Jo Lampert | Queensland University of Technology (original) (raw)

Papers by Jo Lampert

This paper focuses on specific tensions in relation to social justice and education, addressing t... more This paper focuses on specific tensions in relation to social justice and education, addressing the research question: How do early career teachers within high poverty schools reconcile their beliefs about social justice in the light of recent pressures put upon them to produce test-based outcomes for their students? The paper is underpinned by research on teacher education targeting poverty (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005) as well as critical analyses of what is now counted as equity and social justice, and how these changes are measured and re-articulated (Lingard, Sellar and Savage 2014). The theoretical positioning of the paper situates equity/social justice as mediated by a range of social, cultural and organizational contexts within high poverty schools.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education

A great deal of scholarship informs the idea that specific teacher preparation is required for wo... more A great deal of scholarship informs the idea that specific teacher preparation is required for working in high-poverty schools. Many teacher-education programs do not focus exclusively on poverty. However, a growing body of research emphasizes how crucial it is that teachers understand the backgrounds and communities in which young people and their families live, especially if they are to teach equitably, without bias, and with a critical understanding of historical educational disadvantage. Research on teacher education for high-poverty schools is largely associated with social-justice education and premised on two key assumptions. The first is that teachers do make a difference and should be encouraged to see themselves as agents of change. The second is that without nuanced knowledge of poverty and disadvantage, and especially its intersection with race, teachers are prepared as though all students and all communities have equal social advantage. Through targeted teacher educatio...

Social alternatives, 2003

... A white person can also gain cultural kudos also from claiming equal oppression, eg being Iri... more ... A white person can also gain cultural kudos also from claiming equal oppression, eg being Irish, Jewish, being a woman, having a disability...not only ... This, I think, is an issue that has rarely been taken up in white sources, and would certainly make me angry were I Indigenous. ...

Abstract: For teacher education, the challenge of engaging more deeply with community is about ri... more Abstract: For teacher education, the challenge of engaging more deeply with community is about righting imbalances and giving community members a voice in how those teaching their/our children will be prepared and informed. It involves a systemic shift in governance and power. This shift requires an institutionally embedded strategy to allow Indigenous, refugee and other historically vulnerable communities an audible voice at the decision-making table, in central rather than tokenistic ways. In this paper, we report on the early stages of a teacher education intervention based on the research question, ‘How can teacher education be done differently to represent the desires of families and communities most seldom heard?’

This chapter discusses fictional texts set in New York City soon after Septem- ber 11, 2001 (9/11... more This chapter discusses fictional texts set in New York City soon after Septem- ber 11, 2001 (9/11), or whose characters are affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center. Whereas these texts may not have been directly marketed at young adults, they all address ‘youth issues’. Each of the books discussed here contain or are focalized through the eyes of adolescent protagonists. They are all coming-of-age narratives in that the crises within them are usually a result of a catastrophe, taking the characters on journeys of self-discovery, which, once fulfilled, lead them back home.1 As Jerry Griswold (1992) has suggested, coming-of-age stories are especially well suited to the American psyche, and are already familiar to readers of literature based in New York City (the most familiar work being J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye). As with other clas- sic American young adult (YA) literature, the journey and homecoming com- monly associated with coming-of-age are often employed i...

This chapter examines the personal reflections and experiences of several pre-service and newly g... more This chapter examines the personal reflections and experiences of several pre-service and newly graduated teachers, including Kristie, who were involved in the NETDS program. Their documented professional journeys, which include descriptions of struggling when their privileged, taken-for-granted ways of being were destabilized, and grappling with tensions related to their own predispositions and values, are investigated in the context of Whiteness and privilege theory.

This paper explores the use of guided narrative reflection as a strategy used with high-achieving... more This paper explores the use of guided narrative reflection as a strategy used with high-achieving non-Indigenous pre-service teachers in Australia on teaching practicum. We suggest that reflections (and subsequent dialogue) can provide opportunities for non-Indigenous preservice teachers to re-think their beliefs and actions in ways that may intervene in the teaching that often causes educational disadvantage for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

Understanding Sociological Theory for Educational Practices

Critical Studies in Education

In this Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration, we examine discourses of ‘community engagement’ ... more In this Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration, we examine discourses of ‘community engagement’ in Australia’s blueprint education policy, Through Growth to Achievement: The Report of The Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools. While the report addresses the education sector widely rather than being specifically directed towards Indigenous education, as a significant equity-oriented text it is accountable for responding to the educational inequities that so greatly impact Indigenous students and communities. We begin this paper by reviewing some of the complex historical meanings in educational policy assumed through the term community engagement, followed by an analysis of how Australia’s non-Indigenous policy writers have historically constructed Indigenous identities and communities. Drawing on Carol Bacchi’s poststructural policy discourse analysis, ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ we explore the taken-for-granted assumptions about who and what ‘community’ means including what cause and effect benefits are assumed from community engagement. We propose that colonial legacies are still present in the way ‘community engagement’ is defined in this influential report and advocate for a policy disruption that utilises Indigenous definitions of community and community engagement.

Frontiers in Education

In this paper we explore how we are using the principles of two-way learning in a collaboration b... more In this paper we explore how we are using the principles of two-way learning in a collaboration between two academics coming from different worldviews: an Australian First Nations scholar and a White, non-Indigenous scholar working together to promote First Nations Australian perspectives into the curriculum. This collaboration involves supporting each other, learning from each other, opening each other's hearts and minds to each other's worldviews. We act as each other's mentors at different times, we are each other's translators, have each other's backs, and see each other as equals with different views to offer in order to create critical and sustainable change in all areas of education.

Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education

ABSTRACT This paper provides three case studies of initiatives developed to improve educational o... more ABSTRACT This paper provides three case studies of initiatives developed to improve educational opportunities in vulnerable urban communities. The cities in the three countries involved, Australia, the United States, and Spain, are different in many ways; however, each has persistent and entrenched inequalities between the educational opportunities and outcomes of historically marginalised students and their mainstream counterparts. Here, we focus on conceptualising and describing urban examples of poverty from three different countries, and reporting on programs and strategies aimed at enhancing the quality of teaching in schools in high-poverty areas. By providing and comparing the three cases, we aim to contribute to broader understandings of poverty in three locations and how teachers and schools in high-poverty urban settings can re-think their practices.

Australasian Journal of Early Childhood

You can't have a partnership without a relationship, and you can't have a relationship without a ... more You can't have a partnership without a relationship, and you can't have a relationship without a conversation. You've got to have the conversation. Everything starts here.

The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 1996

The goals of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy (AEP), the recom... more The goals of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy (AEP), the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the broader implications of the High Court's Native Title decision place considerable pressure on the higher education system to move rapidly to achieve equity in access, participation and outcomes for Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians.

Faculty of Education Faculty of Health, 1987

Office of Education Research Faculty of Education School of Cultural Language Studies in Education, Apr 15, 2012

This Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools (ETDS) project sets out to design a new model... more This Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools (ETDS) project sets out to design a new model of Australian teacher education responding to recent demands for quality education in low SES and disadvantaged schools. The project moves teacher education from the ‘missionary’ (Larabee, 2010) or deficit (Comber and Kamler 2004; Flessa, 2007) approaches, towards a focus on notions of quality and academic excellence. Rice (2008, p.1) argues for a need to place more of the “very best teachers into the most challenging schools”, yet the problem is not merely one of training more teachers, for disadvantaged schools already receive disproportionate numbers of beginning teachers (Connell, 1994; Vickers & Ferfolja, 2006). Rather, Grossman and Loeb (2010, p. 245) argue the problem centers on the common practice of “[p]lacing the least experienced teachers with the most needy students”. This paper reports on the first year trial of the project. The ETDS project is at present, the only mainstream Australian teacher education model that targets cohorts of academically high achieving pre-service teachers with the overt aim of preparing graduates of the program to teach in disadvantaged schools. At the end of its first year, the ETDS program graduated 20 new teachers, each of whom had over the previous 18 months engaged with a specialized curriculum and carefully monitored/scaffolded practicum placements in disadvantaged schools around Brisbane, Australia.

Office of Education Research Faculty of Education School of Cultural Language Studies in Education, 2008

This paper analyses two American picture books about 9/11 to examine how children are instructed ... more This paper analyses two American picture books about 9/11 to examine how children are instructed to perform as 'good citizens' since 9/11. An exploration of the complicated ways multiculturalism emerges in these books suggests that unity (and Whiteness) is privileged in these texts despite their proclaimed belief in harmony and diversity.