[csaa-forum] NDP seminar series at UWS Bankstown

[Cristyn Davies]

NDP research seminar program

The research activity of the NDP within the School of Education at UWS centres on issues of narrative and discourse analysis, especially as applied to research with pedagogical implications. Though located in education and focused on pedagogy, the research activity undertaken by members of the NDP deals with broader issues of governmentality, subjection and subjectivity. It therefore has implications for, and makes links with, other disciplines, such as Cultural Studies and the Humanities. This seminar series, whilst shaped around the thematics of narrative, discourse and pedagogy, aims to address a range of broader theoretical and methodological issues through engagement with cross- and mutli-disciplinary academics from within UWS and other tertiary institutions. 

Both staff and students are encouraged to attend. Please keep the following date free to attend further seminars: 26th July, 16th August, 27th September, 25th October (all Wednesdays between 4-6 pm).

Wednesday 26th July 2006, 4 - 6 pm, Building 23, Conference room 1, UWS Bankstown campus


'Coaching and training: an ethnographic analysis of student commuting on Sydney’s rail system'

Colin Symes
(School of Education, Macquarie University)

Public transport systems in Australia receive extensive subsidies from state governments to facilitate the movement of students to and from schools. During the educational peak hours, students on their way to and from school dominate the age demographics of buses and trains. Policies of de-zoning plus the drift to private sector schooling have increased the numbers of students commuting each day. The logistics involved on the part of transport services and the students themselves, are often taken for granted and their ‘educational’ significance under appreciated. Employing the ideas of Augé, Schivelbusch, Lefebvre, de Certeau and Urry, this paper investigates the ‘displacement’ practices of students as they travel to and from school on the Sydney rail network, particularly that part of it serving the city’s inner west, where a number of large, high status, single-sex private schools are located. It is argued that these students form closed micro-communities, mostly ‘quarantined’ from other commuters, for the passage of their journeys, in which a range of social and educational activities are exhibited and enacted. 

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*Colin Symes teaches at Macquarie University. He is a co-editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education. His most recent book Setting the record straight: a material history of classical music, published by Wesleyan University Press, was a recipient in 2005 of a Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Recent articles of his have appeared in Teaching in Higher Education, British Journal of Music Education, Popular Music and Discourse. He has just completed with Kalervo Gulson, an edited collection for Routledge entitled Education and the spatial turn.     


Disparate Bodies: The Role of the Teacher in Contemporary Pedagogic Practice.
Megan Watkins
(School of Education, UWS)

The teacher’s body has a dubious status within contemporary pedagogic practice. The impact of progressivism in many western countries, with its emphasis on student-centred learning, has resulted in a marginalisation of the teacher’s role in many classrooms. While its influence appears to be waning, in Australian primary schools, student-centred methodologies such as group-based and independent learning tend to dominate classroom practice. Relegated to the role of facilitator the teacher’s overall presence and bodily impact in classrooms has been greatly reduced. Drawing on a study of the practice of two kindergarten teachers in two schools in Sydney, Australia, this article will examine the ways in which they embody pedagogic space, the regimen they create and the techniques they employ in teaching their students how to write. In a sense the title Disparate Bodies has a dual focus. Not only does it relate to the different ways in which the two teachers deploy their bodies in the classroom, it also refers to the differential embodiment of their students which results from the affects that their teachers’ pedagogies engender.

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Megan Watkins is Lecturer in Literacy and Pedagogy in the School of Education at the University of Western Sydney. She has co-authored the book Genre, Text, Grammar: Technologies for Teaching and Assessing Writing. Sydney: UNSW Press and has recent articles appearing in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies and Discourse: The Cultural Politics of Education.  Her research interests are in the areas of pedagogy, desire and embodiment. 

  


Cristyn Davies 
Research Officer
Narrative, Discourse and Pedagogy Research Concentration 
University of Western Sydney-
Bankstown AUSTRALIA 
Ph. 61 2 9772 6784 
Fax. 61 2 9772 6738 
Email: c.m.davies at uws.edu.au 







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