Lucinda Mcknight
Biographic Data
| ID | 179057 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lucinda Mcknight |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lucinda |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcknight |
| SIGNATURE | MCKNIGHT L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0997-6790 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 32 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
English in a Neoliberal Age
The system of norms that constitutes neoliberal imaginaries has permeated almost every aspect of everyday life. While New Zealand has long embraced neoliberal educational policies, reshaping its approach to English teaching in a manner similar to other Australasian and Western nations, the country now stands on the brink of an intensified neoliberal shift. Over the past two years, the English teaching profession in New Zealand has observed a grad…
‘Visual White noise’? Stock photo literacies in English education
This article, authored by White European/Australian and First Nations collaborators, addresses an under-recognised and under-researched digital literacy, the capacity to create, use and critique contemporary digital stock photography. Interest in this medium emerges from an Australian study of the teaching of digital writing in secondary English classes, and the development of a writing lab website incorporating images. We propose that researchin…
Getting the goods
Writing and the walls
This article shares findings about how physical, material environments are involved in literacy pedagogies. The article is based on a qualitative study of English teachers in Victoria, Australia, involving a survey, school visits and tours incorporating field notes, recorded and transcribed interviews and subsequent analysis of data using feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, with attention to new materialist theory. Rather than the anti…
A framework of subject-specific expertise for out-of-field teachers
While teaching is a learning profession, learning to teach out-of-field (OOF) places subject-specific demands on teacher knowledge, practice and identity. Using Shulman's ‘signature pedagogies,’ we examine what OOF teachers need to know (thinking), do (performing), and be (identity). Through collaborative research, nine teacher educators from various disciplines identified pertinent themes leading to a framework of subject-specific expertise. The…
The subterranean masculinities of elite private boys’ schools
Solving' the curriculum resource 'problem'? A critical policy analysis
With the proliferation of the online curriculum resource marketplace, policy actors are increasingly looking to invest in curated hubs of ready-made resources. Policy discourses indicate this phenomenon is heralded worldwide as a panacea for improving teacher workload issues and student achievement. Focusing on Australia, this article examines how federal government recommendations for the provision of ‘evidence-based’ and ‘quality assured’ curri…
Hive writing
This article brings together data from two complementary studies of the teaching of writing in Australia. Mobilising motifs of the hum and the hive to think together how our projects resonate, the authors highlight a key concern that emerges across both studies: the absence of real-world audiences for student writing in contemporary pedagogy. Specifically, we refer to the limited extent to which teachers have freedom to craft writing opportunitie…
The curriculum of privilege
“Good” choices vs “what really works”
Evidence-based practice, in a form which draws predominantly on quantitative research and privileges randomised controlled trials as research methods, has been translated from medicine into education. It follows that combining understanding of both disciplines may contribute to insights into the costs and benefits of this project. This article shares findings from a small study initiated by a medical doctor and teacher educator to compare version…
The girl (w)hole
This article shares findings from a small, largely qualitative empirical study of elite Australian boys’ school alumni’s perspectives on feminine gender and gender justice. The article focuses on the purported absence in these men’s memories of learning about gender at school and the paradox that the research interviews are full of gender-related memories. Using the metaphor of the ‘(w)hole’ to guide feminist poststructuralist analysis of data, t…
Medical fetishism in education
Teaching is increasingly called upon to become a clinical practice profession, like medicine. The term ‘clinical’ is used in a common-sense way to describe idealized teaching practice, as if universally understood to be a superior and desirable way to enact professionalism. Yet there is little in the literature that mounts a feminist critique of the cultural politics put to work through the word ‘clinical’ in education. We ask what it reifies and…
Researcher reflexivity in studying elite schooling
This article discusses the methodological challenges of researching elite boys’ schooling, in a study involving interviewing alumni who attended these schools from the 1970s to the 2020s. In particular, through a feminist poststructuralist methodological framing, it considers the necessity for researcher reflexivity in engaging in research in such politically charged and publicly debated spaces. Through strategic interventions that require reflec…
Since feeling is first
Conflicting ways to understand the nature of paragraphs, including their purpose and structure, have been central to composition theory for many decades. Yet English teachers across countries are experiencing ongoing pressures to mandate a specific paragraph template. This article traces the contentious, binary history of paragraph theory and pedagogy, and suggests how teachers in Victoria experience conflicts when teaching prescriptive paragraph…
Electric Sheep? Humans, Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Writing
With artificial intelligence (AI) now producing human-quality text in seconds via natural language generation, urgent questions arise about the nature and purpose of the teaching of writing in English. Humans have already been co-composing with digital tools for decades, in the form of spelling and grammar checkers built into word processing software. Yet AI has now advanced such that humans need to have less input in the writing process. This ar…
Addressing pre-service teachers as digital writers
This article explores challenges faced when curriculum designers address pre-service English teachers as digital writers, in a “teacher as writer” program. The article considers the resilience of print dominance in writing, including in tertiary digital education spaces and how the rhetoric of digital expansion is accompanied by practices of proscription and constraint. While curriculum theory encourages pre-service teachers to think of themselve…
Quality and tyranny
This article takes the introduction of a compulsory rubric for assessment across all units taught in an arts and education faculty as an opportunity for the identification and discussion of competing discourses around this process. We identify five discourses that complicate those of quality and efficiency in relation to rubrics: imperatives for twenty-first century learning; authentic assessment; Indigenous perspectives; creative praxis and acad…
Reading and Responding to Poetry
Three poet-researchers conduct three different readings of Tishani Doshi’s poem A Fable for the 21st Century. We ask how as creative practitioners and critics we can negotiate the desire for mastery of a text, and the dangers a semiotic reading presents, allowing for difference, indecision, and complexity. We present our initial readings of the poem and summarize our discussions of them grounded in the transactional reading theory of Louise Rosen…
Teaching writing by formula
The teaching of writing in secondary English subjects in Australia, as in other countries including England and the United States, has become increasingly formulaic. Pedagogies including direct instruction, modelling, scaffolding, and genre-based approaches involve the implementation of formulas for writing sentences, paragraphs, and entire essays; this has taken place in the neoliberal context of tightly proscribed, high stakes testing regimes t…
A broken paradigm? What education needs to learn from evidence-based medicine
The paradigm of evidence-based education continues to inform the development of policy in a number of countries. At its simplest level, evidence-based education incorporates evidence, often that provided by randomised controlled trials, into classroom practice. England’s Education Endowment Foundation is in the process of exporting evidence-based school education, promoted as a medical approach, to other countries, including Australia. Australia …
Seven reasons to question the hegemony of Visible Learning
The publication of John Hattie’s Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement in 2009 has led to the widespread adoption of the Visible Learning program around the world. Critique of this program has been less widespread, especially in English, and has tended to centre on the mechanisms of meta-analysis. We consider what Visible Learning puts to work in relation to cultural politics and find it closely aligned w…
Sponsors of Pleasure
This article moves beyond book-based school ‘wide reading’ to propose constellations of multimodal media, including music videos, fashion parades, literary works, online games and material artefacts, along with associated pedagogies, as sponsors of pleasure. The article, based on empirical research with teachers in an Australian secondary school, proposes how the pleasure teachers experience in textual curation and research during curriculum plan…
Meet the phallic lecturer
This article introduces the concept of the phallic lecturer, a spectral figure negotiated in the early stages of a research career in education, when the relative freedom of doctoral study morphs into compliance with institutional demands. Awareness of the dominance of the phallic in education emerges from reading curriculum theorist Madeleine Grumet, feminist philosopher Judith Butler and academic Judith Baxter, whose feminist poststructuralist …
A bit of a dirty word
A bit of a dirty word: ‘feminism’ and female teachers identifying as feminist
Arthro-Coda
This poem forms a diffraction of Patti Lather's article listing ten learnings from the ontological turn. This work is intended to be read alongside Lather's original article, so the reader can appreciate how poetry and prose form and entangle reciprocally. Ostensibly coalescing as notes from a face-to-face, simultaneously video-conferenced meeting to discuss Lather's list, this poem pulls together fragments from multiple intra-actions and pushes …
Whiteout
This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaborate within a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and academic writing, focusing on the possibilities for writing as a method of inquiry and the opportunities for different perceptions of being that it suggests. Our project unfolds as we also produce a brief diffractive reading that does not mirror or decon…
Swimming lessons
This article shifts from the formal learning spaces of school and university to an Australian public swimming pool to playfully engage some of the dilemmas that recent theory poses for curriculum studies. The article enacts multiple diffractions (Barad, 2007 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe half-way: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London, UK: Duke University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) as theory becomes…
A broken paradigm? What education needs to learn from evidence-based medicine
The paradigm of evidence-based education continues to inform the development of policy in a number of countries. At its simplest level, evidence-based education incorporates evidence, often that provided by randomised controlled trials, into classroom practice. England’s Education Endowment Foundation is in the process of exporting evidence-based school education, promoted as a medical approach, to other countries, including Australia. Australia …
Seven reasons to question the hegemony of Visible Learning
The publication of John Hattie’s Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement in 2009 has led to the widespread adoption of the Visible Learning program around the world. Critique of this program has been less widespread, especially in English, and has tended to centre on the mechanisms of meta-analysis. We consider what Visible Learning puts to work in relation to cultural politics and find it closely aligned w…
The invisible hand
This paper diffracts a curriculum design workshop via online collaboration of a collective emerging from that event. Through the workshop, involving theory, conceptual art, writing, photography and curriculum planning, and the subsequent sharing of words and images, we move beyond interrogating designs for future subjects to asking how the pedagogical imagination composes both the material and immaterial, the corporeal and incorporeal, within eco…
Meet the phallic lecturer
This article introduces the concept of the phallic lecturer, a spectral figure negotiated in the early stages of a research career in education, when the relative freedom of doctoral study morphs into compliance with institutional demands. Awareness of the dominance of the phallic in education emerges from reading curriculum theorist Madeleine Grumet, feminist philosopher Judith Butler and academic Judith Baxter, whose feminist poststructuralist …
The fetish of the lens
The scientific metaphor of the lens remains widely used in qualitative education research, despite critiques of positivism. Informed by two recently completed empirical doctoral studies relying on Metaphors We Live By, we propose that the attachment to the lens is a fetish. We argue that this fetish, evident even in purportedly feminist, post-positivist and inclusive education research, emerges from fascination with masculinist and ableist power …
Still in the Lego (Legos) room
While the issue of boys’ dominance of the curriculum has a long history, the article examines this phenomenon in a contemporary context, through an empirical study with female teachers designing English curriculum around girls’ media in a coeducational secondary school in Victoria, Australia. In this space, teachers, and the researcher, produce and perform both individual gendered identities and plans for the identities of future student subjects…
Solving' the curriculum resource 'problem'? A critical policy analysis
With the proliferation of the online curriculum resource marketplace, policy actors are increasingly looking to invest in curated hubs of ready-made resources. Policy discourses indicate this phenomenon is heralded worldwide as a panacea for improving teacher workload issues and student achievement. Focusing on Australia, this article examines how federal government recommendations for the provision of ‘evidence-based’ and ‘quality assured’ curri…
A bit of a dirty word
A bit of a dirty word: ‘feminism’ and female teachers identifying as feminist
Arthro-Coda
This poem forms a diffraction of Patti Lather's article listing ten learnings from the ontological turn. This work is intended to be read alongside Lather's original article, so the reader can appreciate how poetry and prose form and entangle reciprocally. Ostensibly coalescing as notes from a face-to-face, simultaneously video-conferenced meeting to discuss Lather's list, this poem pulls together fragments from multiple intra-actions and pushes …
Still in the Lego (Legos) room
While the issue of boys’ dominance of the curriculum has a long history, the article examines this phenomenon in a contemporary context, through an empirical study with female teachers designing English curriculum around girls’ media in a coeducational secondary school in Victoria, Australia. In this space, teachers, and the researcher, produce and perform both individual gendered identities and plans for the identities of future student subjects…
Curriculum as colour and curves
This article looks to three inspirational Black women, bell hooks, Stacey McBride-Irby and Patricia Williams, in the pursuit of radical curriculum. While today curriculum is critiqued as racialised, gendered, sexualised and classed, the formats of curriculum documents such as text books, units of work and lesson plans have changed little. These documents are often conceived as linear sequences of steps leading to outcomes, and their voices are di…
Swimming lessons
This article shifts from the formal learning spaces of school and university to an Australian public swimming pool to playfully engage some of the dilemmas that recent theory poses for curriculum studies. The article enacts multiple diffractions (Barad, 2007 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe half-way: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London, UK: Duke University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) as theory becomes…
Naughtiest Girls, Go Girls, and Glitterbombs
In this article I consider the white British and Australian schoolgirl through a notionally comparative study of Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl in the School (1940–1952) series and the contemporary Go Girl (2005–2012) series, texts spanning my lived experience as girl, mother, and teacher. Through incendiary fragments of memory and media, I, as researcher and writer, seek the girl addressed by these texts and consider the struggles, denials, a…
The fetish of the lens
The scientific metaphor of the lens remains widely used in qualitative education research, despite critiques of positivism. Informed by two recently completed empirical doctoral studies relying on Metaphors We Live By, we propose that the attachment to the lens is a fetish. We argue that this fetish, evident even in purportedly feminist, post-positivist and inclusive education research, emerges from fascination with masculinist and ableist power …
The invisible hand
This paper diffracts a curriculum design workshop via online collaboration of a collective emerging from that event. Through the workshop, involving theory, conceptual art, writing, photography and curriculum planning, and the subsequent sharing of words and images, we move beyond interrogating designs for future subjects to asking how the pedagogical imagination composes both the material and immaterial, the corporeal and incorporeal, within eco…
Whiteout
This article shares an experimental poem created by three poet-researchers using an online word processor to collaborate within a single document. We attempt to blur the line between creative and academic writing, focusing on the possibilities for writing as a method of inquiry and the opportunities for different perceptions of being that it suggests. Our project unfolds as we also produce a brief diffractive reading that does not mirror or decon…
Sponsors of Pleasure
This article moves beyond book-based school ‘wide reading’ to propose constellations of multimodal media, including music videos, fashion parades, literary works, online games and material artefacts, along with associated pedagogies, as sponsors of pleasure. The article, based on empirical research with teachers in an Australian secondary school, proposes how the pleasure teachers experience in textual curation and research during curriculum plan…
Meet the phallic lecturer
This article introduces the concept of the phallic lecturer, a spectral figure negotiated in the early stages of a research career in education, when the relative freedom of doctoral study morphs into compliance with institutional demands. Awareness of the dominance of the phallic in education emerges from reading curriculum theorist Madeleine Grumet, feminist philosopher Judith Butler and academic Judith Baxter, whose feminist poststructuralist …
A bit of a dirty word
A bit of a dirty word: ‘feminism’ and female teachers identifying as feminist
Arthro-Coda
This poem forms a diffraction of Patti Lather's article listing ten learnings from the ontological turn. This work is intended to be read alongside Lather's original article, so the reader can appreciate how poetry and prose form and entangle reciprocally. Ostensibly coalescing as notes from a face-to-face, simultaneously video-conferenced meeting to discuss Lather's list, this poem pulls together fragments from multiple intra-actions and pushes …
Quality and tyranny
This article takes the introduction of a compulsory rubric for assessment across all units taught in an arts and education faculty as an opportunity for the identification and discussion of competing discourses around this process. We identify five discourses that complicate those of quality and efficiency in relation to rubrics: imperatives for twenty-first century learning; authentic assessment; Indigenous perspectives; creative praxis and acad…
Reading and Responding to Poetry
Three poet-researchers conduct three different readings of Tishani Doshi’s poem A Fable for the 21st Century. We ask how as creative practitioners and critics we can negotiate the desire for mastery of a text, and the dangers a semiotic reading presents, allowing for difference, indecision, and complexity. We present our initial readings of the poem and summarize our discussions of them grounded in the transactional reading theory of Louise Rosen…
Teaching writing by formula
The teaching of writing in secondary English subjects in Australia, as in other countries including England and the United States, has become increasingly formulaic. Pedagogies including direct instruction, modelling, scaffolding, and genre-based approaches involve the implementation of formulas for writing sentences, paragraphs, and entire essays; this has taken place in the neoliberal context of tightly proscribed, high stakes testing regimes t…
A broken paradigm? What education needs to learn from evidence-based medicine
The paradigm of evidence-based education continues to inform the development of policy in a number of countries. At its simplest level, evidence-based education incorporates evidence, often that provided by randomised controlled trials, into classroom practice. England’s Education Endowment Foundation is in the process of exporting evidence-based school education, promoted as a medical approach, to other countries, including Australia. Australia …
Seven reasons to question the hegemony of Visible Learning
The publication of John Hattie’s Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement in 2009 has led to the widespread adoption of the Visible Learning program around the world. Critique of this program has been less widespread, especially in English, and has tended to centre on the mechanisms of meta-analysis. We consider what Visible Learning puts to work in relation to cultural politics and find it closely aligned w…
Since feeling is first
Conflicting ways to understand the nature of paragraphs, including their purpose and structure, have been central to composition theory for many decades. Yet English teachers across countries are experiencing ongoing pressures to mandate a specific paragraph template. This article traces the contentious, binary history of paragraph theory and pedagogy, and suggests how teachers in Victoria experience conflicts when teaching prescriptive paragraph…
Electric Sheep? Humans, Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Writing
With artificial intelligence (AI) now producing human-quality text in seconds via natural language generation, urgent questions arise about the nature and purpose of the teaching of writing in English. Humans have already been co-composing with digital tools for decades, in the form of spelling and grammar checkers built into word processing software. Yet AI has now advanced such that humans need to have less input in the writing process. This ar…
Addressing pre-service teachers as digital writers
This article explores challenges faced when curriculum designers address pre-service English teachers as digital writers, in a “teacher as writer” program. The article considers the resilience of print dominance in writing, including in tertiary digital education spaces and how the rhetoric of digital expansion is accompanied by practices of proscription and constraint. While curriculum theory encourages pre-service teachers to think of themselve…
“Good” choices vs “what really works”
Evidence-based practice, in a form which draws predominantly on quantitative research and privileges randomised controlled trials as research methods, has been translated from medicine into education. It follows that combining understanding of both disciplines may contribute to insights into the costs and benefits of this project. This article shares findings from a small study initiated by a medical doctor and teacher educator to compare version…
The girl (w)hole
This article shares findings from a small, largely qualitative empirical study of elite Australian boys’ school alumni’s perspectives on feminine gender and gender justice. The article focuses on the purported absence in these men’s memories of learning about gender at school and the paradox that the research interviews are full of gender-related memories. Using the metaphor of the ‘(w)hole’ to guide feminist poststructuralist analysis of data, t…
Medical fetishism in education
Teaching is increasingly called upon to become a clinical practice profession, like medicine. The term ‘clinical’ is used in a common-sense way to describe idealized teaching practice, as if universally understood to be a superior and desirable way to enact professionalism. Yet there is little in the literature that mounts a feminist critique of the cultural politics put to work through the word ‘clinical’ in education. We ask what it reifies and…
Researcher reflexivity in studying elite schooling
This article discusses the methodological challenges of researching elite boys’ schooling, in a study involving interviewing alumni who attended these schools from the 1970s to the 2020s. In particular, through a feminist poststructuralist methodological framing, it considers the necessity for researcher reflexivity in engaging in research in such politically charged and publicly debated spaces. Through strategic interventions that require reflec…
Hive writing
This article brings together data from two complementary studies of the teaching of writing in Australia. Mobilising motifs of the hum and the hive to think together how our projects resonate, the authors highlight a key concern that emerges across both studies: the absence of real-world audiences for student writing in contemporary pedagogy. Specifically, we refer to the limited extent to which teachers have freedom to craft writing opportunitie…
The curriculum of privilege
Sociology (25 works) · Pedagogy (21 works) · Political science (17 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Social science (11 works) · Curriculum (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Linguistics (10 works)