User:Faulkner~enwikiversity

Robyn Faulkner
I am a PhD student in the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. I have completed my Initial Seminar and my Ethics has been approved. I am just waiting on approval from teacher employer authorities before I start my interviewing!

Project Title
KNOWING TEACHERS: A COMPOSITIONAL STUDY OF EXPERTISE, AUTONOMY AND PROFESSIONAL STATUS OF PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS IN THE AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY

Project Overview
''“How teacher professionalism is defined, and by whom, is important. If teachers’ occupational identity is defined from outside, by the power of the state or the pressure of the market, it is likely to be limited in important ways. The capacity to talk back to management, to dissent, or to follow independent judgement, it is not likely to bulk large in such definitions of teaching. Yet this may be crucial on educational grounds, allowing teachers to pursue the interests of the pupils they actually have in front of them”'' (Connell, 2009, p. 222)

Professional status is an equivocal notion and its applicability to a teacher’s identity is problematic. This project’s focus will be on ‘autonomy’ and ‘expertise’ as factors which contribute to the ‘professional status’ of a teacher’s identity. The enactment and acknowledgement of a teacher’s expertise and autonomy take place in a number of contexts. This project’s focus will pan between a ‘local context’, the nexus of classroom and home; and a ‘structural context’, the overarching political and economic environment. The ‘local context’ will be investigated through in-depth interviews with teachers, students and their parents in a number of primary schools in the Australian Capital Territory. The ‘structural context’ will be investigated via texts relevant to the 2009 National Partnership Agreement on Improving Teacher Quality (Council of Australian Governments (COAG), 2009). This oscillation between a ‘local context’ and a ‘structural context’ is deliberate: the study is framed with a perspective which sees identities as constructed relationally, within and amongst the constructions of others’ identities, and dialectically, within and amongst the constructions framed by the broader economy and culture (Fine & Weis, 2008).

Contact

 * eMail: [mailto:robyn.faulkner@canberra.edu.au Robyn]