Neil Harrison

Since its implementation in 2000, the inland Xinjiang senior secondary school class policy (Xinjiangban policy) has promoted and funded middle-school students, mostly ethnic minorities from Xinjiang, to attend boarding schools in predominantly Han-populated cities throughout eastern China. The purpose of this policy is to improve ethnic minority students’ political, economic, and cultural status, enhance ethnic unity, and promote Chinese nationalism. Existing literature on this policy has commonly focused on students’ experiences in school contexts, interpreting ethnic minority students’ identity from a dualist either/or perspective. Less is known about how this policy has influenced and impacted students’ self-perceptions in their everyday practices. This article draws on the work of Sedikides and Brewer, which defines identity at three different levels – individual, relational, and collective – to provide a multi-layered understanding of identity formation and change in Xinjiangban students. The findings show that these students experience feelings of uncertainty and alienation in their educational journey, and that their identity shifts according to contexts and expectations that derive from multiple sources including self, others, and community.

Historical significance continues to be the forgotten element of history education. Without student capacity to establish what they think is important, or why they would care about certain events and people from the past, students will continue to be disinterested in the study of history. This paper draws on the results of a three-year study aimed at understanding how the Stolen Generations in Australia becomes historical significant for pre-service teachers. Rather than being disinterested in stories of the Stolen Generations, we find that these students are vitally invested in such narratives to the extent that they, on occasion, cannot bear to hear the story. While they acquire knowledge, they also resist and ignore it. Hence, we argue that neither reason or cognitive science are up to the task of resisting either the student’s drive to ignore, or their assimilation of difference into the same. For history to be significant in the classroom for students, it must be understood as more than an epistemological pursuit.

How Do We Know What We Think We Know – And Are We Right? Five New Questions about Research, Practice and Policy on Widening Access to Higher Education - Author: Neil Harrison

In this article, two autoethnographies from Australia and New Zealand provide a means of engaging students in difficult histories of colonial nations. The first looks to knowledge as a basis of understanding others, and the second focuses on concepts of empathy and vulnerability as a way of understanding difficult histories. Each of these autoethnographies are accompanied by collaborative writing, where the authors come together to reflect on these narratives through the frame of sociocultural theory. We propose a notion of empathy as enacted, rather than as an attribute that someone has in order to bring things closer. Rather than being governed by proximity, empathy can be performative in reconfiguring an interaction between narratives and memories. It is time for history education in colonial countries to reflect on the reproduction of its own theory of reason, and to move beyond its own existence as a colonial enterprise. The collaboration central to this article reflects the shared purpose of teaching in the name of justice.

Many great cultures of the world have recognised the impossibility of teaching. Governments in various colonial countries continue to spend huge sums of money on ‘closing the gap’ in Indigenous education, yet national assessment figures would support the claim that teaching is indeed an impossibility. This paper draws on some of Biesta’s recent theorisation to highlight the double impossibility of teaching in Indigenous education. While representation and miscommunication surely make teaching an impossible profession, I nevertheless return to the question, what is possible in education? I apply the more recent work of Butler to highlight how vulnerability can allow us to hear the story of others. Vulnerability allows us into the lives of others, and to recognise that they are already implicated in ours, noting that certain bonds are actually shaped through the reversibility of the story. I examine a presentation to teacher education students on the Stolen Generations as a means of understanding how the role of power in constituting body vulnerability can be leveraged in the curriculum beyond the discourse of independent and self-motivated learning.

This paper presents the results of a three-year study of the impacts of teaching about the experiences of trauma on students studying to become teachers. The project’s overarching objective is to develop an effective trauma-informed pedagogy that can support students who learn about the experiences of the ‘Stolen Generations’, the Holocaust, wars, and genocide. Following a presentation from a member of the Stolen Generations, students reported strong emotional impacts, indicating heightened arousal and defensive dissociation. Results indicated that effective teaching about the experiences of trauma must be accompanied by management processes that will mitigate the potential detrimental emotional impacts on such learning. We conclude that the reflexive power of narrative can implicate the student in her or his own life, as well as in the lives of others. Of critical importance is a recognition that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous lives are bound to one another in contemporary Australia.