Emerging Area of Research Strength

Learning, Leadership and Policy: Research Across Methodological Paradigms

Vision Statement

To be recognised nationally and internationally for research in learning, leadership and policy (LLP); to be recognized for providing expertise for industry and community funded research; and to be recognized for empowering its staff, students, and clients through its studies in methodologies across research paradigms in the social sciences.

Context

Education in its broadest sense, unlike in earlier periods, is now at the forefront of national debate and state and federal government policy. Ensuring lifelong learning through a range of new mediums, structures and assessments practices, and the need for leadership in educational and other organizations, have become recognized in these policy debates.

Studies in this area of research strength are constructed and practiced in diverse organizations to empower individuals and communities to facilitate their learning, to exercise leadership, and to generate policy. These capacities are developed through researching and maintaining the highest level of knowledge and skills in the full range of methodological paradigms across the social sciences. The strength of members of LLP arises from their contributions in the substantive areas of learning, leadership and policy, and capacity to employ, advance, and as required, integrate, methodologies from distinctive research paradigms - from positivism to postmodernism, from quantitative to qualitative, and from case study to survey, whether in, basic ARC-funded, applied industry-funded, or student higher-degree, research.

The distinctive aspect of this area of research strength, in addition to studies of the three content areas of LLP, is the concept of empowerment of its members, its students and its clients, through their capacities to employ the most relevant and incisive research methodologies to deal with complex social and educational problems. A special contribution the LLP area of research strength is the support it gives to more junior members of staff in the University to empower them in their endeavours to contribute to basic and applied, industry funded, research.

Definitions

Learning, leadership, policy, and research methodology are generally recognized terms. The area of LLP has distinctive emphases within the broader conceptualistaions of these terms.

Learning

Learning refers to the study of the development of knowledge, understandings, skills, attitudes and values in regard to both generic and specific content. The study of learning incorporates cognitive, social, motivational, volitional and emotional aspects, since these are critical in facilitating or inhibiting the process of learning. Recent theoretical developments have stressed the view that learning is socially situated, dynamic, interactive and multi-faceted, and that learners should be empowered to regulate their own learning. The importance of combining different epistemological perspectives, adopting mixed research methodologies and studying learning as it takes place over a period of time and in real-life settings, whether formal or informal, institutional, organizational or community settings is widely acknowledged. Within this broad conceptual perspective, the study of learning also incorporates micro and macro levels of analysis and contexts. Researchers in LLP are leaders in the newer developments.

Leadership

Leadership is exercised in complex settings involving constructs such as power, authority, and group processes understood to be significant in managing forces of change. Functionally, leadership is the demonstrated capacity to achieve organizational goals. Early models of leadership defined good leaders in terms of strength and direction. In these models, leadership meant achieving goals through people. More contemporary models of leadership focus on collaboration so that goals are achieved with people. In such models good leaders facilitate the identification and articulation of a shared vision for the organization. Leaders recognize the importance of context and apply a wide range of interpersonal skills according to the particular setting. In this facilitative model of leadership, leaders involve others in solving problems. They recognize when a group requires direction, interact effectively with the group, and guide and support group members to accomplish goals that are consistent with the shared vision. The latter approach is the focus of the leadership in this area of research strength.

Policy

Policy is the production of ideas and programs to solve a social issue. Policy analysis is the study of policy documents, such as, mission statement, strategic objectives, government White Papers and private sector policy documents to understand policy processes and enlighten policy debates. It uses discourse analysis and comparative policy analysis to examine various texts. It also draws on empirical research that gathers data on policies through interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires. Currently policy analysts recognize that policy texts take many forms and that the implementation of policy may differ from the intended goals of policy makers. Through a multidisciplinary approach, drawing mainly on politics, economics and sociology, members of the LLP study the policy context to gain a better understanding of the origins and underlying assumptions of policy statements. Starting from the macro-level policies, these are analysed to understand how they are translated into micro-level implementation programs. A policy text is not taken as a given, but examined for its intended as well as unintended consequences and how policy is interpreted at the grassroots level.

Methodology

Methodology is the study of research methods that are used to generate, analyse, and interpret data. These research methods are studied by social scientists, including researchers in education, because their assumptions cannot be taken for granted to the degree that they can be in the natural sciences. Thus in addition to studying established methods to become competent in established techniques (e.g. constructing an interview schedule or questionnaire, and analysing and interpreting the data), the assumptions behind these procedures in various contexts are also problematised, which in turn leads to understanding the different paradigms of research in the social sciences. Understanding these paradigms, rather than taking them for granted, is an important part of outstanding educational research rather than merely competent research, and is the emphasis in this area of research strength. For example, a distinctive part of the studies in measurement in the social sciences in general is to emphasise the integral part qualitative analysis plays in measurement.

Implications of multidisciplinarity

The area of research strength arises from the work in the professional School of Education. Inevitably, to cover the professional demands of preparing educators across a range of disciplines, contexts, and processes, staff in the school come from many different discipline backgrounds, from philosophy and cultural studies to history, mathematics, and natural science. As indicated, they use their discipline knowledge and skills in diverse research methodologies to research the complex content areas of Learning, Leadership and Policy. However, they also use this work to contribute understandings in the disciplines and content areas themselves, for example to psychology from studies in learning; to mathematics and philosophy from studies in measurement; to political science from studies in policy and to linguistics from the study of second language learning.