Education Heresies colloquia 2011-2012 - Colloquium Six

Colloquium Six – does the new doxa of integrationism make multicultural education a contemporary heresy?

The Education Heresies series features leading education scholars and practitioners, speaking out on how educational research, policy and practice need to be challenged and transformed. Contemporary education is a contested field, influenced by agenda that go beyond quality teaching and learning, community building and equality of access and outcomes. The place of education in the national and international marketplace; the standardisation of education materials and standards in the face of increasing cultural and linguistic diversity; 'choice' in public and private schooling; the institutional taming or liberation of the transformative potential of digital; and online technologies are among the issues traversing and disrupting Australian education. Historically, challenges to the deep grammar of prevailing orthodoxies have been branded 'heretical'. This colloquium series invites leading educators to release their inner heretic. It presents opportunities to debate and challenge the prevailing orthodoxies as they are realised every day in policy, curriculum, pedagogy and research in and out of educational institutions. It is a forum in which we acknowledge that recognising deep disagreement on big issues is a necessary accompaniment to developing productive ways forward.

Presenter
Professor Georgina Tsolidis is program coordinator of Master of Education studies at the University of Ballarat. Her areas of expertise are international education; gender and schooling; multicultural education; and culture- and gender-inclusive pedagogies. Her books include Youthful imagination - schooling, subcultures and social justice. She has extensive experience supervising students at honours, master and doctoral level, in particular, theses related to gender studies, multicultural and international education.

Discussant
Dr Megan Watkins is a senior lecturer in the University of Western Sydney's School of Education and researcher with the Institute for Culture and Research at that university. Her research interests lie in the cultural analysis of education and the formation of human subjectivities. These interests mesh with her exploration of the impact of cultural diversity on education and the ways in which different cultural practices can engender divergent habits and dispositions to learning. She is a recipient of two Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkages grants: "Rethinking Multiculturalism/ Reassessing Multicultural Education and Discipline" and "Diversity: Cultural Practices and Dispositions of Learning".

Other presentations in this series

• Colloquium One - you don't know what you've got until it's gone: moments in time for public education
• Colloquium Two - how to kill school spirit: testing times
• Colloquium Three - systems failure: social inclusion as a remedy, or why global policies fail disengaged young people at the local level
• Colloquium Four - schools not fit for purpose: new schools for the times
• Colloquium Five - are markets good for education?
• Colloquium Seven - knowledge-blindness: how educational research neglects the basis of education

RSVP to this event

Time: 5-6.30pm

Location: LT 351, Education Building

Cost: FREE but RSVP is essential

Contact: Patrick Brownlee

Phone: +61 2 9351 2616

Email: 3f1745220b36216d16003e01282d1c0e38030e013e210f76012e2c7a2927