Upcoming Bluestocking Week events in Adelaide

With Bluestocking week quickly approaching I wanted to share an invite for all my colleagues in South Australia to join us in celebrating women in education. Please share with anyone interested in joining us.

Dear colleague,

We are Shelley Pezy and Jennifer Fane and we are your representatives on the NTEU’s Women’s Action Committee.

Shelley has worked in a professional role at the University of Adelaide and been an active union member for 25 years. Jennifer is a lecturer in education at Flinders University who has recently arrived in Australia and has continued her long standing union involvement with her appointment to the Women’s Action Committee.

Every year NTEU members hold Blue Stocking Week, a celebration of women’s participation and achievements in higher education and an opportunity to focus on issues that matter to women.

This year, your union is hosting a fund-raising dinner for the Working Women’s Centre on Wednesday 13th August at 7pm. The dinner will be hosted by Janet Giles, immediate past Secretary of SA Unions, and will feature guest speaker Heather Margrison, coordinator of Moving Forward - a support group for women who have survived domestic violence.

The dinner will be held upstairs at Lemongrass Bistro, 289 Rundle Street, Adelaide. Tickets cost $40 each and can be booked or online here.

We hope you will be able to join us for an enjoyable evening.

Yours in solidarity,

Shelley Pezy & Jennifer Fane
NTEU Women's Action Committee

Latest Publication

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09581596.2014.935703#.U8cXrB2ylyI

Sharing my latest publication entitled: How can we increase children's understanding of the social determinants of health? Why charitable drives in school reinforce individualism, responsibilisation and inequity. It has been published online in Critical Public Health and will be appearing in print in due time.

The article explores the way in which schools engage young children social inequities and suggests alternative ways of teaching and engagement that uphold social justice and work towards health equity.

Here is the abstract of those further interested:

This paper examines the ways in which neoliberal responses to social health issues shape the educational discourses and practices of schools. As schools are increasingly identified as ideal spaces for health promotion, the question of how and why educators and public health practitioners can and should work together continues to be debated. Using Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction, we use this indicative example of emergency food to examine how ‘charity alone’ models reproduce and perpetuate inequitable health outcomes in neoliberal societies. This individualistic view of health continues to work against public health and social justice education initiatives increasingly found in schools, curricula and wider society; creating a dissonance between rhetoric and reality. Revolutionary critical pedagogies are explored to examine the implications of these practices in schools, and how the framework of service learning may offer an approach for involving primary students in empathy,caring and social justice. We seek to extend the existing literature by exploring ways of shifting, rather than reproducing, the current practices of educators and public health practitioners in how children experience health inequality and the social determinants of health.

The article can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09581596.2014.935703#.U8cXrB2ylyI