Session Information
19 SES 02 B, Ethnographic Approaches to Researching ‘Troubling’ Categories of Families and their Positioning within Discourses of Schooling
Symposium
Contribution
Eight years remain in the decade in which the Australian Prime Minister committed his government to halving the widening gap in outcomes and opportunities between Indigenous non-Indigenous people. The achievement of this goal depends largely on the capacity of Australians in all parts of society to find new and more effective ways of working together. In schools, the voices of Indigenous parents and care-givers struggle to be heard. This research reports on conversations with this group in a mid-sized country town. The research was undertaken by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers working in collaboration with members of the local community. The approach is ethnographic in that it aimed to represent the experiences of participants using flexible data collection methods. The conversations (yarns) were conducted in homes, at the local markets, and cafes. Transcriptions wer verified through follow-up contact with the participants. The voices of Indigenous parents and care-givers in this paper tell of their alienation from a system of schooling that does not work for their children or for them. Their deeply considered and hopeful voices need to be attended to by policy makers, bureaucrats, school leaders and teachers in order to improve educational outcomes of their children.
Method
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.