Pauline Ho
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MEd(NanTech), BA(NanTech) PhD candidate |
Email: Phone: Fax: Building.Room: . |
Research project description
Providing quality education for all students is high on the agenda of many countries. In the 21st century economy, students need more than a basic set of skills and knowledge to participant successfully in dynamically changing societies. Yet, it remains the case that a percentage of students are systemically underperforming.
This thesis investigates how a group of educationally disadvantaged, lower tracked students in the Technical stream in Singapore (de)construct meaning of their educational processes to achieve educational success. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner's (1979: 2005) Ecological Systems Theory, the socio-ecological approach aims to examine the relationships and interactions between home-school-community that shaped their educational experiences in the localised context.
The thesis also draws on the recommendations within Ethnomethodology (Hester & Eglin, 1997; Watson, 1997) that categorial organisations are established and accomplished to determine an account of the day-to-day orderliness of social organisations. The analytical framework jointly applies both Conversation Analysis (CA) and Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) as a model of analysis to document the organisation of categorisations that are accomplished in the talk by the participants to make relevant an account of their cultural worlds as Technical students.
It aims to document how the participants and the interviewer mutually construct categories of people, attributions and classifications to make relevant an account of the moral forms, assumptions and attributions attached to 'Technical students', 'Technical stream' and their 'learning'. Using these interpretive procedures, it hopes to show how the participants accomplish the interactional tasks at hand to construct familial and institutional identities and how they socially align or disalign, produce or resist categorisations to develop useful identities as learners.
Centrally, the findings of the study have significant implications for educators and policy makers, offering further insights for understanding teaching, practice and policy with respect to the educationally disadvantaged.
Pauline Ho is a PhD candidate researching how educationally disadvantaged students construct meaning about their educational processes for academic success in Singapore. Pauline’s main research area is educational equity, especially as it is influenced by pedagogical practices and policy. Other research interests include quality management, teacher education, and applied ethnomethodology.
Before her PhD journey, Pauline was with the Ministry of Education (Singapore) as a Music and English teacher and later a Music officer. She also worked as a research associate and tutored post-graduate student teachers at the National Institute of Education, Singapore.
Conference presentation:
- Ho, P. & Freebody, P. (2011). Unpacking (e)merging discourses: edcuationally disadvantaged students in Singapore. BERA Annual Conference, Insitute of Education, London, 6-8 September 2011.
Awards
Thomas T. Roberts Fellow 2010
Outstanding Research Student Award, semester one 2011
NSW International Educational Research (IER) Post Graduate Student Research Award 2010
National Day Parade 2005 Appreciation Award - Government of Singapore
Thesis work
| Project title | Degree | Supervisor |
|---|---|---|
| Beating the odds: interacting perspectives of knowledge and cultural capital of successful at-risk students in Singapore. | PhD | Professor Peter Freebody |
Selected publications
Book chapters
- Chong, S. & Ho, P. (in press). Quality Management for Teaching and Learning: A Systems Approach. In , .
Journal articles
- Ho, P. . (in press). I have won a world championship and now I can retire: Normal technical students' ways of unpacking academic expectations in Singapore. International Journal of Educational Development..
- Ho, P. & Chong, N. Y. (2010). The talent development of a musically gifted adolescent in Singapore. International Journal of Music Education, 28, 47–60.
- Chong, S. & Ho, P. (2009). Quality teaching and learning - a QA framework for initial teacher preparation programs. International Journal of Management in Education , 3, 302–314.
- Ho, P & Chong, NY. (2008). A study on the factors influencing the talent development of a musically gifted adolescent in Singapore using Gagne's DMGT-based analysis. Australian Journal of Music Education, 1, 7–17.