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Australia’s colonial past and subsequent propagation of the White Australia policy in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 has meant that 'Whiteness' remains central to the national imaginary. Consequently, racial-colonial discourses axiomatically regulate scholarly and societal understandings of racial minorities through two unique but analogous debates – one focussed on the schism between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; the other centred around immigration policy and multiculturalism (Curthoys, 2000). In the context of Australian education, there is a slowly developing collection of Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholarship that has addressed and challenged the inequities that pervade the Indigenous student experience (Ford, 2013; Vass, 2014, 2015); however, there has been much less momentum made with other racial minorities. Specifically, the experiences and voices of migrant pre-service and early career teachers from Asian backgrounds like myself, who have become increasingly prevalent in Australian education, remain largely absent from scholarship. In light of this, in this paper I use Asian CRT (AsianCrit) (Museus & Iftikar, 2013) to present an autoethnographic account of a migrant ‘Asian’ Australian high school teacher’s subjectivities, quests for solidarity and attempts at dealing with racial injustice across a range of White Australian classrooms.

Australia’s colonial past and subsequent propagation of the White Australia policy in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 has meant that 'Whiteness' remains central to the national imaginary. Consequently, racial-colonial discourses axiomatically regulate scholarly and societal understandings of racial minorities through two unique but analogous debates – one focussed on the schism between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples; the other centred around immigration policy and multiculturalism (Curthoys, 2000). In the context of Australian education, there is a slowly developing collection of Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholarship that has addressed and challenged the inequities that pervade the Indigenous student experience (Ford, 2013; Vass, 2014, 2015); however, there has been much less momentum made with other racial minorities. Specifically, the experiences and voices of migrant pre-service and early career teachers from Asian backgrounds like myself, who have become increasingly prevalent in Australian education, remain largely absent from scholarship. In light of this, in this paper I use Asian CRT (AsianCrit) (Museus & Iftikar, 2013) to present an autoethnographic account of a migrant ‘Asian’ Australian high school teacher’s subjectivities, quests for solidarity and attempts at dealing with racial injustice across a range of White Australian classrooms.

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This article constitutes a literature review, focusing on the idea of holistic learning, as found in key sources, and its essential contrasting with instrumentalist approaches to learning. It will move to explore updated research on holistic learning factors, with special attention to insights gleaned from values pedagogy and the research that underpins it. The article will juxtapose those insights with the instrumentalism that, it will allege, too often dictates teacher education directions. The article will conclude with an argument that teacher education has become, in modern times, a service industry, too often serving the agendas of governments and teacher unions, rather than preparing teachers to follow the guidelines provided by the latest research into student wellbeing and societal betterment. The article will focus especially on a number of Australian examples to mount the argument that nonetheless applies more generally across Western domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]