Abstracts – Session One
10:00 – 11:00 – 6EN – 516
Chair:Â Sandra Yellowhorse
Noah Romero: Unschooling Matter(s): Agential Realism, Decolonisation, and Critical Unschooling’s Messages for the Mainstream
This thesis presents a philosophical inquiry informed by new materialism to theorise how the study of critical unschooling might improve the learning experiences of black, indigenous, and person of colour (BIPOC) students in secondary schools. An umbrella term used to describe the decolonising self-directed education (SDE) praxes of BIPOC families, critical unschooling explicitly centres the learner-initiated pursuit of social justice, human rights, and environmental stewardship as the purpose and function of education and complicates dominant understandings of the contexts, conditions, and capacities of BIPOC youth. This thesis draws upon practitioner narratives to discern the assemblage of critical unschooling, or the aggregations of entangled material-discursive phenomena that define critical unschooling and distinguish it from other forms of alternative education (such as democratic schools, anarchist free schools, and the Steiner and Montessori methods). This analysis then informs conceptualisations of secondary schooling futures in which teaching and learning are extricated from such discourses as childism, heteropatriarchy, capitalist reproduction, segregation, socioeconomic stratification, and white supremacy. The goals of diffracting BIPOC secondary school experiences through the study of critical unschooling are therefore two-fold: 1) to demonstrate how decolonising and self-directed approaches to education transform affect economies which produce the material conditions of gendered and racialised oppression and 2) to theorise how secondary schooling can be transfigured to more explicitly develop the community-responsive competencies and orientations needed to reckon with the ongoing upheaval of established world orders and the precarity of existence itself.
Natasha Urale-Baker: A Pasifika Methodology – What do the songs utilised in the death and dying culture of Samoans in New Zealand tell us about Samoan culture in contemporary New Zealand?
The presence of Pasifika methodologies in the academic space is not only a response to colonisation but also supports the de-colonisation discourse. Such responses, anchored in the itulagi that is Pasifika, reflect an insistence that knowledge creation on/for Pasifika people must be done through ways of knowing originating from this fanua/whenua in the interest of social justice. In this presentation, I will focus on the methodology for my PhD studies, exploring songs in Samoan funerals in Aotearoa, New Zealand and also share some insights gleaned from the data collection, transcribing and translating phases of my research.
Liyun Wendy Choo: Photo-elicitation interviews: A participatory approach to social change
The use of visual research methods in social research has grown in popularity in recent years due to its participatory potential and the easy availability of imaging devices. For my PhD study on everyday citizenship in Myanmar, I employed photo-elicitation interviews (PEI) to explore the relationship between citizenship, social identities and physical spaces. In this presentation, I reflect on the value and limitations of adopting photo-elicitation interviews (PEI) for research concerned with social marginality, power and justice. I argue that PEI is a useful participatory technique that re-balances the power relations between the researcher and the researched, by allowing participants to interpret their realities in their own voices and take the lead in the interview process.