Elsevier

Teaching and Teacher Education

Volume 61, January 2017, Pages 179-188
Teaching and Teacher Education

Review
An entrepreneurial adventure? Young women pre-service teachers in remote Aboriginal Australia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2016.10.013Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A study of non-Aboriginal pre-service teachers in remote Aboriginal communities.

  • Considers the ways in which racialized forms of power are challenged.

  • Pre-service teachers both reproduce, and disrupt, colonial discourses.

  • Insights from the field of girls' studies are used.

Abstract

Following global interest in how pre-service teacher education might engage with social justice imperatives, this paper reports on interviews with three non-Aboriginal young women pre-service teachers taking part in a professional placement in remote Aboriginal Australia, and explores how their identity work reinscribes and/or challenges racialized forms of power. I argue that theories from the sociology of youth around 21st century girlhood can illuminate these young teachers’ identity work in useful ways that raise important issues and questions for teacher educators to consider. Simultaneously, I show how empirical research into teacher identity can enrich theory and research on young femininities.

Section snippets

Introduction and background

In this paper I explore the identity work of three non-Aboriginal young women pre-service teachers taking part in a professional placement in remote Aboriginal Australia, and I consider the ways in which their identity work might reinscribe or challenge colonising discourses and racialized forms of power. In order to explore this question I bring together insights from the sociology of youth, in particular regarding constructions of young femininity in 21st century western contexts (Burns, 2008

Teachers, identity and racialized power

One of the key challenges outlined in the field of teacher education research is how teachers might be prepared to work toward a more socially just education system (Cochran-Smith, 2003, Lloyd et al., 2015, Sleeter, 2008). A number of researchers across Anglo European nations have observed that the teaching workforce is largely drawn from the “Anglo dominant mainstream” (Shulz, 2015, p. 2) and that their privileged position has implications for how they may construct the diverse peoples and

Data collection and participants

Interviewing was the key data generation method. 19 pre-service teachers were interviewed while they were undertaking a remote community placement during 2012. All participants were non-Aboriginal and most had not had previous experience in remote Aboriginal communities. All but one were female, most were white, and most were aged between 20 and 30. The study was explained to participants prior to leaving for the Northern Territory and they were issued with explanatory statements and consent

Kristen: ‘I know I want to work with disadvantaged kids’

Kristen is a young, white woman in her early 20s from Melbourne and the placement was her first visit to the Northern Territory. She was in the final year of her four year Bachelor degree program, and was placed at Maningrida College. Maningrida is remote Aboriginal community of around 2700 residents. It is on the central Arnhem Land coast of the Arafura sea, 500 km north east of Darwin, at the mouth of the Liverpool river. It is a multilingual community and Standard Australian English is not

Conclusion

The three pre-service teachers explored in this paper performed a variety of subjective positions which worked to both reinforce and challenge colonial discourse and racialized forms of power. My analysis enriches teacher education research by showing how insights from youth sociology around young women can illuminate the identity work of young women pre-service teachers on a placement in remote Aboriginal Australia, and offer further questions and directions for the field of teacher education

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by a Deakin University Emerging Research Group Grant titled ‘Learning from location: Northern Territory Global Experience Program’. Project number: HEAG AE 11-82. I would like to acknowledge Glenn Auld, Julie Dyer and Alan Marshall, the other members of the Emerging Research Group, and Gary Levy for his valuable research assistance. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful assistance of the three anonymous reviewers, and the editor, and thank them for their generous

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