The shocking scenes at Kabul airport — reminiscent of the images of the fall of Saigon in 1975 — ... more The shocking scenes at Kabul airport — reminiscent of the images of the fall of Saigon in 1975 — highlight the desperate situation many Afghans face following the unexpectedly quick Taliban victory. In the 1970s, the Fraser government responded generously to the plight of the Vietnamese people seeking refuge in Australia, taking 15,000 refugees a year. In contrast, last week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia will take in 3,000 Afghan refugees. This comes from our existing annual intake of 13,750 humanitarian visas a year. Our new research shows the government’s reluctance to take a more generous approach to Afghan refugees is not rooted in evidence about how they settle once they get to Australia
What might young people say if we actually asked them for their ideas about their own futures? Al... more What might young people say if we actually asked them for their ideas about their own futures? Almost a million young people to date think that Suli Breaks has something to say: Put yourself in our sneakers for a bit, because statistics show that between 16 and 18 your feet no longer grow … So it’s not that they don’t fit, it’s just that since you started walking on water you forgotten it, and stop tryna overshadow, but understand us kids.1 The voices of young people are often invisible when decisions are being made about them. In this chapter we explore the discourses that emerged in their struggles to make sense of their schooling, their futures, and their desires and disappointments. We also reveal how many of them are not prepared for dead ends in their plans, and how some are more likely to be prepared, and how this intersects with their school culture. We revisit the notion of “scales of opportunity” resulting from the spatial dynamics of schooling in South-Western Sydney (SWS) and the social relations of class, ethnicity, “race,” and gender in students’ lives.
Highlights: • Rural Australian spaces are transformed by immigrants and social interactions. • Co... more Highlights: • Rural Australian spaces are transformed by immigrants and social interactions. • Cosmopolitan social and built environment of rural Australian places and spaces. • Immigrants and Indigenous Australians remake themselves despite unequal power relation. • case studies of immigrant professionals, refugees and entrepreneurs. • Renegotiation of their understanding of, and practices in Australian rural places
Carol's research explores processes of globalisation and mobilities on youth, ethnicity and race ... more Carol's research explores processes of globalisation and mobilities on youth, ethnicity and race and the intersections of these social identities with the changing nature of teacher's work. Katherine Watson holds a BA (Hons) and a PhD from the University of Sydney. She taught in the English Department of the University of Sydney before joining the University of Western Sydney in 2011 as a researcher. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This project could not have progressed so well without the involvement of the New South Wales Department of Education and Communities. Particular thanks to the SouthWestern Sydney Directorate who gave me, Carol Reid, time to discuss the project in meetings of the directorate, who organised support in contacting schools, and who felt the project was important to the future of young people and schools in the region. Many thanks also to the teachers, principals, students and parents who gave their time to provide ideas and at times emotional accounts of the impact of the new compulsory schooling age. Thanks to Katherine Watson, my companion and research assistant whose contribution went beyond organising me and my materials to a real intellectual contribution. As a mother of three young men the stories in this project resonated with her experience. Thanks also to the Centre for Educational Research, particularly Tracy Buckridge and Lin Brown who provided design, referencing and printing support as well as ongoing moral support. Helen Young made considerable contributions to the project during its first year. She holds a BA/BCA (Hons) from the University of Wollongong and a PhD from the University of Sydney. She won an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) 2012-2015: Imagining Diversity: Race and Ethnicity in Popular Fantasy Fiction and left the project to pursue this opportunity. present opportunities. Institutional structures, such as those dividing TAFE and schooling do not facilitate new pathways. Competition for funds underscores the difficulty in collaboration. The Higher School Certificate is now seen as the gold standard producing a range of unrealistic expectations and narrowing choice. Furthermore, more autonomy is not better for all principals, as evident in the constraints on schools that go beyond extra funds to the cultural and social capital available in the local community and the impact of residualisation within the school. Schools cannot resolve these on their own. Schools are not always ladders of opportunity when there is no transport to get to work experience or further training, when there are no alternative curricula and when life at home is so bad that school is just an escape. Class is not dead (Smyth, 2013). Whatever we like to call it-SES or class-it is a social relationship that permeates not just economic aspects of family, school and community life but also access to networks that provide opportunities. It impacts on whose voice is heard and it intersects with ethnicity in this study in particular with the most recent and most dispossessed arrivals. Finally, education is not above politics. In this study it has been important to reveal this heresy by attending to differences in the 'contexts of practice and the distributional outcomes of policy' (Ball, 2006, p. 43). Unless the complex and multi-dimensionsal causes of disadvantage are recognised and addressed, the inequitable opportunities for ethnically diverse young males in particular has the potential to feed into wider discourses pathologising their outcomes, particularly in terms of education and pathways to work and future employment. Central to the findings in this project is a policy disjuncture. The neoliberal policy of school choice, in place in Australia for more than two decades, appears to have exacerbated the challenges facing some schools. This policy disjuncture-school choice alongside the new compulsory schooling age-shows that public high schools in SWS can be residualized for several reasons, including: cultural and religious conventions around separation of the sexes, community perceptions about the value of a particular school, and removal of academically inclined students to selective schools. This policy disjuncture can be summarized as follows: ¾ Choice leads to residualised schools for the most disadvantaged students; ¾ Residualised schools have less staff, less curriculum diversity, less social capital; ¾ The new compulsory schooling age requires all of the above; ¾ The onus on parents to understand the education market and its reforms when they may be disadvantaged themselves through limited or different educational, cultural and linguistic capital, risks producing and reproducing social inequality (Ball, 2006) Department of Education (Tas). 2009. Schools: FAQ. Department of Education, Government of Tasmania. http://www.education.tas.gov.au/school/educators/guaranteeing-futures/legislation/? a=254922. (accessed January 19, 2011). Department of Education and Children's Services (SA). 2008. Compulsory Education Age. DECS. http://www.educationage.sa.gov.au/. (accessed January 19, 2011). Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (Vic). 2009. New Participation Age Requirements-Frequently Asked Questions. State Government of Victoria. http://www. education.vic.gov.au/about/directions/reviewleg_minimumage.htm-2 (accessed January 19, 2011).
... Negotiating Racialised Identities forms of usage is the problem that emerges from the homogen... more ... Negotiating Racialised Identities forms of usage is the problem that emerges from the homogenising ... Therefore, although we may accept that race is a social/cultural construct, not an ... In the case of Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada, racialisation shaped Indigenous ...
The professional identities of Aboriginal teachers in Australia are shaped by ongoing processes o... more The professional identities of Aboriginal teachers in Australia are shaped by ongoing processes of racialization. This chapter seeks to reject more recent manifestations of this process in the form of cultural essentialism. It discusses how Australian Aboriginal groups have been continuously transformed through long-established practices of trade, intermarriage, and, more recently, colonization. The argument is that cosmopolitan theory is able to capture this dynamism and provide a language of transformation that moves beyond the us/them discourse that contributes to cultural essentialism. A cosmopolitan analysis is then used to argue that Aboriginal teachers can be seen as cosmopolitan workers, who engage with multiple epistemologies. This leads to the need to reassess binary logics in the development of Aboriginal professional identities.
How do you decide what is best for your son or daughter? On what basis do you make your decisions... more How do you decide what is best for your son or daughter? On what basis do you make your decisions? What is your role? This chapter draws on Raewyn Connell’s most recent sociological analysis of families becoming market negotiators in education.1 It reveals the inequities that result when the onus is placed on parents to understand the education market and its reforms, when they themselves may be disadvantaged.
Raewyn Connell, an eminent Australian sociologist, has worked for more than four decades to unrav... more Raewyn Connell, an eminent Australian sociologist, has worked for more than four decades to unravel the forces shaping society and education, with a particular eye on inequities. In her most recent work her focus has shifted to knowledge itself; she poses two fundamental questions which we apply, in this book, to the issue of young people being forced to stay in school longer: What does this add to what we already know? What does this ask us to do that we are not now doing, as knowledge workers?1 Any question about compulsory schooling seems a no-brainer. More schooling is better for school students. It will increase their level of human capital, make them more employable, more likely to have a more optimistic, rewarding, and fulfilling employment career. But what if it leads to a more precarious future for young people? This suggestion is of course a heresy, a contradiction of the perceived wisdom that the more years of schooling you get, the better off you will be. Yet the research reported in this book suggests that many young people in schools in South-Western Sydney (SWS) have been adversely affected by the imposition of the unchallenged and unanimous decision to get them to stay at school longer. Why is this the case? The answer to this question—discussed in complex detail in the following chapters—sheds new light on schooling in the age of neoliberal globalization.
In this paper the question of whether girls and boys can or can’t make choices about their educat... more In this paper the question of whether girls and boys can or can’t make choices about their educational pathways is examined in the context of a policy disjuncture. In 2010 the New South Wales (NSW) State Government in Australia extended the compulsory schooling age from 15 to 17 years. There was little warning and no additional resources for schools when this policy was first introduced. Scant consideration was given to the complex contexts that exist in some of the most disadvantaged areas of Sydney and, for that matter, other centres around the state of NSW. NSW was one of the few states in Australia left with a compulsory schooling age below 17 years and so this was one of the justifications for the change but it is also part of a globalising agenda (Lingard 2010) whereby the OECD has argued for increasing the number of years of schooling, a trend noticed in many Western nations. This chapter reports on a project that sought to understand the impact of the change on ethnically di...
This article provides an alternative framing to so-called 'illegal refugees' in compariso... more This article provides an alternative framing to so-called 'illegal refugees' in comparison with those dominating public discourse currently in Australia, drawing upon 'cosmopolitan social theory' and ideas of a shared humanity. It distinguishes between contemporary refugees and the nation-building approach to immigration policy, and the tensions in current humanitarian policy responses to refugees. It draws upon original research among refugees in Australia, providing narratives/stories which allow refugees to speak their own experiences in the host country of Australia.IntroductionThe movement of people across countries either as refugees or immigrants has become a worldwide phenomenon with increasingly diverse characteristics, especially in Western societies. This global migration is often accompanied by duality of citizenship and raises critical issues about the ability of national and local authorities to deal effectively with the task of constructing new civic c...
During 1990 the Disadvantaged Schools Program (D.S.P.) funded an Urban Literacies Project in New ... more During 1990 the Disadvantaged Schools Program (D.S.P.) funded an Urban Literacies Project in New South Wales. There were two strands; one was investigating English as used by children from Multicultural backgrounds; the second was researching the incidence and use of Aboriginal English in the classroom. Redfern Primary School was invited to participate as part of the Aboriginal English strand. The following is a reflection on the processes by Carol Reid and Helen Velissaris. There are some findings that may be useful to teachers regardless of the childrens’ backgrounds but we found them especially relevant for the Aboriginal children we teach in an urban school.
This chapter examines the links between parents, school curriculum and teaching practices in inte... more This chapter examines the links between parents, school curriculum and teaching practices in international schools in Kuwait to understand how they are responding to globalisation and educating students for twenty-first century capacities. With increasing marketization of schooling globally, parental choice rests upon decisions about the kind of education that will best prepare their children for the future. In the Middle East, there is considerable change occurring, although Kuwait has a longer history of US international schools and British schools than many other Arabic speaking countries in the region. Nevertheless there has been a rapid increase in international schools and many local providers are emerging. This chapter uses cosmopolitan theory to analyse interviews with parents in three accredited international bilingual schools in Kuwait. These schools teach both Arabic and international English curricula. Each school represents a certain category; the first school has a reputation for having ‘high quality’ education; the second school favours a more conservative Islamic environment, and the third school offers special needs and inclusive education in addition to main stream classes. Parents were asked about their reasons for choosing an international school and their responses were considered in relation to globalisation – of the English language, Western curriculum (or international education) – and the effect of these schools and their education on the students’ identity and culture. The parents’ responses include views about the curriculum and teachers’ capacities. The benefits of international schools, from the parents’ perspectives, on preparing their children for a future in the twenty-first century will be discussed in relation to Weenink’s (Sociology 42(6): 1089–1106, 2008) concept of cosmopolitan capital. The findings suggest that the parents are primarily ‘pragmatic’ cosmopolitans rather than dedicated cosmopolitans. This leads to an insight into the kinds of capacities parents believe are required and therefore their evaluation of the education in these schools.
The shocking scenes at Kabul airport — reminiscent of the images of the fall of Saigon in 1975 — ... more The shocking scenes at Kabul airport — reminiscent of the images of the fall of Saigon in 1975 — highlight the desperate situation many Afghans face following the unexpectedly quick Taliban victory. In the 1970s, the Fraser government responded generously to the plight of the Vietnamese people seeking refuge in Australia, taking 15,000 refugees a year. In contrast, last week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia will take in 3,000 Afghan refugees. This comes from our existing annual intake of 13,750 humanitarian visas a year. Our new research shows the government’s reluctance to take a more generous approach to Afghan refugees is not rooted in evidence about how they settle once they get to Australia
What might young people say if we actually asked them for their ideas about their own futures? Al... more What might young people say if we actually asked them for their ideas about their own futures? Almost a million young people to date think that Suli Breaks has something to say: Put yourself in our sneakers for a bit, because statistics show that between 16 and 18 your feet no longer grow … So it’s not that they don’t fit, it’s just that since you started walking on water you forgotten it, and stop tryna overshadow, but understand us kids.1 The voices of young people are often invisible when decisions are being made about them. In this chapter we explore the discourses that emerged in their struggles to make sense of their schooling, their futures, and their desires and disappointments. We also reveal how many of them are not prepared for dead ends in their plans, and how some are more likely to be prepared, and how this intersects with their school culture. We revisit the notion of “scales of opportunity” resulting from the spatial dynamics of schooling in South-Western Sydney (SWS) and the social relations of class, ethnicity, “race,” and gender in students’ lives.
Highlights: • Rural Australian spaces are transformed by immigrants and social interactions. • Co... more Highlights: • Rural Australian spaces are transformed by immigrants and social interactions. • Cosmopolitan social and built environment of rural Australian places and spaces. • Immigrants and Indigenous Australians remake themselves despite unequal power relation. • case studies of immigrant professionals, refugees and entrepreneurs. • Renegotiation of their understanding of, and practices in Australian rural places
Carol's research explores processes of globalisation and mobilities on youth, ethnicity and race ... more Carol's research explores processes of globalisation and mobilities on youth, ethnicity and race and the intersections of these social identities with the changing nature of teacher's work. Katherine Watson holds a BA (Hons) and a PhD from the University of Sydney. She taught in the English Department of the University of Sydney before joining the University of Western Sydney in 2011 as a researcher. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This project could not have progressed so well without the involvement of the New South Wales Department of Education and Communities. Particular thanks to the SouthWestern Sydney Directorate who gave me, Carol Reid, time to discuss the project in meetings of the directorate, who organised support in contacting schools, and who felt the project was important to the future of young people and schools in the region. Many thanks also to the teachers, principals, students and parents who gave their time to provide ideas and at times emotional accounts of the impact of the new compulsory schooling age. Thanks to Katherine Watson, my companion and research assistant whose contribution went beyond organising me and my materials to a real intellectual contribution. As a mother of three young men the stories in this project resonated with her experience. Thanks also to the Centre for Educational Research, particularly Tracy Buckridge and Lin Brown who provided design, referencing and printing support as well as ongoing moral support. Helen Young made considerable contributions to the project during its first year. She holds a BA/BCA (Hons) from the University of Wollongong and a PhD from the University of Sydney. She won an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) 2012-2015: Imagining Diversity: Race and Ethnicity in Popular Fantasy Fiction and left the project to pursue this opportunity. present opportunities. Institutional structures, such as those dividing TAFE and schooling do not facilitate new pathways. Competition for funds underscores the difficulty in collaboration. The Higher School Certificate is now seen as the gold standard producing a range of unrealistic expectations and narrowing choice. Furthermore, more autonomy is not better for all principals, as evident in the constraints on schools that go beyond extra funds to the cultural and social capital available in the local community and the impact of residualisation within the school. Schools cannot resolve these on their own. Schools are not always ladders of opportunity when there is no transport to get to work experience or further training, when there are no alternative curricula and when life at home is so bad that school is just an escape. Class is not dead (Smyth, 2013). Whatever we like to call it-SES or class-it is a social relationship that permeates not just economic aspects of family, school and community life but also access to networks that provide opportunities. It impacts on whose voice is heard and it intersects with ethnicity in this study in particular with the most recent and most dispossessed arrivals. Finally, education is not above politics. In this study it has been important to reveal this heresy by attending to differences in the 'contexts of practice and the distributional outcomes of policy' (Ball, 2006, p. 43). Unless the complex and multi-dimensionsal causes of disadvantage are recognised and addressed, the inequitable opportunities for ethnically diverse young males in particular has the potential to feed into wider discourses pathologising their outcomes, particularly in terms of education and pathways to work and future employment. Central to the findings in this project is a policy disjuncture. The neoliberal policy of school choice, in place in Australia for more than two decades, appears to have exacerbated the challenges facing some schools. This policy disjuncture-school choice alongside the new compulsory schooling age-shows that public high schools in SWS can be residualized for several reasons, including: cultural and religious conventions around separation of the sexes, community perceptions about the value of a particular school, and removal of academically inclined students to selective schools. This policy disjuncture can be summarized as follows: ¾ Choice leads to residualised schools for the most disadvantaged students; ¾ Residualised schools have less staff, less curriculum diversity, less social capital; ¾ The new compulsory schooling age requires all of the above; ¾ The onus on parents to understand the education market and its reforms when they may be disadvantaged themselves through limited or different educational, cultural and linguistic capital, risks producing and reproducing social inequality (Ball, 2006) Department of Education (Tas). 2009. Schools: FAQ. Department of Education, Government of Tasmania. http://www.education.tas.gov.au/school/educators/guaranteeing-futures/legislation/? a=254922. (accessed January 19, 2011). Department of Education and Children's Services (SA). 2008. Compulsory Education Age. DECS. http://www.educationage.sa.gov.au/. (accessed January 19, 2011). Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (Vic). 2009. New Participation Age Requirements-Frequently Asked Questions. State Government of Victoria. http://www. education.vic.gov.au/about/directions/reviewleg_minimumage.htm-2 (accessed January 19, 2011).
... Negotiating Racialised Identities forms of usage is the problem that emerges from the homogen... more ... Negotiating Racialised Identities forms of usage is the problem that emerges from the homogenising ... Therefore, although we may accept that race is a social/cultural construct, not an ... In the case of Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada, racialisation shaped Indigenous ...
The professional identities of Aboriginal teachers in Australia are shaped by ongoing processes o... more The professional identities of Aboriginal teachers in Australia are shaped by ongoing processes of racialization. This chapter seeks to reject more recent manifestations of this process in the form of cultural essentialism. It discusses how Australian Aboriginal groups have been continuously transformed through long-established practices of trade, intermarriage, and, more recently, colonization. The argument is that cosmopolitan theory is able to capture this dynamism and provide a language of transformation that moves beyond the us/them discourse that contributes to cultural essentialism. A cosmopolitan analysis is then used to argue that Aboriginal teachers can be seen as cosmopolitan workers, who engage with multiple epistemologies. This leads to the need to reassess binary logics in the development of Aboriginal professional identities.
How do you decide what is best for your son or daughter? On what basis do you make your decisions... more How do you decide what is best for your son or daughter? On what basis do you make your decisions? What is your role? This chapter draws on Raewyn Connell’s most recent sociological analysis of families becoming market negotiators in education.1 It reveals the inequities that result when the onus is placed on parents to understand the education market and its reforms, when they themselves may be disadvantaged.
Raewyn Connell, an eminent Australian sociologist, has worked for more than four decades to unrav... more Raewyn Connell, an eminent Australian sociologist, has worked for more than four decades to unravel the forces shaping society and education, with a particular eye on inequities. In her most recent work her focus has shifted to knowledge itself; she poses two fundamental questions which we apply, in this book, to the issue of young people being forced to stay in school longer: What does this add to what we already know? What does this ask us to do that we are not now doing, as knowledge workers?1 Any question about compulsory schooling seems a no-brainer. More schooling is better for school students. It will increase their level of human capital, make them more employable, more likely to have a more optimistic, rewarding, and fulfilling employment career. But what if it leads to a more precarious future for young people? This suggestion is of course a heresy, a contradiction of the perceived wisdom that the more years of schooling you get, the better off you will be. Yet the research reported in this book suggests that many young people in schools in South-Western Sydney (SWS) have been adversely affected by the imposition of the unchallenged and unanimous decision to get them to stay at school longer. Why is this the case? The answer to this question—discussed in complex detail in the following chapters—sheds new light on schooling in the age of neoliberal globalization.
In this paper the question of whether girls and boys can or can’t make choices about their educat... more In this paper the question of whether girls and boys can or can’t make choices about their educational pathways is examined in the context of a policy disjuncture. In 2010 the New South Wales (NSW) State Government in Australia extended the compulsory schooling age from 15 to 17 years. There was little warning and no additional resources for schools when this policy was first introduced. Scant consideration was given to the complex contexts that exist in some of the most disadvantaged areas of Sydney and, for that matter, other centres around the state of NSW. NSW was one of the few states in Australia left with a compulsory schooling age below 17 years and so this was one of the justifications for the change but it is also part of a globalising agenda (Lingard 2010) whereby the OECD has argued for increasing the number of years of schooling, a trend noticed in many Western nations. This chapter reports on a project that sought to understand the impact of the change on ethnically di...
This article provides an alternative framing to so-called 'illegal refugees' in compariso... more This article provides an alternative framing to so-called 'illegal refugees' in comparison with those dominating public discourse currently in Australia, drawing upon 'cosmopolitan social theory' and ideas of a shared humanity. It distinguishes between contemporary refugees and the nation-building approach to immigration policy, and the tensions in current humanitarian policy responses to refugees. It draws upon original research among refugees in Australia, providing narratives/stories which allow refugees to speak their own experiences in the host country of Australia.IntroductionThe movement of people across countries either as refugees or immigrants has become a worldwide phenomenon with increasingly diverse characteristics, especially in Western societies. This global migration is often accompanied by duality of citizenship and raises critical issues about the ability of national and local authorities to deal effectively with the task of constructing new civic c...
During 1990 the Disadvantaged Schools Program (D.S.P.) funded an Urban Literacies Project in New ... more During 1990 the Disadvantaged Schools Program (D.S.P.) funded an Urban Literacies Project in New South Wales. There were two strands; one was investigating English as used by children from Multicultural backgrounds; the second was researching the incidence and use of Aboriginal English in the classroom. Redfern Primary School was invited to participate as part of the Aboriginal English strand. The following is a reflection on the processes by Carol Reid and Helen Velissaris. There are some findings that may be useful to teachers regardless of the childrens’ backgrounds but we found them especially relevant for the Aboriginal children we teach in an urban school.
This chapter examines the links between parents, school curriculum and teaching practices in inte... more This chapter examines the links between parents, school curriculum and teaching practices in international schools in Kuwait to understand how they are responding to globalisation and educating students for twenty-first century capacities. With increasing marketization of schooling globally, parental choice rests upon decisions about the kind of education that will best prepare their children for the future. In the Middle East, there is considerable change occurring, although Kuwait has a longer history of US international schools and British schools than many other Arabic speaking countries in the region. Nevertheless there has been a rapid increase in international schools and many local providers are emerging. This chapter uses cosmopolitan theory to analyse interviews with parents in three accredited international bilingual schools in Kuwait. These schools teach both Arabic and international English curricula. Each school represents a certain category; the first school has a reputation for having ‘high quality’ education; the second school favours a more conservative Islamic environment, and the third school offers special needs and inclusive education in addition to main stream classes. Parents were asked about their reasons for choosing an international school and their responses were considered in relation to globalisation – of the English language, Western curriculum (or international education) – and the effect of these schools and their education on the students’ identity and culture. The parents’ responses include views about the curriculum and teachers’ capacities. The benefits of international schools, from the parents’ perspectives, on preparing their children for a future in the twenty-first century will be discussed in relation to Weenink’s (Sociology 42(6): 1089–1106, 2008) concept of cosmopolitan capital. The findings suggest that the parents are primarily ‘pragmatic’ cosmopolitans rather than dedicated cosmopolitans. This leads to an insight into the kinds of capacities parents believe are required and therefore their evaluation of the education in these schools.
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Papers by Carol Reid