Teachers should confidently restore higher aims for education
Teachers should confidently restore higher aims for education
Our personal troubles and concerns about education may be expressed in anger about our workplace or in the blame we attribute to others. Where these personal troubles become public they may find expression in resentment politics. Rather than contributing to improvements, these responses incite the erosion of confidence, cynical resignation and apathetic inaction.
Politically, this wrongly suggests that we have exhausted all possible responses. More than this, as we are pressed to keep our thoughts small by the cultural politics of education, we find ourselves acting as subservient, acquiescent victims rather than informed and active citizens.
If we are to make a publicly defensible difference through our work as educators we need to be able to locate our everyday work within a larger preview. The adoption of a multi-level perspective on the events in which our lives are embedded may contribute, positively, to enhancing our ability to engage in productive and creative future-oriented educational work.
It is important to unveil opportunities for promoting an education that is responsive to national/global imperatives. Rather than despairing and legitimating useless inactivity, effort might be better directed to renewing the higher order aims of education, not the least of which is a love of teaching and learning.
There are no simple answers; these have been scrubbed out of existence. There maybe not much you think you can do, but you can dare to hope after all. You might also work on the challenging task of producing and sharing difficult answers.
To fend off melancholia we require a language that promotes mental well-being and spurs realistically new actions appropriate for the difficulties of our times.
It is in this context that I would like to refer to the life and times of a former Member for the Federal seat of Werriwa. Two days after Gough Whitlam's eighteenth birthday, Adolf Hitler perpetrated the Night of the Long Knives. On 1 August 1934 Hitler became Fuhrer and Chancellor of Germany with the intention of overthrowing the Treaty of Versailles. On the 9 October Croatian terrorists assassinated King Alexander 1 of Yugoslavia and the French Foreign Minister Louis Bathou in Marseilles. In the ensuing war, Gough Whitlam served as a navigator-bombardier for the RAAF, flying under the British flag and laws. Gough campaigned for the unsuccessful Fourteen Powers referendum introduced on 11 February 1944. Yet he was able to fend off his depression all these events stimulated, and continue on to do the hard work of making history.
To fend off any sense of melancholia it is always useful to put the "historical fact" into context. Here is Paul Valery writing about all that is solid and holy in the progressive, democratic agenda melting into the air and becoming profane.
Historical Fact
Paul ValeryAll the notions we thought solid,
All the values of civilized life,
All that made for stability in international relations,
All that made for regularity in the economy ....
In a word,
All that tended happily to limit the uncertainty of tomorrow,
All that gave nations and individuals some confidence in the morrow ...
All this seems badly compromised.
I have consulted all the augurs I could find,
Of every species,
And I have heard only vague words,
Contradictory prophecies,
Curiously feeble assurances.
Never has humanity combined so much power with so much disorder,
So much anxiety with so many playthings,
So much knowledge with so much uncertainty.
It is perhaps not suprising, and may even be inspiring to learn that when Paul Valery, one of the greatest French writers and poets of the 20th century, wrote these words it was 1932. He was writing in the years immediately following the collapse of the global economy, a collapse that necessitated the state's regulation of national economies and underwriting the public social and economic security of their citizens to ensure their welfare in the face of recurring market failures.
Resources for drawing democratic principles for action
When base political interests are being embraced, this is not a time to skirt principles. Here there is a need for judgement about what educational responses might enable multicultural Australia and its ethnically diverse citizens to responsibly engage globalisation as manifested unevenly in local communities.
Such educational responses need to be based on principles that have an ethical foundation. What help is there for teachers to make ethically sound, publicly justifiable decisions about what directions to take educational policies, pedagogies and politics?
Teachers' decisions may be made by drawing on two key resources to hand.
First, among the immediate resources to hand are accounts of past experiences. Drawing on history is not a matter of romantic nostalgia or a celebration of the iconic symbols of times past, nor is it an exercise in dismissing the past as inferior or irrelevant.
Moreover history slithers into the present, dodging the strong but imperfect defences established to distance it. The focus is on the critical insights to be learnt from the past about how we might proceed now to make history ourselves. We should be wary of clutching onto bygone days. Productive engagement and responsible responses to the contemporary transitions in globalisation cannot be built through reliance on resuscitating the past.
Australia and its citizens have been forged, shaped and reshaped out of engagements with post-World War II "populate or perish" immigration program that began in the late 1940s. Here we might turn to the post-war reconstruction program led by Minister John Dedman. The efforts of the Chifley Government to enhance Australia's social and economic security were driven by fears about another depression and the evils of mass unemployment, if not another world war (Spaull, 1998).
Then again in the 1970s the Whitlam Government's introduction of the non-discriminatory, selective immigration scheme also provides examples of the virtues that could now be publicly endorsed as expressing the best of what it means to be a responsive and responsible Australian Government and citizen (Hocking and Lewis, 2003).
Second, our decisions about what educational responses might enable Australia as a nation-state and its citizens to engage globalisation may also be informed by contemporary social analyses drawn from our immediate and extended communities. The mesh-work of contacts of which educators are a part, extend beyond the profession itself to include representatives of those already implicated in the imperatives we seek to engage. We can turn to those who have been matured by riding and absorbing the shocks of trying to enable the nation-state and its citizens to openly engage the imperatives of globalisation. This means tapping into the experiential knowledge of the people actively engaging with and responding to globalisation throughout Australia. In particular, the work of Indigenous leaders such as Noel Pearson (2001) is especially important. His efforts to engage those fixed on revivifying the ethno-nationalism of White Australia politics in conversation is a useful antidote to anxiety, fear, anger and violence, as it enables them to share their vulnerabilities and explore alternative sources of hope (Sacks, 2002, p. 2).
As educators we might consider how the exclusionary worldview of ethno-nationalists has been socially and culturally formed and how it might be opened. The advocates of White Australia politics feel lost and are angry at being lost, and together we need to redress the failure to engage them in conversation. On good days those who have been politically abandoned to the forces of neo-liberal globalism share the fears they feel and talk themselves into feeling hope. The hopes of many tiny alienated voices pile high, insisting on the identification, affirmation and elaboration of progressive policy actions.
However, the examination of these national/global imperatives calls for multiple perspectives in order to extend and deepen democracy in Australia. This means tapping into a range of informed opinions, and engaging voices positioned at various points in the struggles with and over neo-liberal globalism. Democracy calls for creating the conditions where people with different angles, different interests and different perspectives on this ideological and political project in open, transformative dialogues.
Democracy as community engagement
Noel Pearson (2001, p. 132) argues that Australia's lower classes have not been adequately prepared for the current political, multicultural and economic changes in ways that would enable them, the majority of the Australian population to take part in public debates about their future. Responsive education is strong on intellectually-based community engagement around just such issues.
Complex though it may be, the Australian national community is now experienced and imagined to be ethnically and linguistically heterogenous, rather than being a homogenous Anglo-ethnic, Whites-only community. A democratic nation is constituted by sovereign citizens who share in its making and remaking through public debates and deliberations that extend and deepen the civility of the state and the economy.
Recognising the Australian community as sovereign citizens requires the enactment of democratic procedures whereby they engage in the processes of publicly persuading each other, the state and business as to the most appropriate policies to pursue. In a democracy politics is an expression and form of public ethics, wherein citizens become aware of their interdependence. The reciprocity inherent in this relationship reinforces their mutual respect for the rights and duties of each to the other. The policies are a result of a process of citizen's deliberations and construction, and thus an expression of the reason and will of Australian citizens themselves. With sovereignty vested in citizens, they understand themselves as the addresses of state policies as well as being at the same time their authors (Habermas, 1989, p. 260).
Think for a moment about the comprehensiveness of the post-World War 11 national reconstruction program.
This included among other initiatives, the creation of the Commonwealth Employment Service, a reconstruction training scheme, the Snowy Mountains hydro-electricity scheme to provide a new source of power for national industrial development and water for agricultural production, the production of the "all-Australian Holden car," the recruitment of European immigrant labour, and the establishment of the Australian National University (to provide graduates and research for the Commonwealth public service in medicine, science, social science and international affairs).
These were among John Dedman's contributions to the modernisation of Australia; to enhancing the environment, technology and security of Australians (Spaull, 1998). Dedman fused post-war reconstruction objectives for Australia's economic and social security through a concern for full employment, better housing, town planning and educational institutions open to all, holding that the social and economic systems should contribute to satisfying people's desires for an increasing standard of living (Spaul, 1998, p. 80). Pearson (2001, p. 141) argues for holistic strategies for redressing contemporary social and economic problems. This involves integrating the whole-of-government capacities, knowledges, procedures and understandings with socially and ecologically responsible corporations and interlocking these with national/global citizens for making sensible, purposeful changes.
For instance, the Whitlam Government's Racial Discrimination Act (1975) was an important legislative advance for the human rights of all Australians wanting to live ethical and compassionate lives untrammelled by racist discrimination. This Act was part of a comprehensive national reconstruction program directed towards the betterment of Australian society that included 'no fees' for university education thereby enabling Aboriginal people to access an education in law (Scutt, 2003: 116).
Many of the long-running and unresolved debates about education cannot be addressed or redressed entirely within the domain of the classroom, even though these concerns flow through the daily life of educational institutions of all kinds.
The stubborn controversies over educational policies, pedagogies and politics flow through classrooms in disjointed configurations and in many different directions. This makes encroaching on other fields unavoidable, but hopefully fruitful (Habermas, 1998, p. 73, 77).
It is important to avoid the dangerous mistake of seeing any one thing as being the single best key to engaging the imperatives confronting multicultural Australia and its citizens. For instance, education alone cannot and will not solve the many problems to which it must make a responsible response.
The imperatives and dilemmas facing Australian citizens and their nation-state cannot be overcome simply through educational initiatives alone. Although education is of central importance, the interdependent social, cultural and economic dimensions must be addressed. A responsive and responsible government builds complementarity into its national reconstruction program. This involves integrating the whole-of-government capacities, knowledges, procedures and understandings with those of socially and ecologically responsible corporations, locking these into the organisations of civil society to make sensible, purposeful changes.
Responsive education addresses equity issues, as do governments responsive to the injustices confronting their citizens. This involves having the goodwill and generosity to address the uneven distribution of assets and services throughout Australian society, especially evident in some rural and suburban regions.
Equity initiatives link material resources; the knowledge, skills and expertise required for civic and paid work, and national/global service networks across the Australian community. The intention is to enhance citizens' socio-economic wellbeing rather reinforce passivity and dependency. A person's status is constituted by their capacity as a wage earner and supplemented by the civic rights of political participation. This provides the mass of the people with the basis for informing and making informed decisions about how 'to live in realistic expectation of security, social justice, and affluence. A more equitable distribution of collective goods is to compensate for the unequal conditions of life in capitalist societies' (Habermas, 1998, p. 204). The acquisition and ownership of assets provides socio-economic security for Australia's ethnically diverse citizens. Employee share-holdings in state-owned joint ventures could help build this security among those presently unemployed.
Reciprocity is practice that awaits further development in order to underwrite the sustainability of Australia as a national community. Noel Pearson (2001: 137) observes that the:
creation of the welfare state was one of the great civilising achievements of our democracy. It gave expression to our social responsibility towards others in society - the aged, the vulnerable and those temproarily disengaged from work in the real economy. It gave expression to our democratic commitment that government belonged to all of us.
Noel Pearson (2001, p. 135) argues that 'Australians do not have an inalienable right to dependency, they have an inalienable right to a fair place in the real economy.'
Pearson (2001, pp. 140-141) has criticised the socially corrosive and dysfunctional features of the negative welfare system which provides income support for able-bodied, working-age people without any requirement for reciprocity; it sediments the power of the state, it reinforces the reluctance of the state to transfer repsonsibility to individuals and their communities, and it reproduces the powerlessness, incapacity and irresponsibility of recipients.
Pearson (2001, p. 140) argues that reciprocity is now a value which must be built into the government's underwriting of the social and economic security of able-bodied, working-aged adults. This emphasis on reciprocity suggests a change in the role of the state where its exercises responsibility, power, decision making and initiative, to one in which communities devise imaginative and enterprising policies that give expression to this principle. In return for their welfare support recipients would be enabled, empowered and engaged in finding solutions to the educational, health or recreational problems confronting their community. Here then the state becomes a partner rather than the sole service provider:
The objective of the state, to resolve social problems will not be achieved without effective community engagement. If the state is to enable communities and individuals, it must understand that good policy ideas and initiatives can be generated within the community. Not all good policy ideas come from government. ... The private sector will need to be the third party in this enterprise. Only by incorporating Aboriginal people in the real economy will we achieve our goal of taking our share of the country. ... the objective of our strategies [is] to use the resources provided by the state to develop our people, through the promotion of education, through tackling grog, through positive engagement in our own health and of those around us, and through the development of an economic base, so that we can eventually take our fair share of the country (Pearson, 2001, pp. 144, 146).
Community engagement is an expression of democratic governance and facilitates the reciprocity central to enabling the sustainability of community life.
Research and Policy Collaborations: Reconstituting Community Learning Networks
Unlike those political parties which refuse to tell the electorate about their policies prior to election, and reneging on 'non-core' promises once in government, Mark Latham (2001; 2003; Botsman and Latham, 2001) has disseminated his ideas widely through the press and in books, making them available for public debate as well as using these means to develop a policy program which might secure electoral support.
Latham has been exploring ways in which government might respond to enable the nation-state and its citizens make sense of and engage responsibly with the national imperatives borne of the contemporary transitions in the local practices, policies and politics of globalisation.
In a sense this echoes the importance Gough Whitlam gave to the hard work of persuading the electorate to take up progressive policies and to create spaces in which citizens can participate in policy determination. As educational researchers it may be possible to identify and affirm the progressive possibilities in Latham's policy proposals, and then to elaborate on their unrecognised, unreleased and unrealised potential.
Given Latham's (2001, p. 6) conclusion that 'we have reached the limit of what schools, colleges and universities can achieve,' consider for a moment possible research that might arise from an attempt to elaborate of the progressive possibilities in his proposal for developing a new generation of education around community learning networks.
Lifelong learning, of more appropriately, learning for life, is increasingly recognised as a basic necessity. However, the excesses of neo-liberal funding cuts and regulatory mechanisms have imposed stresses and strains on the existing institutions for educating the Australian public.
Given this, students could investigate the establishment of a new generation of knowledge producing, community building infrastructure for forming and informing--for educating--the Australian public.
This new generation of institutions for educating Australians committed to exercising the public and private autonomy could be designed for contemporary multilingual knowledge economies rather than the industrial age of the nineteenth century which gave rise to mass education (Lo Bianco, 2001; Singh, 2001).
The technological imperatives of the information age along with the knowledge creating, community-building potential of ever advancing technologies open up possibilities for different forms of organisational structure for community education. This is especially true for the one-in-four Australian adults who feel alienated by established forms of education but who recognise the need for the renewal of their technical, social and cultural knowledge.
The construction of community learning networks could represent a sensible twenty-first century innovation in the education of the Australian public. Libraries, galleries, museums, the university of the Third Age, and adult learning centres could be engaged through this new organisational structure for enhancing learning for life among all Australians.
Community learning networks are not just for disssemination but also the production of really useful knowledge by intellectuals organically connected to these communities.
A nation-wide community learning network made up of ethnically diverse Australian citizens could provide a platform for documenting situated knowledge about the local policies, pedagogies and politics of neo-liberal globalism and thus become a part of a forum for popular democracy. Community members could be co-producers of knowledge about the the challenges and effects of the contemporary transitions in globalisation upon multicultural Australia, its citizens, their knowledge and socio-economic well-being.
Focusing on engaging locally situated knowledge about the policies, pedagogies and political operations of the global cultural economy this new generation of education could reach out to ethnically diverse communities to access and value their funds of knowledge.
These community learning networks could assist politically disadvantaged communities to develop the ability to deal with the complexities of the state, economy and social life. These networks could be effective in institutionalising the dissemination of public knowledge within society as a whole; for instance, for communicating and persuading people as to the ethical principles that might be suffused throughout society.
Policy Action Think Tank: Reconnecting Northern and Southern Australia
A think tank of policy actors and researchers, such as the Whitlam Institute could be a significant vehicle for enhancing the value and impact of cultural research in education and related fields, especially given that such agencies are a key feature of the contemporary knowledge economy (Cohen, 2004, p. 32, 37). To this end such a policy action think tank could:
- draw on the empirical and theoretical knowledge produced by various university research centres which are responsible for the costs of producing and reproducing such knowledge via the education and training of research staff and students.
- establish close working relations to centres of political, multicultural and economic power, that is seeking to win friends and influence people in the corridors of power.
- form an integral part of the new income-generating culture of university research centres that has grown up around the centralised 'command and control' economy established under neo-liberalism.
Bourdieu (2003, p. 13) stated the challenge much more directly, arguing against the
misconception of scholarly virtue, which forbids homo academicus to engage in the plebeian debates of the journalistic and political world. ... their silence is in no small measure responsible for ... policies that are scientifically unjustifiable and politically unjustified. ... We must at all costs bring the achievements of science and scholarship into public debate, from which they are tragically absent-and in passing, call to order the prattling and incompetent essayists who fill newspaper columns and the airways of radio and television.
Partnerships based on community engagement between researchers and policy actors are emerging in response to and as a strategic means for engaging neo-liberal globalism. Lietch (2003, pp. 102, 108, 119) argues that the diverse currents in credible and innovative policies and politics are arising from the coalescence of inter-related groups which represent effective mechanisms for progressive socio-economic change. These partnerships are constituted through the inclusion of:
artists, writers, scientists and researchers collaborating with workers and immigrants; with members of different professions, classes, ethnic origins, sexualities; and with unemployed as well as flexibilised workers. ... [With] new social movements, non-governmental organisations, unions, and poor people seeking similar reforms, restitutions, and transformations of the global political economic order. ... a 'C Team,' a people's movement populated by progressives of all sorts, unions, farmers, members of new social movements and nongovernmental organisations, and the disenfranchised around the globe.
Other strategic elements of such a research-based, policy advocacy think tank include publicly disseminating credible policy proposals through public discourse and the mass media. Here there is need for guidance from teachers and associated knowledge workers engaged in transformative communications/media studies/actions regarding: the use of new forms of communication media; the countering of fatalistic and submissive (depoliticisation) promotion of neo-liberal globalism encouraged by the mass media; the use of the language games of media and markets: what is at stake when intellectuals-knowledge workers seek to maximise media coverage, by keeping their messages short and simple, assign value to telegenic settings and faces, pursue high ratings and broad exposure (Leitch, 2003, p. 102)?
The suburbs of south-eastern Australia and regional centres in the nation's north are grappling with the transitions to the new global/national economy. Historically, all Australians have been enriched and changed through the connections between the Australian bush and its major urban centres.
Unfortunately, White Australia politics deliberately neglected the industrial development of northern Australia, in preference for the south-eastern metropolitan regions (Anderson, 2002; Hage, 1998; Stratton, 1998). Now is the time to reconceptualise the relationship between northern Australia and suburban southern Australia in a way which sees these communities as interconnected.
This means designing spatial strategies that meet the interrelated needs of these localities. For instance, this could include policies to encourage the outward movement of people from the southern cities and the overflow from incoming populations by creating jobs in the new economy, better and more ecologically friendly homes, and structured opportunities to build their economic and educational assets. Linking the western suburbs of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney with centres in northern Australia could provide a way of redressing the disenfranchisement of politically disadvantaged communities, which have been deprived equal socio-economic opportunities.
As a highly urbanised country Australia experiences problems of urban sprawl (e.g. traffic congestion), urban renewal (i.e. poverty), urban environmental degradation (e.g. ecological unsustainability), and urban safety (e.g. crime). The linking of northern Australia with the western suburbs of its south-eastern cities could provide a vehicle for exploring policy options to address these problems.
Student-as-researchers could investigate the mistakes of past public housing projects, and develop policy proposals for 'green, wired, safe' housing and infrastructure for vibrant, safe and livable communities where "learning and earning" are organisationally and spatially integrated. Student investigators from cosmopolitan Broome, Cairns and Darwin could form alliances with their peers from Fairfield, Footscray and Inala to generate innovative proposals to enable Australia's politically disadvantaged communities to secure the economic, social and cultural assets needed to enhance their life opportunities.
A question of methodology: Creating a new generation of joint-venture public companies to reduce unemployment
There is a need for frameworks and methodologies that enable the exploration and tracing of the flows and networks that reveal the knotty connections already present in any given educational event, text or setting. The new terrain for educational research, explores how all the forces, imaginings and connections of globalisation traverse in specific educational texts, sites and events.
This calls for multiple forms of data, and multiple levels of analysis in order to show the complex, interactive ways in which a range of globalising connections, imaginings and forces shape contemporary educational policies, pedagogies and politics. To address these questions novel and innovative methodological orientations are required.
The transitions in contemporary globalisation pose the challenge of creating new responses in approaches to educational research. Given that the global/national/local flows of technology, money, risks, media, people and ideas are embedded one in the other, research that separates and distances these interwoven connections, forces and imaginings is inadequate.
In order to decide what might be achieved through pursuing sensible educational policies, pedagogies and policies, what constitutes sensible changes in these areas, and how to proceed in making sensible changes, multi-level research can bring to consciousness and provide insights into local practices for mediating and mitigating globalisation.
Hargreaves (1999) argues for a research approach that links different levels of analysis, in a dynamic and interactive open framework, so as to foster a deeper understanding and knowledge of the responsiveness of education to national/global imperatives. Here the metaphor 'looking beyond the classroom' is inappropriate.
The question is, 'How transitions in the technology, media, money, risks, people and ideas already present in educational events, settings and texts give expression to and are responses to national/global imperatives?'
The self-sceptical re-working of the concept and practice of critical educational ethnography (Katz, 1992) makes it possible to reframe research projects in terms of the interpenetration of multiple levels of educational policy, pedagogical and political action. Such projects would, therefore depart from the prevailing 'either-or' single-level analysis of educational research, which typically directs attention to either the school, or the education system, or the nation-state, or reflections on these.
Research that isolates the micro, from the meso, the macro and the meta-levels is being called into question. To avoid the dangers of regressive parochialism such research would situate the work of education policy actors as embedded within national/global imperatives, all of which are complicated by the dynamic interactions, disputes and conflicts borne of socio-political, economic and cultural-historical processes.
Using a multi-level framework such research could combine the study of the (a) school (micro-level), (b) the education system (meso-level), (c) national/global imperatives (the macro-level), and (d) the reflexive consciousness these stimulate (meta-level). This necessarily requires a range of approaches to generating evidence so as to address the multiple factors being mediated and mitigated through the educational sites, events and texts that provide the focus for empirical study.
This is a particularly important initiative, especially where educational research attempted to produce such a multi-level analysis of these global cultural flows so as to illuminate the connections between the structuring of schooling, unemployment, and the state's underwriting of citizens' socio-economic security, for instance through public enterprises.
A new generation of joint-venture companies might be created to break the cycle of long-term unemployment experiences by many Australian families. These companies could provide appropriate cultural as well as technological goods and services for national/global markets to address problems of ecological unsustainability, including issues of land clearing, salinity, photochemical smog, the loss of water as a renewable resource, as well as concerns about community security.
For instance, the joint-venture Green, Wired, Safe Australia could create a new common wealth, that had the following shareholder features. In the first instance, this new generation of publicly owned, joint-venture companies could be invested in and underwritten by the collaborative efforts of Australian governments (Federal, State, Territory and Local).
The purposes of this government-led investment could be (a) to provide for the socio-economic security of the Australian community, (b) to leverage other sources of investment funds, and (c) to create a sound business enterprise for subsequent privatisation should this prove publicly justifiable and desirable. In other words, the financial resources of governments could be directed, via 'InnovationAustralia' to creating new joint-venture businesses and therefore new employment opportunities for southern Australians in the nation's north. Such joint-ventures are well suited to the fiscal and civic responsibilities of government and to restoring public confidence in government.
Second, rather than being ignored or forced overseas Australian innovators could be key shareholders in these joint-venture companies, along with universities and colleges of technical and further education working together in these National Inter-Action Zones. These small-to-medium joint-ventures could be required to fund university resesarch scholarships for students from, and/or committed to working in, and with politically disadvantaged communities.
Third, the employees of these companies could be recruited from the alienated, disaffected sector of suburban Australia, including the unemployed. They could be educated in the technical/operational, cultural/critical and socio-economic dimensions of these enterprises. Further, they could become shareholders with board representation made possible through an employee trust fund.
Fourth, local community organisations, for example, community credit institutions, community local development corporations and neighbourhood associations wculd also become shareholders in this new generation of joint-venture companies. For instance, community housing associations could become shareholders in major community building and housing development projects to be established in the National Action Zones linking northern and south-eastern Australia.
Fifth, government investment could make possible the leveraging of investment funds from a range of socially responsible corporations, including superannuation funds.
Structuring responsive educational research: Revitalising Democracy and Civil Society through National Inter-Action Forums
A key task and challenge is to find and initiate the organisational and financial means to encourage researchers to unite their work with responsible policy actors in order to collectively identify, affirm and elaborate analyses and proposals for policy innovations. Some of this research already exists albeit in reports and publications that have yet to be turned into instruments of policy advocacy.
The structuring of responsive educational research need not follow existing forms of research organisation if it is to be capable of perceiving and expressing aspirations for turning research into policy advocacy. In particular, universities concerned about community engagement are keen to enable citizens to recapture their agency as policy actors, thereby enhancing civic intervention in the policy and political processes of democracy.
Second, the invention or reinvention of responsive educational research calls for an orientation to specific concrete issues of importance in social life (e.g. housing, employment, health, the legal status of asylum seekers), and works for direct and practical solutions.
Third, the participation of communications researchers who understand the functioning of the media industry and, know how to create events and to dramatise a particular problem to secure media attention is especially significant given the powerful role of media in modern society.
Fourth, another feature of responsive educational research is its move away from a defensive, insular and isolationist stance in favour of both a multi-disciplinary and a new internationalist orientation that moves beyond the Anglo-phone nations.
This involves three dimensions. The complexities of transnational interconnections and the implementation of initiatives of mutual benefit may be explored by means of liaison with other countries as well as across disciplines. For instance, transnational comparative analyses may be used to challenge localised efforts at the naturalisation of neo-liberalism as well as identify alternatives sources of progressive ideas and actions. Likewise, research and researchers in education need to be linking to the large field of research on (multi)cultural production and reproduction of which our work is an important part. An obstacle here to the structuring of multi-disciplinary and transnational research is overcoming the discipline-based, UK/US-centred approach to much education research in Australia.
The aim then is to construct a partnership that is capable of gathering together education-cultural researchers and community policy actors both nationally and internationally. There are researchers and policy actors who reject neo-liberal policies and are intent on engaging transformatively with the dominant forces of neo-liberal globalism and regressive parochialism in the collaborative work of critique and construction.
One possibility for structuring responsive educational research is to establish a coordinating network that brings together researchers and policy actors to share their diverse expertise, standpoints and programs, while each would maintain their independence. Key functions of such a research/policy alliance network could be: to minimise the fragmentation and dispersal of the work of researchers and policy actors being consumed in the minutiae of particular parochial initiatives, and to enable policy actors and researchers to overcome the ups and downs of research and policy actions. Bourdieu (2003, pp. 42-43) offers a model that involves the establishment of:
a coordination of demands and actions while excluding attempts of any kind to take these movements over. Such coordination should take the form of a network capable of bringing individuals and groups together under conditions such that the resources linked to the diversity of experience, standpoints and programs is preserved. The main function of such a network would be to prevent the actions of social movements from becoming fragmented and dispersed-being absorbed by the particularism of local initiatives-and to enable them to overcome the sporadic character of their action. This must be done, moreover, without leading to a concentration of power in bureaucratic structures.
The research of individuals and small teams could form nodal points within a research concentration that provides a vehicle to share research traditions and experiences. The published research could then be fed into a policy action think tank, which could work with particular researchers to explore options for policy advocacy.
This could enlarge the horizon within which researchers throughout Australia conduct their specific projects, providing a vehicle through which to debate and reach agreement on their self-understandings. By incorporating a diverse population of researchers and policy actors within the Network, the horizon will also change. A thematic focus, for instance "Green Wired Safe Australia, could provide a shared 'horizon' for research about current issues that give rise to public debates about the best interpretation, principles and strategies, and a forum for enhancing citizen's self-understandings.
Such forums could provide for the development of a shared political culture, including the development of a consensus on the legitimate enactment and exercise of decision-making power; enable citizens to see themselves as members of the national polity; develop an appreciation of democratic ethos that would permeate such an exercise, and sharpen citizen's appreciation of the Australia's diversity and the integrity of different forms of life co-existing within multicultural Australia.
Bringing together geographically dispersed researchers and policy actors separated by linguistic or social barriers, both within and between countries, is as necessary as it is difficult. The proposal here is to build complementarity through a coordinated accumulation of otherwise fragmented research disciplines and knowledge, and policy recommendations and proposals. In other words, the intention is to effect a concentration of educational-cultural research so as to further inform its theoretical and empirical basis with the explicit aim and mechanism for formulating realistic policy actions.
Student-researchers could investigate the legally institutionalised mechanisms that are necessary to extend and deepen democratic processes. What forums could enable Australian citizens to collective form and inform public debates about shared conceptions of a good and desirable form of life for these times? A goal of these forums could be to revitalise democracy and civil society through addressing common sets of problems inviting citizens from northern and south-eastern Australia to work together. Strategically, these forums could link those areas of regional northern and suburban southern Australia which have acute political deprivation, especially as manifested in such indicators decaying housing, vandalized public spaces, high rates of unemployment, welfare dependency, substandard schools and unhealthy lifestyles (Halpin, 2003, p. 100).
It would be important to ensure that those who are politically disadvantaged because of their gender, class or ethnicity are adequately and appropriately represented, and empowered to do participate by building the capability of these citizens to do so. These forums could create conditions for significant dialogue and multi-directional communication; ensure the appropriate representation of the state, the market and the range of interests across civil society; and facilitate frank and open public discussions, debates and deliberations about specific scenarios, new issues, strategies and operational matters for responding to national/global imperatives.
These forums might be regarded as a historical project which institutionalises mechanisms for handling the problems of living with, in and against neo-liberal globalism. For instance, this might mean dealing with contending collective goals and the distribution of collective goods. It could involve establishing procedures for the mediating, regulating and protecting the integrity and vulnerability of Indigenous and Muslim Australian women and children in the light of changing needs, interests and contexts.
In such forums the participants could clarify the ways they understand the 'national/global imperatives' confronting multicultural Australia and its citizens; what aspects of the tradition of White Australia politics they want to perpetuate and which they want to discontinue; and how they want to deal with producing new accounts of Australian history to explain the challenges now being faced. These forums could be investigated to see whether they become well-functioning, open communication structures that permit and promote public discussions oriented to enhancing participants self-understanding of 'national/global imperatives.' Not only could student-researchers learn the rules and forms of public deliberation, debate and argumentation, but they could also learn that:
the citizens' opinion and will formation forms the medium through which society constitutes itself as a political whole ... in the citizens' practice of political self-determination the polity becomes conscious of itself as a totality and acts on itself via the collective will of citizens (Habermas, 1998. p. 247).
These discussions could shape and reshape students and teachers own ethical self-understanding and their sense of Australia's ethical standing in these times of uncertainty and disorder.
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