EEP101 - Philosophical and Social Contexts of Education
Assessment item 1
Investigation of an Equity Issue
Value: 50%
Due Date: 05-Sep-2018
Return Date: 27-Sep-2018
Length: XXXXXXXXXX
Submission method options: EASTS (online)
Task
The purpose of this assessment is for students to investigate an equity issue by drawing on their understandings of the first six topics of EEP101 subject content.
Stage 1: The task requires each student to identify an equity issue that is relevant to the young children and/or families and to Early Childhood and/or Primary professionals. Students need to identify how the equity issue is relevant to Australian Government policy aims and objectives.
The equity issue needs to relate specifically to one of the topics covered in weeks 3 to 6 : social class, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, or rurality. After students have identified the equity issue, this needs to be confirmed with your subject coordinator. You must submit a maximum 500 word document outlining a description of the issue, and its relevance to policy and families/students and teaching professionals (see assessment 1 ru
ic). This submission should be emailed directly to your subject coordinator ( XXXXXXXXXX). This submission should be referenced to provide an indication of your early research. The subject coordinator will then provide feedback and permission to proceed with your selected topic. This stage of your assessment is worth 10 marks. The final date for submission of Stage 1 is Wednesday 15 August 2018.
This stage of your assessment should include the following (a template will be provided by your subject coordinator):
- Statement of the equity issue
- Briefly evidence the equity issue
- What is know about the impact of the issue on children and families/consequences of the issue
- Connection to Australian Government policy aims and objectives
- Identification of relevant sociological theory to your topic
Read
Textbook: Connell et. al XXXXXXXXXXChapter 6 Cultural Difference and Identity
Reference:
Welch, A., Vickers, R. Connell, N. Mockler, A. Sriprakash, H. Proctor, D. Hayes, D. Foley, M. Vickers, N. Bagnall, K. Burns, R. Low, S. Groundwater-Smith (2018). Education, change, and society. 4th Edition. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
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PowerPoint Presentation
EEP101
EEP418
Lecture 5a
Ethnicity
Lecture Overview
Terminology
Distinguishing between race and ethnicity
A
ief of history of race in Australia
Racism and institutionalised racism
Critical Race Theory (CRT) and White Privilege
How race and ethnicity plays out in schools
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are a
anging their prejudices”
(William James, XXXXXXXXXX)
Terminology
Othering: Determining the membership or our own social groups, and its boundaries, by deciding who we are not. Othering is about deciding who is in and who is out and why.
Ethnocentrism: Viewing others from our own cultural perspective, with an implied sense of cultural superiority based on an inability to understand or accept the practices and beliefs of other cultures.
Prejudice: A hostile attitude towards a person from another group based solely upon their membership of that group.
Stereotyping: When a group becomes characterised without regard for individual difference
Scapegoating: A group blamed for all problems. This is associated with both stereotyping and victim-blaming. The victims of the system are blamed for the problems within it.
Discrimination: When members of particular groups are denied equal treatment, based solely on their membership of that group.
Race and Ethnicity
Race: A term without scientific basis that uses skin colour and facial features to describe what are alleged to be biologically distinct groups of humans. Race is actually a social construction used to categorise groups of people and sometimes implies assumed (and unproven) intellectual superiority or inferiority.
Race as a social construct
Race as a discursive system
Race as relational
Ethnicity: While often used as a synonym for race, it is built around an entirely different logic. There are no necessary biological components to ethnicity as there are with race. Ethnic classification is based on social factors such as nationality, culture, religion, and language
Australia and Race (A
ief history)
In Australia, there is arguably a long historical legacy of racism, evident since colonisation, that underpins racial and ethnic discrimination today.
We need to acknowledge the way that ‘whiteness’ functions throughout Australia’s colonialist history as a signifier of social worth and how ‘race’ and ‘whiteness’ have played an ongoing role in the politics of contemporary Australia
The legacy of racial violence, social exclusion and structural disadvantage in Australia is extensive and is evidenced by:
Massacres of Indigenous people during colonisation
The genocide of Aboriginal Tasmanians
The ‘White Australia’ policy – introduced in 1901 as the first act of parliament
The ‘Stolen Generation’ of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families and communities
The large number of deaths in custody and imprisonment of Aboriginal people
Mandatory detention of boat people since 1989
Racism and Government Policy
Colonial Australia
Having British heritage was considered a measure of social merit
Social merit (to a degree) could also be earned via conformity to the dominant social group (the ‘white’ British) in custom, habits and manners
White Australia
Whiteness became enshrined as a political and social ideal when the ‘White Australia’ policy was introduced
Immigration was restricted to people of certain countries (mainly Europe) and largely excluding non-Europeans – with a dominant belief at the time that only Europeans could adequately understand the concept of democracy and that keeping Australian society ‘racially pure’ would best protect its democratic ideals
This policy stayed in place until 1966 when Australia signed the United Nations Convention to eliminate racial discrimination however many scholars argue that it has continued in the immigration detention policies that have continued with relation to asylum seekers and refugees
Multicultural Australia
During the Whitlam era, and later under the Fraser government ,there was increased attention towards multiculturalism and efforts to ensure that migrants had adequate legal rights and services in making the transition to Australian life
During the 1980’s multiculturalism was the target of funding cuts under the Hawke government cutting funding to ESL and other language programs in schools. This resulted in considerable public protest which resulted in the reformation of some of the programs however the government had arguably already demonstrated that issues of minority ethnic groups were expendable by ‘White’ government bureaucracies
Post 9/11 Australia
A renewed emphasis on non-white minority ethnic groups as a potential ‘threat’ to national security and cultural hegemony in Australia
Most pronounced in Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, many of whom have been displaced from their countries of origin due to the ‘war on te
or’ – of which Australia continues to be a part of
Must be considered as connected to, rather than separate to, racist policies of the past
6
Racism
It involves the belief that humanity can be organised in various groups – races – and that these groups can be ranked according to achievement and worth. In essence, it is the belief that some groups are inherently – biologically – inferior to other groups
Abuse, violence, discrimination, rejection on the basis of assumed differences from the dominant group
For minority groups, this may be throughout their lives, within and outside school
Name-calling, teasing, ve
al abuse, exclusion from activities, violence, assumptions of difference, ‘jokes’, stereotypes are all racism – common in schools but often little is done
Institutional Racism
Where the system acts to discriminate – in schools - testing, content, structures, pedagogy, power….
Organisation of schools
Cu
iculum
Standardised testing
“The distinctive feature of racist thinking is not hatred, what sets it off from other thinking is that it justifies policies and institutional priorities that perpetuate racial inequality” (Wellham, 2001, 164).
When thinking about whether policies and institutions are racist, we need to look beyond their stated intents to their lived effects.
Critical Race Theory
Critical race theory has been used by educators to examine how race and ethnicity can be implicit in unequal power relationships between teachers and their students by examining the normalised practices of privileged white teachers who teach students unlike themselves.
The ideas of critical race theory provide a useful ways for pre-service and practicing teachers to critique their own cultural positioning, how they view their students, and more significantly, how they become responsible for their actions.
A key element of critical race theory is examining privilege.
Teachers can gain a better understanding of how educational policy, cu
iculum, pedagogy and other institutional school-based practices are developed and enacted in ways that are normalised by the dominant culture through critical race theory
The Invisibility of Whiteness and White Privilege
The fact that white people don’t see any issues of racism, sociologists argue, means that their ‘race’ is privileged and that they do not experience racism, since whiteness is the powerful position on the social hierarchy (Leonardo, 2004).
In this sense whiteness is invisible, meaning it is positioned as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’, as if every other racial identity is ‘different’ or ‘other’ (Roman, 1993).
When white privilege is the focus, it is possible to shed light on key deficit presumptions that have widespread impact on the quality of education frequently offered to children and young people in disadvantaged communites. For example, cultures of low expectations and how this is associated with race, ethnicity, and culture.
Race, Ethnicity and Schooling
Schooling is affected by
oader social contexts in positive and negative ways…
What are schools like as settings for the making of race and ethnicity; as places fostering racism or diversity?
The everyday practices, organisational procedures & discourses of school reproduce racial and ethnic inequalities – make people into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’
Educational Outcomes: Affect of Race and Ethnicity
Non-Anglo Celtic Ethnicity
Evidence suggests ethnicity plays a significant role in determining educational outcomes – although not clear cut.
Complex relationship between social class, gender, and ethnicity
Segregation according to public and private school enrolments
Indigenous students perform significantly below other ethnicities
Immigrants and Refugees
Australia is one of only four countries where immigrant students perform above the OECD average
The top 25% of immigrants perform better than the topic 25% of Australian-born students
The bottom 25% of immigrant students perform significantly worse than the bottom 25% of Australian born
Refugees struggle in our education system
Diversity is dynamic and enriching – something we could all benefit from…
The teacher who stands for equity…
Learns about how racial and ethnic discourses are used to position and regulate us and our students – how we police ourselves with the same discourses – we then might learn to construct oppositional discourses
It’s all about valuing multiple and diverse forms of race and ethnicity – trying to remain vigilant so that no one is disadvantaged or harassed on the basis of their racial and/or ethnic identities.
References
Ballantine, J.H. & Hammack, F,M XXXXXXXXXXThe Sociology of Education: A Systematic Analysis. Boston: Pearson.
Lampert, J., Burnett, B., and Morse, K XXXXXXXXXXDestabalising privilege: Disrupting deficit thinking in white pre-service teachers on field experience in culturally diverse, high poverty schools.