Garth Stahl

The University of Queensland | UQ · School of Education

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus remains an important theoretical framework educational researchers draw upon to explore the learner identities of students as well as their learning trajectories. As scholars grapple with habitus, as both a theory and a method of working with the data, they have drawn upon different research methodologies. To da...

Within a neoliberal educational policy context, we are increasingly witness to educational leaders compelled to become strategic operators to ensure the survival of their schools. Drawing on the tenets of institutional ethnography (IE), this article traces the everyday work and experience of a school leader in one Australian private school site tha...

This paper illustrates how spaces were created for children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to emotionally engage in traditional Chinese literacy practices in a primary school in Sydney, Australia. The ethnographic data allow insight into how ordinary activities organised around character tracing and writing can pedagogically...

Sourcing information related to socio‐scientific issues requires sophisticated literacies to read and evaluate conflicting accounts often signified by disagreement among experts, multiple solutions or misinformation. Much of the previous work exploring how young people approach conflicting information has tended to focus on students in the secondar...

While emotional geography is a burgeoning field in educational research, research on foreign languages education, and Chinese language education specifically, has largely ignored emotionality and space. We begin to rectify this situation through nuancing how students' Chinese language learning experiences are (re)shaped by recurrent emotional and r...

The field of social entrepreneurship, a domain focused on implementing solutions to social, cultural and environmental issues, remains highly male-dominated. Research continues to emphasise that women social entrepreneurs are often expected to behave in masculine ways in order to become successful. The study presented in this article explored the p...

Many studies have sought to better understand the link between childhood trauma and vulnerability to involvement in violent extremism; research drawing on the voices, experiences, and perceptions of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) practitioners , who work directly with violent extremists in their daily work, remains limited. In order to address...

Research on social mobility continues to foreground the role of familial relationships. Studies of students who are first-in-family to attend university have often highlighted the intensity of familial obligations. Drawing on longitudinal research with upwardly mobile young men from working-class (and working-poor) backgrounds, this article present...

This article explores the operationalization of transnational habitus by scholars to understand how individuals experience mobilities across borders. Our scoping study of 21 scholarly publications focuses on the various ways in which transnational habitus is defined as well as the different approaches to theorizing a transnational habitus. In criti...

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While research continues to document the influence of higher education institutions on students’ identities, studies considering how these institutions inform students’ post-study aspirations and career pathways remain limited. This paper engages with a new phenomenon – international students in vocational colleges in China – where we examine how t...

On the one hand, studies of African international students in China document their instrumental role in ‘telling China’s story and spreading China’s voice’ while, on the other hand, this research indicates how their lived experiences are shaped by racialisation and exclusionary practices in social life. However, there remains surprisingly little sc...

Higher education is an important social determinant of health. In Australia, the under-representation of Indigenous males (In this study we use the term ‘males’ rather than ‘men’. This is an attempt to acknowledge cultural lore and be inclusive of males who have been through an initiation ceremony and those who have not had the opportunity to do so...

Globally, there has been an increased focus on the importance of Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) in research involving Indigenous peoples. This is premised on concepts of self-determination during the planning, generation, and use of Indigenous related data. It is also tied to the importance of privileging of Indigenous knowledge systems in Indig...

In all levels of schooling there exist disparities in terms of class and gender. The research presented in this article contributes to the study of how gender, class and curriculum influence the aspirations of students who are the first-in-family to attend university. Drawing on a study of 48 students over a three-year period, we are interested in...

The underrepresentation of boys from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australian universities continues despite recent gains in widening participation. This article presents a case study documenting the transition of one Indigenous student, Robbie, from an underprivileged school located in the Western suburbs of Sydney to an urban A...

Debate continues to grow over the institutional practices of the expanding charter school networks in the United States, often referred to as charter school management organizations (CMOs). These networks of schools, largely found in urban areas, follow a very specific model of schooling and typically serve low-income students of color. Neoliberal...

This chapter investigates a continual trend in the educative experiences of disadvantaged young people: attention to the compliance of the student body. While bodies have always been a part of schooling, I highlight how increased attention to the corporeal has become the new pedagogy of the poor. These curriculum practices – which I term the corpor...

Young people, who are the first in their family to attend university, are often from low-socio-economic backgrounds and they remain severely underrepresented in Australian higher education. Many feel as if they are outsiders within what can be an uninviting and, at times, alienating institutional culture. It is through movement within new spaces th...

Educational research has been witnessing a ‘spatial turn’ and an ‘affective turn’ which have informed studies on pedagogy and foreign/second language acquisition. Drawing on a teacher-researcher ethnographic study, this paper examines the implications of primary students’ affective engagement in the space of Chinese language and culture learning in...

In the last 20 years, we have seen a growing interest internationally in Pierre Bourdieu’s scholarship within the field of educational research. Bourdieu’s reflexive and relational sociological armory provides insight into how structural inequalities are established and maintained, ripple through education, and can be attenuated or disrupted. This...

Literacy skills are essential if students are to access knowledge and achieve academic success in middle school science. A key difficulty with interpreting literacy practices in any discipline is the problem of conceptualising what constitutes literacy. Our study contributes new understandings to the discipline of science where there are ongoing de...

Educators continue to struggle with how masculinities are performed and regulated in spaces of learning. In a time of rapid social change, there is a renewed impetus for gender justice reform in schooling, though these approaches themselves remain a shifting picture. Adding a new layer of complexity, we are now witness to educational policy recomme...

Engaging working-class males in their education, specifically higher education, remains a confronting and complex problem. The majority of the participants in this study spoke of striving for a balance between their own time and the demands of work and university study. Their accounts of their journeys demonstrated strong feelings related to their...

Integral to first-in-family males’ success at university is the forms of support they receive. The final empirical chapter focuses on how the changes in identity experienced by first-in-family males relate to the shifting dynamics between their two primary social groups: the peer group and the family. Both are foundational to their sense of self. D...

The focus of this chapter is the Australian higher education context and the impact of the widening participation agenda. The Australian education system is deeply stratified and, while there has been a significant policy shift to recruit students from non-traditional backgrounds, this agenda sits in tension with a ‘value for money’ educational pol...

To address the identity and equity issues informing the First-in-Family Males Project, this chapter recounts a short history of working-class masculinities in education as well as recent contemporary research on disadvantaged males. The aim is to draw on international and historical research to delineate important shifts in working-class masculinit...

The focus of this chapter is the role of social class in social mobility. It draws on conceptual work—specifically in regard to pathologization and shame—to highlight that attending university is an affective experience for working-class young men that carries an impetus to change the self. To be first-in-family involves various identity negotiatio...

Previous research has shown that the working-class experience in education is informed by various aspects of class disadvantage. While not disputing this work, this chapter maps a dimension of subjectivity for those participants who successfully transitioned to higher education—that of fulfilment. The discourse of fulfilment and improvement was int...

This chapter documents the transition to university as a process of dissonance and validation. In drawing on empirical data from the boys in The First-in-Family Males Project, their parents and their teachers, the chapter shows how their transition was restricted by resources which rendered many of them academically underprepared for university lif...

The university experience for many first-in-family males is shaped by prolonged bouts of isolation as they struggle to belong to what, for many, is a foreign environment. Central to coming to belong is the crafting of new identities as they engage in new forms of selfhood and studenthood. Specifically, as they transition to higher education, the da...

The proportion of international students in Chinese higher education is increasing, however, there remains little research that explores their motivations and how their learning of Chinese influences their identities and imagined futures. In this paper, we address the need for research on South-South migration—specifically Sino-African relations—...

Young men from disadvantaged contexts are the least likely to attend university in Australia; furthermore, when they do attend, they are likely to struggle. This article draws on empirical data documenting the aspirations and resilience of first-in-family young men in Australian higher education, with the aim of nuancing their classed experience of...

Pre-service teachers are required to become reflective practitioners who can adapt their skills to a range of contexts and the diverse needs of learners. Many consider the practicum experience as critical to forming values and dispositions that are essential to a professional teacher identity. This article focuses on the experiences of five White p...

This report explains how and why Indigenous men engage and succeed in higher education.

For those working in the field of critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM), the study of masculinities, culture and intergenerational familial responsibilities continues to be an important area of research. Drawing on a case study of five second-generation Vietnamese-Australian males over three years, we seek to explore the role of family i...

Within the field of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) teaching, there has been limited engagement with Global Citizenship Education (GCE). The politicisation of CFL education in today's diverse and multilingual Australian classroom remains a significant cause for concern as it endangers spaces of pedagogic possibility. Drawing upon data from an A...

This article presents a longitudinal case study of five second-generation Vietnamese-Australian males experiencing the transition from boyhood to manhood. The participants reside in the same peri-urban region in Australia and come from families working in factories and restaurants or on farms and all aspire to pursue more middle-class forms of empl...

Despite efforts to widen participation, first-in-family students, as an equity group, remain severely under-represented in higher education internationally. This book explores and analyses the gendered and classed subjectivities of 48 Australian students in the First-in-Family Project serving as a fresh perspective to the study of youth in transiti...

High performing charter schools have come under scrutiny for their use of ‘no-excuses’ (NE) pedagogies focused on certain bodily comportments. Arguably, these school environments have arguably become vehicles for behavioral scrutiny and bodily surveillance – practices which shape the lives of economically disadvantaged students of color. The popula...

Media plays an important role in how young men come to understand what it means to ‘be a man.’ For adolescent men, representations in the media of high-profile male figures are a constant and pervasive stream of performances of masculinities and, as such, can be considered a resource for gender identity work. As part of a longitudinal study of masc...

Read about how scholars have used Bourdieu in researching inequalities in higher education.

Schools worldwide are increasingly enmeshed in discourses of securitisation. Efforts to prevent or counter violent extremism (P/CVE) are a manifestation of this. P/CVE in education takes various forms; the pilot explored here is considered super-soft in that no mention was made of violent extremism. Attention was given to schools’ capacities to enh...

The global forces shaping international education requires us to explore how transnational pre-service teachers navigate new and unfamiliar education contexts. Within studies of transnational pre-service teacher education, the voice of the Chinese diaspora remains largely on the periphery. This article aims to redress this paucity by applying Fouca...

The fields of science and literacy education continue to be shaped by pervasive gender inequality. Previous research has documented how the formation of a ‘science identity’ is contingent on access to science capital while research in literacy education continues to highlight how boys struggle in their literacy acquisition. Despite a robust scholar...

Within the social imaginary of Australia’s dominant ‘White’ culture, ethnic minority men, particularly Muslim men, are often depicted as ‘folk devils,’ resistant to the cultural norms of mainstream society. Muslim masculinities have been problematically conflated with notions of radicalisation, terrorism and violent extremism. There has been decide...

Few studies in science education have examined how place-based experiences influence students’ STEM career aspirations. Rural school students’ lived experiences of place and non-traditional STEM career aspirations such as farming are scarcely considered in dominant narratives around science aspirations and career pathways. Adopting a critical relat...

This paper investigates the experiences of Western teacher expatriates in a Shanghai international schooling organization. We explore the risks and benefits associated with transnational mobility and how teacher expatriates, as part of the global middle-class (GMC), maintain and reaffirm their middle-class status. Focusing on adaptation and constra...

Schools serving communities experiencing poverty continue to be challenged as to how to best meet the needs of their pupils. This article documents how educators in one school in Wales developed and implemented a ‘vulnerability unit’ – called The Bridge – which centred on trusting relationships to improve the educational experience for primarily wh...

There exists an unsettling relationship between Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) and formal schooling today that remains under-researched and largely unproblematized. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with state level policy actors as they implement a federally funded, small-scale grant to develop Restorative Practice in four Austr...

Aspirations are embedded in social alliances and affectively realised. This article presents a longitudinal case study of the support and pastoral care in place for one Samoan-Australian male, Fiamalu, during his final year of compulsory schooling. Fiamalu’s path to higher education was precarious for numerous reasons, including losing both his par...

The concept of a ‘learner identity’ has been approached from a variety of different theories and methodological approaches. Scholarship on learner identities primarily speaks to various socio-psychological concepts such as ‘meta-cognition,’ ‘self-concept,’ ‘self-regulation’ and ‘practice.’ However, from a sociological perspective, the learner is co...

This forum reviews a mix of resources to inform pedagogy and related educational practices that foreground representations of youth and their literacy practices within and outside of school.

Despite suspicions concerning the global expansion of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education, the teaching of Chinese is often a mainstay within global citizenship and elite education. With this paradox in mind, the paper draws on theories of classed selfhood and learner identities to explore the possibilities of CFL to influence the learner...

Countering violent extremism (CVE) continues to be a topic of national and international concern as well as media interest. In the field of CVE, educational institutions have an important role to play, but precisely how educators and policymakers should best respond to extremism within schools remains unclear. This article draws on interviews with...

Improving the academic and social outcomes of boys – specifically boys from low-SES backgrounds – remains of international importance. With this in mind, research continues to document the ways in which relational learning is integral for the well-being of students, specifically those students in disadvantaged school contexts. This paper focuses on...