Fostering Community Engagement in Education for Social Justice Education

This workshop brings together leading scholars and academics from around Australia and overseas to discuss existing and emerging research on practical approaches to community engagement for inclusive education. The workshop focus aligns closely with the aims of the Sociology of Education and Social Justice SIGs at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). A bottom-up approach to research and practice in education that engages with schools and communities is the first critical step in addressing the significant disadvantages that students from culturally and linguistically diverse and Indigenous communities and those from minority groups face in education. This workshop offers a range of activities followed by the keynote from Professor Tyrone Howard, including seminars, workshops and roundtable discussions led by academics and scholars on fostering strong school-community engagement for equity, diversity and social justice education.

Venue and Date:

La Trobe University Melbourne City Campus, Level 2/360 Collins Street Victoria 3000 Australia; 20 June 2023

Contact person:

Dr Babak Dadvand ([email protected])

Catering:

Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Catering services provide morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea.

Workshop Agenda and Activities

The workshop (9:00 AM-4:30 PM) starts with a keynote by our international keynote speaker Professor Tyrone Howard, followed by Q&A and discussion. Professor Tyrone Howard will join the workshop via Zoom. This will be followed by a series of 5 separate 20-minute seminar presentations to share the most recent research led by each of the four expert panellists, who will lead separate 30-minute activities followed by opportunities for Q&A and discussion with the participants.

About the keynote speaker:

Professor Tyrone Howard (School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, the US) is the Director and Founder of the Black Male Institute at UCLA, which is an interdisciplinary cadre of scholars, practitioners, community members, and policymakers dedicated to improving the educational experiences and life chances of Black males. Tyrone’s research addresses issues tied to race, culture, access, and educational opportunity for minoritized student populations. Professor Howard is a member of the National Academy of Education and is the current president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). 

About the expert panel and workshop facilitators:

Wading through the conceptual soup: What are the differences between codesign, community engagement and consultation as conceptualised in educational policy?

Professor Jo Lampert (Monash University), Professor Grace Sarra (Queensland University of Technology) and Dr Marnee Shay (The University of Queensland)

Our research, an ARC Indigenous Discovery, explores how codesign is conceptualised and enacted in Indigenous education policy and practice. But what is codesign and how does it differ from concepts such as community engagement or, for that matter, consultation? How do educators or education researchers think about and use the terms, what do they mean and how can they be ‘done’ in ways that benefit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities? There are two parts to this presentation. In the first part, we present on some of our research to date and generate discussion about the potential of codesign to generate transformative outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education. In the second, participatory half of the presentation, we interact with participants, presenting education policy extracts to tease out how education researchers make meaning of each of the three keywords: codesign, community engagement and consultation. The aim of this workshop is to come to more nuanced and intentional understandings of each of these important conceptual ideas to use them in socially transformational ways.

Low educational aspirations: Dispelling a persistent myth and addressing barriers

Prof Kitty te Riele (University of Tasmania, Peter Underwood Centre)

A persistent narrative in Tasmania is that the state’s relatively low educational attainment (e.g. NAPLAN, Year 12 completion) is due to the low educational aspirations of young Tasmanians and their parents/carers. I start this presentation by dispelling this narrative as a myth, drawing on multiple research and outreach projects at the Peter Underwood Centre, University of Tasmania. However, these projects also highlight there are real barriers for young Tasmanians to achieve high aspirations. Rather than perceiving a need for community engagement to focus on ‘raising aspirations’ (as per the myth), enhancing educational equity and social justice relies on collaborating with communities to identify barriers as well as solutions. After presenting some examples from our work, the workshop will invite participants to explore the role of university-based research and outreach for advocacy and interventions to address various barriers.

Curriculum activity around lifeworld-based problems that matter: Designing academic collaborations with school students, teachers and local community people

Prof Lew Zipin and Prof Marie Brennan (Victoria University)

We begin this presentation-and-workshop session by presenting our thinking about school curriculum activity that builds young people’s knowledge capacities to address global-in-local problems that matter (PTMs) for social and planetary futures. We explain how such knowledge activity connects school subject areas to funds of knowledge (FK), embodied among diverse local-community groups, which accumulate around PTMs that manifest in lifeworlds of students and their families/communities. As the key means to connect diverse FK and school-subject knowledges, students in a school cohort, across their diversities, identify locally-mattering problems and action-research them in participatory collaboration with school teachers, people in communities where PTMs are lived, and academics in education and PTM-relevant areas. Workshop activity will then focus on key questions for ‘us’ (education academics). How might we contribute to PTM-based action research as school curriculum activity? How might we support students to identify mattering problems in their lifeworlds and to take the lead in researching them? How might we support gathering diversely relevant knowledges and their bearers across community-based, school-based and university-based spaces? How might we help build educator professional community around the PTM approach? How might we co-participate as learners-and-teachers with the diverse-all whom the PTM gathers?

Cohorts, Communities, and the Challenges of preparing preservice teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools.

Prof Bernadette Walker-Gibbs and Dr Steve Murphy (La Trobe School of Education)

This session draws on experiences from a range of alternative initial teacher education programs to reflect on the impact of working with cohorts of preservice teachers to develop “community ready” teachers for traditionally hard-to-staff schools. Using illustrations from La Trobe University’s Nexus program, Access Quality Teaching Initiative, and the Multi-provider Teaching Academy of Professional Practice, we first present the opportunities and challenges experienced when building community connection and an understanding of social space through these alternative models of ITE. This is followed by a workshop activity exploring the enablers and barriers for ITE programs aiming to establish and sustain strong school-community engagement to support the preparation of great teachers for hard-to-staff schools.

Quality, Equity, and Social Justice in Early Childhood Education

Prof Sue Grieshaber & Dr Elise Hunkin (La Trobe School of Education)

Quality in early childhood education (ECE) settings has dominated the global economic policy agenda since the early 1990s, and despite decades of public investment, quality reform has stalled in Australia and internationally. This lack of quality improvement has been attributed to the inadequacy of the standardised, quantitative, and economic perspectives that drive policy, which are increasingly focused on standardised, academic interpretations of quality. These interpretations ignore educator perspectives, and values such as equity, justice, and democracy are diminished, if not discounted, for dominant economic concerns. Complex, empirical, and contextual evidence of what constitutes quality in ECE settings are underdeveloped. The most impactful dimensions of quality are interpersonal and include warm, frequent interactions and rich, responsive play-based environments. However, little is known about these dimensions and research is urgently needed. We report initial data from a project that draws on members of the ECE community – educators and pre-service teachers - to investigate what they think constitutes quality, including ‘in the moment’ experiences. Workshop participants are invited to engage with and respond to how our study is exploring and theorising the interrelationships among educator thinking, doing, and place, including developing a theorisation of critical ecologies of quality. We are particularly interested in participant perspectives about how a theorisation of critical ecologies of quality might address issues of equity and social justice.

Host or Publisher School of Education