Menu | Spatialities of educational engagement I

Dr Aspa Baroutsis¹

¹Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

Locations of high poverty are often publicly constituted as being educationally deficit, with location-based successes being identified as exceptional variances. This is particularly the case in the public domain through online visual and textual representations that contribute to institutionalised understandings of poverty. Using the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test as a starting point for the public representations of educational attainment, this paper draws on spatial metaphors to analyse these textual and visual portrayals of one Queensland location impacted by poverty. Drawing on metaphors of area, orientation, and movement, examples will be presented from online newspapers. These data will problematise the homogeneous representations of educational attainment in locations of poverty through metaphors of 1) area space relates to boundaries, inclusions and exclusions through a demarcation and division of educational attainment; 2) orientation space refers to a progression or change within educational performance informed by directional attributes such as up or down, top or bottom; 3) movement space focuses on comparisons of educational attainment through mechanisms such as hierarchies, elevation, distance, and targets. These spatial metaphors in media texts focus on competitive, rather than cooperative institutional practices, and potentially normalise location-based poor attainment that amplifies inequality.

Biography:

Aspa Baroutsis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Australia. Her research interests include social justice and education; education policy and mediatisation; teachers’ work and identity; learning spaces; and children’s voice and agency. She can be contacted at a.baroutsis@griffith.edu.au or Twitter @aspa25.

Prof. Elaine Stratford¹, Prof. Kitty  te Riele², Dr Sarah Stewart²

¹Institute for the Study of Social Change, University Of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia,

²Peter Underwood Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia

The need for high quality teacher education is evident in standards set by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) to accredit pre-service teacher education programs. Seven standards apply: (a) know students and how they learn; (b) know the content and how to teach it; (c) plan for and implement effective teaching and learning; (d) create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments; (e) assess, provide feedback, and report on student learning; (f) engage in professional learning; and (g) engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers, and the community. In this paper, we focus on the fourth standard. We refer to a significant literature showing that physical learning environments affect literacy outcomes. We then consider how some of the 184 educators from 28 Tasmanian government schools in a three-year review of literacy teaching: view the importance of learning environments for educational attainment outcomes; articulate their concerns about certain characteristics of learning environments; and share their ideas for attractive, highly functional learning spaces conducive to teaching and learning, especially in relation to literacy. The insights gained from this research have allowed us to advance a (emergent) spatial framework for the AITSL standards that moves beyond one element to include all seven.

Biography:

Elaine Stratford is a research professor in the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of Tasmania. Her key focus is on fundamental, strategic, and applied research about how people flourish in place, in everyday and unexpected movements and migrations, in daily life, and over the life-course. She and her co-authors are currently working on pressing questions related to educational attainment and its effects on lifecourse outcomes.

Mr David Boon¹

¹Curriculum Services, Department of Education, Tasmania, Hobart, Australia

While the local area is utilised for student learning, little research has been put into how students actually perceive that environment in a spatial sense. My experience as a primary classroom teacher and working with teachers in a number of support and professional learning roles is that students actually have greater awareness and perception of their surroundings than the adults teaching them. Teachers tend to focus attention on what it is they want students to learn. Students however don’t organise their perceptions into neat curriculum boxes, nor do they limit their observations to just what the teacher wants them to. This paper explores my teaching experiences and my leadership of professional learning which challenge traditional notions of how to utilise the local area. It  suggests how we might better utilise student perceptions of the environment to engage them as learners and deepen their understanding of both the curriculum and their local area.

Biography:

David Boon david.boon@education.tas.gov.au (B Ed., MSc – Education) is a Principal Education Officer with the Department of Education, Tasmania and supports implementation of the curriculum kndergarten to year 8 across all learning areas. His Masters degree through Curtin University focused on student perceptions of learning environments. David was a participant in the Howard government’s National History Summit and worked on the framing paper for the Australian Curriculum: History. He is an author of Place and Time: Teaching History, Geography and the Social Sciences which is used in teacher training nationally and includes several chapters he co-authored on primary level geography.