Editorial introduction [to Strategic uncertainties: ethics, politics and risk in contemporary educational research]

Strategic Uncertainties: Ethics, Politics and Risk in Contemporary Educational Research offers new perspectives on contemporary educational research in a wide range of contexts and settings. The authors provide fresh insights into the ethics, politics and risks of educational research through their deployment of up-to-date concepts and methods. They also bring educational research ‘to life’ as a series of meaningful and significant issues and dilemmas, and by drawing on the voices of ‘real-life’ research participants and practitioners. In 2001, a theme issue of the Queensland Journal of Educational Research (Coombes & Danaher, 2001) was published under the title Cui Bono?: Investigating Benefits and Interests in Educational Research. In that issue, a group of authors from a range of academic disciplines explored the notion of who benefits from educational research and how such benefits might be identified, evaluated and weighed against potential costs to the research participants. The purpose of the contributors was not to view the intentions and results of research through rose-coloured glasses (‘everyone benefits and everyone is happy’) but to establish, as honestly as possible, whether the perceived benefits of a particular research project would actually occur without some cost to those involved. The key concepts, which were the focus of each article, were therefore the benefits and costs of educational research. In Strategic Uncertainties, the focus of attention shifts to the potential risks of educational research and to the strategies that researchers might employ to minimise or from some perspectives try to eliminate these risks (and from other perspectives to embrace and celebrate such risks). Educational research, by its very nature, is concerned with people; it cannot function in a sterile vacuum. Where people are concerned, complete agreement among the participants can never be guaranteed. Thus stakeholders may compete for powerful speaking positions. Research projects, though conceived with the best of intentions, may serve to highlight the gap between researcher and researched by reinforcing the socioeconomic and educational inequities of their relationships with one another. These particular risks, among many others, emphasise the ethical and political dimensions of relationships among the participants and subject to critical scrutiny claims that research projects confer particular kinds of benefits. Educational research is indeed a ‘risky business’, but this should not deter researchers from engaging in the practice. It is the purpose of Strategic Uncertainties to apply theoretically informed, methodologically rigorous and experientially grounded critique to the ‘murky shadows’ and ‘no-go areas’ of contemporary educational research. The title of this book, Strategic Uncertainties, is taken from the text of Ian Stronach and Maggie MacLure (1997), Educational Research Undone: The Postmodern embrace. The authors focused on postmodern researchers’ efforts to avoid being caught in the snares of: the binary oppositions that have traditionally promised the comforts of certainty in philosophical thinking – between reality and appearance, reason and superstition, causes and effects, meaning and language, identity and imposture, local and universal etc. – they choose not to choose between them, not to work to transcend them, nor, importantly, to ignore them, but instead to complicate the relations between them. (p. 5; emphasis in original) According to Stronach and MacLure (1997): The kind of opening which such work attempts is that of the rupture – or interruption and disruption – in the (uncertain) hope that this will generate possibilities for things to happen that are closed off by the epistemologies of certainty….These are uncanny openings, then. They rupture things, not in order to let the light pour in, but to make it harder to see clearly. They open spaces which turn out not to be spaces, but knots, complications, folds and partial connections. It is impossible even to tell for sure whether they are openings or closings, since they are also blocking manoeuvres, which would prevent escape routes to happy endings…We try to practise this kind of strategic uncertainty throughout, and within this book. Our aim is to mobilise meaning…rather than to fix it. (p, 5; emphasis in original; emphasis added) Elaborating and expanding on these propositions by Stronach and MacLure (1997), the content of Strategic Uncertainties is a set of accounts by contemporary educational researchers of the ethics, politics and risk of their own research projects. While those accounts draw on a multiplicity of theoretical, methodological and empirical resources to frame and inform their respective engagements with educational research, they have in common a general commitment to, and at the same time an ongoing interrogation of, the ideas encapsulated in the term ‘strategic uncertainties’

Guest editors' introduction to special theme issue [of Teaching and Teacher Education]: marginalised pedagogues?

[Background and Rationale]: Writing in the International Handbook of Teachers and Teaching, Good, Biddle and Goodson (1997) referred to “the recent flowering of works on the lives of teachers” (p. 672). Although this “flowering” can be traced to earlier publications (see for example in the Australian context Connell, 1985 and Turney, Eltis, Towler & Wright, 1986), its existence is reflected in the creation and expansion of Special Interest Groups in various Educational Research Associations: Lives of Teachers in the American Educational Research Association; Teachers’ Work and Lives in the Australian Association for Educational Research; Primary School Teachers’ Work in the British Educational Research Association; and Continuing Professional Development for Teachers and Leaders in Schools in the European Educational Research Association. In addition, there is the publication of texts such as the 2 collections edited by Goodson and Hargreaves (1996) and Tattam (1998), entitled respectively Teachers’ Professional Lives and Tales from the Blackboard; books like Huberman with Grounauer and Marti’s The Lives of Teachers (1993) and Muchmore’s A Teacher’s Life: Stories of Literacy, Teacher Thinking and Professional Development (2004); and texts written by authors who have contributed to this volume, including June A. Gordon’s The Color of Teaching (2000) and Beyond the Classroom Walls: Ethnographic Inquiry As Pedagogy (2002). There are also the cinematic representations of educators’ lives, from Robin William as John Keating in Dead Poets Society (1989) to Julie Walters’ memorable portrayal of Dame Marie Stubbs in Ahead of the Class (2005). These developments are manifestations of the recognition of the crucial links between what educators do and who they are – that is, between their work and their identities. Given the “flowering” noted by Good and his colleagues (1997), it is timely to interrogate those links in relation to a particular topic: the impact on educators of teaching so-called ‘minority’ learners. By this term we mean the diversity of individuals and groups who by one measure or another are defined as ‘different’ from the ‘mainstream’, including on the basis of age, ethnicity, gender, location, political and/or religious affiliations, and socioeconomic position. Given that ‘difference’ often shades into ‘deficit’ and ‘discrimination’, it is necessary to consider the extent to which educators teaching these learners see themselves as ‘marginalised’ – and/or perhaps as ‘privileged’ to be working with these learners, as ‘innovators’ because they are away from the surveillance directed at ‘mainstream’ education and so on. Through a close examination of several incarnations of this ‘difference’, we have sought to explore in this special theme issue of Teaching and Teacher Education the character and existence of “marginalised pedagogues” through posing such questions as the following: What attracts educators to teaching learners who are ‘different’ or ‘minority’? What distinctive challenges and opportunities for the educators’ work arise from their interactions with ‘minority’ learners? What are the effects of such interactions on the educators’ identities? What are the implications of these international studies for extending understandings of both educators’ lives and the education of ‘minority’ learners? The aims of the special theme issue have been as follows: to represent a broad diversity of international studies of the work and identities of educators teaching ‘minority’ learners to investigate whether and how these educators construct themselves as ‘marginalised’ and/or as other kinds of pedagogues to link that investigation to the broader literature on educators’ lives and the education of ‘minority’ learners

Derrington, C. & Kendall, S. (2004). Gypsy traveller students in secondary schools: culture, identity and achievement. Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling USA: Trentham Books (ISBN 1 85056 320 8) [Book review]

Review of C. Derrington & S. Kendall's 2004 publication, Gypsy Traveller Students in Secondary Schools: Culture, Identity and Achievement. Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling USA: Trentham Books. (ISBN 1 85056 320 8). The book is concerned with English Gypsy Travellers (although six participants were Irish Travellers), as opposed to fairground or circus people and new age travellers

Contesting ‘transitions’ and (re-)engaging with ‘subjectivities’: locating and celebrating the habitus in three versions of ‘the first year experience’ at Central Queensland University

Instead of the homogeneous and undifferentiated view of ‘the first year experience’ implied by the term ‘transitions’, we prefer to emphasise diversity and heterogeneity in mapping multiple experiences of university life, particularly in ‘the first year’. This mapping includes – in the context of Central Queensland University (CQU) – students in a pre-undergraduate preparatory program with rich life experiences but limited formal education; school leavers and mature age students in a first year undergraduate program; and students with industry and professional experience in a pre-service teacher education program with both undergraduate and graduate entry points. Despite the considerable differences among these ‘first year experiences’, they have in common a focus on the habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990) as a framework for locating and celebrating student and staff subjectivities and hence for maximising student (re-)engagements with university life. The paper illustrates these crucial processes in each of these versions of ‘the first year experience’

Transforming learning through capacity-building: maximising life and learning support to mobilise diversities in an Australian pre-undergraduate preparatory program

One key manifestation of educational diversity is low socioeconomic status students and those who are otherwise marginalised from accessing higher education. This exploratory case study outlines and evaluates a long-running Australian pre-undergraduate preparatory program directed at providing maximum life and learning support to students by means that engage with and build on their diversities. Data are drawn from semi-structured focus groups with successive cohorts of students and theoretically-informed reflections by program staff members. The analysis of these data is framed by the conceptual blending of current theorising about transformative learning and capacity-building, which in combination constitute a powerful lens for illuminating student diversity in higher education. Based on that analysis, despite some inevitable limitations, the program is largely successful in its strategies to maximise life and learning support in order to mobilise the students' diversities in ways that enhance their current and prospective learning outcomes

Review of Susan Ellsmore, Carry on, teachers! Representations of the teaching profession in screen culture, Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling, USA, 2005, ISBN 1 85856 359 3 [Book review]

Review of Susan Ellsmore's 2005 publication, Carry On, Teachers! Representations of the Teaching Profession in Screen Culture. Stoke on trent, UK and Sterling USA: Trentham Books. (ISBN 1 85856 359 3). There is a strong and continuing tradition of cinematic representations of the work of educators, some of it memorable and inspiring. The most recent of these viewed by the reviewers was Julie Walters’ superlative performance in the television film Ahead of the Class (ITV, 2005). Walters portrayed Dame Marie Stubbs, who came out of retirement to lead St George’s Roman Catholic Secondary School in London, at whose gates a previous headteacher had been murdered and which was threatened with closure by the English Office for Standards in Education. Partly by dint of her powerful personality and partly through the enforcement of what some might see as traditional behaviour such as courtesy and punctuality, she succeeded in taking the school from having been threatened with closure to being lauded as a national example of good pedagogical practice

O'Hanlon, C. & Holmes, P.(2004). The education of gypsy and traveller children: towards inclusion and educational achievement. Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling USA: Trentham Books. (ISBN 1 85856 269 4) [Book review]

Review of C. O’Hanlon & P. Holmes's 2004 publication, The Education of Gypsy and Traveller Children: Towards Inclusion and Educational Achievement. Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling USA: Trentham Books. (ISBN 1 85856 269 4)

Review of Chris Tyler (ed.), Traveller education: accounts of good practice, Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling, USA, 2005, ISBN 1 85056 308 9 [Book review]

Review of Chris Tyler's 2005 publication, Traveller Education: Accounts of Good Practice. Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling USA: Trentham Books. (ISBN 1 85056 308 9)

Salinas, C. & Fránquiz, M. E. (Eds.) (2004). Scholars in the field: the challenges of migrant education [Book review]

Review of C. Salinas & M. E. Fránquiz's 2004 publication, Scholars in the Field: the Challenges of Migrant Education

Teachers under siege, Sandra Leaton Gray, Trentham Books, Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling, VA, 2006 [Book review]

Review of Sandra Leaton Gray's 2006 publication, Teachers Under Siege. Stoke on Trent, UK and Sterling USA: Trentham Books