Research Seminar- Kathryn Greenwood - Seminar recorded

Seminar recorded - click here

Storying learning: Aboriginal parent engagement in schools on Bundjalung country

ABSTRACT:

Bundjalung nation is now devastated from the mountains to sea by the impact of flood on communities. Towns and villages are in disarray, schools and hospitals are in disarray, academic timeframes are in disarray, schedules of research events are in disarray, organisation and agency appear dispersed. My PhD must now change pace to accommodate a new kind of time and to reconnect with new knowledge, new contexts, new priorities of the mind, new questions, new stories.

I had been struggling with the brief of this presentation, a business of weaving myself into my work, of identifying myself as a person who is appropriate to conduct research among and with Aboriginal educators and to attempt to make meaning through stories and shared commitments. I wrote and discarded many words built on unreliable memories of events and feelings loaded, over time, with emerging knowledge and sequential learnings of theory and myth.

My PhD is about Aboriginal parent engagement in schools on Bundjalung country, gathering, through stories, a picture of how policy enactment for Aboriginal parent engagement in schools happens. For the purposes of this research, the connectedness of stories, the shared nature of experience and the knowledge borne of experience is a fabric, a carpet, a ground, a place to find common ground.

Stories are the lived and known experience of storytellers, the nuance and the other side of narrative, the further view, the inner knowing and the meaning of what is and has been and even what will be. My research methodology is a wilful effort to use storying as the means to elicit, share and privilege the stories of educators who are key knowledge holders on Bundjalung country; to make meaning of the narrative of policy. This will enable policy makers to better reflect on the contexts, the barriers and the opportunities that impact policy enactment for Aboriginal parent engagement in schools. My presentation today is based on my reflections of my own methodological efforts to grapple with these stories – an effort to story my own learning.

Bio:

Kathryn Greenwood is a PhD candidate in the School of Education, who has extensive experience of working and teaching in schools that seek to enhance the lives of all students. She has a passion for enhancing the lives of the Aboriginal students with whom she has been fortunate to share her own teaching and learning journey.

Date:  Wednesday 27 April 2022

Time: 3:30 pm

Room: 24-S402