Thinking with theory as a policy evaluation tool: The case of boarding schools for remote First Nations students
| Author | Marnie O’Bryan,John Guenther,Samuel Osborne,Richard Stewart,Janya McCalman,Michelle Redman-MacLaren,Tessa Benveniste,David Mander |
| DOI | 10.1177/1035719X20905056 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Academic Article |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1035719X20905056
Evaluation Journal of Australasia
2020, Vol. 20(1) 34 –52
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1035719X20905056
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Thinking with theory
as a policy evaluation tool:
The case of boarding
schools for remote
First Nations students
John Guenther
Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, Australia
Tessa Benveniste
CQUniversity, Australia
Michelle Redman-MacLaren
James Cook University, Australia
David Mander
Aquinas College and University of Western Australia, Australia
Janya McCalman
CQUniversity, Australia
Marnie O’Bryan
Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Australia
Samuel Osborne
University of South Australia, Australia
Richard Stewart
James Cook University, Australia
Corresponding author:
John Guenther, Education and Training, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, Batchelor,
NT 0845, Australia.
Email: john.guenther@batchelor.edu.au
905056EVJ0010.1177/1035719X20905056Evaluation Journal of AustralasiaGuenther et al.
research-article2020
Academic Article
Guenther et al. 35
Abstract
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 understood. The authors of this article
came together as a collaboration of researchers who have published about boarding
school education for First Nations students to examine the evidence and develop a
theory-driven understanding of how policies drive systems to produce both desirable
and undesirable outcomes for First Nations boarding school students. We applied
complexity theory and post-structural policy analysis techniques and produced a
useful tool for the evaluation of boarding policy and its implementation.
Keywords
boarding schools, policy evaluation, residential schools, theory of change, thinking
with theory
Introduction
This is a collaborative paper motivated by a shared interest in better understanding the
systems that produce a myriad of outcomes for remote First Nations young people
who attend boarding schools1 away from home. Boarding as an ‘intervention’ should
be seen as one response to the larger issue of First Nations education. Governments
have grappled with how to address the failure of remote education for a long time, but
in the last decade, boarding has been identified as a practical solution to the problem.
Our intent is to inform better policy leveraging of desirable outcomes. Scholarly
research exploring this topic has rapidly expanded in Australia over recent years. It has
generated awareness of a range of immediate and long-term outcomes for First Nations
youth and their communities which have resulted from policies prioritising boarding
school over place-based secondary opportunities. The challenge now is to deploy this
evidence in the development and implementation of more nuanced future educational
policy that optimises desirable outcomes.
To achieve this goal, the authors agreed that critical scrutiny of existing policy was
necessary to uncover the complex interaction of community-based, school-based, pol-
icy and political actors on educational outcomes for remote First Nations young peo-
ple. The authors therefore applied an adaptive and inclusive methodology and a
thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2018) approach. This led to a theory of
change and the inception of an evaluative framework to assess potential impacts of
policy design and implementation practices. The authors are non-Indigenous research-
ers from Australia with significant professional experience in remote and boarding
school education. The work stems from a broader participatory approach which
included both First Nations and non-Indigenous researchers and practitioners. Our
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