Dr Pauline Lysaght

Born in England, Pauline Lysaght migrated to Australia with her family at the age of 15. She came to the University of Wollongong as a mature-age student in 1975 where she completed an undergraduate degree in Arts.

Pauline initially aspired to be a school counsellor, which led her to complete a Diploma of Education in Armidale in the mid 1980’s and despite an initial reluctance, the moment she stepped into a classroom; she discovered a love of teaching.

She continued to learn, completing her Master’s in the early 1990’s and began lecturing and tutoring, whilst completing a doctorate, which she gained in 2001. She then gained the position of the Sub-Dean of Education in the following year.

In 2004, herself and two of her colleagues; Roslyn Westbrook and Associate Professor Ian Brown established the Voices of Children; an organisation which gives children all over the world the opportunity to tell their stories through photographs and stories they have taken and written themselves, as well as having their photographs and stories displayed at a professional exhibition in both Wollongong and in their own countries.

Pauline has also studied Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences and has applied it to her own work, in one particular paper; “Women Returning to Study: Stories of Transformation” Pauline interviewed and worked with women who were returning to study and asked them to rate their intelligence according to Gardner’s theory of intelligences.

I interviewed Pauline on Tuesday May 25^th 2010.

 

1. I read the paper “Women Returning to Study: Stories of Transformation” and I came across the Multiple Intelligence Theory, how exactly does this work?

That was out of my thesis, what I used was Howard Gardner’s; Multiple Intelligence Theory. I used narrative and the stories that people told and I put those two things together.

It assesses a person’s pattern of relative strengths and weaknesses so at that stage, Gardner was talking about seven intelligences; linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinaesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Linguistic and mathematical intelligence is recognised, there tested within traditional IQ tests and to a certain extent spatial is tested. But he is talking about intelligence in quite a different way saying these are intelligences, they are quite discreet. We made a graph with columns and got the women to colour in the columns depending on where they saw they had a strength, not where they had a strength compared to somebody else, but what their strengths were and where areas of weakness were.

I asked women who were returning to study at TAFE and someone who was also at university, how they rated their intelligence according to Howard Gardner’s theory. They filled out a profile, in many cases they underestimated their levels of intelligence and they compared themselves to other people. But they had a pretty good idea of their own strengths and weaknesses. They talked about their lives growing up and going to school, after school, what had happened, how they saw themselves, how they changed. After a year, I asked them to complete the profile again, mostly what they did, was complete a profile in pretty much the same pattern as they did before, but the difference was in the way that they talked about it. They talked about themselves as being intelligent, capable women who had adapted and overcome adversity and had a clear picture of how they could pursue an education and where it could take them in terms of a career.

2.  What inspired the establishment of the Voices of the Children Program?

I work on it with Ian Brown and Roslyn Westbrook in the education department and we started it in 2004. What we wanted to do was gather images taken by children and also their written answers to six questions, we wanted to gather that information from children in different communities and then hopefully have an exhibition, where their works would be hung professionally, but also have a website that we could develop as a teaching-learning website that children and teachers all over the world could tap into. We were really interested about the stories that children tell us about themselves and their lives through the pictures that they take and the stories that they write. Again it’s a narrative approach.

We just got in contact with colleagues in other countries and they were very happy to be involved. We presented at a couple of conferences, we had an exhibition here in Creative Arts and it just snowballed from there.

Every time we present and have an exhibition, people say “can we be involved too?” Different countries have become involved over the years, last year we worked with people in Mumbai and Calcutta. We had a really big exhibition here at the university opened by the consulate general of India and then we had a week long exhibition in Mumbai and another in Calcutta. Our website, unfortunately very old and out of date, what we hope is that children and teachers will learn through the exhibitions and the website is that there are many ways to live a life and there is enormous diversity and it is valuable. We see there are cultural differences in what we see and what they write, but there is a commonality there too.

3.  Are there any more exhibitions coming up?

We’ve had an exhibition every year since 2005. Last year was India. This year we have children in Turkey taking photographs and they’re completing booklets. We’ve already given booklets and cameras here to children in the Turkish community. All the children attend a Turkish community language school, they come from homes where the parents are Turkish and what we’ll have is an exhibition of images and text from Turkish children here in Wollongong and from Turkish children in Turkey, we booked the Wollongong Art Gallery for the exhibition and we’ll have the exhibition here, a few weeks before the exhibition in Turkey.

4.  Do you believe women need more support when they are returning to the workforce and/or education?

I think there should be more support for everyone who wants to do that. I think different groups require different support. For example, mature-age students need different support to other students and probably mature-age women, depending on the field they are going into. They need encouragement, their aspiration level is really important, and what is it they aspire to? Once they are here, they need knowledge and skills, but there also need encouragement to continue.

5. Do you think there should be more educational programs for people who want to return to the workforce? Or say pre-tertiary programs to ease the transition?

There were some. There was the WOW (Work Opportunities for Women) at TAFE. Typically they are axed when funding is cut, they are the first programs to go, and they are not seen as high priority. The current government’s agenda of social reform and widening participation in the higher education sector in the next few years, I’m not clear whether they will offer more of those courses, or whether it’s at University, that support will be put in place, because transition is something we also deal with here.

6.  Do you have anything to add?

I think it’s interesting that traditionally, that women who are intellectually capable, have gone into nursing or teaching, historically that’s been the case and it has been accepted for them  to do that, it has been an acceptable avenue for them and it’s still acceptable now. I’d like to see more encouragement for women to go into disciplines across the board and I think that’s happening but it takes a long time.