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Learning on the Run: Traveller Education for Itinerant Show Children in Coastal and Western Queensland

“Learning on the Run” refers to the educational experiences of the primary
school children travelling along the agricultural show ‘circuits’ in coastal and
western Queensland. This thesis examines those educational experiences by
drawing on the voices of the show children, their parents, their home tutors
and their teachers from the Brisbane School of Distance Education, which
from 1989 to 1999 implemented a specialised program of Traveller education
for these children (in 2000 a separate school was established for them).
The thesis focusses on the interplay among marginalisation, resistance
and transformation in the spaces of the show people’s itinerancy. It deploys
Michel de Certeau’s (1984, 1986) concept of ‘tactics of consumption’ and
Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1986a) notions of ‘outsiddness’ and ‘creative understanding’
to interrogate the show people’s engagement with their absence of
place, the construction of their otherness and forms of seemingly
unproblematic knowledge about their schooling. Data gathering techniques
included semi-structured interviews with forty-two people between 1992 and
2000 in seven sites in Queensland - Mackay, Bundaberg (over two years),
Emerald, Brisbane, Rockhampton and Yeppoon - and document collection.
The thesis’s major finding is that the show people’s resistance and
transformation of their marginalising experiences have enabled them to initiate
and implement a significant counternarrative to the traditional narrative (and
associated stereotypes) attending their itinerancy. This counternarrative has
underpinned a fundamental change in their schooling provision, from a
structure that worked to marginalise and disempower them to a specialised
form of Traveller education. This change contributes crucially to understanding
and theorising the spaces of itinerancy, and highlights the broader
significance of the Queensland show people’s “learning on the run”.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/217302
Date January 2001
CreatorsDanaher, Patrick Alan, danaher@usq.edu.au
PublisherCentral Queensland University. Education and Innovation
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Rightshttp://www.library.cqu.edu.au/cqulibrary/disclaimer.htm), Copyright Patrick Alan Danaher

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