Other by Louise G Phillips
Performing Lines: Innovations in walking and sensory research methodologies is an International r... more Performing Lines: Innovations in walking and sensory research methodologies is an International research project with a goal to create a collaborative network and partnership between artists, arts organizations, activists, scholars and educators interested in walking, movement, and sensory knowledge.
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Papers by Louise G Phillips
Children’s attention to sensuous and affective qualities of nature-matter affordances and constra... more Children’s attention to sensuous and affective qualities of nature-matter affordances and constraints is the focus of this chapter, along with related possibilities for movement, learning and thought. An eco-aesthetic account of ChildhoodNature touch is developed in relation to Barad’s quantum physics-informed theory of agential realism. By this account, all particles are entangled in the void, so that every degree of touch is touched by all possible others. Encounters of ChildhoodNature touch are drawn from the author’s lived experiences of child-led walks in Chiang Mai, Thailand. These are performative walks from ‘The Walking Neighbourhood Hosted by Children’ project, in which arts workers supported primary school aged children to locate places of connection in urban landscapes for curating and leading walks as public performance. Sensory ethnographic attention to the encounters were privileged due to limited mutual language sharing. The eco-aesthetics of ChildhoodNature touch encounters in three child-led walks of Chiang Mai are storied from the author’s lived encounters to invite “possibilities of engaging the force of imagination in its materiality” (Barad, 2012, p. 216). Poetics and storying are purposefully offered to entice readers to imagine sensing the insensible – the indeterminacy of the entanglement of matter. By doing this, experiences of childhood connections with nature can be (re)imagined, foregrounding the affect of eco-aesthetics in provoking appreciation and care for the entangled other.
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Space and Culture, 2017
Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders vehemently enforces closed borders to asylum-seekers arri... more Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders vehemently enforces closed borders to asylum-seekers arriving by boat to Australia. Policed urban-borders were enforced in Brisbane, Australia during the G20 Summit in 2014, to protect visiting dignitaries from potential violent protest. The ephemeral arts intervention Walking Borders: Arts activism for refugee and asylum seeker rights symbolically confronted border politics by peacefully protesting against Australian immigration policy. Rather than focussing on the direct effects of the ephemeral arts intervention, this article attends to the affective workings of the aesthetic elements of the project through sensory ethnography and storying. Informed by Ranciere’s aesthetics of politics, this article explores the affective experience and potential educative gains of the ethical turn attended to in participatory arts such as ephemeral arts interventions.
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Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 2017
Civics and citizenship are increasingly used in early childhood education policy, but what citize... more Civics and citizenship are increasingly used in early childhood education policy, but what citizenship and civic learning can be for young children is under-researched and lacking definition. Drawing from the Australian findings of the major study Civic Action and Learning with Young Children: Comparing Approaches in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States this article shares evidence of civic capacities that a community of young Aboriginal Australian children demonstrate in an early childhood education and care centre. Communitarian citizenship theory provides a framework for citizenship that is accessible for young children by focussing on families, communities and neighbourhoods. Cultural readings of illustrative examples of how young Aboriginal children express civic identity, collective responsibility, civic agency, civic deliberation and civic participation are discussed highlighting how cultural values shape civic action. Links to state and national early childhood curricula are provided to guide others to further support civic learning in early childhood education. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge and graciously thank the custodians and community members of Wakka Wakka Country for welcoming the research team into their community to enter the worlds of their beautiful children.
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Early Child Development and Care , 2016
Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand,... more Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand, Australia and the US, we consider some of the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and collectively pursue ideas and things that are important to the group. We use an example from each country and apply the work of Rancière and Arendt to think about collectivity as civic action in young children's schooling lives. Play, rather than an act itself, is positioned here as political time and space that make such civic action possible in the everyday lives of children. We argue here that play is the most common (and endangered) time and space in which children act for the collective.
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Young people are largely excluded from consultation and contribution to government decision-makin... more Young people are largely excluded from consultation and contribution to government decision-making. Both Australia and New Zealand are signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and are obliged to honour children’s rights to freely express their views in all matters affecting them.
However, neither country has mandated mechanisms to ensure children’s views are heard within their civic institutions. Western models for citizenship participation have been designed by, and for, adults. The default position in social and political theory is to disregard children altogether, or to consider them as learner-citizens.
To understand what the public thinks about children’s political participation, we commissioned a question to be added to the 2016 Australian and New Zealand versions of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP).
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How can parents best help their children with their schooling without actually doing it for them?... more How can parents best help their children with their schooling without actually doing it for them? This article is part of our series on Parents’ Role in Education, focusing on how best to support learning from early childhood to Year 12.
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A recent surge in private companies offering “skill and drill” school-readiness programs has been... more A recent surge in private companies offering “skill and drill” school-readiness programs has been likened to “kindy bootcamps” by the media.
These programs typically run for one hour a week (with fees in the range of A$40 an hour) for small groups of around five children aged between two and five.
The programs are often housed within companies that also offer tutoring to school-age children. They are not regulated or accredited, as child care, preschool and kindergarten full-time programs are.
Parents with disposable incomes seem to be seeking out these add-on programs to ease their anxieties about their child’s future academic achievement and competitive entry into elite schools.
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This thesis inquires into possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship as provoked throu... more This thesis inquires into possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship as provoked through a practice of social justice storytelling with one Preparatory class of children aged five to six years. The inquiry was practitioner-research, through a living educational theory approach cultivating an interrelational view of existing with others in evolving processes of creation. Ideas of young children‘s active citizenship were provoked and explored through storytelling, by a storytelling teacher-researcher, a Prep class of children and their teacher. The three major foci of the study were practice, narrative and action. A series of storytelling workshops with a Prep class was the practice that was investigated. Each workshop began with a story that made issues of social justice visible, followed by critical discussion of the story, and small group activities to further explore the story. The focus on narrative was based on the idea of story as a way knowing. Stories were used to explore social justice issues with young children. Metanarratives of children and citizenship were seen to influence possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship. Stories were purposefully shared to provoke and promote young children‘s active citizenship through social actions. It was these actions that were the third focus of the study. Through action research, a social justice storytelling practice and the children‘s responses to the stories were reflected on both in action and after. These reflections informed and shaped storytelling practice. Learning in a practice of social justice storytelling is explained through living theories of social justice storytelling as pedagogy. Data of the children‘s participation in the study were analysed to identify influences and possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship creating a living theory of possibilities for young children‘s active citizenship.
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Rattler, 1999
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A B S T R A C T Mobile devices, such as iPads, are described as supporting 'anywhere, anytime' le... more A B S T R A C T Mobile devices, such as iPads, are described as supporting 'anywhere, anytime' learning by enabling students to move fluidly between at-school and beyond-school contexts. However, research on mobile digital tools in schools has largely been preoccupied with issues of design and implementation rather than with how mobile devices transform the nature of learning per se, and the identities of students both at school and beyond. In this paper, we draw on Bakhtin to explore the dialogical self-making of iPad-using students as they take up and resist various identities mediated by these cultural tools. Our focus requires a research methodology that accounts for the fluid nature of identity, and considers digital tools as mediational means deployed by students in knowledge-making as well as self-making. We illustrate how Bakhtin's view of the self as inherently dialogic – 'I-for-myself', 'I-for-the-other' and 'the-other-for-me' – provides insight into how and why particular identities are taken up or rejected by students in the fluid movement between lifeworlds at school and beyond. We adopt a reflexive microethnographic research approach to capture the identity work undertaken by iPad-using students in a high school where everyone in Year 11 and Year 12 had received iPads to assist with their learning. In this paper, we report our in-depth analysis of one student, Phoebe, whose self-making shifts in nuanced and subtle ways in relation to the device. We see Phoebe deploy the iPad to render a dialogical version of who she is and might become, comparing herself across time to her past and future selves as well as in relation to others in her social world. Our analysis makes visible how Phoebe negotiated and traversed the challenges of relational self-making, both in relation to iPads and to others—including the dynamic multiplicity of her own voices. In this way, we demonstrate how a Bakhtinian perspective can be theoretically and methodologically responsive to the fluidity and complexity of twenty-first century learning and learning contexts.
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In J. Gillett-Swan & V. Coppock (Eds.), Children’s Rights, Educational Research and the UNCRC; Past, present and future, 2016
Article 42 of the CRC asserts that 'States Parties undertake to make the principles and provision... more Article 42 of the CRC asserts that 'States Parties undertake to make the principles and provisions of the Convention widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike'. Yet since the ratification of the CRC in 1989, the CRC is not widely known to children and adults. Public discourses of children and childhood are considered as key hindrances to widespread promotion of the CRC. Significant actions that have taken place since 1989 to promote the CRC internationally and nationally are mapped, noting gaps, missed opportunities and possible explanations for neglect in the promotion of the CRC. To move forward in honouring children's rights through the CRC being widely known, possible awakenings in practice and policy are proposed.
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Global Studies of Childhood, 2013
In March 2012, Contact Inc., a community cultural development organization based in Brisbane, Aus... more In March 2012, Contact Inc., a community cultural development organization based in Brisbane, Australia, launched the project ‘Walking Neighbourhood: hosted by children’. This project sought to engage young people in the negotiation of a large urban space, as well as provoke an awareness of child actualization by challenging existing understandings of the role young people play as active citizens. By asking a group of children, aged between eight and twelve, to navigate their way through a large urban space and subsequently lead a curated tour of this space for groups of participant adults, Walking Neighbourhood unsettled existing notions of child safety, the place of children within the city and assumptions surrounding young people as cognizant, active citizens. This article will explore the implications of the Walking Neighbourhood project and how renewed understandings of young people’s capacities to navigate urban spaces as active citizens might form.
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English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 2014
Current educational reform, policy and public discourse emphasise standardisation of testing, cur... more Current educational reform, policy and public discourse emphasise standardisation of testing, curricula and professional practice, yet the landscape of literacy practices today is fluid, interactive, multimodal, ever-changing, adaptive and collaborative. How then can English and literacy educators negotiate these conflicting terrains? The nature of today’s literacy practices is reflected in a concept of living texts which refers to experienced events and encounters that offer meaning-making that is fluid, interactive and changing. Literacy learning possibilities with living texts are described and discussed by the authors who independently investigated the place of living texts across two distinctly different learning contexts: a young people’s community arts project and a co-taught multiliteracies project in a high school. In the community arts project, young people created living texts as guided walks of urban spaces that adapt and change to varying audiences. In the multiliteracies project, two parents and a teacher created interactive spaces through co-teaching and cogenerative dialoguing. These spaces generate living texts that yield a purposefully connected curriculum rich in community-relevant and culturally significant texts. These two studies are shared with a view of bringing living texts into literacy education to loosen rigidity in standardisation.
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Curriculum Perspectives, 2016
Australia is a signatory to United Nations legislation that requires state parties to educate chi... more Australia is a signatory to United Nations legislation that requires state parties to educate children and young people about human rights, through human rights and for human rights. To assess how Australian curricula address human rights education, evidence of key civil, political, social and cultural rights relevant to children’s lives was sought through curricula analysis of the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia and the Australian Curriculum (Foundation to Year 10). References to ‘rights’ were searched for and surrounding content read for relevance and implications. Illustrative quotes from the curricula documents were analysed for inferences pertaining to prioritisation and interpretation of civil, political, social and cultural rights and to how children and young people are positioned as rights holders and claimers in education in Australia. Significant discrepancies were found between the Early Years Learning Framework and the Australian Curriculum, conveying incongruent messages to children as to how, when and where they can be rights holders and claimers, along with signalling wide gaps in rights education. Propositions are thus offered for how continuity in education about, through and for human rights could be sustained from the early years and then throughout schooling.
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Storytelling, Self, Society, 2012
Recently, young children have begun to be recognized as active citizens of their world. Stories h... more Recently, young children have begun to be recognized as active citizens of their world. Stories have a great capacity to explain and explore the world through sensuous and poetic knowing. Based on these understandings, the author investigated how her practice as a storyteller with a class of five-six-year-old children might provoke and promote the children's active citizenship. This article explains teaching and learning through a practice of social justice storytelling that highlights significant motifs and some folktales that reflect these motifs. It provides a living theory of social justice storytelling as pedagogy that can serve as a model for others to enhance their living practices and theorizing of practice.
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In J. Davis & S. Elliott (Eds.), Research in early childhood education for sustainability: International perspectives and provocations, 2014
Framed within communitarianism, this chapter explores possibilities for young children's active p... more Framed within communitarianism, this chapter explores possibilities for young children's active participation in the sustainability of Earth and its inhabitants, via attention to the interdependence of natural, social, economic and political systems. How embedded social and political structures limit and control the scope of children's participation is brought to the fore, with insights from two studies offering possibilities for adult practices to work with children to circumnavigate barriers to children's participation. In particular, possibilities for innovations in pedagogy in early childhood education for sustainability are discussed. One study explored a living theory of storytelling pedagogy, whilst another study investigated the scope of public pedagogy to cultivate shifts in social perceptions of children and citizenship. Data from both studies demonstrate that children want to be active citizens. They want to do 'real things', which challenges the metanarrative of young children existing in worlds of play, domesticity, and school. The ideas discussed alert educators, policy makers and community workers to the complexities that surround notions of young children's active citizenship and provide guidelines for practice to open doors to the breadth of possibilities for young children's inclusion in civic participation for sustainability.
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In W. Midgley, P. Danaher & M. Baguley (Eds.), The Role of Participants in Education Research: Ethics, Epistemologies, and Methods, 2012
Sociological research is filled with quandaries and tensions that need to be negotiated, especiall... more Sociological research is filled with quandaries and tensions that need to be negotiated, especially where the research purpose is to gain an inside and interrelational perspective. Such a perspective embraces a level of intimacy in the co-construction and analysis of data that requires researchers to engage with not just their voices but also the voice/s of the participant/s. If social studies are about educating citizens for a democratic society, Johnston (2006) argues that research methodologies as well as teaching should include democratic processes.
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In W. Midgley, P. Danaher & M. Oliver (Eds.) Echoes: Ethics and Issues of Voice in Education Research, 2014
Children have been the focus of studies dating back to the start of the twentieth century (Hendri... more Children have been the focus of studies dating back to the start of the twentieth century (Hendrick, 2003), but they have largely been positioned as objects of inquiry (Christensen & James, 2008; Tisdall, Davis, & Gallagher, 2009; Wyness, 2006). A scientific approach to research which positions humans as objects is dehumanising, and has not only occurred for children but unfortunately many marginalised groups, with historical examples of extremely abhorrent ethical violations.
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Geographical Research, 2016
Recent times have witnessed global trends of increased protection toward children in public space... more Recent times have witnessed global trends of increased protection toward children in public spaces. The participatory arts project The Walking Neighbourhood hosted by Children renegotiates child agency in public spaces by inviting primary school aged children to curate and lead adult audiences on walks of local neighbourhoods. Multiple cities across Australia, Asia and Europe have hosted The Walking Neighbourhood since 2012. This article focuses on one aspect of that initiative: the Australian-Thai research collaboration for the Chiang Mai child-hosted walks. Through storytelling, the Australian and Thai authors share their sensorial ethno-graphic encounters of two child-led walks in Chiang Mai to provide lived sensorial affective accounts of children's perceptions and engagement with public spaces. These stories demonstrate how the project provides education for children's independently mobile engagement with their neighbourhoods and public spaces, in that the children competently managed responsibility for their adult audiences, and embraced responsibility for sharing their emplaced connections with a neighbourhood locale. Through participatory arts practice, artists, child hosts, and adult audience members co-construct and interpret exploratory walks of local neighbourhoods to enable enhanced independent mobilities for children, challenging the norms that assert controlled childhoods. Such interdisciplinary, intergenerational and intercultural experiences can enable reconceptualisation of children and public spaces and new realities for civic engagement and learning for all.
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Other by Louise G Phillips
Papers by Louise G Phillips
However, neither country has mandated mechanisms to ensure children’s views are heard within their civic institutions. Western models for citizenship participation have been designed by, and for, adults. The default position in social and political theory is to disregard children altogether, or to consider them as learner-citizens.
To understand what the public thinks about children’s political participation, we commissioned a question to be added to the 2016 Australian and New Zealand versions of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP).
These programs typically run for one hour a week (with fees in the range of A$40 an hour) for small groups of around five children aged between two and five.
The programs are often housed within companies that also offer tutoring to school-age children. They are not regulated or accredited, as child care, preschool and kindergarten full-time programs are.
Parents with disposable incomes seem to be seeking out these add-on programs to ease their anxieties about their child’s future academic achievement and competitive entry into elite schools.
However, neither country has mandated mechanisms to ensure children’s views are heard within their civic institutions. Western models for citizenship participation have been designed by, and for, adults. The default position in social and political theory is to disregard children altogether, or to consider them as learner-citizens.
To understand what the public thinks about children’s political participation, we commissioned a question to be added to the 2016 Australian and New Zealand versions of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP).
These programs typically run for one hour a week (with fees in the range of A$40 an hour) for small groups of around five children aged between two and five.
The programs are often housed within companies that also offer tutoring to school-age children. They are not regulated or accredited, as child care, preschool and kindergarten full-time programs are.
Parents with disposable incomes seem to be seeking out these add-on programs to ease their anxieties about their child’s future academic achievement and competitive entry into elite schools.
Providing rich and interesting coverage of the approaches to the field of storying research from Aboriginal and white Australian perspectives, this text seeks to enable a profound understanding of the significance of stories and storying. This book will prove valuable for scholars, students and practitioners who seek to develop alternate and creative contributions to the production of knowledge.