Faculty of Arts and Education

School of Education


   Prof. Trevor Gale

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Position Chair in Education Policy and Social Justice
Email trevor.gale@deakin.edu.au
Area School of Education
Phone +61 3 925 17245
Campus Burwood
Location G2.08
Role and profile Professor Trevor Gale is a critical sociologist of education, with research interests in policy and social justice, particularly in the fields of schooling and higher education.

He has an international reputation for his monographs Just Schooling (OUP 2000) and Engaging Teachers (OUP 2003), co-authored with Kathleen Densmore, and for his Foucauldian theorization of policy methodology. His more recent conception of student equity in terms of ‘mobility’, ‘aspiration’ and ‘voice’ (with Sam Sellar) and his typology of student transition (with Stephen Parker), have reframed the problem of social inclusion in higher education.

Prior to taking up his current position, Trevor was the founding director of Australia’s National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (2008-2011), a research centre funded by the Australian Government. While there he led the government-commissioned national review of university outreach programs, reported in Interventions Early in School (2010), which now informs inter/national policy and practice in the field.
Teaching responsibilities Trevor’s teaching primarily involves supervising research students (PhD, Masters by research, Honours). Potential research students should contact Trevor about supervision possibilities, particularly if their research intentions match his areas of research expertise and/or his more specific research projects.

His current research students and the working titles of their research projects are as follows:
* Jessica Bok, PhD: Adaptive preferencing and the capacity to aspire. Recipient of Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship.
* Sugiono Eltamani, PhD: Social Justice in Indonesian Schooling. Recipient of Deakin Postgraduate Research Scholarship.
* Avril Howard, PhD: A policy analysis of Christian school chaplaincy.
* Astrid Paape, PhD: Negotiating student aspirations and life chances in East Timor.
* Bernard Petter, PhD: Institutional work in Australia's VET sector. (intermission)
* Andrew Skoudoumbis, PhD: Positioning Teachers and Teaching: Unraveling The Teacher Effectiveness Agenda. (under examination)
* Stephen Kelly, PhD (enrolled at QUT): Globalising Influences and Secondary Literacy Policy: A Critical Policy Sociology (intermission)
Research interests As a critical scholar, Trevor's research orientation is distinguishable by its (1) political commitments – identifying who benefits and who doesn’t by particular social arrangements and what can be done about these – and by its (2) dialectic method, which moves beyond seemingly ‘oppositional’ theoretical and methodological notions (such as theory/practice, structure/agency, objectivity/subjectivity, etc), reimagining these as different accounts of the same social reality.

This orientation informs his research interests in policy sociology, social justice, schooling, higher education, and pedagogy, and the research methods he employs, such as critical ethnography, critical case study, and critical discourse analysis. He is well versed in conducting interviews, participant observation, and in survey design.
Current research projects Trevor's program of research includes the following funded projects:
* Social justice dispositions informing teachers' pedagogy in advantaged and disadvantaged secondary schools, with Cross & Mills (ARC 2013-2015).
* Capacitating student aspirations in classrooms and communities in a high poverty region, with Zipin, Brennan & Sellar (ARC 2012-2014).
* Student Aspirations in Central Queensland: (Re)imagining higher education in low SES student futures, with Parker, Moore & Doig (CQU & HEPPP 2012-2013).
* Dispositions Towards Social Justice in Advantaged and Disadvantaged Schools (Deakin CRGS, 2012).
* Student transition in higher education: a typology, with Parker (ALTC 2011).
Service to the University,
discipline or community  		 Trevor’s views on education policy and social justice are regularly sought by government and the media and he is a frequent keynote speaker at national and international conferences. In 2009, he was an expert member of the DEEWR working group which developed the Indicator Framework for Higher Education Performance Funding and the new measure of socioeconomic status for higher education students. In the same year he was appointed by the Deputy Prime Minister as a founding member of the National VET Equity Advisory Council (NVEAC). In 2010-2011 he also served on the National Quality Council (NQC).

He is the founding editor of Critical Studies in Education, a past president (2005) of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE), Australia’s pre-eminent association of education researchers, and a past board member of the Asia-Pacific Education Research Association (APERA). He is also on the editorial panel and board of the International Journal of Inclusive Education and the International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning.

Within Deakin, Trevor is an executive member of its Strategic Centre for Research in Education Futures and Innovation (CREFI) and Convenor of the Centre's research program "Governance, Policy and Leadership". He is also an expert member of Deakin's Work Stream CD04: ‘Education where you are’, which is part of CReaTe – Deakin’s Curriculum Review and Transformation Initiative. As part of his role, Trevor provides Deakin with policy and strategic advice on matters of student equity.
Awards Researcher of the Year (2010), Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences, University of South Australia.
Qualifications DipT (Monash), BEd (Monash), MEdAdmin (UQ), PhD (UQ)
Memberships American Educational Research Association (AERA)
Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)
British Educational Research Association (BERA)
European Educational Research Association (EERA)
Conferences Trevor was the Invited Speaker in the Sociology of Education SIG Invited Symposium: Education Equity: Opportunities, Outcomes and Mechanisms, at the AARE Conference in Hobart, November 2011. His paper was titled Troubling equity in Australian education policy and research. The symposium was also presented as the AARE Symposium at the 2012 AERA Conference, Vancouver, Canada, 13-17 April 2012.

Trevor was also a keynote speaker at the UK Open University's Widening Participation Conference, Discourses of Inclusion in Higher Education, held 24-25 April 2012, Whittlebury Hall, Northamptonshire, UK.
Research link View Deakin associated research data
Publications

Last three years (2010-2012)

Trevor is author and co-author of 6 books and over 150 chapters, journal articles and other scholarly publications. Many inform the work of researchers, policy makers and practitioners in the field. For example, Rough Justice (Peter Lang 2005) – an ethnography of homeless and street youth – is set reading for Victorian Government juvenile justice workers. Similarly, Just Schooling (OUP 2000) along with many of Trevor's journal articles are set reading in graduate courses throughout Australia, the UK and the USA.

His latest books are Schooling in Disadvantaged Communities (Springer 2010) with Carmen Mills and Educational Research by Association (Sense 2010) with Bob Lingard. Clicking on the research link above provides access to an abridged (selected publications) and truncated (since 2005) list of his publications. Below is a list of his refereed publications over the last three years (2010-2012).

Books
Mills, C. & Gale, T. (2010) Schooling in Disadvantaged Communities: Playing the game from the back of the field. Springer.

Gale, T. & Lingard, B. (eds.) (2010) Educational Research by Association: AARE Presidential Addresses and the field of educational research. Rotterdam: Sense.

Book chapters
Gale, T. & Tranter, D. (2012) ‘Social inclusion as a matter of policy: Australian higher education for the masses’ in T. Basit & S. Tomlinson (eds) Social Inclusion and Higher Education. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, pp. 149-169.

Sellar, S. & Gale, T. (2012) ‘Aspiration and education: Toward new terms of engagement for marginalised students’ in B. McMahon & J. Portelli (eds) Student Engagement in Urban Schools: Beyond Neoliberal Discourses. North Carolina, USA: Information Age Publishers, pp. 91-109

Lingard, B. & Gale, T. (2010) ‘Presidential Address as Pedagogy: Representing and constituting the field of educational research.’ In Gale, T. & Lingard, B. (eds.) Educational Research by Association: AARE Presidential Addresses and the field of educational research. Rotterdam: Sense, pp. 1-22.

Journal articles
Gale, T. (2011) Expansion and equity in Australian higher education: Three propositions for new relations. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(5), pp. 669-685.

Sellar, S. & Gale, T. (2011) Mobility, aspiration, voice: A new structure of feeling for student equity in higher education. Special Issue: “New capacities for student equity and widening participation in higher education”. Critical Studies in Education, 52(2), pp. 115-134.

Mills, C. & Gale, T. (2011) Re-asserting the place of context in explaining student (under) achievement. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 32(2), pp. 239-256.

Sellar, S., Gale, T. & Parker, S. (2011) Appreciating aspirations in Australian higher education. Special Issue: “Globalisation and student equity in higher education”. Cambridge Journal of Education, 41(1), pp. 37-52.

Gale, T. (2011) Student equity’s starring role in Australian higher education: Not yet centre field. Special Issue: “Confronting perceptions of student equity in higher education”. Australian Educational Researcher, 38(1), pp. 5-23.

Gale, T. & Tranter, D. (2011) Social justice in Australian higher education policy: An historical and conceptual account of student participation. Critical Studies in Education, 52(1), pp. 29-46.

Gale, T. (2010) Social inquiry and social action: Priorities for preparing school leaders. Special Issue: “Leadership Education Priorities for a Democratic Society.” Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly, 4(4), pp. 316-318.

Lingard, B. & Gale, T. (2010) Defining Educational Research: A perspective of/on presidential addresses and the Australian Association for Research in Education. Australian Educational Researcher, 37(1), pp. 21-49.

Additional URLs

Critical Studies in Education

equity101

@trevagale

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22nd April 2013