What is this thing called Respect? Perspectives on post-multiculturalism
The value of official multiculturalism in Australia has increasingly become the subject of debate... more The value of official multiculturalism in Australia has increasingly become the subject of debate in recent years. The term itself, now more than 30 years old, appears in some fora to have taken on the mantle of yesterday's ideal, a flawed policy in need up updating to deal with the emerging complexities of the 21st Century. For many of its supporters, the debate has left its mark on multiculturalism, leaving them searching for a post-multicultural alternative. In its day, multiculturalism appeared as an archetypal paradigm shift turning ways of understanding diversity in contemporary societies on their head. Yet the heralding of its passing has been long and drawn-out, with no paradigm shift appearing to take its place. Instead many terms have emerged, or reappeared, in the ongoing attempt to engage with cultural diversity - cosmopolitanism, everyday multiculturalism, integration, social cohesion, social inclusion and, in the case of this conference, respect. This panel will gi...
Reconstituting teachers’ professional knowledge: using Cultural Studies to rethink multicultural education
Continuum, 2022
Making multiculture
Media ‘Dog-Whistling’ and Anti-Muslim Racism in Australia Since 2001
Doing Diversity Differently in a Culturally Complex World
Doing Diversity Differently in a Culturally Complex World explores the challenges facing multicul... more Doing Diversity Differently in a Culturally Complex World explores the challenges facing multicultural education in the 21st century. It argues that the ideas fashioned in 1970s 'multiculturalism' are no longer adequate for the culturally complex world in which we now live. Much multicultural education celebrates superficial forms of difference and avoids difficult questions around culture in an age of transnational flows and hybrid identities. Megan Watkins and Greg Noble explore the understandings of multiculturalism that exist amongst teachers, parents and students. They demonstrate that ideas around culture and identity don't match the complexities of the social contexts of schooling in migrant-based nations such as Australia, the UK, the USA, Canada and New Zealand. Doing Diversity Differently in a Culturally Complex World draws on comprehensive research undertaken in Australian schools. It examines how a diverse range of schools address the challenges that 'superdiversity' poses, considering how the strengths and limitations of each school's approach reflect wider logics of traditional multiculturalism. In contrast, the authors argue for a transformative multiculturalism involving a critically reflexive approach to understanding the processes, relations and identities of the contemporary world.
Pedagogies of incorporation : touch and the technology of writing
Metaphors of tactility are often used to describe the considerable ease that skilled individuals ... more Metaphors of tactility are often used to describe the considerable ease that skilled individuals display in the performance of certain actions; a pianist who has a deft ‘touch’ or a footballer with a ‘feel’ for the game. While such terms denote skill, they tend to mask the process the process of its acquisition, suggesting an intuitive ability rather than a technique perfected over time through practice. This is similarly the case with phenomenologies of the body that emphasise an almost seamless meshing of subject and object in the acquisition of skill. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, in discussing a typist’s touch, describes this as ‘knowledge in the hands’ but doesn’t fully explain how it gets there. While he considers this a ‘knowledge bred of familiarity’ and attests to the power of habit in the body ‘appropriating fresh instruments’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1999: 143-144), this implies a pedagogy whereby acquiring a skill is simply learnt as a matter of course. Such physical capacities, however, are not just learnt, they are also often taught. In the context of children learning to write and their production of text through the use of a pencil, this is an important distinction. Children do not simply acquire the capacity to write, they are taught to do so and the pedagogies that affect this process are instrumental to their embodied and sensuous competence
Carnivale Schools Writing Project
Pedagogy : the unsaid of socio-cultural theory
The formation of subjectivities has long been central to contemporary social and cultural theory.... more The formation of subjectivities has long been central to contemporary social and cultural theory. There has been substantial work across the Humanities, Social Sciences, and beyond, considering the ways in which various domains of the modern world shape minds and bodies by discursive and material means. Yet this work tends to emphasise already formed subjects or particular social and cultural effects which are seen to constitute classed, gendered and radicalised subject. The processes that produce, for example, these effects – or how forms of conduct are acquired through particular relations and practices across a range of settings –receive far less scrutiny. This book deploys the notion of ‘cultural pedagogies’ to recast the processes of subject formation, institutional conduct, cultural representation and human capacities as pedagogic practices of teaching and learning, broadly understood, which produce cumulative changes in how we act, think, feel and imagine. Existing work on critical and public pedagogies and the recent proliferation of work on ‘pedagogies of…’ (place, consumption and gender, for example) offer important starting points, but we believe a more comprehensive approach to cultural forms of pedagogy is still needed, building on this work and pushing it in the new directions
The ‘career’ of the migrant
Critical Reflections on Migration, ‘Race’ and Multiculturalism, 2017
On the Arts of Stillness: For a Pedagogy of Composure
M/C Journal, 2009
We live in an era in which the ‘active learner’ has become accepted as the fundamental goal of go... more We live in an era in which the ‘active learner’ has become accepted as the fundamental goal of good teaching from early childcare to university education (Silberman; University of Melbourne University). In this paper we reflect upon the arts of stillness in contemporary classrooms based on research in schools across Sydney (Watkins and Noble).Part of the context for this paper is the way ‘activity’ has been uncritically elevated to a pedagogic principle in contemporary education. Over several decades a critique of traditional or more formal approaches to education has produced an increasing emphasis on learning that is said to be more engaged often under labels such as ‘discovery’ or ‘experiential’ learning, enquiry methods or ‘learning by doing’. This desire to give students a greater role in the educational process is admirable. It is also seen to be more democratic and ‘relevant’ to young people (Cope & Kalantzis). Positioned against a straw man of ‘passive learning’, characteris...
Multicultural Days are a regular event in Australian schools. While they are viewed as a vehicle ... more Multicultural Days are a regular event in Australian schools. While they are viewed as a vehicle for cultural inclusion and strengthening community, they have long been critiqued for their avoidance of a more critical engagement with deeper issues around cultural complexity. The intent of this paper is not simply to add to this critique but to understand why such forms of lazy multiculturalism persist in schools. Taking an ethnographic orientation to the field of multicultural education, it examines one school's approach to the Multicultural Day. The paper considers how, despite engaging in professional learning designed to challenge established practice in this area, teachers resisted the intellectual task of doing diversity differently. The ethnographic methods used in the study not only allowed for an examination of the practices this school engaged in, they drew attention to how teachers might modify their practice and develop a deeper understanding of cultural complexity.
Acts of War: Military Metaphors in Representations of Lebanese Youth Gangs
Media International Australia, 2003
The media representations of the terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States and their... more The media representations of the terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States and their aftermath bear strong similarities to the media coverage of ‘Lebanese youth gangs' over the last few years — both rely significantly on the metaphor of war. This paper explores two media narratives about Lebanese youth gangs which draw on this metaphor — the first deploys a simple us/them structure which, like the dominant Western reportage of the terrorist crisis, turns on a form of moral reduction in which the forces of good and evil are relatively clear. The accumulated imagery of Lebanese gangs, drugs, crime, violence and ‘ethnic gang rape’ articulates a dangerous otherness of those of Arabic-speaking background — echoed in the coverage of the terrorist ‘attack on America'. This simple narrative, however, gives way to a second, emerging narrative about Lebanese youth gangs which also relies on the metaphor of war but acknowledges the moral duplicity of both ‘combatants' ...
‘Dog-Whistle’ Journalism and Muslim Australians since 2001
Media International Australia, 2003
‘Dog-whistle politics’ was much discussed around the 2001 federal election campaign in which the ... more ‘Dog-whistle politics’ was much discussed around the 2001 federal election campaign in which the Howard government used the ‘ Tampa crisis’ and September 11 to appeal successfully to popular xenophobia and insecurities. The notion involves sending a sharp message which, like a dog whistle inaudible to humans, calls clearly to those intended, and goes unheard by others. This article argues that this sort of ideological manoeuvre has been abetted by an analogous process in the tabloid press, in which ostensibly liberal, reasonable stories speak at the ‘inaudible’ level to those whose insecurity and ignorance leaves them susceptible to populist claims that their relaxed and comfortable past has been stolen away by cosmopolitan, ‘politically correct’ elites and the ‘multicultural industry’. Three examples are analysed: the stories of the women's gym and the halal hamburgers in Western Sydney, and that of the Muslim man threatened with dismissal from his Sydney North Shore professional job for praying in his lunch hour. Each was originally run as a ‘good news story’ or as sympathetic to Muslim protagonists, but provoked a backlash which generated extended ‘news’ and comment — much of it racist — and irresponsibly exacerbating community tensions.
The Visibility of Racism: Perceptions of Cultural Diversity and Multicultural Education in State Schools
The International Journal of Organizational Diversity, 2014
This paper draws upon the findings of an online survey of all public school teachers in New South... more This paper draws upon the findings of an online survey of all public school teachers in New South Wales around issues of multiculturalism and multicultural education (May–June 2011; completed sample of n=5,128). The survey showed an encouraging trend among teachers to be pro-diversity, suggesting a widely held openness to cultural difference. It also found that teachers are supportive of multicultural education and strongly support anti-racism in schools. Teachers, however, were less likely than the general population to acknowledge racism as a problem in Australian society, and only half agreed that racism was a problem in schools. Executive staff were even less likely to acknowledge there was a problem with racism in schools or in Australian society more broadly. The survey also found that classroom teachers were much less likely to have read Departmental policies on multicultural education and anti-racism than were executive staff, though this is to be expected given the latter’s requirement to report on the operationalisation of departmental policy. While teachers seemed to have a more extensive view of the presence of racism than executive staff they displayed less awareness of their own schools’ implementation of policies of anti-racism and multicultural education. Compared to teachers at the chalkface, school leaders tend to under-acknowledge racism and overestimate the effects of anti-racism. Together these findings indicate a problematic disjuncture within the professional practice of schooling, and a source of disruption to the delivery of multicultural education programs.
al-Lubnaniyun fi Ustraliya : qiraah fi al-huwiyah wa-al-unsuriyah fi zaman al-awlamah (The Lebanese in Australia : a Reading in Identity and Racism in the Age of Globalisation)
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Papers by Gregory Noble