Robyn Henderson

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Southern Queensland

This paper discusses issues that relate to student mobility and implications for teachers and guidance officers. Whilst there has been a tendency to locate problems associated with mobility in the children themselves or in their families, it is argued that this is not a particularly productive approach. Taking lessons from recent literacy understan...

For many 'new' university students, especially those who might be called 'mature age', 'interrupted' or 'second chance' learners, the commencement of university study is often fraught with difficulties. Whilst family and paid employment commitments sometimes compete with study time, some students worry that they do not have the wherewithal for tert...

This special issue of the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education explores school-community relationships from a diversity perspective. The contributions originated in presentations delivered as part of the European Educational Research Association’s Network 14 sessions at the annual European Conference in Educational Research in Au...

Although definitions of rural vary across educational research projects and from country to country, an enduring theme has been the framing of rural as a disadvantage or problem that sits alongside a view of the urban as normative. In questioning the urban/rural binary and the deficit discourses that are associated with it, the authors present four...

Global education is often framed in terms of standardised testing that makes comparisons across nations. This is particularly evident with international measures like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests 15-year-olds in member countries. Images on the PISA website provide representations of education that seem to c...

This paper reports on research that extends knowledge about higher education students’ perceptions of online engagement. In particular, the study aimed to identify what students thought engagement was and how they experienced it. Understanding students’ views about online engagement will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the topic and s...

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that online teaching in higher education became the default. Educators were, and often now continue to be, required to pivot to online teaching, necessitating them to adapt their teaching delivery, effectively engage students online, and apply existing skills to new and unfamiliar pedagogical contexts. This...

In this paper we present a case study of doctoral study at a distance, and we explore issues of belonging, pedagogy and learning as part of that process. As a team of one doctoral researcher and three supervisors, we critically reflect on the place of belonging in the context of doctoral study by distance. In this case study, the importance of belo...

Robyn Henderson's review of Educational Research and Schooling in Rural Europe: An Engagement with Changing Patterns of Education, Space, and Place reflects on a useful and scholarly contribution to issues and theories relevant to rural European education.

This paper’s second author is a doctoral student, based in Erbil, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, whose study focuses on peer education in refugee camps in that region. The other three co-authors are her supervisors, whom, to date, she has not physically met. Yet, we have created and sustained a productive ‘learning community’ from a distance. In...

This article reports on teachers' experiences of ICT training in rural areas of Nepal. It discusses aspects of policy documents to help understand the Nepali educational context, before highlighting the challenges of establishing and maintaining infrastructure and professional learning opportunities across a country with challenging terrain and ext...

In this special issue of the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, a collection of international authors considers how their work and experiences in rural education research can inform, and sometimes even improve, urban-based education research. The issue responds to the provocation to shift such perceptions and locate the rural...

This paper uses data from research projects that deliberately set out to tell positive stories about educators who were working with the children and families of migratory agricultural workers in the US. The aim underpinning these projects was to move beyond the deficit discourses and stories of blame that so often circulate, particularly in relati...

Extensive literature within the learning sciences addresses the phenomenon of online engagement and strategies that support online learning. However, for academics, there is limited guidance to support them in the processes of reflecting on efforts to facilitate online learner engagement and, ultimately, to use those reflections to redesign approac...

This chapter considers how rural education research might inform literacies pedagogies. It begins by describing how researchers have mapped pedagogical approaches for teaching literacies and how there are consequences for using particular pedagogies in narrow ways. It also considers how, in the current competitive context of standardised testing, s...

Student engagement is understood to be an important benchmark and indicator of the quality of the student experience for higher education; yet the term engagement continues to be elusive to define and it is interpreted in different ways in the literature. This paper firstly presents a short review of the literature regarding online engagement in th...

Seasonal farm workers play an important economic role through their contributions to annual harvests and the fact that they spend income in the community where they sojourn. However, research shows that farm workers and other temporary residents are often socially marginalised in rural communities and feel as though they are outsiders who do not be...

In the current context of extensive national and cross-cultural migration, the education of migrant and refugee children is an important and critical consideration. In the U.S., the education of migrant children—who move with their farm worker parents within states, across state borders and sometimes across national borders—brings challenges th...

This past decade has seen an increasing focus on the effects of academic bullying, workplace harassment, incivility and other disruptive workplace behaviours within the university (Fogg, 2008). Yet despite this growing awareness and charting of the costs of these behaviours – both to the individual and organization – it is evident that flawed and i...

The challenges of conducting lengthy fieldwork in today's busy academic world have impacted the types of research that are able to be carried out. In particular, traditional educational ethnography has become problematic for research beyond initial doctoral research programs. This article analyzes data collected during a return to the field of a st...

How should a teacher be taught? This book suggests that it is necessary to move away from the highly technicist and one-size-fits-all approaches to teaching in order to instil confidence throughout a teacher's training. Instead a pedagogy of induction should engage the student in their profession from the outset of their studies.

Classroom observations are sometimes a challenging form of data collection. Not only are interpretations of those observations subject to the researcher’s theoretical lens, but communication between the researcher and the teacher is often delayed until well after the observed events. This article reports research that focused on the pedagogical dec...

This chapter presents a framework for a pedagogy of induction based on seven years of design-based research. It suggests a new model of collaborative, critical reflection as a tool for professional learning and induction. The framework of a pedagogy of induction promotes awareness of professional learning from the commencement of university study a...

This chapter uses two stages of a model of critical reflection to deconstruct and confront aspects of a pedagogy of induction. Drawing on longitudinal research, the analysis deconstructs notions of teacher and teaching through shared experiences and problematises the main tenets of knowledge and practice that have become normalised within the teach...

This chapter focuses on the theorising component of a model of critical reflection as used in constructing a pedagogy of induction. It highlights the usefulness of looking beyond immediacy to explore broader theoretical and philosophical debates in relation to teacher professional learning and induction. The chapter demonstrates how, through the pr...

This chapter examines the impact of engagement in a pedagogy of induction on the transition of novice teachers to the world of work. It advocates for ongoing research on the effects of induction programs and professional learning on new teachers’ experiences and their sense of efficacy, as these may provide ways of redressing high attrition from th...

This chapter describes the foundational tenets of a pedagogy of induction, which was developed through a design-based research approach that investigated and advanced the effectiveness of five teaching-learning projects. A model of critical refection, which was used to inform the teaching-learning projects as well as the research, enables an unpack...

Henderson and Noble introduce a design-based research project conducted over seven years in a regional university in Australia. The research was designed as part of five scholarly teaching-learning projects. Some projects were established initially to address the attrition of early career teachers, by creating opportunities for professional inducti...

As digital technologies continue to permeate aspects of everyday life, contributing to an increasingly multiliterate world, educators are working to include digital technologies into classroom practices. However, there is evidence that the digital divide between schools and homes continues to widen as more and more technologies become available. Th...

For many university students, the commencement of university study is often fraught with difficulties. Whilst family and paid employment commitments sometimes compete with study time, some students worry that they do not have the wherewithal for tertiary study or that they may not be successful in their new venture. This paper sets out to investiga...

In Australian faculties of education, retention and progression issues are paramount within the current neo-liberal climate which emphasises student degree completions. This is particularly the case in regional universities, where many students – often the first in their families to attend university – are from rural, regional and low socio-economi...

This paper describes a strategy, designed by a faculty of education in a regional Australian university, to induct pre-service educators into the education profession. It then focuses on one component of the strategy, an initiative called Education Commons. This initiative uses a model of critical reflection to engage pre-service educators in discu...

If effective ways of constructing capacities are to be understood, several means of identifying and assessing multiple approaches to conceptualising and contextualising such capacities need to be developed. This chapter explores and evaluates some of those approaches, adopting an eclectic and culturally diverse approach that considers each approach...

Across universities, a plethora of approaches has been designed to initiate beginning students into higher education. This paper describes a particular approach, the FYI programme, which operates in the faculty of education of an Australian university. Using a learning circle approach, the programme privileges relationships and social support. Impo...

If effective ways of constructing capacities are to be understood, several means of identifying and assessing multiple approaches to conceptualising and contextualising such capacities need to be developed. This chapter explores and evaluates some of those approaches, adopting an eclectic and culturally diverse approach that considers each approach...

It is vital for research teams to assess their activities and outcomes as they grow in confidence and momentum if their capacities are to be enlarged and sustained. The authors use this chapter to conduct a theoretically framed evaluation of the first three years of operations of the research team that they constitute. Attention is given simultaneo...

"Constructing Capacities: Building Capabilities through Learning and Engagement" explores several contemporary manifestations of individuals, groups and communities participating in varying types of learning and thereby engaging effectively and productively with their contexts and environments in order to build and develop their multiple capacities...

With transition to university a strong focus across most higher education institutions, undergraduate teacher education programs have been increasingly scrutinised regarding their (in)ability to adequately prepare students for the challenging social contexts that they will meet. As a result, there has been a burgeoning of approaches which initiate...

Creating connections in teaching and learning is both what we do as educators and what we aspire to do. The chapters of Creating Connections in Teaching and Learning have shown many profound and creative ways in which authors/educators have attempted to do just this, across diverse landscapes and with varying degrees of success. The range of resear...

We know that education in today's world is a complex and valued enterprise. In whatever way we look at educaiton, we cannot but see connections to other aspects of life. Indeed, the mission of education has been described as ensuring that "all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and econ...

This chapter elaborates possible implications of the experiences of writing this research book for the development and sustainability of the authors as a productive and supportive research team. The preceding chapters have explored several different dimensions of research collaborations and in the process have enacted specific elements of collabora...

It is much easier to talk and write rhetorically about the benefits of collaborative research than it is to enact those benefits in the actions and outcomes of a sustainable research team. This is hardly surprising: all manner of obstacles confront those seeking to conduct and publish research in contemporary Australian universities. Some of these...

Sustaining Synergies: Collaborative Research and Researching Collaboration explores the experiences, expectations, potential pitfalls and possible outcomes of team-based education research and publishing. It addresses vitally important questions for those engaging in collaborative research, including: • What are the different forms that can be take...

One key potential research collaboration is the relationship between doctoral students and their supervisors. While this relationship is vital to training new researchers and expanding knowledge frontiers, it is fraught with the risks of miscommunication, exploitation and learned dependency. This chapter presents an account of a small section of a...

For many ‘new’ university students, especially those who might be called ‘mature age’, ‘interrupted’ or ‘second chance’ learners, the commencement of university study is often fraught with difficulties. Whilst family and paid employment commitments sometimes compete with study time, some students worry that they do not have the wherewithal for tert...

The massification of higher education in Australia has set the spotlight firmly upon issues of access, participation and retention across the sector. Yet recognition that not all groups of people have equal opportunity to access higher education is not new. With this context in mind, this paper begins by describing an approach to the first year of...

During 2008, Flagstone Creek State School, a small rural school, underwent a process of pedagogical and curriculum renewal. In a collaborative partnership with academics from the Faculty of Education at the University of Southern Queensland and assistance from the University's Media Services, the project resulted in a set of artefacts which will be...

This chapter builds on James Gee's (2003) description of the playing of computer games as the learning of a new literacy. To investigate this form of literacy learning from a player's perspective, the author created an avatar and joined the online community of the Massively Multiplayer Online Game, the World of Warcraft™ produced by Blizzard Entert...

Current policy, media and curriculum initiatives across Western nations are drawing literacy and literacy pedagogy toward enticingly simplistic understandings of literacy as commodity. Increasingly they focus on ‘fixing’ perceived literacy problems by assuming the primacy of early years literacy and ‘top-up’ intervention programs. In the wash-up of...

The teaching of digital literacies is regarded as an important facet of literacy teaching in the 21 st century. With many literacy tests continuing to indicate that students' levels of achievement tend to be differentiated along socioeconomic lines, it seems timely to consider the connections between home and school and how these play out in relati...

This paper highlights how individual literacy narratives influence pre‐service teacher literacy identities. Working with a diverse group of future literacy educators provides a challenge in negotiating and making sense of their personal literacy narratives and considering the impact this has on their literacy learning. Going beyond outcome measures...

This paper will describe the process of professional or pedagogical conversations that was used by a team of teacher educators to reflect on their literacy pedagogies and their practices as the 'teachers' of future literacy teachers. Through these conversations, the teacher educators discussed their understandings of literacies within the broader c...

The second half (of this workshop on "Getting Published") is a seminar on receiving, "surviving" and responding to reviewer feedback. Dr Robyn Henderson (USQ) and Associate Professor Patrick Danaher (USQ) will walk participants through a process of responding to peer reviews of articles submitted for publication. Using examples of their own success...

At a regional Australian university, a Learning Circle approach was implemented with a small group of first year education students who identified themselves as “at risk” of failure in the tertiary context. As part of their participation in weekly meetings, the students engaged in discussion, reflection and problem-solving related to their transiti...

This paper revisits a successful short-course in academic literacy that was conducted for 50 “disadvantaged” students enrolled in the first year of an education degree at an Australian regional university (see Hirst, Henderson, Allan, Bode & Kocatepe, 2004). Based on a sociocultural approach to learning and drawing on a conceptualisation of tertiar...

Recent discussions about learning have problematised academic literacy and its place within an increasingly plural, multicultural, multilingual and textually multimodal society. The take up of academic language, once considered central to a 'schooled' and 'intelligent' person, is now, Gee (2004, p.94) argues, “at best a necessary, but not sufficien...

For researchers wanting to take up critical discourse analysis as an analytical tool, Norman Fairclough's (1989) early work provided a step-by-step approach that he called 'a guide not a blueprint.' In response to calls for a more explicit theoretical justification, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) attempted to theoretically 'ground' CDA and to sp...

As the two main settings and experiences of contemporary children's lives, home and school have been foregrounded for their role in constructing and shaping the current parameters of childhood (Edwards, 2002). Research has often focussed on the constraining nature of school-based discourses on family practices. By foregrounding school-based literac...

This paper investigates stories that are told in a North Queensland rural community about the arrival of itinerant farm workers for the winter harvesting season. Permanent residents often represent this annual event as an invasion of the community by undesirable people who break the law, exacerbate racial tensions and take jobs from locals. Such st...

Although many Australian children change schools during the course of a school year, the children of itinerant seasonal farm workers can move residences as well as schools on a regular basis, often two or three times annually. Surprisingly, however, educational itinerancy has not been widely researched, particularly in Australian contexts. This pap...

No abstract available Excerpt: It’s not unusual for a multiliteracies approach to literacy teaching to be equated with the literacies associated with computers and other information communication technologies. Although literacy educators need to take account of these emerging technoliteracies, a multiliteracies approach should encompass much more...

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This article explores the gender dynamics of boys' responses to one Particular aspect of English teaching. oral performance work. It focuses on the possibility that the requirement to perform publicly in dramatic and other oral tasks may be an important factor in the rejection of English by many boys, and may contribute to boys' relatively poor ach...

Current understandings about literacy have moved away from the belief that literacy is simply a process that individuals do in their heads. These understandings do not negate the importance of the individual aspects of literacy learning, but they emphasise understandings of literacy as a social practice. In many cases, responses to early literacy i...

Abstract This article reports researchinto the ways that early childhood teachers in three schools used narratives of blame as part oftheir theorisation of literacy failure in relation to Queensland’s Year 2 Diagnostic Net. The teachers’ narratives clustered into three groups: blaming families, blaming children and explanations that moved beyond bl...

This paper explores the complex behavioural and academic issues that surfaced in an Australian primary school following the enrolment of a student whose parents were itinerant farm workers. The student did not merge easily into the school population as most of the other itinerant farm workers' children seemed to do. Instead, he stood out because of...

This paper reports the initial stages of a study into the engagement of 3 rd year students in a literacy curriculum course within a primary and middle-years education degree at an Australian regional university. Prompted by concerns about students' poor attendance at lectures and tutorials and their limited use of available support mechanisms in ot...

This paper examines the notion of spatial imaginaries as a means of understanding, interpreting and challenging unspoken norms of university life, through an investigation of the transition experiences of self-identified 'at-risk' students in a regional university in Australia. Taking an actor-orientated perspective, the authors' focus is an examin...

Applying for ethical clearance and conducting research in ethical ways are part of due process and procedure in educational research. However, research that focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of people's lives, especially when marginalised groups are involved, may not always run according to plan Researchers may find that the terrain is...

Contemporary educational research seems to be undergoing a number of crises – of confidence, of conscience, of faith and of purpose. As educational researchers explore the multiple terrains and varying topologies of the research landscape – from flat and undulating to rocky and precipitous – they find themselves engaging with complex, contested and...

Whilst changing schools can be a daunting experience for students, it is also an important consideration for teachers who are expected to provide high quality and high equity education for all of the students they teach. This paper examines pedagogical considerations that relate to students who are newly arrived in the classroom. It investigates ho...

In recognising literacy as a social practice, some educational research has investigated the nexus between school and home or community literacy practices. In doing this, however, researchers sometimes find themselves opening a Pandora's Box, where the expected jewels of wisdom have been replaced by unexpected ethical dilemmas. This paper presents...

Increasing numbers of students change schools every year. Some, including the children of itinerant farm workers, change residences, schools and education systems on a regular basis. Whilst teachers and parents tend to regard student mobility as having a negative effect on students' literacy achievements, research in the field of educational itiner...