Abstracts - Earli

E 829 August 2007 14:30 - 16:30Room: 3.67 BékésySymposiumResearching teachers’ constructions of student diversity incontemporary educational settingsChair: Peter Renshaw, University of Queensland, AustraliaOrganiser: Peter Renshaw, University of Queensland, AustraliaDiscussant: Guida Abreu, Oxford Brookes University, United KingdomEducators across the world face increasingly socio-culturally diverse classrooms resulting fromlarge-scale trans-national mobility. In this symposium, presenters draw upon extensive researchprojects in Europe and Australia to address the question of how educators understand andconstruct student diversity, and how they strategically adapt their practices to provide inclusiveeducational experiences for students. Diversity has typically been theorised as a set ofcharacteristics that students bring with them into educational settings. Students’ characteristics areregarded as a-priori, stable traits that effective teachers consider in planning lessons. The goal is tofit classroom pedagogy to the needs of different students. The powerful formative influence ofpedagogical practices on students’ identities and capabilities over time, reinforces the sense thatdifferences between students are indeed pre-existing and fixed. An alternative frame forresearching diversity is explored in this symposium. Drawing upon a family of discourse andsocio-cultural theories of human action, the presenters in the symposium theorise diversity asemergent and socially constructed in the context of institutional, social and linguistic practices.Rather than being a set of stable background variables, ‘difference’ between students is seen ascontingent on institutional practices of selection, grouping, naming and differentially providingstudents with learning activities. Practices can be quite blunt as in ability streaming, but they canalso be subtle, shifting and embedded in everyday interactions. In this symposium, participantsprovide research evidence on both kinds of practices - the institutional processes of assigningstudents to different educational streams, as well as to the more subtle and embedded everydaypractices of constructing students as different kinds of learners. The implications of thischallenging research, particularly in terms of ensuring ethical and inclusive educational policiesand practices, will be addressed by each of the participants as well as by an expert discussant.Teachers’ funds of knowledge for framing student diversity in the middle years: Institutionalconstraints and teachers’ professional agency.Peter Renshaw, University of Queensland, AustraliaRaymond Brown, Griffith University, AustraliaElizabeth Hirst, Griffith University, AustraliaWhile policy has consistently advocated the deployment of inclusive forms of pedagogy for anincreasingly diverse student population, recent evidence across different countries suggests thatteachers seldom incorporate recognition of student diversity in their teaching practices. Our aim inthis presentation is to document how middle-years’ teachers in a rapidly growing suburban area inSouthern Queensland, Australia, recognise and ‘name’ student diversity and how they rationalisetheir classroom practices in dealing with diversity. We theorise diversity as an aspect ofinstitutional and socio-cultural practices, rather than a set of inherent individual traits. The data– 269 –