initiative and the ability to generate own opportunities
- Increasing employability, CV and work-ready skills
- Authentic interactions and connection with locals/community
- Create a comprehensive evidence portfolio of work, skills and
achievements - To have fun applying skills in a challenging and productive way
Program Design
The focus was to build on current competencies, develop new skills, build a professional portfolio of experience (and evidence), and for participants to become more confident in initiating their own opportunities and outputs.
This program minimised the ‘daily’ supervision and ‘student’ mentality of traditional internships to instead put supported autonomy firmly into the hands of each participant, who ultimately self-managed their own workload.
The program provided tailored experiences (below) that provided exposure to a collection of advanced competencies that are cumulatively not commonly experienced in other internships or classes.
The program integrated three main competency streams: EAS, Professional Skills and Individual Development. The program was scaffolded so that tasks became progressively more challenging and required greater participant self-direction to complete, as seen below:
Unique Features
Participants undertook a series of challenging tasks, including:
- Develop and present a professional development workshop (individually and in pairs)
- Undertake an individual project that resulted in an output (ie. Crowdfunding project, publication)
- Self-identify an industry leader to cold call for a 20-min introductory meeting
- Complete a
Coursea MOOC on an area of their choosing - Research a social issue to creatively present as an individual ‘art bike’ – as part of the team Public Art Bike Social Issue Presentation and Forum
- Research and produce five original blog posts on how bicycles are being used to create more positive community change in their home country
- Weekly meeting with an assigned independent industry expert mentor
- Join an industry association and attend events
- Series of community activities: vox pops; invite locals to contribute to a community storybook; solicit locals to donate bicycles; deliver their work at a local community garden to the general public as part of the Art Bike Public Forum; conduct an individual public presentation
- Complete an Internship Portfolio (documentation of work and reflection journal that documents, audits and reviews tasks, opportunities and skills)
- The BCC Internship Team: Public Art Bike Social Issue Presentation and Forum. Sunday 13th March 2016
Take-aways
There were many lessons learned from this project and given time constraints, only a few were touched on in the presentation. Some key takeaways were:
- Provide transferable and unique opportunities to develop ‘generic employability’, critical reflection and creative problem-solving skills
- Provide integrated, genuine, and practical ways to apply skills
- Celebrate strategies, ‘sticky points’, ‘misfires’ ‘pregnant opportunities and successes
- Make tasks more challenging and higher profile
- Participants loved having more contact with the local community
- Adaptations are needed for aspects to be taken up by educational institutions
- Work from the end result backwards (CV and skill development)
- Have visible, productive, and meaningful evidence (or body) of work
- Foster ability to independently create own opportunities & networks
- Honour unexpected outcomes
- Change the mindset to change to experience
This project was a voluntary, independent and informal project, so for ideas on how to modify or embed aspects of this program into an existing course or for any other information, please contact Nina Ginsberg.
Re-Imagining Education for Democracy Summit
13- 15 November 2017. The University of Southern Queensland, Springfield, QLD.
Symposium Title: When education for gender justice backfires: Tales from the crypt.
My Presentation Abstract One of the biggest challenges for critical pedagogues enacting social and cultural changes within and across communities can be the unintended consequences of their work. What are the material, discursive and affective implications of ‘doing good’ when things don’t quite go according to plan? What are the ethical considerations for researchers when others might be adversely affected by our good intentions?
In this symposium, we work to illuminate those unsettling moments when working for gender justice in educational settings backfires. The stories we divulge examine how critical pedagogues might, with the very best of intentions and through their own actions, become unstuck
The approach we are using keeps us from slipping into a version of intellectual hegemony that can position researchers as all-knowing experts setting out on a quest to do good. We believe that, if educational research is to be socially just, democratic and impactful, then it needs to start from a place of honesty that is as transparent about its failures as it is about its successes.
This symposium is not intended to demonise or reify critical pedagogues or their practices. Nor is it intended to stop researchers/educators from pursuing social justice agendas. Instead, it functions to problematise notions of critical pedagogy and its potential for transformative thinking, social action and self-transcendence. By situating the stories that we would sometimes prefer to keep buried within a post-critical framework we encourage all knowledge and research to be seen as fluid, contestable, irreducible and evolving.
This we believe is an approach that would support research to be more honest, authentic, informed and real. The ethical ramifications of this approach for educational research are significant.
Title: Girls’ Unfreedoms: Just getting to school is our greatest educational issue
Education in Australia has been subject to much debate over the years. Yet compared to education in many developing countries, Australian education is remarkable. In many developing nations, just being able to walk in the door of a school is a major challenge for many students, especially girls.
This presentation will provide compelling evidence and experiences where material, ethical and cultural challenges necessitate a ‘rethinking’ of approaches to educational problems. But what happens when these ‘reimaginings’ are not successful, or even possibly harmful? What do we do when things go wrong? Using as a starting point some of the cultural practices, politics and meanings are drawn from student’s daily school travel and from work on other programs in developing contexts, this session will pose critical and possibly uncomfortable considerations for researchers and educators
By sharing examples and outcomes of working in challenging educational situations, Nina hopes this discussion will lead to further action on how similar issues are recognized and addressed in Australian
Australia Walking and Cycling Conference 2017
17-18th July 2017. Adelaide University, Adelaide, SA.
Read how this conference went: CLICK HERE.
Title: Bicycles Create Change – an innovative guide to creating memorable and meaningful engagement in community bike projects
Summary: Drawing on the success of Bicycles Create Change projects, this session will present insights and inspiration for developing high-impact, interactive and memorable community bicycle-inspired initiatives.
Title: How can local bicycle projects be more engaging for individuals, groups and communities?
Abstract: This session will inspire, challenge and reframe mainstream views of ‘community participation’ by explaining the origin, development and implementation of a series of ‘biketivism’ events created by Nina Ginsberg. With a focus on inclusion, creativity, education, environmentalism and participation, Nina’s community bike projects are popular, fun and interactive. Each project has a particular themed focus, responses to key social issues and has genuine community participation at its core.
Making bicycles inviting and desirable for everyone (especially non-riders) is an ongoing challenge. Yet, by injecting a little imagination, community bike projects can easily provide unique opportunities that encourage, share and connect more people with bicycles in ways that are not based on age, fitness or ability. The objective of this is to foster and expand more positive social associations and acceptance of bicycles.
From locals contributing stories of their biking experiences for a Community Storybook, to a suburb donating bicycles for an international students’ art bike exhibition or creating a pedal-powered, bartering op-shop spectacle, this session will provide proactive, unique and vibrant bike-centred alternative activities that are cheap, quick and collaborative to establish. Reflecting on these projects’ outcomes and community responses, key considerations will be provided in relation to initiative impacts, alternative modifications to suit a range of contexts and potential for future opportunities.
Using these events as case studies, this session will outline key insights, considerations and successes for how to design and manage a low-budget, high-impact bicycle-inspired community project.
Attendees will leave this session equipped with new some quick and easy ideas, methods, considerations – and a renewed enthusiasm for their next amazing project. This session will be of particular interest for city councils, organisations, community engagement stakeholders, or anyone who wishes to add some extra flair and energy to any upcoming community project.
