About

To research in education is equally to project ourselves beyond the present, with its particular configuration of material and social conditions, and to ask questions about the past (How did it get this way? Could it have been otherwise?), questions about the present (How are the present conditions constructed? Whose interests are privileged or marginalised by the present conditions?), and questions about the future (How could things be different? What are the possibilities and constraints for change and reconfiguration?). To conduct educational research is to enter into a conversation between the past, the present and the future. Imagining opens up a space for this conversation to occur – a space where transformations of the present can be proposed, and where we can move beyond simply critiquing former or current practices, to imagine different versions of a more hopeful future. Imagining is not a solitary process of quiet reflection but a collective conversation about possible futures. It foregrounds a strong sense of our collective agency by suggesting that our research in the present can help create a better future with more opportunities and benefits for more people, for people previously marginalised or excluded. Imagining also foregrounds our collective responsibility to contribute to re-authoring the present  and pre-figuring the future, in a serious but playful engagement with each other about hopeful possibilities.

In addition to its framing by imagination, Educational Research in New Times examines communities. The word community tugs at our need to belong, to be secure, to sense continuity from generation to generation. In our own community we can feel at ease, at home, and within our comfort zone as we interact confidently with others, safe in our implicit grasp of the tacit norms of our local culture. But community also entails exclusion of people from complete membership, unequal access to the varied forms of community capital (material and cultural) and the maintenance of barriers to outsiders. Community as singular rather than plural, suggests a place of uniformity and homogeneity, a state of mind where clear-cut divisions are maintained between members and non-members, In contrast, we can imagine communities "of and for difference", where membership boundaries are blurred and permeable, where resources are made available more equitably, and where processes of marginalisation are resisted and challenged. Instead of yearning for local communities of a nostalgic past, the authors in the current volume imagine various facets of what communities could be, what forms they could take.

Educational Research in New Times: Imagining Communities for Inclusiveness and Diversity is the third volume in a series generated from the annual postgraduate research conferences in The Graduate School of Education, The University of Queensland. The conference organisers, the contributors, and the editors are to be congratulated for their imagining and bringing into being this collective conversation from inside a research community that itself represents both diversity and inclusiveness.

Proudly published by Post Pressed

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Contributions

Educational Research in New Times: Imagining Communities for Inclusiveness and Diversity
Karen Chalmers, Samuela Bogitini, Peter Renshaw

Imagining New Forms of Education and Research

• Fractal Alterity
  Joy Hardy
• muki wants chocolate: interrupting mother artists in the field
  sandra thibodeaux and son
• Education and the Meaning of Life: Existentialism, Spirituality & Philosophy
  R Scott Webster

Classroom Imaginings: Forming New Identities

• "People are frightened of my equations!": Emerging Aspects of a Primary Classroom Community of Practice
  Raymond A. J. Brown
• Teachers' Impact on the Development of Student's Domain Specific Self-schemas
  Chi-hung Ng
• Lesson Observation of Student Learning
  Maznah Abd Samad
• "She was telling us about the oral thing": Different Versions of an Oral Assessment Task in One High School English Classroom
  Karen B. Moni
• Issues in the Development of Pitch Labeling Skill
  Nan Bahr

Policy Imaginings: Communities and Identities

• Citizenship Education: an Impediment to Globalisation
  Peter Bond
• Globalisation and the Cultural Politics of Fijian Curriculum
  Samuela Bogitini

Imagining Communities: New Spaces and Power Relations

• Costing the 'worldly riches of extra time'
  Kathryn J. Roulston
• Discursively Creating the JET Adviser (and Client) within Centrelink
  Karen Chalmers
• Members' Methods for Entering and Leaving #IRCbar: A Conversational Analytic Study of Internet Relay Chat
  Rhyll Vallis
• Clerical Training Standards: Their Congruence with Workplace Practices
  Anne Kelly

Imagining Communities for Diversity: Including the Excluded

• The Analysis and Enhancement of Unconventional Communication in Very Young Children with Cerebral Palsy
  Kathleen Tait, Jeff Sigafoos and Gail Woodyatt
• A Comparative Study of Social Skills of Problem Behaviour and Nonproblem Behaviour Vision Impaired Children in India
  Sushama Sharma

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