Deficit Discourses Research Articles

The complexity of leading for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students' success in schools

ABSTRACT School leaders in Australia have responsibilities to support First Nations student engagement. In Australia, where Reconciliation is unfinished business, this work requires leaders to negotiate a complex set of arrangements that are often associated with deficit approaches. This paper attempts to disrupt these deficit discourses by researching the management of school reforms for success in student engagement. We analyze survey and interview responses of 40 participants who reflect on their school leadership practices using a framework of Leading for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student success. The findings reveal that school leaders can be agents of decolonizing agendas to position schools as allies for the aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Making citizens, procedures, and outcomes: Theorizing politics in a co-productionist idiom.

The literature engaging political theory in STS often puts forward a deficit model view of STS, in which homegrown STS ideas about politics, such as co-production, are either treated as having an insufficient account of the political or not read as political theory at all. This article challenges the deficit discourse by reading co-production as a full-blown political theory in its own right, in particular by showing how it investigates normative questions of 'the good' that are central to any theorization of politics. Where political theory often concerns itself with the construction and application of universal political ideals-such as of the good citizen, legitimate procedures or smart outcomes-co-production looks at empirical sites where citizens, procedures, and outcomes articulate understandings of the good held by political actors in situ. By looking at the making of citizens, procedures, and outcomes in practice, we can better understand co-production as political theory. In particular, co-production elaborates on how the making of citizens, procedures, and outcomes constitute (and are constituted by) ideal normative positions, including: authoritative views about what citizens may claim to know, culturally-situated understandings of procedural legitimacy, and political values and ideologies embedded in seemingly 'objective' measurements of outcomes.

Horizons of Possibility—Young People’s Encounters with Nature and Their Qualities in Social Programs

AbstractThis article presents an analysis of young people’s encounters with nature within a context of social programs. In the intersection between nature and social initiatives, nature is often defined as something that contains a range of inherent properties that can have a positive impact on various aspects of young people’s lives—such as their well-being, development and learning. However, there is a lack of analyses that focus on the manifold, diverse and divergent exchanges and liaisons that young people’s encounters with nature can give rise to. Based on an approach, where humans and nature are considered so intertwined that one cannot be meaningfully understood without the other (Haraway 2021, Latour 2005), the aim of the article is to shed light on the many different types of entanglements and interconnections that unfold in young people’s encounters with nature, as well as on the processes of becoming they are associated with. Drawing on a qualitative study, the article develops a typology of six significant types of entanglements and interconnections between young people and nature. It is a characteristic of these entanglements and interconnections that they unfold depending on how the encounters between young people and nature are framed by the social programs. They are thus not defined by already known outcomes, but can be understood as ‘figurations’ (Braidotti 1994), that contain both a lived here and now and an ‘imagined elsewhere’ (Haraway 1991). The article shows how this perspective confronts deficit discourses, where young people in social programs are seen as either lacking resources and agency or whose resources and agency are going in the wrong direction, as well as those contemporary discourses that position and problematize the overall present youth generation as fragile, hypersensitive and disoriented.

Racialised identities of multilingual teachers: stories, experiences and agentic action of Indonesian teachers in Australian schools

ABSTRACT In a context of increasing deficit discourses about multiculturalism and multilingualism, this study examined the racialised identities of multilingual Indonesian teachers in secondary schools in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Informed by the Douglas Fir Group Framework (2016), the study unpacked teachers’ socio-cultural, and linguistic trajectories in schools to understand the ways in which they navigate, negotiate, and resist their racialised identities at micro, meso, and macro levels of activity. Through semi-structured interviews with six Indonesian teachers teaching Bahasa Indonesia in NSW schools, the study focused on three broad dimensions, namely: (i) teachers’ perceived racialised identities in connection with their students and colleagues in schools (micro); (ii) the perceived institutional practices that reproduce racialisation and marginalisation (meso); and (iii) the broader societal factors that contribute to ‘self’ and ‘other’ racialisation (macro). Thematic analysis of the interview data reveal that teachers identify systemic ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ that essentialise their racialised identities, Additionally, the racialisation of Indonesian language teachers in broader societal contexts is influenced by systemic factors, including language policies and institutional structures. Findings suggest that despite the pervasive forces which perpetuate monolithic thinking in schools, teachers engage in agentic action that seeks to resist and overcome their racialised identities.

Reciprocal mentorship and RECE journeys: An intergenerational dialogue

This essay brings together three intergenerational colleagues, two RECE founders, and a mid-career colleague, engaged in reciprocal mentorship, collaborative projects, and research focused on child care, critical policy studies, and global childhoods. We explore our encounters with RECE and how we have engaged with, been influenced by, and found various collaborative spaces through our reconceptualist/RECE experiences. In our dialogue, we discuss how we came to engage with reconceptualist scholarship and consider one of its tenets, reciprocal mentoring. We reflect on how the DAP debates have and still play a role in our scholarship, how naming and countering deficit discourse influence our work in early years policy, and the ways children’s voices, experiences, and participation rights need to be centered. We conclude by discussing current projects and future possibilities in our shared and individual work, exploring the implications for scholar activism and the future of reconceptualist work in early care and education.

(Re)countering multilingualism and refugee-background students in Australian compulsory education

Compared with nations around the world, Australia has one of the highest rates of refugee resettlement per capita. Approximately 40 per cent of newly arrived refugees in Australia in 2018–19 were under the age of 18 and close to 90 per cent spoke a language other than English. Given that education is compulsory until the age of 16 in most states and territories of Australia, young people labelled as refugee-background students (RBSs) are tasked with navigating the English-only education system, in which their multilingualism is often viewed as a barrier; however, there are increasing calls for research to focus on the positive, affirmative practices of RBSs through a strengths-based approach in education, to counter a ‘damage-centred’ and deficit discourse. Thus, this article presents a systematic literature review of studies conducted in Australia with RBSs between 2010 and 2022. Specifically, this review explores the strengths-based multilingual practices of RBSs in compulsory education in Australia. Inspired by RefugeeCrit theory, we seek to highlight strengths-based examples of RBSs multilingual practices as examples of counter-narratives to the prevailing deficit discourse, while remaining attentive to issues of trauma, agency and multilingualism.

Thinking About Rural Education and Binary Logic

Although definitions of rural vary across educational research projects and from country to country, an enduring theme has been the framing of rural as a disadvantage or problem that sits alongside a view of the urban as normative. In questioning the urban/rural binary and the deficit discourses that are associated with it, the authors present four short data excerpts and their thinking about how they represent rural education in their research. They conclude that the telling of positives stories about rural education is a move towards changing the discourses that circulate.

Conceptualizing political knowledges needed to teach inclusive mathematics: theorizing through counterstories

How do teachers develop and use political knowledge to create equitable and inclusive conditions for and with disabled students, particularly disabled students of color? In this essay, we build on concepts of political teacher knowledge in mathematics education, critical inclusive mathematics education and disability studies to explore teacher knowledges that support disabled students’ mathematical learning. We focus on four aspects of political knowledge for teaching mathematics: (1) knowledge as relational and unfolding over time, (2) understanding and negotiating the political contexts in which we teach mathematics, (3) deconstructing deficit discourses about marginalized students, and (4) learning to creatively resist the systems for and with our students. To develop our theoretical analysis, we use a counterstory of a middle school Latino student named Luis and his Latina mathematics teacher, Ms. Marquez. Our aim is to open up discussions in mathematics teacher educational research about the politics at play in teaching inclusive mathematics.

An Indigenous Strengths-based Theoretical Framework

ABSTRACT This article explores the inadequate recognition and integration of the strengths of Indigenous 1 people in direct practice, policy development, and research. To address this concern, I present an Indigenous strengths-based theoretical framework designed to recognise and illuminate the diverse strengths inherent in Indigenous people and communities. The ongoing structure of colonisation often presents challenges for practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and others collaborating with Indigenous people to adopt a strengths-based approach. Unfortunately, well-intentioned collaborators, especially non-Indigenous allies, often succumb to deficit-based thinking and simplistic binary comparative analysis. This article draws inspiration from Dennis Saleebey's (2023) six-step, strengths-based approach, integrating it with a micro, meso, and macro framework and Indigenous Standpoint Theory. The result is an Indigenous strengths-based theoretical framework that embraces a strengths-based approach within the context of Indigenous cultures and world views. This framework fosters the identification and development of Indigenous strengths in a respectful and culturally safe manner. IMPLICATIONS A strengths-based approach must supersede the deficit discourse that continues to be a defining feature of how social workers, allied health professionals, researchers, and policymakers interact with Indigenous Australians. This article draws inspiration from Saleebey’s (2023. The strengths perspective in social work practice: Extensions and cautions. In Social work (pp. 230–235). Routledge) six-step approach to a strengths perspective, combined with a systems theory framework and an Indigenous standpoint, and can assist in (re)defining Indigenous strength-based practice.

Asset and deficit discourses of student ideas in science formative assessment co‐design

AbstractThe Framework for K‐12 Science Education set an ambitious goal of broadening participation in science learning for all students. Meeting this vision will involve supporting teachers in making meaningful connections with the cultural and linguistic resources their students bring to school; in essence, developing pedagogies that frame these resources as assets important to learning. In this manuscript, we present a qualitative case study of one community of high school science teachers who participated in a year‐long professional learning focused on formative assessment co‐design related to natural selection. Findings show that the process of formative assessment co‐design surfaced both deficit‐ and asset‐based statements about students' contributions. Teachers were more likely to share deficit‐based statements as compared to facilitators, whose statements were more asset‐based. This was particularly true with reference to students' prior knowledge and linguistic resources. At the same time, our analysis suggests that teachers were more likely to share more asset‐based framings of learners when practicing for and reflecting on enactment of formative assessment tasks. These findings suggest that supportive co‐design environments can encourage teachers to take more asset‐oriented views of learners. We discuss the implications of these findings for professional learning and science classroom practice.

Distributed liderazgo: the making of spaces and leadership structures for a multilingual school ecology

ABSTRACT This qualitative study conducted at a Midwestern U.S. elementary school with a ‘strand’ bilingual programme examines the ways that administrators, teachers, and parents create learning environments for emergent bilinguals (EBs) that promote a positive view of bilingualism. To frame the study, the author used distributed leadership to emphasise the multiple stakeholders and levels on which leadership is exercised. Liderazgo is used to emphasise the collective mission behind these leadership practices to create wider multilingual school ecology. Critically applying these perspectives to the data, the author developed the notion of ‘distributed liderazgo’ to identify actions taken and needed to contribute to the school's multilingual ecology. Promising instances include a shared mission focused on EBs, teacher collaboration reinforced by shared planning and opportunities for students to interact outside their programmes, and parent-led meetings. Additional steps could be taken to further the visibility of parent leadership and opportunities to support more languages at the school. The notion of distributed liderazgo is useful for practitioners and researchers to consider how leadership practices can contribute to a school's assets-based orientation to bilingualism. Work like this is important to contest monolingual orientations and deficit discourses about EBs that persist in otherwise English-dominant classrooms and schools.

Racially minoritised students’ strategies for navigating and resisting racism in higher education

ABSTRACT For years now racially minoritised people have entered UK Higher Education (HE) at higher rates than their white peers and, in recent years, recognition of race inequality in the sector has been growing. Despite this, institutional racism and whiteness continue to underpin UK HE. A growing body of work centres the experiences of racially minoritised students and considers how they experience racism and whiteness in HE. Less scholarly attention has been paid to how students respond to and resist racism and whiteness. As such, this article draws attention to racially minoritised students’ agency and the strategies they develop and deploy to navigate and resist racism in HE. In so doing, it challenges deficit discourses that suggest that racially minoritised students lack the capital required to survive in the academy. Second, through exploring students’ agency and resistance, it reveals the weight of institutional whiteness in HE.

Teacher positioning within the figured world(s) of urban school science

AbstractAlthough research has highlighted the challenges of teaching in urban settings, particularly for science teachers, it has paid less attention to the development of science teaching identities in urban settings. This paper situates science teaching identity within societal discourses of science, education, and teaching to explore the ways in which macro‐level discourses influence the positions available to science teachers in urban schools. Using questionnaire data from 64 teachers, discourse analysis is used to demonstrate how participants reinscribe or disrupt prominent macro‐level discourses, including the elitism of science, accountability, and deficit views of urban areas, and the resulting positions that are created by this negotiation process. The findings include possible positions relative to science, education, and teaching as well as a consideration of differences between elementary and secondary teachers and between beginning and experienced teachers. Although many participants successfully disrupted damaging discourses of science as elite and disconnected, as well as discourses of accountability and the role of standardized testing, they were not able to disrupt deficit discourses that resulted in positioning themselves as outside of their students' worlds, often as saviors. The findings demonstrated the strong influence of deficit discourses on teachers' descriptions of their experiences as science teachers and the need to support teachers in understanding the historical and cultural contexts of urban education to identify and disrupt deficit discourses and create teacher positions based on asset and justice‐based views of students, schools, and communities.

Supporting widening access, continuation and success: the positive impact of the Extended Project Qualification (EPQ)

The Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) is a Level 3, post-16 UK qualification that students usually take alongside A Levels, prior to entering university or the labour market. It plays an important role in improving access to, and success at university. The University of Southampton's Learn with US Transition Programme has developed support particularly for students undertaking the EPQ, who are underrepresented at university. This programme responds to the Office for Students′ (OfS) requirement to develop and submit an Access and Participation Plan (APP). The EPQ challenges the lack of aspiration and deficit discourses that are especially damaging to students from underrepresented backgrounds. Students who complete the EPQ are shown to perform better in terms of Key Stage 5 attainment and at degree level due to developing key academic and research skills prior to enrolment. The Learn with US team is exploring links between EPQ attainment and other institutional goals, such as addressing degree awarding gaps for under-represented students. The University of Southampton takes a whole-institution, lifecycle approach to removing barriers for underrepresented students, and the Learn with US Transition Programme is a key element of our provision that is proven to have positive outcomes for students transitioning into university, especially for those students who are already impacted by structural disadvantage.

Blueprint for Rural Mathematics

This paper reports on the development and use of a Blueprint for Rural Mathematics (herein referred to as the Blueprint) in a study of middle-primary mathematics teaching. The study presented a counter-narrative to the deficit discourse around rural education outcomes through an emic perspective of middle-primary mathematics on Yorke Peninsula, a rural district in southern Australia. This study defined ‘rural’ as being both a sociological and a geographical phenomenon. It takes a sociological stance acknowledging the situatedness of the rural, and the social and cultural uniqueness of the people and their communities. Geographically, the rural locations in this study were those distanced from, and outside the commuting zone of, large urban areas and major cities. This study claimed that rural schools of Yorke Peninsula are unresearched, under-theorised and underestimated in their teaching of mathematics. Hence, very little was known about the experiences of the Yorke Peninsula teachers, or the pedagogical practices they employ in their teaching of mathematics. Yorke Peninsula people have an identity of deficit imposed on them with no opportunity to negotiate it. In understanding and addressing the accuracy of this pervasive negative framing, this study involved investigating Yorke Peninsula teachers of mathematics, and concluded that the rural social space, the identity of its members, and teacher pedagogy are essential considerations in the teaching of mathematics. The Blueprint provides a framework with which to explore these key components of rural education.

Chinese university English teachers’ perceptions and practices of critical thinking: Challenging discourses of deficit

Critical thinking (CT) is established almost universally as a core goal in education, but continued association of practices involved in CT with education in the global north has constructed a discourse of deficit that underpins flows in higher education to institutions in the north, especially in the Anglosphere. The study presented in this paper is based on an analysis of the evidence of CT skills by a group of Chinese academics interviewed at the end of a short professional development program at an Australian university. Findings revealed that although participants voiced deficit discourses in relation to their own CT capacities and those of students and academics in China more generally, their responses to questions about any potential transfer of their learning to practice offered evidence of CT. We conclude that reductive assumptions assigning ownership of CT to particular groups or education systems need to be critically interrogated.

Let’s Talk About Writing Support for Plurilingual Graduate Students

Academic writing is an inseparable aspect of graduate school (Holmes et al., 2018) as students’ academic writing is the primary basis for assessment (Turner, 2011). The high-stakes nature of academic writing is magnified for plurilingual students, whose attendance at English medium universities is growing exponentially (Fenton-Smith & Humphreys, 2017). However, there is a scarcity of research that addresses how faculty support writing as an essential practice for plurilingual graduate students, particularly in English-medium universities where English is implicated in structures of power and privilege. Employing a critical analytic collaborative autoethnography (Anderson, 2006; Kempny, 2022) this research uses polyvocal conversations among seven researcher/practitioners to consider the question of how faculty members perceive and respond to the academic writing needs of plurilingual graduate students. Informed by intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2017; Hankivsky, 2014), these conversations illuminate the ways both educator identities and epistemological turns in education theory impact approaches to writing support for plurilingual graduate writers. Importantly, these discussions are implicated in the socio-political contexts of Canadian and Australian universities where systems of inequality act to marginalise plurilingual writers. These contextualised conversations then aim to problematise and revise existent, dominant deficit discourses and pedagogies of writing support for plurilingual students. Findings illuminate the capacity of educators, who are cognisant of their power and place, to generate alternative practices to support plurilingual graduate writers in service of more asset-orientated and inclusive spaces that take advantage of students’ plurilingual repertoires in English-dominant universities.

Where our identity lies: Confirmation of Aboriginality—narratives of colonial and lateral violence

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are facing growing levels of scrutiny to prove their identity to access Indigenous-specific government services designed to mitigate the impacts of past government policies. Yet, it is those who have been most severely impacted by past government policies of forcible removal from Country and separation of families who often face challenges obtaining evidence to prove their Indigeneity. Employing narrative inquiry and collaborative autoethnography, this article draws on the personal reflections and experiences of the Aboriginal authors to explore the health and wellbeing impacts of deficit discourses, perceptions, and judgements about Indigeneity in Australia. Our personal stories are shared to enliven discussion on how proof of Indigeneity requirements may systemically compound ongoing intergenerational trauma. These stories and perspectives are shared to stimulate review of proof of Indigeneity policies and procedures by government agencies and education institutions across Australia.

Different as deficient: Challenging the language of difference in constructions of Marshallese and other minoritized students

This paper presents a discourse analysis of the role the label “different” plays in mitigating or constructing deficit discourses of Asian-Pacific Islander students in a school in the U.S. Some scholars argue that discourses of linguistic difference play a positive role in countering deficit ideologies (e.g., Paris & Ball 2009). Others disagree, claiming that discourses of difference index deficiency (e.g., Gorski, 2016). To address this debate, I analyze a discussion with a U.S. educator and the language we used to talk about her first- and second-generation Marshallese immigrant students. Both of us were trying to speak positively about both the students and Marshallese culture. Nonetheless, “different” inadvertently functioned as an index of deficiency and had the effect of racializing Marshallese students. This analysis illuminates some of the negative impacts a focus on “difference” can have and challenges academics to reconsider the role “different” plays in their research and advocacy.

‘I danced on the road to the Macarena song which felt a bit naughty’: Affective entanglements and the wayfaring pandemic child

This paper applies a posthumanist lens, informed by the work of Hollett and Ehret and of Ingold, to consider children’s playful affective entanglements with the human and the more-than-human during fluctuating periods of social distancing in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this refracting theoretical lens, I (re)examine a selection of play and leisure experiences of an emergent subject – the pandemic child – during the national U.K. lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Via a national online, qualitative survey, children and families were invited to share examples of their play and leisure experiences during the pandemic to the Play Observatory, a U.K. research project that ran from 2020 to 2022. These survey contributions provide portals through which to (re)consider children’s connection, participation and emergent becomings, attuning analytical attention towards children’s affective place-event entanglements during pandemic times. A posthumanist (re)telling of children’s Play Observatory contributions demonstrates how children were imbricated in constantly emergent affects, meanings, becomings and potentialities, that waxed and waned, intensified and dissipated, transcending the physical locus of lockdown. This paper contributes to the field by unsettling discourses of rupture, loss and deficit that have tended to dominate public and policy discussions of children’s experience of lockdowns. It contributes to ongoing, collective attempts to interrupt policy responses to the pandemic that centre individualising practices of curriculum ‘catch-up’ and fail to invite into the debate consideration of the potential richness of experiences and events encountered by the pandemic child outside of the strictures of normal schooling and curriculum.