Papers by Louise Gwenneth Phillips
Article 42 of the CRC asserts that ‘States Parties undertake to make the principles and provision... more Article 42 of the CRC asserts that ‘States Parties undertake to make the principles and provisions of the Convention widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike’. Yet since the ratification of the CRC in 1989, the CRC is not widely known to children and adults. Public discourses of children and childhood are considered as key hindrances to widespread promotion of the CRC. Significant actions that have taken place since 1989 to promote the CRC internationally and nationally are mapped, noting gaps, missed opportunities and possible explanations for neglect in the promotion of the CRC. To move forward in honouring children’s rights through the CRC being widely known, possible awakenings in practice and policy are proposed.
Journal of Embodied Research, 2020
A collection of five video essays on embodiment and social distancing, with a focus on practices.... more A collection of five video essays on embodiment and social distancing, with a focus on practices. RAFFAELE RUFO, “Dancing Together Alone: What Can Be Learnt About Connection When Touch is Forbidden?” (00:10): This video essay reengages the experience of leading a dance improvisation practice on Zoom during the Coronavirus lockdown. As a tango and contact improvisation dancer confined at home, I felt urged to ask: what can be learnt about embodied connection when we are not allowed to physically touch each other? ANAT BEN-DAVID AND CATHARINE ANNE CARY, “What’s the Matter?” (05:54): Performers, scenographers, musicians and wordsmiths Anat Ben-David and Catharine Cary improvised via ZOOM every Tuesday from March to May 2020. Embracing latency, zoom’s affordances, limitations and distortions, they show here excerpts of a transformed body of work. Separated by 5218 km, given the Covid-19 situation, it could have been 200 meters. DEANNA BORLAND-SENTINELLA, LOUISE GWENNETH PHILLIPS, AND ALICE OWEN, “Virtually Embodied: Remembering the Sensations of Connection” (12:04): This film is an exploration of the body: Being present to place and time; being aware of connection with others, whether that be in reality or through virtual connection and sensorial memory. NATHALIE S. FARI, “Notes from a zoom 5Rhythms® session” (17:10): By using a three-hour 5Rhythms® online workshop as basis, this video sheds light into the ways in which the practitioner interacts and engages with both one’s own bodily awareness and the new technology of zoom. AMBERBECKYCREATIVE, “Sheltering in Spacetimematterings: Audiovisual Considerations of Social Distancing” (22:42): Two socially distant authors glitch audiovisual intra-actions through embodied (dis)orientations of space, time, and matter in past/present/future collapsed to (re)present what it’s like to shelter in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Link: http://doi.org/10.16995/jer.66
Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability, 2014
with twenty years of experience as a professional storyteller and early childhood teacher. Sustai... more with twenty years of experience as a professional storyteller and early childhood teacher. Sustainability principles have been (and continue to be) at the core of her work with storytelling and early childhood education. Her current research focuses on explorations of young children's active citizenship, foregrounding young children's participation in society, and cultivating social responsibility.
Space and Culture, 2017
Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders vehemently enforces closed borders to asylum seekers arri... more Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders vehemently enforces closed borders to asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia. Policed urban borders were enforced in Brisbane, Australia, during the G20 Summit in 2014, to protect visiting dignitaries from potential violent protest. The ephemeral arts intervention Walking Borders: Arts activism for refugee and asylum seeker rights symbolically confronted border politics by peacefully protesting against Australian immigration policy. Rather than focusing on the direct effects of the ephemeral arts intervention, this article attends to the affective workings of the aesthetic elements of the project through sensory ethnography and storying. Informed by Ranciere’s aesthetics of politics, this article explores the affective experience and potential educative gains of the ethical turn attended to in participatory arts such as ephemeral arts interventions.
Early Child Development and Care, 2016
Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand,... more Using data from an international, comparative study of civic action in preschools in New Zealand, Australia and the US, we consider some of the types of civic action that are possible when time and space are offered for children to use their agency to initiate, work together and collectively pursue ideas and things that are important to the group. We use an example from each country and apply the work of Rancière and Arendt to think about collectivity as civic action in young children's schooling lives. Play, rather than an act itself, is positioned here as political time and space that make such civic action possible in the everyday lives of children. We argue here that play is the most common (and endangered) time and space in which children act for the collective.
Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 2017
CIVICS AND CITIZENSHIP ARE increasingly used in early childhood education policy, but what citize... more CIVICS AND CITIZENSHIP ARE increasingly used in early childhood education policy, but what citizenship and civic learning can be for young children is under-researched and lacking definition. Drawing from the Australian findings of the major study Civic action and learning with young children: Comparing approaches in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, this article shares evidence of civic capacities that a community of young Aboriginal Australian children demonstrate in an early childhood education and care centre. Communitarian citizenship theory provides a framework for citizenship that is accessible for young children by focusing on families, communities and neighbourhoods. Cultural readings of illustrative examples on how young Aboriginal children express civic identity, collective responsibility, civic agency, civic deliberation and civic participation are discussed, highlighting how cultural values shape civic action. Links to state and national early childhood cur...
Navigating datascapes: mapping testing practices within and across national and global contexts
Learning, Media and Technology, 2023
We draw upon Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ and Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) to interrogate historic... more We draw upon Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ and Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) to interrogate historical and spatial flows in relation to specific testing technologies. We reveal how testing systems, conceptualised as actor-networks, rearticulate colonial legacies of inequality which are intensified by new and emerging technologies. ANT helps trace social and relational interactions occurring in various national and global data spaces, and helps make sense of incessant transformations in education datascapes. Mapping actor-networks, and translations, help name and navigate neoliberal forces acting through colonial legacies via emerging educational datascapes. Our examination shows how educational technologies associated with standardised testing in northern and southern contexts – specifically, England, Singapore, Bangladesh and Australia – exacerbate structural inequalities. We consider how such technologies are actants and reflective of co-existing historical and temporal influences, and global cultural and spatial flows, allowing us to map the multiple ways in which educational technologies are manifested in an emerging education datascape.
Educational Review, 2024
We live in a data-driven world. The voluminous scale of data gathered can lead to diminished cons... more We live in a data-driven world. The voluminous scale of data gathered can lead to diminished consciousness of ethics whilst economic interests are prioritised. Across recent decades education has come to be heavily data driven and datafied. We have witnessed the dehumanising and increased labour impacts of school datafication. In search for alternatives, we wonder about the role and hope of story. We look to the etymological roots of data to see how a relationship with story may work to foreground ethicality, through attention to positionality, values, presence, representation and form. As education researchers of differing socio-cultural backgrounds, we bring diverse illustrations of how these five considerations feature in our research with educational data and trouble the politics of education data in a posttruth world. To further resonate a merging of story with data for ethical research, we apply Derrida's metonymic logos: "cinders there are", reminding us of the traces of life in data. We close with questions to inform ethical consciousness to storied data with transparent attention to positionality, values, presence, representation and form.
Introduction: The What, How and Why of Storytelling Pedagogy
Springer eBooks, 2021
What emerges in playing in The Corner of artist-curated and created matter
We offer poetic, pictorial and storied accounts of artsworkers, children, family members and matt... more We offer poetic, pictorial and storied accounts of artsworkers, children, family members and matter in an arts-designed play/making space called The Corner for 0-8 year olds in the State Library of Queensland, Australia. The two authors bring differing theoretical readings (agential realism and ecological psychology) of what happens in the intra-actions/ transactions between artsworkers, children, family members and the materiality and spatiality of The Corner to come to know it’s ontologies, epistemologies and ethicalities.
On the certainty of entanglements with ecocide: pragmatic action for responsive pedagogy inspired by ecological psychology and permaculture
Educational review, Dec 14, 2021
Inspired by youth concerns for environmental justice and pathways forward that sustain diverse bi... more Inspired by youth concerns for environmental justice and pathways forward that sustain diverse biology, we draw upon ecological psychology to theorise learning. This novel proposition, against the tide of cognitive constructivism, proffers a non-dualist para-digm more aligned with the purpose and intent of those seeking ecological justice and responds to calls for theory to support place- based education. Additionally, theory from ecological psychology lends support for understanding how ecocide is sustained and why work that inspired the environmental movement over half a century ago, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring has seemingly remained ignored and derided in the broader public realm. We provide some clues as to how that ignorance is perpetuated via understandings of perceptual learning theory. Finally, we map a pathway forward to respond with permaculture activism and offer a unique and solutions-based narrative that inspires hope in the face of catastrophe.
Pedagogies: An International Journal, Jun 25, 2020
A disconnect from environments has largely dominated educational discourse and policy. Attention ... more A disconnect from environments has largely dominated educational discourse and policy. Attention to place and environment in education has gained momentum recently through several relational theories. Application of these theories in education notes the materiality and relationality of pedagogy, though often without specificity as to what the pedagogy is-how it is enacted and what guides such pedagogy. For pedagogical direction in enlivening learning with environments, this paper looks to the potential of ecological psychology theories of affordances and developing specificity via perception and action with environments. To illustrate such, we offer reflections on the pedagogical gap from a teacher education project that attunes preservice teachers to the potential for learning by engaging with spaces produced for children by artists. We then look closely to the pedagogical practices of an artist working with children in a primary school maker space-oriented program. Inspired by ideas from ecological psychology, we identify four pedagogical principles in practices of responsive learning with environments and suggest these as a possible pedagogical framework for eliciting embodied, emplaced, relational, and integrated learning with environments.
How storytelling can work as a pedagogy to facilitate children’s English as a foreign language learning
Language Teaching Research, Nov 17, 2022
Storytelling has a long tradition in education including language learning and teaching because o... more Storytelling has a long tradition in education including language learning and teaching because of its extensive benefits in language development. In second and foreign language education, stories and storytelling have been integrated into school curricula to enhance language development; however, there is scarce empirical evidence about how storytelling facilitates children’s English as a foreign language (EFL) learning and its potential as a holistic pedagogy. This article explores a living educational theory (Whitehead & McNiff, 2006) of how storytelling works as a pedagogy in storytelling workshops with an English class at a private tuition centre in Vietnam to facilitate children’s EFL learning. Key pedagogical elements identified through the living theory methodology included storytelling as: a responsive strategy; multimodal scaffolding; mutual inspiration; and a linguistic model. Each of these elements is explained with illustrative examples from the storytelling workshops.
Bringing Storytelling Pedagogy Ideas Together
Storytelling Pedagogy in Australia & Asia, 2021
The Australian Educational Researcher
The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration Goal two argues for young Australians ‘to unde... more The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration Goal two argues for young Australians ‘to understand their responsibilities as global citizens’. In these precarious times, children and youth require (and are demanding) education on how to address the myriad of convergent global challenges that is the focus of global citizenship education (GCE); however, perceived ambiguity is recognised as a barrier to greater GCE uptake. To support teacher uptake of global citizenship education, we searched for and mapped open-access GCE materials to create a systematic, research-based resource catalogue for teachers and students. We employed a scoping study to examine each resource’s alignments with Australian Curricula and global GCE frameworks and identified the areas where there is insufficient resourcing. Results showed that most resources were targeted to primary and secondary school students. More materials are needed for early childhood education as well as materials that engage learners...
In this article, we contest globalised notions of data as 'universally' beneficial, necessary and... more In this article, we contest globalised notions of data as 'universally' beneficial, necessary and 'evidence-based'. We do so by drawing upon narrative accounts of the problematic ways data impact educators researching and working in university and schooling settings over time and in varied national contexts. We reveal how data are transient and often erroneous, even as data appear omnipresent and omnipotent. Employing an autoethnographic storytelling approach, we draw upon our diverse experiences as educators working within and across multiple national and subnational contextsin England, Singapore, Bangladesh and Australiato reflect on how data have reconstituted and recalibrated our experiences in school and university settings. We seek to break the 'myth' of datathat we cannot live without the supposedly complete construction of work and life that dominant, reductive assemblages of data provide. In doing so, we argue for the reimagination and demystification of broader data regimes.
School of Education and School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work The University of Queensland, 2019
Young Families Connect (YFC) is a Program of Excellence at Ipswich State High School that commenc... more Young Families Connect (YFC) is a Program of Excellence at Ipswich State High School that commenced in May 2016. The program seeks to remove the barriers faced by pregnant and parenting young people through flexible curriculum delivery, within a supportive and nonjudgemental environment. Through the program, students access a range of resources and support services to enable them to complete their formal schooling. The program is funded by Mission Australia as part of the Communities for Children (CfC). This initiative of the Federal Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) focuses on early intervention and prevention approaches to improve children’s and young people’s health and well-being. The YFC program has the capacity to
enroll up to 20 young women. At the time of the research 15 young others were enrolled in the program; however 4 young women were on Maternity Leave and were therefore unable to be interviewed. Working in partnership with a range of government organisations such as Queensland Health, the Aboriginal Community Controlled health service KAMBU Health and other
external agencies, the program aims to provide comprehensive, wrap-around support for young parents. Simultaneously focussing on academic and parenting education, the program provides on-site child care and play groups, flexible learning options and links with external organisations to addresses barriers to school completion. Through advocacy and
support of young parents in relation to a wide range of factors, including social and
economic disadvantage, the program aims to build capacities of young parents, so they can maximise their opportunities for future meaningful employment. Through collaboration between The University of Queensland and the YFC program, together with Ipswich State High school, research was undertaken to develop a clear image of YFC operating within the school and wider community. The objective of the project was to find ways to enhance the program within the local school and community contexts.
These data may also be used to inform similar programs in different communities.
The Conversation, 2019
Voting is a key part of the democratic process. It allows all citizens of a certain age to have a... more Voting is a key part of the democratic process. It allows all citizens of a certain age to have a say on matters important to them. Voting in federal elections and referendums is compulsory for every Australian aged 18 and over.
But decisions made by elected governments – especially in areas such as education, health and energy – impact young people too. Legal and political voices have long called for Australia to lower the voting age to 16. After all, people under 18 can leave school, get a job, drive a car and pay taxes. So why not vote?
Storytelling opens doors
Practical Literacy: The Early and Primary Years, 2022
Storytelling invites us into the worlds of others. Storytelling teachers and authors from this ne... more Storytelling invites us into the worlds of others. Storytelling teachers and authors from this newly released edited collection share how they teach through storytelling to support inclusivity.
Braiding Dislocated Lives
Department of Culture and LearningCentre for Education Policy Research (CfU), 2021
We have co-created a multimedia work by beginning with braided stories on "what’s presently happe... more We have co-created a multimedia work by beginning with braided stories on "what’s presently happening" through the colour blue. Through painting, soundscaping, videography, writing, making, montaging and deconstructing we respond to ‘what’s happening’ and to each other’s responses in entangled and diffractive ways. We are sensorily present, attuned and make/think with matters and beings in our lived spaces in attempts to make sense of ‘what’s happening’.
Drawing from Haraway’s (1992) proposal of diffraction as a metaphoric means for mapping material-semiotic interference patterns, this project will use diffractive analysis to “map where the effects of differences appear” (p. 300). Barad (2007) further proposes diffraction as a critical tool for “reading insights through one another” (p. 25), enabling multiple and diverse perspectives to be elicited through differing meaning-making, including the diffraction of narratives, images, poetics, theories, the political, the spiritual, the sociocultural, and so on. We play with “diffractive storying” (Phillips, 2020) following the entangled effects that diffractive differences make. Blue-ness is vitalistic multiplicity where “non-unitary identities and multiple allegiances” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 144) with-ness each other. We are there for each other, we the subjects, we the co-creators, we the dis-located scholars who patiently braid the threads, who weave (Haraway, 2016, p. 91) the four colourful lines of thought: w h a t - i s - g o i n g - o n ?
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Papers by Louise Gwenneth Phillips
Link: http://doi.org/10.16995/jer.66
enroll up to 20 young women. At the time of the research 15 young others were enrolled in the program; however 4 young women were on Maternity Leave and were therefore unable to be interviewed. Working in partnership with a range of government organisations such as Queensland Health, the Aboriginal Community Controlled health service KAMBU Health and other
external agencies, the program aims to provide comprehensive, wrap-around support for young parents. Simultaneously focussing on academic and parenting education, the program provides on-site child care and play groups, flexible learning options and links with external organisations to addresses barriers to school completion. Through advocacy and
support of young parents in relation to a wide range of factors, including social and
economic disadvantage, the program aims to build capacities of young parents, so they can maximise their opportunities for future meaningful employment. Through collaboration between The University of Queensland and the YFC program, together with Ipswich State High school, research was undertaken to develop a clear image of YFC operating within the school and wider community. The objective of the project was to find ways to enhance the program within the local school and community contexts.
These data may also be used to inform similar programs in different communities.
But decisions made by elected governments – especially in areas such as education, health and energy – impact young people too. Legal and political voices have long called for Australia to lower the voting age to 16. After all, people under 18 can leave school, get a job, drive a car and pay taxes. So why not vote?
Drawing from Haraway’s (1992) proposal of diffraction as a metaphoric means for mapping material-semiotic interference patterns, this project will use diffractive analysis to “map where the effects of differences appear” (p. 300). Barad (2007) further proposes diffraction as a critical tool for “reading insights through one another” (p. 25), enabling multiple and diverse perspectives to be elicited through differing meaning-making, including the diffraction of narratives, images, poetics, theories, the political, the spiritual, the sociocultural, and so on. We play with “diffractive storying” (Phillips, 2020) following the entangled effects that diffractive differences make. Blue-ness is vitalistic multiplicity where “non-unitary identities and multiple allegiances” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 144) with-ness each other. We are there for each other, we the subjects, we the co-creators, we the dis-located scholars who patiently braid the threads, who weave (Haraway, 2016, p. 91) the four colourful lines of thought: w h a t - i s - g o i n g - o n ?