On academia
A chat with Sally Larsen about the world of research and higher education
I have a great group of friends who retrained to be teachers at the same time as I did. We went to UTS together and discovered that most of us had children, most of us were refugees from media or industry and all of us thought teaching would be a good career change. We engage in a little performance every year - usually around HSC Trials - where we complain about how stressful and not-family-friendly teaching is, we ask each other if we have regrets, we agree that no, we don’t, and we get on with it for another year. Recently, a couple of us have been wondering whether academia might be a viable career pathway for when our third or fourth syllabus change is announced. I decided to speak to former English teacher, and now completing PhD student Sally Larsen about how this has worked for her and of course we got chatting about all sorts of other issues that feed into the web of complexity that is academia and its relationship with education.
Sally is now a PhD researcher at the University of New England, working in the field of standardised testing. A recent paper of hers has sparked a lot of online debate and has fired up the school funding wars once again. She was incredibly generous with her time and gave some great advice and insight into her world, a world that is unfortunately often divorced from the professional lives of teachers.
On breaking into academia
When I asked Sally how she broke into academia, the answer was surprising. She said, “I found my first job as a research assistant in the local newspaper!” Sally was looking for something a little more family friendly than English teaching, and the transfer of her qualifications from Queensland to regional New South Wales made finding regular work prohibitively challenging. She describes hitting on a research career as something that happened mostly “by chance.” The very night of our interview, she spotted this other ‘chance’ opportunity on Twitter, very similar to the role that gave her an introduction.
When I asked her if research careers were more family friendly, she said that in some ways, yes. In non-academic roles, the hours can be great for parents with small children and some of this work can even be done remotely. But the industry is heavily reliant on grants and job security is lower than ever.
On research
Sally’s professional interests have partly sprung from her initial assistant role at UNE, where she had access to large datasets that were ripe for unpicking. She says, “I realised I could test claims made in the public domain given the right kind of data,” for example claims about the usefulness of NAPLAN for making inferences about school and sector influence, which on closer examination may not stand up to scrutiny. Some of her analysis suggests that school influence may be a lot less than people assume, which has huge potential for further research. But we also talked about how difficult it is to get good research in front of policy makers. The translation of research from academia into the real world is always challenging and maybe especially so in schools, which always seem to be under scrutiny.
She’s smart about not claiming to offer ‘magic bullet’ solutions. She asks big and thorny questions that arise from the way we traditionally read and interpret educational data: what does it mean if we improve average achievement, but the range of achievement doesn’t change - is this success? What if achievement gaps narrow but the mean declines? What if aiming for closing the gap doesn’t serve our most able students? She asks whether our decisions about where to contribute time and resources - because time is finite - mean that educational decisions are a zero sum game. I can see her point here - that research not only gives information but gets us asking the right questions, potentially helping us to clarify our vision and purpose.
On postgraduate research
Sally warned that it can be hard to find a university supervisor in an Education department who is passionate about quantitative methodology. She says, “In my experience I haven’t come across a lot of education people who are data people.” In her education degrees she only took one research methods course at Masters level - one that covered both qualitative and quantitative methodology. The rest of her training has been in the Psychology discipline. She spoke about the long standing cultural split between learning scientists and Education academics: contrasting philosophical and methodological approaches make some research areas in learning paradoxically incompatible with supervision by Education faculties.
She talked about the value of research methodology courses during her PhD studies. With online learning, some of these can be completed through overseas institutions, but she also recommended a research Masters (rather than a coursework track), which can be a good training ground, depending on what exactly is being offered. If you’re interested in postgraduate research and wondering how to find a supervisor, a hot tip from Sally was to look into what they have written, especially where they are named as the first author. This is where you might find common ground, suitability, and vast potential for a research niche of your own.
Personally, my biggest fear is not being able to find an area that would sustain my interest for several years. She allayed these concerns by explaining that with PhD research: “You’ll find that opportunities come up for it to evolve,” with the drivers changing over time. Some of Sally’s really valuable research has branched from her PhD study, and while it’s not directly related, she has gained a lot of satisfaction from publishing her work.
On academia and education
Interestingly, Sally’s research is overseen by the Psychology department at UNE. We talked about postgraduate research pathways and she pointed out an issue that I have been obliquely aware of for a while, but I hadn’t really thought through the implications. She talked about education departments as being “silo’d” away from learning science and psychology. Education departments have come under scrutiny for being out of touch in relation to the practicalities and realities of teaching and learning. Sally mentioned that some of the best research into the teaching of reading comes not from education departments but from the reading scientists - take Anne Castles and Pamela Snow as prominent examples. She asks, “How do we build more collaboration?” and it’s a good question for universities.
I was left with the feeling that we have a lot of research and data available and very little connection between academia and industry. I’m really grateful that Sally opened the door to a new kind of dialogue.