the big house closing the gap: dreams and dissonant discourses
TRANSCRIPT
The Big House Closing the Gap: Dreams and Dissonant Discourses
Senior Lecturer Arts EducationSchool of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist EducationUSQ Applied Linguistics Group, Leadership Research International Group
Keynote by Dr Janice K Jones2015 International Conference on Deep Languages Education
Policy and Practices (17 – 18 October)Stimulating languages and learning - global perspectives and
community engagement
Acknowledgement of Country
I acknowledge the Yuggera and Ugarapul people who have been custodians of country and who support and celebrate our shared journey in learning. I honour the wisdom of Elders past, present and future, seeking to walk together in the spirit of reconciliation.
Image: Jada DENNISON/Untitled/2015/acrylic monoprint/60 x 42 cm
Closing the gap…Universities’ role
A significant gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians
Melbourne Declaration (2008)
A ‘fair go’: equal opportunity
Human rights
Health Life expectancy Education Employment Rate of imprisonment Suicide rates
Moral - and Economic Imperatives
A ‘fair go’: equal opportunity
Human rights Reversing damage of
colonialisation Improving health Reducing suicide
rates Revivifying language
Cost of education far less than cost of imprisonment
Benefits to all parts of society, family structures, child and adult health
University funding for increased low SES enrolments
USA: The ‘School to Prison Pipeline’USA: confinement of African American males in secure juvenile detention mirrors their experiences with school discipline. Given the potential influence of teacher and leadership preparation programs on pre- and in-service teacher and school practices, teacher educators must deconstruct and reverse pathways from the schoolhouse to the “Big House.”
"the school-to-prison pipeline is characterized as the negative school experiences that persistently route African American males away from school and into juvenile justice systems" (Townsend Walker, B. L. 2012, p. 320)
Confronting Statistics
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2014)http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject/4517.0~2014~Main%20Features~Imprisonment%20rates~10009
Korff, J. (2015, September). http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/law/aboriginal-prison-rates#axzz3ojH4j7fZ
The challenges
Increasing student disengagement from formal schooling. Mistrust/fear of ‘the big house’, its values, fear of intrusion, documentation, recording, monitoring, control
Education and urbanisation: the new divides Loss of Australia’s Indigenous languages, displacement
and ‘stolen generation’/’lost generation’ Universities: complex, hierarchical entities: Gatekeeping,
certification and corporatisation Privilege excellence over attending to education for the
masses. Hence, the university may be perceived as the Big House, the locus of power, control and judgement.
From A Big House to The Big House A Big House (positive
connotations) 1850’s Ireland, Carolina.
Labouring tenants on large estates
Grandeur, wealth, size, spaciousness
Antebellum America – shift in meaning the big house = home of the landowner
Image of power, control & punishment
The Big House (negative associations)
Power, domination ‘landowner/slave-
owner’ Shift 1940’s: street
slang – Prison (USA, Ireland, Australia)
Shift 1980’s: any institution of control
Can universities reverse the damage? How?
Educating future teachers Creating pathways for
participation and completion of degrees
AND Community Engagement! Let’s break down the barriers –
build real relationships with our Indigenous communities!
The University as Saviour and Superhero!
The Big House
Lines, boxes, borders, boundaries
One Study – Community Engagement
University as ‘The Big House’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012)
The challenge: to build bridges
It starts with people not institutions…
Individual teachers, artists and researchers build trust
But…against a background of mistrust of institutional power
relationship building takes time
Different ways: epistemology/ontology
Increasing university focus on control, image management and protection, branding and compliance.Two discourses: ‘How we do things here’ (Cornbleth, 2010).
The project team: arts researchers
Education through Arts
for Social Justice
EquityTransformation
Arts for Transformation
Lindy: White Middle-class Australian
Informal and Non-traditional
Education
Janice: White Migrant
Celtic Diaspora
Space, Power, Culture and
Identity
Language and Arts Pedagogy
Diversity and Inclusivity
School Improvement
Technologies and Networks
A Successful Funding Bid!!
Kulila Indigenous Kindergarten Parent and child as co-
learner using iPads to build capacities in language, literacies, digital technologies
Building Childcare staff skills Partnership building…. Exhibition and launch at the
university?
WHADDUP! Indigenous Youth Centre Teenagers: creating art
works for exhibition Using technologies -
Augmented Reality Young people capture their
own films: Music, drama, dance
storytelling Come to the university to
edit them!
Building trust 101: Youth Group
Community facilitated and strengths-based approach
Friday nights 7 – 9pm volunteers drive round town to collect the kids
Focus: Pride, skills, sports, arts, healthy cooking Positive role models Keeping youngsters out of trouble and
off the streets Leadership/mentoring - sport, arts,
healthy cooking, organised trips. Volunteers from PCYC, schools, parents
and Elders
Building Trust 101: The Kindy
Discourse – The Community
Discourse – The University
‘Partnership’= Market VisibilityOf course exhibition documents and the children’s books will have university logos on – we’re funding the project, after all!We need to meet with all stakeholders in the community.Filming children? Public exhibition? Parents must sign forms – we’ll set up a meeting between the legal office and your community leadersThe iPads will belong to the university – not the communityThe IP of childrens’ books will belong to the university. We will arrange a book launch and display on campus.The expansion of marketisation has not always been antithetical to egalitarianism. Yet its effects have been increasingly inegalitarian (Spies-Butcher, 2014)
A Collision of Discourses
Another kind of impact
‘If academics want to prevent the further colonization of higher education …they cannot afford to be either silent or distant observers. The stakes are too high and the struggle too important.’ (Giroux, 2011)
Further complexity – colonising representations
Deficit discourses operate at many levels – for community agents/researchers as well as institutions.
As our team prepared the exhibition we realised we were ‘re-presenting’ the work to please the public’s ideas – not those of the young Indigenous people
Colonising thought – in the selection, presentation and positioning, juxtaposition and labelling of works – in the the curation and launch celebration.
Learning to stept back back from power was critical to the process: community owned that space.
Decolonising the exhibition
A response: removing colourful card mounts: unadjusted originals were placed at child height in the gallery. The variety and range of works challenged concepts of ‘aesthetic’ display running counter to the ‘prettification’ of children’s work in public displays.
Inequities and divergences of purpose and value present challenges for increasingly corporatised universities and for the funding and conduct of community-university initiatives and partnerships.
Educators and researchers engaging with communities, are challenged to be aware of and to de-colonise relationships, discourses and practices.
‘Big Problem’ =big grant (deficit funding)
Universities’ success is celebrated on university websites marketed in terms of:
Deficit discourse: the University as superhero providing solutions - overcoming ‘Wicked Problems’
Weak community – strong university – we can help!! (until the grant runs out and a new research project starts…)
Language of success: innovation, saving the world! Why? So we look better, get more funding – do research
– generate more new ideas to solve the world’s problems!
Driving change –ABCD? Are other approaches possible? Do communities need ‘saving’ by universities? If universities stop trying to be the superhero – how can
they build more balanced and lasting community partnerships?
Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) methods build capacity through a strengths approach (John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann) http://www.abcdinstitute.org/about/
An(other) discourse and practice
Deficit approach Purpose: Changing
community through more service
Method: Institutional reform Accountability: Leaders are
professionals who answer to institutional stakeholders
Assets: Asset mapping is data collection and system input
ABCD approach Changing community
through citizen action Citizen-led production Leaders are volunteer
citizens in widening circles, accountable to community
Assets are dots to connect for self realisation, and leadership development
Adapted from Cormac McCarthy (2009)
Confronting the ‘Discourse of Need’ Emphasise genuine strengths and assets rather than
community’s need for intervention Re-position the university not leader but partner Start from community’s agency to bring change Re-evaluate evidence of impact in longer term
relationship building for equity and longevity. Reframe discourses in terms of assets and agency –
not needs and helplessness Academics: write back/talk back to agendas for
‘projects’, short term funding Challenge institutional habitus - universities too need
to critically evaluate their ways of thinking and doing
Kevin Rudd – Apology 2008Another apology from (most of!) the world’s universities:
Sorry we have not quite ‘got it’ - yet, but we are working to learn new ways of thinking, writing and working with community.
Thanks to: Cormac Russell of the ABCD Institute http://www.abcdinstitute.org/faculty/russell/Dee Brooks of the Jeder Institute http://www.jeder.com.au/about-us/jeder-directors/dee-brooks-director/
Thanks to the Indigenous youth group, kindergarten, families, helpers and Elders of Toowoomba area. Thanks to colleagues and students at the University of Southern Queensland for supporting our work and for learning in partership– we are all leaders in learning.
“Asset Based Community Development believes that every
single person has capacities, abilities and gifts. Living a good life depends on whether those capacities
can be used, abilities expressed and gifts given"
(John McKnight)
Terima Kasih
http://abcdasiapacific.ning.com/
ReferencesCornbleth, C. (2010). Institutional Habitus as the de facto Diversity Curriculum of Teacher Education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 41(3) 17.Giroux, H. A. (2011). Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University: Higher Education in the Service of Democracy. Op Ed. Truthout.Kevin Rudd's sorry speech: The text of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's speech to Parliament. (2008). Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/kevin-rudds-sorry-speech/2008/02/13/1202760379056.htmlKorff, J. (2015, September). Aboriginal Prison Rates. Creative Spirits.Retrieved from http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/law/aboriginal-prison-rates#axzz3ojH4j7fZ Jones, J. K. (2014). Neither of the air, nor of the earth but a creature somewhere between:The researcher as traveller between worlds. In K. Trimmer, A. Black, & S. Riddle (Eds.), Mainstreams, Margins and the Spaces In-between: New possibilities for education research. Abingdon, Oxford: Taylor & Francis (Routledge).Ministerial Council on Education Employment Training and Youth Affairs. (2008). Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation Retrieved from http://www.curriculum.edu.au/verve/_resources/National_Declaration_on_the_Educational_Goals_for_Young_Australians.pdf.
References continued
Scarborough, W. K. (2006). Masters of the big house elite slaveholders of the mid-nineteenth-century South (pp. 521). Retrieved from http://ezproxy.usq.edu.au/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/unisouthernqld/Doc?id=10716169 Spies-Butcher, B. (2014). Marketisation and the dual welfare state: Neoliberalism and inequality in Australia. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 25(2)185-201.Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books.Townsend Walker, B. L. (2012). Teacher Education and African American Males: Deconstructing Pathways From the Schoolhouse to the “Big House". Teacher Education and Special Education: The Journal of the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children, 35(4), 12. doi:10.1177/0888406412461158