Evaluating sociocultural influences affecting participation and understanding of academic support services and programs (SSPs): Impacts on notions of attrition, retention, and success in higher education
- Authors: Weuffen, Sara , Fotinatos, Nina , Andrews, Tulsa
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory and Practice Vol. 23, no. 1 (2021), p. 118-138
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- Description: While no major change in relation to student attrition and retention data has been recorded over the past 20 years, the increasingly neoliberal agenda imposed on Australian higher education institutions has led to increased scrutiny around such data. In this case study, we explore discourses of attrition and retention to understand better the unique needs of students, and influences of targeted student support programs, as they transition to a regional higher education learning environment. We applied a mixed methods approach via a poststructuralist lens to identify frequency of nodes in relation to dimensions of the Kahu’s conceptual framework of engagement, antecedents and consequences model and present staff (n=6) and student (n=7) perceptions about the tangible value of knowledge, engagement, participation, and reportable outcomes of student support programs. Our findings indicate that staff tend to view student support programs from deficit discourses, whereas students view them as empowering. © The Author(s) 2018.
Surveying the landscape five years on : An examination of how teachers, and the teaching of Australia's shared-history, is constructed within Australian academic literature
- Authors: Weuffen, Sara
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Teaching and Teacher Education Vol. 78, no. (2019), p. 117-124
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- Description: The purpose of this paper is to conduct a literature review of academic debates relating to the Australian Curriculum: History (ACH), in particular subjective constructions of teachers, and the teaching of Australian History and Aboriginal peoples' and Torres Strait Islanders’ histories. The literature reviewed from a socio-political lens, examines functions of power/knowledge operating in discourses of education to illuminate how teachers, Aboriginal peoples, and Torres Strait Islanders, take up and/or resist subjectivities constructing them. Drawing from the toolbox of post-structuralism, this literature review troubles the notion of the non-Indigenous perspective as dominant, and the teacher as an active, non-critical participant in the process.