Samantha McMahon, M. Stacey, V. Harwood, N. Labib, Alexandra Wong, Sheelagh Daniels-Mayes
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Exploring students’ metaphors for learning in Western Sydney schools
ABSTRACT In both academic and policy spaces, learning is often cast as lifelong, dynamic, constructive and in particular, agentic. Despite this focus students’ voices are rarely privileged in these spaces – especially in policy. We respond to this oversight by deploying Foucault’s theories of knowledge to explore how students understand themselves as learners, considering this alongside dominant political and academic discursive constructions of learning. Using a metaphor card approach, we explored metaphors for learning articulated by students in longitudinal focus group interviews. Conducted over a two-year period with 47 students from four Western Sydney schools, student metaphors for learning were diverse and wide-ranging, frequently reflecting strategic approaches to learning that aligned with requirements of high stakes exit exams. Significantly, student descriptions of themselves as exhausted, passive containers of impermanent learning were at odds with national and international policy and higher education constructions of learning as ‘lifelong and agentic’. This contradiction raises critical questions about students’ experiences of learning in schools, the role of teacher education, and re-direction of university equity programmes aimed at increasing access and participation for educationally marginalised students.
期刊介绍:
Critical Studies in Education is one of the few international journals devoted to a critical sociology of education, although it welcomes submissions with a critical stance that draw on other disciplines (e.g. philosophy, social geography, history) in order to understand ''the social''. Two interests frame the journal’s critical approach to research: (1) who benefits (and who does not) from current and historical social arrangements in education and, (2) from the standpoint of the least advantaged, what can be done about inequitable arrangements. Informed by this approach, articles published in the journal draw on post-structural, feminist, postcolonial and other critical orientations to critique education systems and to identify alternatives for education policy, practice and research.