J Guenther
Biographic Data
| ID | 42507 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Guenther |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Guenther |
| SIGNATURE | GUENTHER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0080-1698 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
What Makes ‘Good’ Evaluation
Changing pedagogy to change attendance, engagement and retention of First Nations Australian students
Missing Pieces
What makes quality teachers in remote First Nations schools and what difference do they make
First Nations students need to feel safe
‘Learning can be anywhere’ – On the ground views of what impacts student engagement and attendance in remote Australian schools
Despite contrary evidence, attendance remains a measurement of success in remote First Nations education. This motivation, in part, derives from the Australian Government’s ‘Closing the Gap’ policies, which in the past included attendance targets for First Nations students. These assumed that increased school attendance led to improved school outcomes. Our article provides an account of what students, school staff and community members living, wo…
Success and University for Indigenous students
This paper examines how well Higher Education (HE) meets the aspirations of Indigenous people in Australia, especially as reflected in the public policy discourse and its measurements of success. Through a literature review, the paper analyses current public policy and experiences of Indigenous students to identify the extent to which the HE system meets the needs of Indigenous people, especially those from remote areas. From a critical examinati…
Principles of Successful Digital Inclusion Initiatives in Remote Australia
Digital inclusion remains elusive for many people living in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities of Australia. People in many communities experience limited access, high cost, and often struggle with digital literacies. The policy environment increasingly assumes that government and financial services are universally accessible. The Australian Government has initiated several digital inclusion strategies. However, remote commu…
Managing evaluation risks
The social imperative of evaluation
Representations of Reality in Evaluation
Transitional pathways through middle school for First Nations students in the Northern Territory of Australia
The middle-school years (Year 7 to Year 9) is a particular challenge for socially disadvantaged populations, with high proportions of children either repeating school years or dropping out of school. In Australia, a group of particular concern is First Nations children for whom there is a collective effort by all governments to improve education outcomes, although there have been few studies of their transition through the middle-school years. Th…
Mapping benefits and value from evaluations
Evaluation at the cutting edge
Evaluation purpose
Empowerment evaluation and social justice
Remote secondary education retention
Over recent years there has been a strong emphasis on year 12 completion as an indicator of success in remote First Nations education. The research reported in this article explores what students, school staff and community members say leads to secondary school retention and, ultimately, completion. The research was conducted in the Northern Territory and Western Australia during 2023 by a team of researchers from Batchelor Institute of Indigenou…
Theory building from qualitative evaluation
This article argues that not only is theory building from qualitative evaluation possible, but ought to be considered as a desirable product and utilisation of evaluators’ work. Based on three case studies, the authors show how theory building can work, and why it can be important and useful. Theory building is seldom considered an impact-producing product from evaluation. Theory in evaluation is typically limited to ‘evaluation theory’ as a way …
Getting evaluation right in diverse contexts
Transformative spaces for evaluation in programs, policies and organisations
Learning regenerative cultures
What is regenerative learning in Australian higher education? This paper addresses the intersecting crises of climate, species loss and injustice; often called a conceptual emergency. We tackle the problem of disciplinary compartmentalisation, preventing integration of important related concepts. The particular case is separation of the Australian Curriculum Cross-curriculum Priorities at school and university for teaching, learning and research …
The Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS)
In late 2013, under the leadership of Prime Minister Abbott, the Australian Government announced a new policy designed to increase attendance rates in remote community schools—the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS). The model assumed that employing local people in the program, which was designed to support parents get their children to school, would yield significant improvements and consequently improve educational outcomes. After a slight…
Aboriginal Nation
Our past shapes our present. However, do Australian universities understand the ways historical discourses continue to shape them? Provoked by the findings of our empirical study implemented in Western Australia’s Kimberley region in 2018-2019, we conducted a critical text analysis of recent and past policies to seek historical explanation. As a research team, we noted a demand on behalf of Aboriginal activists to shift from the discourse of ‘pro…
Connections, community and context
For many remote Aboriginal Australian students, periods of time during their secondary education are spent living away from home at a boarding school. While financial, political and community support is burgeoning for boarding models that provide scholarships, sports programs or accommodation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, very little academic research or evidence exists that examines the experiences of students post-boarding…
Negotiating Indigenous higher education policy analysis at the cultural interface in the Northern Territory, Australia
Policy analysis can be useful for learning about ‘what works’ in policy. Contemporary policy studies literature highlight that such learning is influenced by power relations in government that shape our ways of knowing the world. This paper offers a critically reflexive narrative account of power relations present during Indigenous higher education policy analysis research conducted in the Northern Territory (NT), Australia to shed light on how t…
Are We Making Education Count in Remote Australian Communities or Just Counting Education
For quite some time the achievements of students in remote Australian schools have been lamented. There is not necessarily anything new about the relative difference between the results of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote communities and their counterparts in urban, regional and rural schools across Australia. However, in the last decade a number of changes in the education system have led to the difference being highlight…
Building on 'Red Dirt' Perspectives
The Remote Education Systems (RES) project within the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP) has, over the last four years, gathered and analysed qualitative data directly from over 230 remote education stakeholders and from more than 700 others through surveys. The research was designed to answer four questions: (1) What is education for in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?; (2) What defin…
Red Dirt Thinking on Aspiration and Success
This article sets the scene for the series of five articles on 'red dirt thinking'. It first introduces the idea behind red dirt thinking as opposed to 'blue sky thinking'. Both accept that there are any number of creative and expansive solutions and possibilities to identified challenges - in this case, the challenge of improving education in very remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island schools. However, the authors believe that creative thin…
Red Dirt Thinking on Educational Disadvantage
When people talk about education of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, the language used is often replete with messages of failure and deficit, of disparity and problems. This language is reflected in statistics that on the surface seem unambiguous in their demonstration of poor outcomes for remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. A range of data support this view, including the National Action Plan-Literacy and…
Generalising from qualitative evaluation
Evaluations are often focused on assessing merit, value, outcome or some other feature of a programme, project, policy or some other object. Evaluation research is then more concerned with the particular rather than the general – even more so, when qualitative methods are used. But does this mean that evaluations should not be used to generalise? If it is possible to generalise from evaluations, under what circumstances can this be legitimately a…
Taken for a ride? The disconnect between high school completion, employment and income for remote Australian First Nations Peoples
‘Education is the key’ is often used as a metaphor in remote Australian First Nations communities to indicate the importance of learning to achieve some measure of socio-economic advantage—education is seen as a vehicle for advancement. First Nations people have enthusiastically bought into education and training vehicle. High school completion data suggest that ‘gaps’ are closing. But the vehicle appears to be breaking down as it heads along the…
Thinking with theory as a policy evaluation tool
Many recent policy documents have outlined the challenges of delivering high-quality education in remote First Nations communities and proposed that boarding schools are one important solution. These documents have influenced the increasing uptake of boarding options and there has been considerable public investment in scholarships, residential facilities and transition support. Yet the outcomes of this investment and policy effort are not well u…
Exploring definitions of success in Northern Territory Indigenous higher education policy
This article critically examines definitions of policy ‘success’ in the context of historical Indigenous higher education policy in the Northern Territory (NT), Australia. We begin by summarising applications of the often-used but arbitrary, rarely-critiqued terms ‘policy success’ and ‘what works’. The paper chronologically articulates what ‘policy success’ has looked like in the context of historical Northern Territory higher education, based on…
Race, Rules and Relationships
Boarding schools have been increasingly championed in strategies to move closer to educational equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. However, there is a significant lack of research and evidence on the implications of the boarding environment for Aboriginal students, families and communities. This paper presents a study of an Aboriginal residential program in South Australia. Semi-structured and narrative interviews with 55…
Hearing the voice of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander training stakeholders using research methodologies and theoretical frames of reference
Researchers in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander contexts within Australia are frequently faced with the challenges of working in an intercultural space where channels of communication are garbled with interference created by the complexities of misunderstood worldviews, languages, values and expectations. A concern of many researchers in these contexts is to ensure that the voices of research participants in remote communities are not…
Red Dirt Thinking on Education
In Australia, the 'remote education system' presents itself as a simple system where the right inputs, such as quality teachers and leaders will engender the outputs that have been set by the system, such as certain levels of English literacy and numeracy. The system has measures in place, including national testing, to report on its success. For the most part, this system seems to be working quite well. However, this modelling breaks down when t…
Did DI do it? The impact of a programme designed to improve literacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote schools
Over the 10 years of 'Closing the Gap', several interventions designed to improve outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students have been trialled. In 2014 the Australian Government announced the 'Flexible Literacy for Remote Primary Schools Programme' (FLFRPSP) which was designed primarily to improve the literacy outcomes of students in remote schools with mostly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. The programme, using …
Examining remote Australian First Nations boarding through capital theory lenses
In Australia, boarding schools and residential facilities for remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (First Nations) students have long been part of the educational landscape. Policy settings are paying considerable attention to boarding schools and residential colleges as secondary schooling options for First Nations students, particularly for those from remote areas. Further, First Nations education is seeing increased investment in schol…
Red Dirt Thinking on Power, Pedagogy and Paradigms
Recent debates in Australia, largely led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island academics over the past 5 or so years, have focused on the need for non-Indigenous educators to understand how their practices not only demonstrate lack of understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, but even deny their presence. This debate has serious implications for the non-Indigenous remote educator who wishes to support remote students to achie…
Digital inclusion in central Australia
Based on an evaluation of the inDigiMOB project, auspiced by First Nations Media Australia, this article examines the role of a programme designed to improve digital inclusion for people living in town camps and remote communities of central Australia. Increasingly, Australians are expected to use technology to access health, government, utility, and education services. Over the last three years, inDigiMOB has been testing a model using local “Di…
Red Dirt Education Leaders 'Caught in the Middle
Schooling for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote or 'Red Dirt' communities has been cast as 'problematic', and 'failing'. The solutions to deficit understandings of remote schooling are often presented as simple. But for those who work in Red Dirt schools, the solutions are not simple, and for education leaders positioned between the local Red Dirt school and upward accountability to departments of education, they are comple…
Towards a Good Education in Very Remote Australia
The education system, as it relates to very remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia, faces challenges. While considerable resources have been applied to very remote schools, results in terms of enrolments, attendance and learning outcomes have changed little, despite the effort applied. The Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP) in its Remote Education Systems (RES) project is trying …
Do numbers speak for themselves? Exploring the use of quantitative data to measure policy ‘success’ in historical Indigenous higher education in the Northern Territory, Australia
‘The numbers speak for themselves’ is a phrase often linked to statistics supporting claims about the success (or otherwise) of policies. Quantitative data are usually viewed as objective and somehow exempt from the same critique that qualitative data faces. QuantCrit theory challenges these assumptions by considering how structural racism impacts on the use of statistics in research and evaluation. This paper applies QuantCrit to the Indigenous …
Generalising from Qualitative Research (GQR)
In this paper, the authors debunk a long-held myth that generalisation is primarily the domain of quantitative research. Based on a review of modern and historical approaches to generalisation, they argue that generalisation from qualitative research (GQR) can be achieved, not through a process of self-justification, but through defensible and rigorous research design and methods. The authors go on to consider examples from their own qualitative …
Empowerment is the Basis for Improving Education and Employment Outcomes for Aboriginal People in Remote Australia
In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people score poorly on national mainstream indicators of wellbeing, with the lowest outcomes recorded in remote communities. As part of a 'shared space' collaboration between remote Aboriginal communities, government and scientists, the holistic Interplay Wellbeing Framework and accompanying survey were designed bringing together Aboriginal priorities of culture, empowerment and community with g…
Success’ in Indigenous higher education policy in the Northern Territory, Australia
The concept of policy ‘success’ has been subject to much contestation. In the Indigenous higher education setting, Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) scholars have brought attention to the relevance of experiential knowledge to understanding the effects of power and race on policy, including how success is theorised. This paper aims to interrogate the notion of policy success by exploring how Indigenous users of higher education policy in the Northe…
Suicide story
Despite concerted efforts to improve strategic responses to suicide, it remains a major concern in Australia. Among Indigenous communities the rates of suicide are up to three times higher than among non-Indigenous communities. Indigenous males are three times as likely to suicide than Indigenous females. The death rates for the Northern Territory are second highest in Australia, at 27.4 deaths per 100,000 population. In the Northern Territory, a…
Mapping Boarding School Opportunities for Aboriginal Students from the Central Land Council Region of Northern Territory
The 2014 Wilson review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory recommended boarding school models as the preferred secondary education option for very remote Aboriginal students. This study considers boarding uptake by Aboriginal students from the Central Land Council region of the Northern Territory. An examination of boarding programs available to Aboriginal students in this region found that scholarship access is largely determined b…
Learning from Evaluations of School–Family Strengthening Programs
For more than 10 years, a program called Families And Schools Together (FAST) has been run in schools across the Northern Territory. These programs have always had an evaluation component built in. However, over time, the evaluations have changed. Initially, they were summative, built around a quantitative psychometric tool (with a positivist research paradigm). The intent of the summative evaluation was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the pr…
Social Studies Activity Centers
Are We Making Education Count in Remote Australian Communities or Just Counting Education
For quite some time the achievements of students in remote Australian schools have been lamented. There is not necessarily anything new about the relative difference between the results of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote communities and their counterparts in urban, regional and rural schools across Australia. However, in the last decade a number of changes in the education system have led to the difference being highlight…
Towards a Good Education in Very Remote Australia
The education system, as it relates to very remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia, faces challenges. While considerable resources have been applied to very remote schools, results in terms of enrolments, attendance and learning outcomes have changed little, despite the effort applied. The Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP) in its Remote Education Systems (RES) project is trying …
Red Dirt Thinking on Education
In Australia, the 'remote education system' presents itself as a simple system where the right inputs, such as quality teachers and leaders will engender the outputs that have been set by the system, such as certain levels of English literacy and numeracy. The system has measures in place, including national testing, to report on its success. For the most part, this system seems to be working quite well. However, this modelling breaks down when t…
Red Dirt Thinking on Power, Pedagogy and Paradigms
Recent debates in Australia, largely led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island academics over the past 5 or so years, have focused on the need for non-Indigenous educators to understand how their practices not only demonstrate lack of understanding of Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, but even deny their presence. This debate has serious implications for the non-Indigenous remote educator who wishes to support remote students to achie…
Red Dirt Thinking on Educational Disadvantage
When people talk about education of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, the language used is often replete with messages of failure and deficit, of disparity and problems. This language is reflected in statistics that on the surface seem unambiguous in their demonstration of poor outcomes for remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. A range of data support this view, including the National Action Plan-Literacy and…
Red Dirt Thinking on Aspiration and Success
This article sets the scene for the series of five articles on 'red dirt thinking'. It first introduces the idea behind red dirt thinking as opposed to 'blue sky thinking'. Both accept that there are any number of creative and expansive solutions and possibilities to identified challenges - in this case, the challenge of improving education in very remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island schools. However, the authors believe that creative thin…
Learning from Evaluations of School–Family Strengthening Programs
For more than 10 years, a program called Families And Schools Together (FAST) has been run in schools across the Northern Territory. These programs have always had an evaluation component built in. However, over time, the evaluations have changed. Initially, they were summative, built around a quantitative psychometric tool (with a positivist research paradigm). The intent of the summative evaluation was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the pr…
Hearing the voice of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander training stakeholders using research methodologies and theoretical frames of reference
Researchers in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander contexts within Australia are frequently faced with the challenges of working in an intercultural space where channels of communication are garbled with interference created by the complexities of misunderstood worldviews, languages, values and expectations. A concern of many researchers in these contexts is to ensure that the voices of research participants in remote communities are not…
Building on 'Red Dirt' Perspectives
The Remote Education Systems (RES) project within the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP) has, over the last four years, gathered and analysed qualitative data directly from over 230 remote education stakeholders and from more than 700 others through surveys. The research was designed to answer four questions: (1) What is education for in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?; (2) What defin…
Examining remote Australian First Nations boarding through capital theory lenses
In Australia, boarding schools and residential facilities for remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (First Nations) students have long been part of the educational landscape. Policy settings are paying considerable attention to boarding schools and residential colleges as secondary schooling options for First Nations students, particularly for those from remote areas. Further, First Nations education is seeing increased investment in schol…
Generalising from Qualitative Research (GQR)
In this paper, the authors debunk a long-held myth that generalisation is primarily the domain of quantitative research. Based on a review of modern and historical approaches to generalisation, they argue that generalisation from qualitative research (GQR) can be achieved, not through a process of self-justification, but through defensible and rigorous research design and methods. The authors go on to consider examples from their own qualitative …
Race, Rules and Relationships
Boarding schools have been increasingly championed in strategies to move closer to educational equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. However, there is a significant lack of research and evidence on the implications of the boarding environment for Aboriginal students, families and communities. This paper presents a study of an Aboriginal residential program in South Australia. Semi-structured and narrative interviews with 55…
Knowledge Intersections
KEYWORDS: Intercultural research practicesindigenous knowledgesknowledge intersectionsinter-epistemologyinterculturalityeducationcentral Australia
Empowerment is the Basis for Improving Education and Employment Outcomes for Aboriginal People in Remote Australia
In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people score poorly on national mainstream indicators of wellbeing, with the lowest outcomes recorded in remote communities. As part of a 'shared space' collaboration between remote Aboriginal communities, government and scientists, the holistic Interplay Wellbeing Framework and accompanying survey were designed bringing together Aboriginal priorities of culture, empowerment and community with g…
Mapping Boarding School Opportunities for Aboriginal Students from the Central Land Council Region of Northern Territory
The 2014 Wilson review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory recommended boarding school models as the preferred secondary education option for very remote Aboriginal students. This study considers boarding uptake by Aboriginal students from the Central Land Council region of the Northern Territory. An examination of boarding programs available to Aboriginal students in this region found that scholarship access is largely determined b…
Taken for a ride? The disconnect between high school completion, employment and income for remote Australian First Nations Peoples
‘Education is the key’ is often used as a metaphor in remote Australian First Nations communities to indicate the importance of learning to achieve some measure of socio-economic advantage—education is seen as a vehicle for advancement. First Nations people have enthusiastically bought into education and training vehicle. High school completion data suggest that ‘gaps’ are closing. But the vehicle appears to be breaking down as it heads along the…
Knowledge intersections
In this special edition of Rural Society, we present a collection of papers developed from a research symposium held in Alice Springs, in November 2019. The symposium, which was established in 2017
Digital inclusion in central Australia
Based on an evaluation of the inDigiMOB project, auspiced by First Nations Media Australia, this article examines the role of a programme designed to improve digital inclusion for people living in town camps and remote communities of central Australia. Increasingly, Australians are expected to use technology to access health, government, utility, and education services. Over the last three years, inDigiMOB has been testing a model using local “Di…
Thinking with theory as a policy evaluation tool
Many recent policy documents have outlined the challenges of delivering high-quality education in remote First Nations communities and proposed that boarding schools are one important solution. These documents have influenced the increasing uptake of boarding options and there has been considerable public investment in scholarships, residential facilities and transition support. Yet the outcomes of this investment and policy effort are not well u…
Exploring definitions of success in Northern Territory Indigenous higher education policy
This article critically examines definitions of policy ‘success’ in the context of historical Indigenous higher education policy in the Northern Territory (NT), Australia. We begin by summarising applications of the often-used but arbitrary, rarely-critiqued terms ‘policy success’ and ‘what works’. The paper chronologically articulates what ‘policy success’ has looked like in the context of historical Northern Territory higher education, based on…
Did DI do it? The impact of a programme designed to improve literacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote schools
Over the 10 years of 'Closing the Gap', several interventions designed to improve outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students have been trialled. In 2014 the Australian Government announced the 'Flexible Literacy for Remote Primary Schools Programme' (FLFRPSP) which was designed primarily to improve the literacy outcomes of students in remote schools with mostly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. The programme, using …
Red Dirt Education Leaders 'Caught in the Middle
Schooling for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote or 'Red Dirt' communities has been cast as 'problematic', and 'failing'. The solutions to deficit understandings of remote schooling are often presented as simple. But for those who work in Red Dirt schools, the solutions are not simple, and for education leaders positioned between the local Red Dirt school and upward accountability to departments of education, they are comple…
Considering Young People’s Dislocation From STEM Education
Rural, regional and remote (RRR) communities and industries in Australia cannot currently produce or attract the workforce needed to survive, making skills and qualifications in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) increasingly important. Yet student engagement in STEM education in RRR schools remains low, with limited numbers of young people either moving into further STEM education post-secondary, or accessing readily availab…
School-based Indigenous cultural programs and their impact on Australian Indigenous students
This critical systematic review of Australian research literature provides insights into the aspirations of Indigenous communities to collaborate with schools in establishing local Indigenous language and cultural programmes. This systematic review investigates the body of Australian research into the cultural, social and educational impacts on those Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students who have had opportunities to engage with these…
Sociology (43 works) · Political science (39 works) · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights (26 works) · Indigenous and Place-Based Education (25 works) · Education Systems and Policy (22 works) · Pedagogy (22 works) · Public relations (20 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Social science (17 works)