A longitudinal study on a place-based school-university partnership : listening to the voices of in-service teachers
- Authors: Ma, Hongming , Green, Monica
- Date: 2023
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Teaching and Teacher Education Vol. 129, no. (2023), p.
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- Description: This paper reports on a longitudinal place-based study by two Australian teacher educators investigating their three-year science-based school-university partnership. The study examined key benefits, challenges, and tensions within the partnership. Data collection was drawn from focus group interviews with in-service teachers across each partnership year. While findings portray the partnership as a catalyst for increased science learning opportunities for school students, teaching opportunities for pre-service teachers, and new in-service teacher roles and responsibilities, the study highlights the evolving nature of partnership development, including the need for continuous negotiation of labor division and stakeholder expectations. © 2023 The Authors
Cultivating whole-heartedness in the academy during a time of COVID : insights from/within an inter-collegial friendship
- Authors: Green, Monica , McClam, Sherie
- Date: 2023
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Reflections on Valuing Wellbeing in Higher Education : Reforming Our Acts of Self-care Chapter 9 p. 111-124
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- Description: This chapter explores how we, Sherie (American) and Monica (Australian), two feminist teacher educators and collaborators, used reflective dialogic exchanges to examine our academic lives during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The underpinning personal and emotional layers of our wholehearted conversations sit within our robust inter-collegial friendship, which offers us critical support and reminders about the importance of self-care/compassion in our navigation of academic complexities and obligations. The chapter is framed by three of Brene Brown’s ‘wholehearted’ provocations or prompts that we used to explore our respective lived COVID-19 experiences within the broader milieu of contemporary academia. The chapter concludes with insights about the ways in which collegial friendships contribute to academic wellbeing and self-care. © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Narelle Lemon.
"We need to care about this, and yes the facts are terrifying" : understanding young people's perspectives about energy transition and climate adaptation in regional Australia
- Authors: Green, Monica
- Date: 2022
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Children, Youth and Environment Vol. 32, no. 2 (2022), p. 125-144
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- Description: This small-scale study examinesyoung people’s perspectives aboutenergy transition and climate change adaptation in regional Gippsland, Victoria,Australia. As the opinions and experiences of children and youth have been historically overlooked in contemporary sustainability climate discourse and policy, this research investigatespreviously unheard accounts.The studydrawsonfourfacilitated “Conversations for Change”discussions with a total of 14 young people (aged 9-17)that exploredtheir ideas and concerns about sustaining themselves and their communities during a time of climate change and energy transition. Theirideas and opinionsaboutliving in/with a climate-alteredlocaland global futurearereflected across four main themes: (a)young people’s values;(b) perceptions of energy, transition and adaptation;(c) the enabling role of climate literacy for young people; and (d) responding to a just energy transition through collective endeavors.
School ground pedagogies for enriching children’s outdoor learning
- Authors: Green, Monica , Rayner, Michelle
- Date: 2022
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Education 3-13 Vol. 50, no. 2 (2022), p. 238-251
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- Description: Despite teacher interest in wanting to engage students in learning beyond the classroom, many don’t have the skills or confidence to do so. Drawing from an earlier study that examined outdoor, environmental and sustainability pedagogies across three Australian primary (elementary) schools, this paper presents and examines two teaching and learning vignettes from one of the study schools to investigate the impact of outdoor pedagogy and children’s learning in a school ground environment. The place-based study used a set of semi-structured interviews with the school’s gardening/environmental teacher as well as children’s reflective workbook entries to explore how outdoor learning was enabled and scaffolded by the teacher. Findings indicate that school ground pedagogies, particularly when framed by self-directed learning tasks increases student autonomy, efficacy and achievement. The implication of the findings is important for increasing teacher capacity to incorporate locally-based curriculum and pedagogy in school ground settings to enrich children’s outdoor learning. © 2020 ASPE.
Learning to teach in place : transforming pre-service teacher perceptions of science teaching through place pedagogies
- Authors: Ma, Hongming , Green, Monica
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 46, no. 7 (2021), p. 53-69
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- Description: Although teaching science outdoors is well established in global circles, its pedagogical value in Australia is less understood. This paper addresses this gap through its investigation of outdoor science teaching in a science method course in a teacher education program at an Australian regional university. As part of their coursework, pre-service teachers designed and delivered science lessons to primary school-aged children in small teaching groups in a wetland setting and wrote reflective essays about the experience. Data collection methods included document analysis of the essays as well as follow-up semi-structured interviews with pre-service teachers. Findings suggest that the outdoor science teaching experience improved pre-service teachers' general science teaching skills, and significantly contributed to their capacity to teach science outdoors. Considerations regarding how teacher education curriculum and pedagogy can be reconfigured to better equip graduating teachers with the relevant science skills, knowledge and confidence are discussed. © 2021 Social Science Press. All rights reserved.
The affordance of place in developing place-responsive science teaching pedagogy : reflections from pre-service teachers
- Authors: Ma, Hongming , Green, Monica
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Science Teacher Education Vol. 32, no. 8 (2021), p. 890-910
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- Description: Despite being increasingly popular within broader educational discourse, place-responsive pedagogy is less apparent in science teacher education. This paper investigates the perspectives of pre-service teachers in a science education course informed by place-responsive pedagogy in a Bachelor of Education (primary) program at an Australian regional university. The place-based study belongs to longitudinal research that examined the impact of the modified science course hallmarked by university–school partnerships and science lessons conducted by pre-service teachers with children from rural and regional schools in Gippsland, Victoria in a wetland and school ground setting. The study and science course were framed by a place pedagogy framework. Using this framework, we examine how pre-service teachers view and understand the affordance of places for teaching science. The study employed a document analysis of coursework essays as well as follow-up semi-structured interviews with two pre-service teacher cohorts (wetland and school ground). Findings indicate that pre-service teacher’s exposure to place-responsive frameworks helped build their awareness about the affordance of place for science teaching. Challenges associated with taking science beyond the conventional classroom are also identified and discussed. © 2021 Association for Science Teacher Education.
Agents of regional-global transformation : Federation University Gppsland education (fugue) researchers
- Authors: Plowright, Susan , Green, Monica , Johnson, Nicola
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Educational researchers and the regional university : agents of regional-global transformations 1 p. 1-19
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- Description: The lived particulars of Gippsland, the region, the land, the people and all life, are the heart and impetus of Federation University Gippsland Education (FUGuE) researchers, the chapter and collection authors. To us, Gippsland is portentous as both a wonderful place and prophetic of the transformations required for a sustainable and just regional-global future. The Latrobe Valley, for example, home of our small, new, regional university campus, is both bucolic rural locale and site of several coal-fired power stations. For many years, non-Indigenous residents enjoyed a fairly self-contained place of financial and intergenerational security.However, decades of seismic shifts have written new layers of trauma onto the Gippsland palimpsest that began with European invasions.With global imperatives to transition to a low-carbon economy, Gippsland is a canary in the global coal mine. Assertively locating our research in this region, we address moral and institutional imperatives to act as agents in generating a new regional-global modus vivendi from hinterland and a range of other minority positionalities. To set the regional scene, we map territorial and ideational incongruences that the toponyms of 'Gippsland' and 'region' conjure.We narrate how FUGuE contrapuntally emerged from this context and argue that through 'word and deed', FUGuE challenges hegemonic positivist and dominant discourses of what counts as notable research. Like a Bach fugue masterpiece in which each voice has intrinsic integrity but in counterpoint transforms into something new, our interwoven research voices of transformative agency through educational research, disruptively reveal our appreciable, but largely underappreciated, 'impact'. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019. All rights are reserved.
Collective hope and action in a time of transition : kitchen table conversations with Gippsland sustainability change agents
- Authors: Green, Monica , McClam, Sherie
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Located Research: Regional Places, Transitions and Challenges p. 223-251
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- Description: This chapter stems from a broader research initiative involving a collective of eight Australian and US academics investigating the conditions that affect Education for Sustainability (EfS) educators’ capacity for agency. As part of the wider collective, the two authors of this chapter (one Australian and the other American) collaborated on a small study that examined how sustainability and climate change advocates and educators in Gippsland, Victoria, gain traction in effecting change. Study participants were recruited from two regional committees-RCE Gippsland (Regional Centre of Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development) and the GCCN (Gippsland Climate Change Network)-who each mobilise and disseminate sustainability and climate change information across the region. Using a narrative ethnographic methodology to explore participant perceptions of how they effect change in the region, the authors facilitated two conversational dialogues around two distinctive farmhouse kitchen tables in West Gippsland. Drawing on theories of new materialism and the concept of collective hope, this chapter engages with conversational vignettes generated via the agency of the kitchen tables and shared food. Emergent themes explored in the chapter include the work of EfS change agents and the importance of ‘the collective’ to deal with the challenges and tensions associated with creating change in the regions. © The Author(s) 2020.
Educational researchers and the regional university : agents of regional-global transformations
- Authors: Plowright, Susan , Green, Monica , Johnson, Nicola
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book
- Relation: Educational researchers and the regional university : agents of regional-global transformations
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- Description: This book showcases a compilation of research partnerships produced by the Federation University Gippsland School of Education. Through this book, readers will gain valuable insights into how education research initiatives can help adapt to an age characterized by massive regional/global economic, environmental, identity, cultural and social shifts. The respective chapters address the universal human and researcher condition in a regional setting, highlighting how individuals and groups are seeking to achieve transformation with their regional, educational research. On the whole, the compilation showcases a specific university in a regional context that is now responding to change by rejuvenating, reinventing, re-envisioning and rethinking its research, its identity and its relationality. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019. All rights are reserved. All rights are reserved.
Frog bogs, turbines and biodiversity : bringing children's sustainability knowledge to life through handmade artefacts
- Authors: Green, Monica
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Educational researchers and the regional university : agents of regional-global transformations p. 153-172
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- Description: Globally, sustainability is a complex and contested term with multiple meanings and interpretations. This chapter highlights research that was undertaken by a FUGuE (Federation University Australia Gippsland) academic who used a participatory arts-based methodology to frame research with Gippsland children involved in sustainability education. The study originated from the author's involvement in the Regional Centre of Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development (known as RCE Gippsland), a global network of formal, non-formal and informal education organisations responsible for the mobilisation of education for sustainable development (ESD). Drawing on RCE Gippsland's inaugural Sustainable Schools Expo, an event that supports primary school students to engage in sustainability themes and workshops and share their respective education for sustainability initiatives, the study involved working with children who were keynote Expo speakers. A key innovation of the study was the use of sustainability artefacts created by children, which represented their sustainability learning and knowledge and were used in recorded dialogical conversations. Findings from the study highlight regional children's well-developed views about the state of the world, including their concern for humankind's impact on planetary sustainability and the subsequent decline of ecological systems locally and globally. Further to this, the immersion of regional children in places where they lived and learnt was highlighted as integral to their sustainability knowledge and understanding. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the methodological contributions of the study and its capacity to illustrate the voice of regional children and their place-oriented lifeworlds. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019. All rights are reserved.
From northern China to hazelwood wetlands : navigating place and identity through science education
- Authors: Ma, Hongming , Green, Monica
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Educational researchers and the regional university : agents of regional-global transformations 10 p. 173-190
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- Description: This chapter highlights an emergent self-study or professional inquiry that sits within wider longitudinal research examining the impact of a science teacher education university-school partnership in Latrobe Valley Gippsland. Partnership stakeholders in this particular study included the two authors (Hongming and Monica-Federation University Gippsland Education (FUGuE) researchers and science teacher educators), pre-service teachers and teachers/students from a local primary school. The chapter explores a number of complexities pertaining to our redesign of a science education course in the Bachelor of Education (primary) teaching programme. Central to the changes we made was a transition from universitybased lectures to place-based science lessons conducted by pre-service teachers in a local wetland. As part of the self-study, we met regularly throughout the semesterlong science education course to discuss course preparation, implementation, design and delivery. These recorded and later transcribed conversations became the main data collection source of the study.We also generated personal autobiographies as a way of reflecting on our personal, professional and collective learning journey within the science education course.Our analysis of this overall process brings to light emergent levels of complexity and uncertainty in our attempt to reshape science education through a partnership model. While we each had and shared very different experiences of the science education course, the chapter pays attention to the strengths of our differences, and in particular, its contribution to our collaboration. The impact and implications of the self-study are discussed, and in conclusion, we highlight the contributions of place-oriented approaches and collegiality that supported us to undertake science differently. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019. All rights are reserved.
Preface : idylls, smoke plumes and educational research from the south-eastern tip of mainland australia
- Authors: Plowright, Susan , Green, Monica , Johnson, Nicola
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter , Editorial
- Relation: Educational Researchers and the Regional University: Agents of Regional-Global Transformations p. ix-x
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Everyday local nearby healthy childhoodnature settings as sites for promoting Children's health and well-being
- Authors: Dyement, Janet , Green, Monica
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research Chapter 61 p. 1155-1180
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- Description: In this chapter, we highlight the central role that healthy, vibrant, and functioning “everyday, local, and nearby” childhoodnature ecosystems can play in both keeping children healthy and in helping them to understand the relationship between ecosystem health and their own health. By understanding these interconnections, children can learn that they are not separate from or superior to nature. Rather, these settings become sites where children can refresh and reimagine understandings of nature and their relationships as, within, of, and to nature. Healthy settings are, we believe, a foundation for healthy children. A focus on health is particularly timely for two reasons. First, there are mounting international concerns about children’ health – be it around issues of physical activity, mental illness, social resiliency and belonging, overweight and obesity, and spiritual grounding. But it is not only children’s health that is of concern: there are deep and mounting international concerns about the health of ecological systems, be it around issues of global warming, acid rain, species loss, air pollution, urban sprawl, waste disposal, ozone layer depletion, and water pollution. This Chapter is framed around the World Health Organization’s definition of health and explores the ways in which local nearby natural childhoodnature settings can promote physical, mental, social, and spiritual health and well-being of children. To illustrate these concepts in action, we profile a case study from our research in Australia. This chapter concludes with a discussion on the ways that healthy childhoodnature settings can unite, inform, and support the interests of educators, environmentalists, and children’s health advocates who have an interest in the health of children and ecosystems.
Transforming science teaching and science teacher education through an Australian university-school partnership
- Authors: Green, Monica , Ma, Hongming
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Making a positive impact in rural places : Change agency in the context of school-university-community collaboration in education Chapter 13 p. 285-309
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- Description: This chapter reports on empirical study that examined the impact of two distinctive university-school partnerships involving two teacher educators, preservice teachers, in-service teachers and their primary-aged students from two regional primary schools. The study took place in Gippsland, Australia and was underpinned by a science education subject embedded in a Bachelor of Education degree that involved the delivery of science lessons by pre-serivce teachers with children in outdoor settings. In asking the question how can a university-school partnership shape and inform science teaching and science teacher education, the chapter draws on a data set of focus group and individual interviews with pre-service and in-service teachers. The chapter contends that university-school partnerships make an important contribution to education, particularly in relation to science teaching and science teacher education. We contend the place-based partnership frameworks will be of interest to those teacher educators and in-service teachers looking to enrich and renew educational practice more broadly, as well as in the science domain.
Wilding pedagogy in an unexpected landscape : Reflections and possibilities in initial teacher education
- Authors: Green, Monica , Dyment, Janet
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education Vol. 21, no. 3 (2018), p. 277-292
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- Description: This article stems from our participation in the Wild Pedagogies colloquium on Tasmania’s Franklin River in December 2017. The two authors embarked on the 10-day rafting trip with a group of nine other educators and academics from Australia, Canada and England, engaging in extensive conversations about wild pedagogy principles in education. Conceived and developed by some of the Franklin river participants on earlier colloquiums in North America and Scotland, wild pedagogy thinking and practice is constituted by six key touchstones, including: (1) agency and the role of nature as co-teacher; (2) wildness and challenging ideas of control; (3) complexity, the unknown, and spontaneity; (4) locating the wild; (5) time and practice; and (6) cultural change. The touchstones framed our group’s discussions pre-, during and post-colloquium. Drawing on the colloquium’s conversations and engaging with a number of the main touchstone ideas post-colloquium, in this paper the teacher educator authors use two distinct case studies (regional and online contexts) to locate the wild within their initial teacher education practice. They do this by initially making links between current teacher education practice and the touchstone ideas, before re-engaging with the touchstones to collaboratively envisage future wilding possibilities. In conclusion the authors advance the touchstone ideas as particularly relevant to those teacher educators seeking to wild their teaching practice in challenging times.
Green outdoor environments: Settings for promoting children’s health and wellbeing
- Authors: Dyment, Janet , Bell, Anne , Green, Monica
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Outdoor learning environments Chapter 4 p. 21
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- Description: Educators have a key pedagogical role in promoting ealry years outdoor play in natural environments. Active outdoor playa involving risk-taking has been linked to positive effects on social health and behaviour, and encourages physicalactivity and motor skill development . At the same time , it has been recognised that opportunities for childten to experience outdoor learning have been reduced in recent decades due to the impacts of technology, urbanisation and social change.
‘If there’s no sustainability our future will get wrecked’: Exploring children’s perspectives of sustainability
- Authors: Green, Monica
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Childhood Vol. 24, no. 2 (2017), p. 151-167
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- Description: Education for Sustainability is an internationally recognised field of learning that is currently mandated as a cross-curriculum priority in the Australian curriculum. Empirical research into children’s views about sustainability, and how they develop sustainability knowledge, however, remains limited. This article focuses on research that investigated children’s perspectives of sustainability in Victoria, Australia. The children were recruited through the Sustainable School Expo where they delivered keynote presentations about their school’s respective Education for Sustainability initiatives. Data were generated from interviews with 16 children aged from 9 to 13 years and included a set of self-created and designed sustainability artefacts. The article contends that children have strongly conceptualised ideas about sustainability that are developed through interactions with material entities (human/more than human) in diverse environments. A key finding suggests that children become vital stakeholders in Education for Sustainability through experiential, investigative, sensorial and place-oriented ways of learning, which informs how they build sustainability knowledge.
Preparing pre-service teachers for professional engagement through place/community pedagogies and partnerships
- Authors: Green, Monica
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 41, no. 11 (2016), p. 44-60
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- Description: There is an expectation that Australian teachers engage professionally in all aspects of teaching and learning, including engagement with teaching networks and broader communities. This paper reports on a partnership between a teacher educator and an environmental educator who set out to expand pre-service teachers' professional knowledge, engagement and practice in an undergraduate Bachelor of Education (primary) course. The paper reports on a study about teacher education students' perspectives of fieldwork-based learning and its potential to inform students' future engagement with the broader school community. Using a conceptual framework of place- and community based education, the study examined data from an electronic survey and student teacher fieldwork reflections to better understand how pre-service teachers interpret the benefits of working with local schools, and communitybased representatives. Findings suggest pre-service teachers' professional engagement was significantly enhanced as a consequence of partnership fieldwork. The implications for teacher education and future teacher practice are discussed.
Reimagining and transforming identity as rural researchers and educators : A (con)textual fugue
- Authors: Plowright, Susan , Glowrey, Cheryl , Green, Monica , Fletcher, Anna , Harrison, Dianne , Plunkett, Margaret , Emmett, Susan , Johnson, Nicola
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Association for Research in Education (AARE)
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- Description: This paper presents the educational and research journey of a group of rural academics as a (con)textual fugue. We understand a fugue as a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and is successively taken up by other interweaving parts. Through weaving the multiple motivations and methodological underpinnings of the authors‟ individual research and education aspirations, a collective composition emerges. Our „fugue‟ represents the sum of the parts but it also challenges individualised conceptions of research and researcher identity. By conceptualising an assemblage of relational research presences and intentions for „disruptive transformations‟ in the rural context to which we are all deeply committed, we present another way of imagining or "seeing" research. Our „place‟ is Gippsland, Victoria, a distinctive and extensive area encompassing regional, rural and remote communities; diverse natural environments and localities; and correspondingly complex social, cultural and economic underpinnings. The establishment of Federation University in this setting, where the authors are situated, has precipitated what Mezirow might describe as a sudden, dramatic, reorienting insight and a reframing of habitual interpretations. Through coming together, we create a fresh impetus to pursue a collective but polyphonic purpose, impact and researcher identity.
Children, Place and Sustainability
- Authors: Somerville, Margaret , Green, Monica
- Date: 2015
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- Description: This book sets out to give close and careful attention to the intimate and often surprising nature of children's sustainability learning in the context of their local places. The authors draw on new materialist and posthuman theory to consider the challenges posed to conventional environmental education by the advent of the new geological era of the Anthropocene and global climate change. Individual chapters explore the role of place and the material world in the development of literacy and language, the contribution of student-led design, arts-based approaches and indigenous knowledges as well as scientific pedagogies to provide unique insights into how children learn in their everyday places. The book is distinctive in its grounding in a range of empirical research studies with children and their teachers about their sustainability learning in a number of different locations in Australia. (From back cover).