Shut up and read: Recent publications from TCAP research group members
Rebecca Cairns
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
Researchers often participate in shut and write sessions to carve out dedicated time for writing. What about having more time to shut up and read? But you don’t have time, I hear you say. This problem is the focus of the first of these recent publications from TCAP research group members.
Time poverty is something that affects all our working lives. A co-authored chapter featuring TCAP member, Ros Black, looks at why time pressures have become even more acute for teachers and researchers in higher education. Decay of Time in Researching and Teaching, by Thomas, Black and Whitburn is part of the edited collection Education Research and the Question(s) of Time. In the context of higher education, the authors suggest
time “is constructed as an inherently linear and progressive institution in the service of an imagined future.”
The chapter illustrates the perils of being “increasingly subject to tight temporal constraints, measurement, and regulation through digital temporalities” within universities. Drawing on Byung-Chu Han’s notion of the transparency society, the university is described as a digital panopticon: a place where we are constantly accountable and under surveillance. The chapter explores how the accelerated “race and pace of academic labour” has serious implications for academic time and how we work in universities, which the authors scrutinise through seven tropes of digital temporality. The provocations presented in this chapter, will certainly challenge readers to find time to contemplate how these tropes and pressures might be upset and resisted.
Another recent publication also considers the implications of our digitised world but in relation to GenAI and the teaching of writing in secondary school English. Hive writing: a post-pandemic, audience and AI-aware manifesto for writing pedagogies is by TCAP member Lucinda McKnight in collaboration with Susan Gannon. Positioning the work in the “post-pandemic, AI-focused moment,” the researchers reflects on the ways in which writing pedagogies might be more attuned to these times by encouraging less solitary writing and writing better geared towards real audiences. By bringing their data from separate projects into conversation, McKnight and Gannon articulate a manifesto for the teaching of writing, conceptualised as a “set of research-informed provocations” rather than a “recipe.” Inspired by encounters with an art installation and the posthuman world, the authors ask: What can bees teach us a what bees can teach us about resilience, agency and sociality, through hive writing? The image of the hive is evoked by McKnight and Gannon:
“In the hive, punitive practices of competitive measurement are left outside. Instead, collaboration and communication hum through every cell, and empathy, with animals and insects, as well as with audiences, is the priority.”
They then expand on the three areas of resilience, agency and sociality with practical examples of how collaboration and connection can be pursued by students and teachers. This is essential reading for anyone interested in possibilities of “AI aware” pedagogies, especially English teachers.
Another recent article also models a collaborative approach to integrating research findings from across different yet related projects and is the first co-authored paper from TCAP. Engaging diverse voices across sites of curriculum making in Australia: realities and possibilities by Kerri Garrard, Rebecca Cairns, Michiko Weinmann, Shelley Hannigan and Fiona Phillips questions the over-emphasis on top-down approaches to curriculum making and argues for placing greater value on the sort of nuanced curriculum making work that occurs in localised sites with students, teachers and other community members. Extending on a symposium presented at the AARE Conference, this article adopts
“a collaborative approach to curriculum inquiry by bringing together insights from three separate projects spanning a range of disciplines and education contexts, which are interconnected by a focus on teachers and students as on the ground curriculum actors.”
The authors apply Priestley et al.’s (2021) sites of curriculum making framework to the Australian context and more specifically, the 2020–2021 curriculum review of the Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia cross-curriculum priority; a national student survey about senior secondary History and a community-based project in a primary school. This innovative approach is shown to be effective for illuminating the complexities of curriculum making that are often overlooked by the dominant narratives projected during periods of curriculum reform.
‘Solving’ the curriculum resource ‘problem’? A critical policy analysis by Rebecca Cairns, Michiko Weinmann and Lucinda McKnight is another collaborative outcome from TCAP and the first from the TCAP project: Navigating the Curriculum Resource Marketplace. In this marketplace, teachers can instantly access teaching materials and lesson plans from diverse sources including TeachersPayTeachers, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and X. Hubs of curated, curriculum aligned resources are also expanding rapidly, such as Oak Academy in the UK, and Ochre and AERO in Australia. GenAI is of course reshaping these spaces too. This article presents an analysis of recent recommendations made to the Australian Government for the purpose of informing the development of the National School Reform Agreement. The authors use Bacchi’s What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) framework to examine how curriculum resource provision is constructed as a policy ‘problem/solution’. They problematise calls for greater government investment in curriculum resource provision of banks of ‘high-quality’ and ‘evidence-based’ materials. To highlight the implications of streamlining teachers’ curriculum work, the article quotes a secondary school teacher:
“No one would argue against the good logic of having shared resources within collaborative teams, nor individual schools investing in‘suites’ of quality resources to support those teachers who need it. […] But it is deeply worrying to propose expensive, factory-model reforms that aim to eliminate the inevitable variation in teaching and learning across classrooms, and that undermine the professional autonomy of teachers.” (Melanie Ralph, blog, 2022)
Cairns, Weinmann and McKnight conclude that considering the validity of such policy constructions is vital to enhancing transparency around curricular initiatives, and to ensuring that future curriculum investment is not based on a flawed understanding of what the problems may be.
The final publication similarly prompts readers to reflect on the importance of curriculum resources being localised rather than mass produced, in this case so they can better recognise and respect the Countries, places, people and ecologies to which they are connected. Decolonising Australian Gold Rush Narratives with Critical Geopolitics comes from TCAP member Robin Bellingham and is co-authored with Deakin colleague, Al Fricker. Both are also members of Deakin’s Centre for Regenerating Futures. Their article presents a powerful and unique perspective on the ways that educational resources about the Australian gold rush perpetuate colonial discourses and narratives, including school curricula and local goldrush museums. The authors argue:
such extractive gold rush imaginaries “support an influential story of Australia’s past/present that erases First Nations custodial relations with Country, strengthens settler-colonial futurity and celebrates and legitimises its colonising and extractive relations between people, Country, and ecologies.”
More specifically it locates this analysis on Dja Dja Wurrung and Wadawurrung Countries in central Victoria to illustrate how the dominant narratives about gold as commodity and emblem of ‘progress’ have dominated historical narratives that continue to shape contemporary school curricula. These “powerful stories” about the gold rush, “represent a familiar, cherished and even sacrosanct origin story, involving adventure, sudden and exciting riches, a pioneering and egalitarian spirit, and the emergence of the globally significant city of Melbourne.” Curriculum, pedagogy and resources, they argue, could instead work to critique the dominance of these narratives and investigate and embrace multiple place stories and our care for these places.
These publications showcase how Deakin research works to transform curriculum, assessment and pedagogy. See the TCAP webpage to find out more.