Stakeholder collaboration in the education of Australian students with autism spectrum disorder

This doctoral thesis reports on an investigation into how collaboration is conceptualised and experienced across the Australian education system. While research has established the importance of collaboration for a variety of purposes in education, it remained unknown how collaboration was defined, interpreted, and practised by key stakeholders at the classroom level. In addition, the systemic pressures that influenced this conceptualisation in the Australian context were yet to be identified. Given the complexities of the support required for students with additional needs in mainstream schools, collaboration between key stakeholders involved in the education of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was explored. To achieve these objectives, the study consisted of five data-collection phases: (1) an autoethnography detailing the primary researcher’s lived experiences of systemic pressures on the education of her children; (2) an initial scoping review reporting on literature pertaining to collaboration in the education of Australian students with ASD; (3) a systematic literature review investigating the types and extent collaboration between multiple stakeholders had been reported in contemporary Australian literature, (4) a document analysis inquiring how home-school interactions for students with disability was addressed within Australian policy and guidelines since the release of the Disability Standards for Education 2005 (Commonwealth of Australia, 2006), and (5) a nation-wide survey examining the lived experiences of individuals at multiple levels of the education system (employees in related divisions in educational departments and agencies, school leadership personnel, and the individuals directly involved in the education of students with ASD at the classroom level: teachers, carers, and allied health professionals), and the factors that impacted upon their realities of collaboration. The results of each independent study provided a deepened understanding of how collaboration was conceptualised, as well as identified the specific individual, team, and systemic factors influencing a stakeholder’s engagement or disengagement from a collaboration. This collective knowledge resulted in the development of an original conceptual framework for understanding these factors: Dynamic Influences on Collaborative Engagement (DICE). The DICE framework is reported in relation to its relevance to practitioners, researchers, and policymakers. Within this thesis, each of these five interrelated studies, and the DICE framework, is reported in article format in line with the University of Tasmania’s Guidelines for Incorporating Publications into a Thesis (University of Tasmania, 2020). While the conception of this doctoral thesis centred on collaboration influencing stakeholders involved in the education of Australian students with ASD, the discussion emphasises the likely utility of the findings and the DICE framework for understanding collaboration centred around other student populations and in other geographic locations.