Keynote presentation: 2015 International Conference on Deep Languages Education Policy and Practices - Stimulating Languages and Learning - global perspectives and community engagement

1. The Big House Closing the Gap: Dreams
and Dissonant Discourses
Senior Lecturer Arts Education
School of Linguistics, Adult and Specialist Education
USQ Applied Linguistics Group, Leadership Research International Group
Keynote by Dr Janice K Jones
2015 International Conference on Deep Languages Education
Policy and Practices (17 – 18 October)
Stimulating languages and learning - global perspectives and
community engagement

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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)

6. Confronting Statistics
Australian Bureau of
Statistics (2014)
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/4517.0~2014~Main%20Features~Impris
Korff, J. (2015,
September).
http://www.creativespirits.info/ab
originalculture/law/aboriginal-
prison-rates#axzz3ojH4j7fZ

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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!

10. The Big House

11. Lines, boxes, borders, boundaries

12. 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

13. 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).

14. The project team: arts researchers
Education
through Arts
for
Social Justice
Equity
Transformation
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

15. 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!

16. 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


17. Building Trust 101: The Kindy

18. Discourse – The Community

19. Discourse – The University

20. ‘Partnership’= Market Visibility
Of 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 leaders
The iPads will belong to the university – not the
community
The 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)

21. A Collision of Discourses

22. 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)

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. ‘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!

26. 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/

27. 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)

28. 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

29. Kevin Rudd – Apology 2008
Another 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.

30. 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.

31. “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/

32. References
Cornbleth, 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.html
Korff, 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_Educat
ional_Goals_for_Young_Australians.pdf.

33. 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