The GAE website highlights work from the ‘Community organising in Australian education policy, 1970s-1980s ’ research project, co-led by Helen Proctor (University of Sydney), Jessica Gerrard (University of Melbourne) and Susan Goodwin (University of Sydney) and funded by the Australian Research Council (DP 200102378).
The 1970s and 1980s was a crucial period of community organising in Australian education policy. An array of new organisations and associations appeared on the landscape to press for changes in education practice and policy and make claims upon the state. In turn, federal and state governments conducted major public inquiries into education, providing opportunities for community groups to voice their views and aspirations.
The GAE website shares data collected on groups, people and policy inquiries from this period through a portal with search, mapping, network visualisation, and data download capabilities. The groups included in the database were found through the submissions to both federal and state policy inquiries and reports and newsletters produced by community groups. Many of these groups were ad hoc, ephemeral and almost invisible in the public record, while others either grew or were absorbed into more formal structures and yet others were subgroups, splits or fractions of larger organisations. The project and the website offers a new way of examining policy inquiries as windows into diverse community activism, animated by policy reform.
The GAE website aims to expand the use and users of materials from the past beyond academic scholarship and to contribute to current-day debates about participatory politics and grassroots activism.
Image sourced from: State Library of New South Wales, https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/1wN2Nqxn/3lM6WVaapaEyQ
Professor Helen Proctor uses historical methods and perspectives to examine the making of contemporary educational systems. Her publications include A History of Australian Schooling (Campbell and Proctor, 2014) and The Curriculum of the Body and the School as Clinic: Histories of Public Health and Schooling (Burns and Proctor, 2024). https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3293-6789
Associate Professor Jessica Gerrard works in the fields of the sociology and history of education and critical policy sociology. Her publications include Expertise (Gerrard & Holloway, 2023); Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State (Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard, 2022); and Class in Australia (Threadgold and Gerrard, 2022). https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9011-6055
Professor Susan Goodwin conducts research on social policy for social change and the application of poststructuralist perspectives in policy research. Her publications include, Working Across Difference: Social Work, Social Policy and Social Justice (Baines, Bennett, Goodwin and Rawsthorne, 2019); Poststructural policy analysis: A guide to practice (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016), and Markets, Rights and Power in Australian Social Policy (Meagher and Goodwin, 2015).
Dr Heather Weaver holds a PhD in education history from the University of Washington, Seattle, and was Research Associate on the project. As a cultural historian, her work focuses on childhood, schooling, media and visuality. She explores how cultural imaginings inhabit a space between the intellectual and the social, between theory and practice.
Isabel Iglesias holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sydney. In her role as Research Assistant on the project she conducted the research on activist groups and people and education policies for the GAE database and coordinated the website development. Her main areas of research interest are gender, social theory and health.
Phoebe Oldham completed a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Politics and International Relations and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne. In her role as Research Assistant on the project she was responsible for sourcing archival material and analysing sources for the project. Her main interests are gender, environment and Indigenous studies.
