John Christopher Guenther- PhD
- Research Leader, Education and Training at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, Darwin, Australia
John Christopher Guenther
- PhD
- Research Leader, Education and Training at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, Darwin, Australia
About
241
Publications
88,738
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Introduction
John Guenther is the Research Leader for Education and Training with Batchelor Institute, based at Casuarina in the Northern Territory. His research interests relate to aspects of schooling and adult learning with a focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education and training.
Current institution
Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, Darwin, Australia
Current position
- Research Leader, Education and Training
Additional affiliations
July 2016 - present
Position
- Research Leader, Remote Education and Training
June 2011 - June 2016
Position
- Principal Investigator
Description
- Working with the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation
February 2006 - June 2011
Editor roles
Australian and International Journal of Rural Education
Position
- Chief Editor
Education
September 2002 - September 2006
Publications
Publications (241)
In its election pitch, the recently elected government in the Northern Territory proposed an education policy aimed at improving school attendance by holding parents accountable for ensuring their children attend regularly. The policy includes measures such as imposing fines of $370 on parents for truancy, increasing police presence in schools, and...
This report presents findings from the Angkentye-kenhe Apmere consultation project, funded by ILA. The consultation was designed to raise the voices of central Australian language stakeholders to understand their aspirations for a language centre and the model that they would like to be presented. The intent of the consultation is reflected in its...
Too often the remote school discourse continues to reinforce a deficit perspectives
by focusing on the students (lack of) participation in school. This is exacerbated,
in part, by entrenched funding models that are based on the counting of students.
One way of reframing such deficit perception is to examine the school environ-
ment to understand wa...
inDigiMOB has worked towards digital inclusion in remote communities since 2016. In the first three years it was largely focused on building skills through employment and mentoring models through community-based partners. Years 2 and 3 of the project were evaluated by Batchelor Institute (Guenther 2019, 2020). In 2022, there was a shift away from t...
Despite contrary evidence, attendance remains a measurement of success in remote First Nations education. This motivation, in part, derives from the Australian Government’s ‘Closing the Gap’ policies, which in the past included attendance targets for First Nations students. These assumed that increased school attendance led to improved school outco...
The Australian education system works well for most students. However, equitable access to secondary education is problematic for First Nations people living in remote communities. There is a strong emphasis on Year 12 completion as an indicator of successful engagement in remote First Nations education. This has been partly driven by Australian Go...
The articles in this issue can be viewed through the lens of theories of recognition and distributive justice. These theories, when applied to rural education, point to the marginalisation and devaluing of rural education, such that some kind of remedy is required. The remedies for these are arguably the responsibility of systems that develop polic...
Over recent years there has been a strong emphasis on engagement and attendance as indicators of success in remote First Nations education. Attendance in remote schools has been steadily falling for several years. At the same time teacher quality and quality teaching have been described as critical for student outcomes. Finding teachers who have th...
Over recent years there has been a strong emphasis on year 12 completion as an indicator of success in remote First Nations education. The research reported in this article explores what students, school staff and community members say leads to secondary school retention and, ultimately, completion. The research was conducted in the Northern Territ...
Access to tertiary education remains a significant concern for many remote, regional and rural communities. This topic has been explored in the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education since its creation. In February 2024, the Journal went one step further by facilitating a conversation between two policy leaders whose remits include...
A realist informed evaluation of the Lutheran Care Cashless Debit Card program initiative in central Australia during the change of Australian Government policy relating to Income Management measures and the introduction of SmartCard and Enhanced Income Management scheme (eIMs)
This issue of the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education features articles that describe and critically analyse rural education, the common thread being 'What Does a Quality Education Look Like in Rural Schools?'. The education settings discussed include Australia, Czechia, Iraq, South Africa, Sweden, Tanzania, and the United State...
Over the last few years, attendance rates in remote schools have fallen, and Year 12 completions have also dropped. We are not sure why this is, though events like COVID-19, floods and other natural disasters have not made it easy. The case study presented here was part of a bigger project that sought to understand what people in remote schools and...
In Australia, ‘remote’ education is often placed in a different category from ‘rural’ education. For the purpose of this chapter, we consider ‘remote’ to be a subset of a broader ‘rural’ description of geographically isolated areas that are distant from larger metropolitan centres. ‘Remote’ schools often cater for mining or agricultural communities...
Over the last few years, attendance rates in remote schools have fallen, and Year 12 completions have also dropped. There has been some uncertainty about why this is, though events like COVID-19, floods and other natural disasters have contributed. We wanted to know what people in remote schools, and the communities they are in, thought makes a dif...
In this issue of the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, our authors explore the importance of giving voice to people whose lives and learning journeys are entwined with ‘the rural’. The articles reflect the concerns of Australian First Nations students and researchers, of young people and medical students on a vocational pathw...
For over 30 years, the Journal of the Society for Provision of Education in Rural Australia has reported research and practice discourses associated with rural, regional and remote education, with the aim of impacting policy and practices relating to education in rural Australia. The journal, originally named Education in Rural Australia, commenced...
This article argues that not only is theory building from qualitative evaluation possible, but ought to be considered as a desirable product and utilisation of evaluators’ work. Based on three case studies, the authors show how theory building can work, and why it can be important and useful. Theory building is seldom considered an impact-producing...
The middle-school years (Year 7 to Year 9) is a particular challenge for socially disadvantaged populations, with high proportions of children either repeating school years or dropping out of school. In Australia, a group of particular concern is First Nations children for whom there is a collective effort by all governments to improve education ou...
Housing in remote Australia's Indigenous communities has remained an unsolved challenge after many years of effort. Factors to be considered in remote housing have been researched broadly but rarely taking a holistic design point of view. This requires the inclusion of all factors that affect the success of a design project (eg resources, physical...
The establishment of homeland schools in the Northern Territory of Australia in the 1970s offered an alternative to community-based education for Aboriginal people. Homeland schools were set up at the request of Elders and community leaders, but in most cases they were only funded to deliver teaching to students for between one and three days per w...
Nyangatjatjara College is an independent Aboriginal school distributed across three campuses in the southern region of the Northern Territory. Since 2011, the College has conducted student and community surveys to obtain feedback regarding students’ educational experiences and their future aspirations. In 2016 Nyangatjatjara College funded a resear...
In late 2013, under the leadership of Prime Minister Abbott, the Australian Government announced a new policy designed to increase attendance rates in remote community schools—the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS). The model assumed that employing local people in the program, which was designed to support parents get their children to school...
The Palmerston Child Wellbeing and Connectedness Technical Report details findings of research projects funded through Grow Well Live Well. Grow Well Live Well is part of a Collective Impact process designed to work with the community to develop local solutions to address the needs of children and young people across the City of Palmerston.
In this issue of the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, our authors explore the impact of partnerships on education in rural communities. Schools are expected to prepare students for an unknown and uncertain future. Partnerships between schools and industry, higher education providers and the wider community can achieve greate...
What is regenerative learning in Australian higher education? This paper addresses the intersecting crises of climate, species loss and injustice; often called a conceptual emergency. We tackle the problem of disciplinary compartmentalisation, preventing integration of important related concepts. The particular case is separation of the Australian...
Our past shapes our present. However, do Australian universities understand the ways historical discourses continue to shape them? Provoked by the findings of our empirical study implemented in Western Australia’s Kimberley region in 2018-2019, we conducted a critical text analysis of recent and past policies to seek historical explanation. As a re...
For many remote Aboriginal Australian students, periods of time during their secondary education are spent living away from home at a boarding school. While financial, political and community support is burgeoning for boarding models that provide scholarships, sports programs or accommodation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, very...
Policy analysis can be useful for learning about ‘what works’ in policy. Contemporary policy studies literature highlight that such learning is influenced by power relations in government that shape our ways of knowing the world. This paper offers a critically reflexive narrative account of power relations present during Indigenous higher education...
Despite concerted efforts to improve strategic responses to suicide, it remains a major concern in Australia. Among Indigenous communities the rates of suicide are up to three times higher than among non-Indigenous communities. Indigenous males are three times as likely to suicide than Indigenous females. The death rates for the Northern Territory...
This report provides findings and recommendations from a three year evaluation of the Nawarddeken Academy, a small homeland school in western Arnhem Land.
Why the need for a special edition on First Nations ruraleducation? Surprisingly,there is almost no literature within Australia that discusses the significance of ruralityin First Nations education.Many research articles describe the significance of remotenessin First Nations education. Much of the extant research is built on a premise that remoten...
In this issue of the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, our authors present a series of perspectives about rural professional learning. These perspectives relate to teacher education, rural clinical placements, rural pathways to university, and credentialling of remote education tutors. Each paper demonstrates how important co...
The concept of policy ‘success’ has been subject to much contestation. In the Indigenous higher education setting, Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) scholars have brought attention to the relevance of experiential knowledge to understanding the effects of power and race on policy, including how success is theorised. This paper aims to interrogate the...
While most of the Australian population now has access to high-speed broadband internet and is making increasing use of the opportunities it creates for education, remote work, telehealth, and social networks, people who live in remote parts of the country often find themselves digitally excluded. The reasons for exclusion are in part related to th...
‘The numbers speak for themselves’ is a phrase often linked to statistics supporting claims about the success (or otherwise) of policies. Quantitative data are usually viewed as objective and somehow exempt from the same critique that qualitative data faces. QuantCrit theory challenges these assumptions by considering how structural racism impacts...
In 2015 a small homelands school was established by the newly formed Nawarddeken Academy Limited. The school, located in the homeland called Kabulwarnamyo, about 100km to the east of the town of Jabiru in West Arnhem Land, was developed to ensure that Bininj working on Country in the Warddeken Indigenous Protected Area, would also be able to provid...
In 2018, a small, soon to be independent school in West Arnhem Land, commissioned a three-year evaluation project to support its emerging role as a school for primary-aged children in the Warddeken Indigenous Protected Area. The evaluation, funded by philanthropists, was designed to build the capacity of local Bininj to engage in research on Countr...
‘Literacy’ is often seen as a direct enabler for adults to gain access to a range of individual and social outcomes: including but not limited to, economic participation, social cohesion/capital, health and wellbeing, identity, wellbeing and cultural sustainability. The simple causal logic for these outcomes might look something like this: being li...
Rural and remote students, schools and teachers are placed in stereotypical ‘boxes’ in ways that suggest they have problems that need fixing. The language that surrounds these problems are metrocentric biased and perpetuate persistent negative discourse (Ledger, Masinire, Delgado & Burgess, 2021). For example remote First Nations students in Austra...
Rural, regional and remote (RRR) communities and industries in Australia cannot currently produce or attract the workforce needed to survive, making skills and qualifications in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) increasingly important. Yet student engagement in STEM education in RRR schools remains low, with limited numbers of...
In this chapter, we draw on the example of rural education research in Australia to highlight how place-consciousness in research is an ethical concern. In discussing this issue as an ethical concern, we are referencing the broader ethical responsibility around valuing people, places, communities, lived experiences, and the implications for researc...
Boarding schools have played an important role for much of Australia’s colonised history. But in recent years attention has shifted to the role of boarding schools particularly for rural and remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. The Northern Territory Government’s 2014 Review of Indigenous Education (The Wilson Review) supported bo...
Educational research and public policy comment are often framed around notion of binaries and social construction that reference an implicit norm. For the purposes of this edition, important binaries include advantage/disadvantage, centre/periphery, and rural/urban. Similarly, terms such as ‘rural’ and ‘remote’ are often socially constructed with r...
Evaluations are often focused on assessing merit, value, outcome or some other feature of a program, project, policy or some other object. Evaluation research is then more concerned with the particular rather than the general-even more so, when qualitative methods are used. But does this mean that evaluations should not be used to generalise? If it...
Australian and International Journal of Rural Education
Across Australia, COVID-19 has certainly disrupted our lives. For many researchers it has caused us to push the pause button on our activities and rejig our timelines, our methods and our ethics approvals to suit the changed conditions. As an educational researcher in the Northern Territory,...
Over recent years, considerable effort has been put into increasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (First Nations) participation in higher education. While there are signs that enrolments are increasing, the sustained engagement and successful completion of higher education remains challenging, particularly in remote locations. With this in...
In our earlier work on generalizing from qualitative research (GQR) we identified our two-decade struggle to have qualitative research outcomes formally “listened to” by policy personnel and bureaucratic systems in general, with mixed success. The policy sector often seems reluctant to acknowledge that qualitative research findings can be generaliz...
In this chapter we draw on the example of rural education research in Australia to highlight how place-consciousness in research is an ethical concern. In discussing this issue as an ethical concern, we are referencing the broader ethical responsibility around valuing people, places, communities, lived experiences, and the implications for research...
Despite wellbeing being critical for individuals and communities to thrive in life and succeed in education, there is little research that investigates how Indigenous Australian youth attending universities conceptualise wellbeing. The purpose of this research was to empower the voices and agency of Indigenous youth attending higher education insti...
Guenther & Osborne, (2020) in their critique of the Flexible Literacy for Remote Primary Schools Programme, assert that Direct Instruction (DI) has done nothing to improve English literacy in schools that have been part of the program. Their findings show that a before and after comparison of schools using the program shows no improvement, and a co...
This critical systematic review of Australian research literature provides insights into the aspirations of Indigenous communities to collaborate with schools in establishing local Indigenous language and cultural programmes. This systematic review investigates the body of Australian research into the cultural, social and educational impacts on tho...
Guenther and Osborne's (2020) article ‘Did DI do it?’ raises concerns about the outcomes of a programme designed to improve literacy for First Nations students in remote schools. A critique of the article challenges the methods and findings. In this response, the authors respond to the criticism.
Based on an evaluation of the inDigiMOB project, auspiced by First Nations Media Australia, this article examines the role of a programme designed to improve digital inclusion for people living in town camps and remote communities of central Australia. Increasingly, Australians are expected to use technology to access health, government, utility, a...
The authors of the article ‘Did DI do it? The impact of a programme designed to improve literacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote schools’ respond to a critique of their analysis of work.
‘First know your students’, is a well-known saying in teaching. But do Australian universities really know their students? In this paper we present findings from research conducted in remote and very remote Australia where Aboriginal higher education students and educators were asked about their learning and teaching needs, and their views on thing...
This report describes outcomes of First Nations Media Australia's inDigiMOB program, Year 3.The program, funded by Telstra aims to increase digital inclusion in remote parts of the Northern Territory.
The term 'choice-less choice' in education arises from the ethical dilemma where parents are left with no option other than one they do not want to choose. In this article, we draw particularly from David Mander's (2012) use of the term, where he applied it to First Nations students from Western Australia. In Australia, choice-less choice applies t...
The term ‘choice-less choice’ in education arises from the ethical dilemma where parents are left with no option other than one they do not want to choose. In this article, we draw particularly from David Mander’s (2012) use of the term, where he applied it to First Nations students from Western Australia. In Australia, choice-less choice applies t...
In 2018, Australians Together, an organisation committed to promoting reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia, commissioned research on a trial programme designed to improve teachers’ confidence teaching the Australian Curriculum’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures cross-curriculum priori...
‘Education is the key’ is often used as a metaphor in remote Australian First Nations communities to indicate the importance of learning to achieve some measure of socio-economic advantage—education is seen as a vehicle for advancement. First Nations people have enthusiastically bought into education and training vehicle. High school completion dat...
Many recent policy documents have outlined the challenges of delivering high-quality education in remote First Nations communities and proposed that boarding schools are one important solution. These documents have influenced the increasing uptake of boarding options and there has been considerable public investment in scholarships, residential fac...
This article critically examines definitions of policy ‘success’ in the context of historical Indigenous higher education policy in the Northern Territory (NT), Australia. We begin by summarising applications of the often-used but arbitrary, rarely-critiqued terms ‘policy success’ and ‘what works’. The paper chronologically articulates what ‘policy...
Over the 10 years of ‘Closing the Gap’, several interventions designed to improve outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students have been trialled. In 2014 the Australian Government announced the ‘Flexible Literacy for Remote Primary Schools Programme’ (FLFRPSP) which was designed primarily to improve the literacy outcomes of students...
Improving Indigenous students’ literacy is a major priority area for the Australian Government, receiving significant funding to address below benchmark English literacy standardised test results. Despite this, recent benchmark tests suggest Indigenous students continue to achieve well below the national average. This systematic review discusses pe...
Blog based on a presentation to the AARE Conference, Brisbane 2019, https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=4797
This paper reports one part of a broader Aboriginal Voices Project that has been undertaken by 13 Australian researchers bringing together 10 systematic reviews on Aboriginal School Education. The extent of collaboration and engagement between school and community leaders is important to influence joint decision-making and required to attain lastin...
Child Friendly Alice is a community collaboration facilitated by Communities for Children – Anglicare NT, Strong Kids Strong Centre – Red Cross, Connected Beginnings and Larapinta Child and Family Centre – NT Department of Education which aims to ensure every child has the best possible chance in life to grow up healthy and strong. The collaboratio...
In our earlier work on generalising from qualitative research (GQR) (Falk & Guenther, 2007; Guenther & Falk, In Press; Guenther & Falk, 2019), we identified our two decade struggle to have qualitative research outcomes formally ‘listened to’ by policy personnel and bureaucratic systems in general. The policy sector commissions a large amount of res...
In this paper, the authors debunk a long-held myth that generalisation is primarily the domain of quantitative research. Based on a review of modern and historical approaches to generalisation, they argue that generalisation from qualitative research (GQR) can be achieved, not through a process of self-justification, but through defensible and rigo...
This blog article challenges the conventional thinking that Year 12 completions will help achieve parity economic participation for remote Aboriginal students.
Download the report here: https://austogresources.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/EDU+assets/PD184+BIITE+Report_web_FA.pdf
Australians Together's Professional Learning Workshops (PLW) aim to deepen teachers' understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, histories, cultures and current contexts and increase their confidence to emb...
In the original publication of the article, the author name “Cathie Burgess” was inadvertently missed in the author group.
This most ambitious series of systematic reviews of the literature (SRL) associated with the field of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander school education brings together nine academics from six Australian higher education institutions, to review over 10,000 papers. The SRL arose from the recognition that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sch...
School systems and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have long acknowledged the levels of social, cultural and epistemic conflict that has historically existed between teachers and schools, and Aboriginal students, families and their local communities. This relationship is both symptomatic and causal of the broader and highly complex field of...
This review analyses studies that identify pedagogies to support, engage and improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student outcomes. Some studies focus on pedagogies to support and engage, while others describe pedagogies that are designed to improve engagement, attendance and academic skills. The role of context emerges as a key theme, par...
Editorial for the special issue of the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education 29(1), Rural Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education .
One of the aims of a systematic literature review (SLR) is to test the weight of historical perception against the reality of research and practice. A second aim is to identify approaches to knowing in schools (defined as curriculum) that might help us to identify possibilities for improvement in Indigenous student engagement and achievement in Aus...
The ‘Aboriginal Voices’ project is a consortium of researchers invested in seeking long-term solutions to the many and varied issues that have been identified as factors contributing to the underachievement of Indigenous students in education across Australia. The Aboriginal Voices systematic review project established an agreed methodology and pro...
Questions
Questions (14)
There is a lot of literature about theory driven evaluations, particularly in the realist evaluation field. There is also a bit of literature that shows how theory informs evaluation findings and outcomes. From what I can see in the literature there is very little about how evaluation is used for or can be used for building theory. By contrast there is plenty on how research is used to build theory. Does anyone know of literature that talks about how evaluation is applied to develop new theory OR how it is used to build on existing theories? If there is none, why is this so? Any thoughts would be appreciated.
I'm interested to read what leading Indigenous academics have to say about the intersection between traditional or Indigenous knowledges/epistemologies, values/axiologies and ways of being/ontologies and their application in the context of teaching and learning at schools or universities. Any references or links greatly appreciated.
I'm thinking here about developmental and participatory research designed to affect social changes. I realise that an obvious answer to the question is 'it all depends'. I have in mind research that uncovers change strategies that will positively in community-wide behaviours, for example in ways that might lead to sustained responses to things like environmental sustainability, community safety or domestic violence, health and wellbeing or maintaining or improving biodiversity. The context I have in mind is probably more related to relatively low socio-economic or educational status. Is there a body of literature on this already? Can anyone share any thoughts?
I'm looking for evidence that shows what kinds of pedagogies work to improve outcomes for indigenous school students who are learning English as an Additional Language (or English as a Second Language-ESL). I've got the Australian literature pretty well covered but haven't really looked widely for literature in other contexts. I'm particularly interested in quantitative studies the show measurable change. Any suggestions welcome!
