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This paper examines the personal and professional experiences of the five arts leaders who co-wrote the foundation document for Australia's first national curriculum in the Arts. Their personal and professional backgrounds, which were explored during in depth interviews, drove the complex collaborative process that informed the first iteration of the "Australian Curriculum: The Arts." Though each couched their responses in the context of their background and arts discipline, they shared an awareness of the important role of the Arts in providing the analytical tools for children and young people to identify and subsequently challenge social injustice. The findings, which are presented as a group narrative using a Narrative Inquiry approach, reveal how the five arts leaders' individual lived experience, disciplinary experience and expertise, and commitment to collaborative leadership informed their approach. It was one driven by their shared belief that all Australian students, regardless of their background, are entitled to a quality arts education.

Assessment policy internationally places significant importance on the use of assessment criteria across all subject areas. However, in order to ensure effective use of criteria, it is critical for teachers to develop an in-depth understanding of them. This paper reports on a study of a range of Australian Science teachers' views and uses of criteria in practical work. Six Science teachers working in secondary schools across Sydney were interviewed, their classroom activities were observed, and the data obtained were analysed using a qualitative constant comparative method. The findings indicate that despite the emphasis on Assessment for Learning (AfL) in assessment policy in Australia, teachers generally consider criteria as a marking tool, for Assessment of Learning (AoL), rather than a learning instrument. Consequently, they use criteria exclusively as a framework for assigning grades. This paper argues that teachers need to consider the use of criteria from a learning perspective in addition to its other multipurpose functions.

Ideas and practices associated with inclusive education have featured prominently in the policies and reforms of successive Australian federal governments since the 1990s, yet there are limited historical analyses of these developments. This paper analyses federal and national inclusive education policies in Australia spanning from 1992 to the present. Drawing upon the concept of 'political rationality', the paper examines how the modes of reason underpinning inclusive education policies have evolved over time. Three distinct phases of policy development are identified, which we suggest are characterised by three dominant rationalities: (1) standardisation, (2) the neo-social and (3) personalisation. We argue that examining these rationalities reveals fundamental shifts in ways of thinking about and reasoning inclusive education in policy. We conclude by considering the implications of the different rationalities and single out the potential tensions emerging between rationalities of standardisation and personalisation as an area for future investigation.

Debates about subject English in Australia are often conducted through the senior years curriculum. In light of the anticipated interest in the new Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) English study design released in 2022 to be implemented in 2023, this paper outlines the current state of research on the VCE English subject by mapping areas of interest, types of evidence and gaps in research. The authors utilise a hybrid approach of narrative scoping review to identify methodological and thematic trends in the scholarly literature, and intersecting professional and media discourse on VCE English from 1990 to 2021. Finding that the student experience and the enacted curriculum have been largely elided, the paper identifies fresh lines of inquiry into VCE English and advocates for new discussions around scholarly interest and approaches to senior secondary English in Australia.

In this paper, we address the work of teachers at the intersection of educational policy and professional discretion, by undertaking a conceptual reading of "Through Growth to Achievement: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools," and examining how the report conceptualises teacher practice. Drawing on the Bourdieusian notion of regulated improvisation, the study explores the constraints of pedagogical practices as conceptualised by influential policy reports of this kind, highlighting the paradoxical expectations of the report on teachers whose situational awareness of classrooms is curtailed through regulation. The study examines the tension between teacher autonomy and constraints, negating important considerations to temporalities of learning. The central contribution of the paper is a conceptual understanding of how policy drivers position teacher expertise through standardisation, compliance and performance, a concern not unique only to the Australian context of educational policy, nor schooling.

The limited research into leading STEM education in rural schools internationally tends to adopt a deficit view, with a focus on the poor achievement and aspirations of rural students, difficulties recruiting and retaining STEM teachers, and issues of isolation and under-resourcing. Counter to this trend, this paper reports on research investigating leadership practices shaping STEM education at three high STEM-performing rural schools. High-performing rural schools in Victoria, Australia were identified through analysis of state-wide final year enrolment and achievement data in STEM related senior subjects. Three rural schools with relatively high STEM subject enrolments and achievement levels were selected for in-depth study. The theory of Practice Architectures guided thematic analysis of interviews with principals, middle leaders, and teachers, facilitating a description of the ways that leadership practices interacted with the Practice Architectures evident at each school, which, in turn, enabled and constrained practices that contributed to each school's STEM education success. Five leadership practices were identified as contributing to STEM education success at all three schools: leveraging community relationships, utilising local resources to enrich STEM learning, empowering STEM teaching staff, promoting the value of STEM education, and supporting STEM pathways. In detailing these leadership practices, this paper provides guidance to rural education leaders and policy makers seeking to improve STEM education in rural schools.

Legal attendance requirements and national declarations establish a social contract between the State and its citizens for the provision of schooling. Any shortage of teachers compromises the ability of the State to meet its contractable obligations. The sovereignty of the social contract is complex as no single body has ultimate responsibility for housing the teaching workforce, but everyone has a stake in it. Empirically focused on the largest school system in the southern hemisphere, the New South Wales public education system (Australia), this paper demonstrates that 90.8% of teaching positions, over 50,000 full-time equivalent posts, are in Local Government Areas where the median rent and house sales price are severely unaffordable on a top-of-the-scale teacher salary. With the system requiring additional teachers to meet increasing enrolments, and housing costs outstripping salaries, many schools not traditionally considered difficult to staff are becoming, if not already, inaccessible for teachers.

Schools are often the first point of contact for young refugees resettling in Australia and play a significant role in establishing meaningful connections to Australian society and a sense of belonging in Australia (Olliff in "Settling in: How do refugee young people fair within Australia's settlement system?" Centre for Multicultural Youth Issues, Melbourne. http//:www.cmyi.net.au/ResearchandPolicy. Accessed 21 June 2010, 2007; Gifford et al. in: "Good Starts for recently arrived youth with refugee backgrounds: Promoting wellbeing in the first three years of settlement in Melbourne, Australia." Melbourne: La Trobe Refugee Research Centre. http://www.latrobe.edu.au/larrc/documents-larrc/reports/report-good-starts.pdf. Accessed 4 June 2011, 2009; Sidhu and Taylor in: "Educational provision for refugee youth in Australia: Left to chance?" "Journal of Sociology," 43(3), 283-300, 2007). However, too little is known of how refugee youth encounter school in their new country. This article draws upon individual narratives of young former refugee's experiences of high schools. It explores the stories told by the young people of being identified as different and of negotiating ways of belonging in schools both academically and socially. It argues that it is how the school positions the newly arrived refugee students within mainstream school culture that opens up or restricts opportunities for inclusion in all aspects of school (in culture and pedagogy).

Recent negotiations of 'data' in schools place focus on student assessment and NAPLAN. However, with the rise in artificial intelligence (AI) underpinning educational technology, there is a need to shift focus towards the value of teachers' digital data. By doing so, the broader debate surrounding the implications of these technologies and rights within the classroom as a workplace becomes more apparent to practitioners and educational researchers. Drawing on the Australian Human Rights Commission's "Human Rights and Technology final report," this conceptual paper focusses on teachers' rights alongside emerging technologies that use or provide predictive analytics or artificial intelligence, also called 'personalisation'. The lens of Postdigital positionality guides the discussion. Three potential consequences are presented as provocations: (1) What might happen if emerging technology uses teachers' digital data that represent current societal inequality? (2) What might happen if insights provided by such technology are inaccurate, insufficient, or unrepresentative of our teachers? (3) What might happen if the design of the AI system itself is discriminatory? This conceptual paper argues for increased discourse about technologies that use or provide predictive analytics complemented by considering potential consequences associated with algorithmic bias.

Learning to live in a superdiverse world might be heralded as one of the great social challenges of our time. In the last decade, intercultural education has been posed as one way to foster intercultural capabilities in young people that can contribute towards learning to live well with cultural difference. As the diaspora in Australia--and elsewhere--expands, developing intercultural understanding is seen as a priority. Despite the directives of official policy and curriculum, enacting intercultural education in meaningful ways is complex and fraught. This paper reports on an Australian ethnography at a predominantly 'white' school that examined the way productions of cultural difference across school spaces complicate teachers' intercultural work. This paper considers how intercultural understanding might move beyond celebrations of multiculturalism, arguing that 'coming-to-terms with our routes' necessarily prefigures intercultural understanding and provides opportunity for an intercultural education beyond a celebration of multiculturalism.

Absence from school, especially frequent or prolonged absence, is acknowledged as a potential factor in school dropout and suboptimal academic achievement. The issue of absence from school took on added significance in 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, which resulted in schooling interruptions in several jurisdictions. However, there is little agreement in the literature on the exact relationship between absence and school outcomes as a function of socioeconomic status (SES). Using nationally representative pre-COVID longitudinal data of young Australians aged 12-13 and 14-15, this paper examines the relationship between absence from school on the one hand and school belonging and academic achievement (numeracy and reading test scores) on the other. The paper also examines whether SES intersects this relationship. Controlling for gender, prior educational achievement, computer access, and time spent doing homework, the study finds that absence impacts belonging, but that SES does not significantly influence this relationship. The effect of absence on reading is not significant either. However, absence is associated with numeracy outcomes, with the strongest associations among low SES young people at age 14. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.

This paper is concerned with the definition of the field of educational research and the changing and developing role of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) in representing and constituting this field. The evidence for the argument is derived from AARE Presidential Addresses across its 40-year history. The paper documents the enhanced complexity and diversity of the field over these 40 years, including the emergence of a global educational policy field, theoretical and methodological developments in the social sciences and new research accountabilities such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) measure. Specifically, the paper suggests that the evidence-based movement in public management and education policy, and the introduction of the ERA, potentially limit and redefine the field of educational research, reducing the usefulness and relevance of educational research to policy makers and practitioners. This arises from a failure to recognise that "Education" is both a field of research and a field of policy and practice. Located against both developments, the paper argues for a principled eclecticism framed by a reassessment of quality, which can be applied to the huge variety of methodologies, theories, epistemologies and topics legitimately utilised and addressed within the field of educational research. At the same time, the paper argues the need to globalise the educational research imagination and deparochialise educational research. This call is located within a broader argument suggesting the need for a new social imaginary (in a post-neoliberal context of the global financial crisis) to frame educational policy and practice and the contribution that educational theory and research might make to its constitution. In relation to this, the paper considers the difficulties that political representations of such a new imaginary might entail for the President and the Association, given the variety of its membership and huge diversity of its research interests. (Contains 1 table and 9 endnotes.)

Acknowledging Australian Indigenous cultural diversity involves respecting local Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. This can be difficult for teachers who do not know about Indigenous people and their knowledge. The Differentiated Indigenous Pedagogies project evaluated digitally available information describing Indigenous in this paper, 'Indigenous' will be used when referring to First Nations and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, pedagogies, policies, and institutional contexts in Australia apart from references used which use other terminology. The authors acknowledge the contested nature of terminology and use the term 'Indigenous' as it is consistent with the title of the research project on which this article is based pedagogies in the Northern Territory. The purpose was to consolidate findings to increase positive intercultural actions in the wider education community. An important aspect of the project is addressing gaps in western, non-Indigenous teacher knowledge pertinent to the diversity within Indigenous language groups and regions. Through searching for available Indigenous pedagogies as a teacher might, we found information differs in description and levels of relationality. Pedagogies are presented in numerous ways which complicates teachers' cultural understandings. Common themes from search results and Indigenist educational research are used to define ways teachers can actively engage in more respectful, relational, and reconciliatory ways to develop a differentiated approach for themselves to use when working with Indigenous pedagogies.

This paper reports on a study that explored the user-driven inter-organisational professional learning that teachers from two education systems collectively engaged in via social media. A dedicated Facebook group was established to enable Australian early childhood teachers (sector one) and primary school teachers (sector two) to engage in collaborations that would support children's transition to school. Using an Activity Theory framework, findings showed that the site was mainly used by early childhood teachers to seek peer support in meeting reporting requirements, and that school teachers rarely posted. As such, the capacity of the Facebook group to support inter-organisational cross-sector collaboration and learning was challenged as determined by the most active participants within the site, while reinforcing the group's capacity to support 'just in time' intra-organisational professional learning. This highlights a need for further research to explore the ways and means by which social media may best facilitate cross-sector collaboration between education systems, such as a more focussed and integrated use of social media during face-to-face cross-sector professional learning.

Increasing the numbers of Indigenous people enrolled in research higher degrees in Australia is important for building the Indigenous academic workforce, broadening the scope of knowledge production in academic institutions and ensuring effective research outcomes for Indigenous Australians. While the numbers of Indigenous research higher degree students are increasing, universities still have a lot to do to bring that number up to parity. In this paper, we explore the value of a pre-doctoral program developed for Indigenous people interested in doing a PhD that provides them the information they need to inform their choices about undertaking a doctoral project. As the only program of this kind in Australia, this research contributes to the emerging literature on the factors that have an influence on why Indigenous people choose to undertake PhD programs and the effectiveness of initiatives to support their pathway to higher degree research. The research outcomes build on the evidence base for improving initiatives across the university sector, highlighting the need for tailored, Indigenous-led pre-doctoral support programs for Indigenous students, the value of cohort experiences and the importance of universities that value Indigenous people and their knowledge systems.

By the end of 2021, more than 168 million students across the globe had missed a year of face-to-face schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In NSW, Australia, most students engaged in learning from home for eight weeks during 2020 and a further 14 weeks during 2021. This study provides robust empirical evidence on how two years of disruptions to schooling affected student learning. Drawing on matched data for 3,827 Year 3 and 4 students from 101 NSW government schools, this paper compares student achievement growth in mathematics and reading for 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2021 (second year of the pandemic) student cohorts. While overall there was no significant difference between cohorts, when analysed by socio-educational advantage, we were surprised to find that students in the lowest band achieved approximately three months' additional growth in mathematics. Arguably, grave concerns about the potentially dire impact of COVID-19 on the learning of disadvantaged students were met by investments that made a difference. We argue that targeted funding and system-wide initiatives to support more equitable outcomes should remain a priority after the pandemic if Australia is to meet its aspirations for excellence and equity.

Menstrual management is recognized as a critical issue for young people internationally. Relatively little published research explores issues pertaining to menstruation in school education. This paper is based on the results of an Australian survey of 5007 young women aged 13-25, which examined their experiences of menstruation and dysmenorrhea. It focuses specifically on participant qualitative responses to the question, "What do you think schools could do to better support girls during their period?" Six key themes were identified across responses. These related to sanitation; pain management; removing stigma; adequate breaks; and being considerate. The findings reported herein highlight some of the challenges menstruating young people encounter at school and give voice to their needs; these have important implications for school improvement in this area.

Driven by the focus on standardised assessment and performance-driven accountability, a considerable body of literature has documented differences in students' academic achievement across school sectors, both internationally and in Australia. However, few studies have to date explored the potential mechanisms underlying such differences, particularly through the lens of school climate and student engagement. And despite extensive literature on school climate and student engagement, including their relationships with achievement, the differences in these patterns across school sectors remain under-studied. In this paper, we leverage nationally representative data from a large-scale longitudinal survey in Australia with linked administrative data on student achievement to reveal different patterns of school climate and student engagement across government, Catholic and independent sectors. Employing multivariable regression analyses, we identify unique school climate and student engagement facets that are associated with improved achievement in each of these sectors, offering important pointers for educational policies.

Access to higher education remains elusive for many young people despite substantial investment in outreach interventions, most of which target students in underrepresented equity groups. This paper explores an alternative approach to widening participation in Australia that focuses on teacher professional development to support student aspirations. We examine school teachers' responses to a course designed to develop their conceptual understanding of aspirations and provide a framework for developing aspirations-related initiatives with their students and colleagues. The course pilot was evaluated drawing on surveys (N = 49) and interviews (N = 21). Teachers reported that they gained the following: (1) access to robust evidence of factors affecting aspirations; (2) relevant theoretical perspectives to conceptualise aspirations in new ways; and (3) insights on practical strategies with which they might nurture student pathways to higher education. To support widening participation in higher education, we argue that the scope of current outreach initiatives offered by universities must broaden to capitalise on the untapped potential of teachers.

Global pressure on universities to compete for research rankings has escalated research expectations and intensified a performativity culture for early career researchers (ECRs). However, there are limited examples in the literature of ECRs advocating for their career and research trajectories. In response to this issue, ECRs in one Australian regional university initiated the Teacher Education ECR Action and Advocacy Group (TEECRAA). This research, reported in this paper, aimed to understand how TEECRAA contributed to the career and research trajectories of these ECRs and their advocacy regarding ECR-specific policy in their higher education context. Framed by tenets of policy network theory and policy communities, this study draws on documents developed by the TEECRAA group using content and thematic analysis to investigate their activities and experiences. Findings highlighted that ECRs were able to set research and career goals, prioritise opportunities for professional learning, create resources to support their research profiles, and develop a network of support. ECRs also increased their contributions to policy and practice by engaging in strategic action that promotes ECR visibility and advocates for their needs. This contribution, however, requires the development of a network-like interaction between ECRs and university leaders with a commitment from the university to work in partnership with ECRs for mutual benefit.

This paper examines the openings for educational change enabled by framing inequality through the concept of rights, considering how variations of this framing have emerged historically and in current debates. Taking as our starting point the 1970 publication Rights and Inequality in Australian Education, we suggest that it is important to pay attention to the ways in which rights gain force within social action and through demands made by differently constituted publics. In the 1960s and 1970s, a right to educational equality garnered greater recognition, prompting moves towards needs-based funding and curriculum diversification, led by the Commonwealth Schools Commission. These moves were responsive to social movements that helped to shape new publics. In a second and more politically conservative moment, rights and inequality were increasingly separated in policies influenced by neoliberalism. We argue that the strategies currently adopted by Indigenous scholar-activists are promoting a return to a rights-based perspective, which is distinctive in casting inequality as ontological and epistemic violence.

In this paper, we examine engagement with 'the rural context' in Australian education research, focussing on the implications of the signifier 'rural'--in terms of its inclusion or absence. A review of Australian research literature in rural education indicates that the term 'rural' and its synonyms are more often used to denote assumptions of a generalised and predetermined 'context' for research than to think about its meaning. We present our findings here and discuss the implications of the signifier 'rural' in the Australian research literature to argue that while educational policy-makers must attempt to think differently about the 'problem of the rural', the field itself also needs to more fully develop the capacity to do this.

Developing students' reading and numeracy skills remain key goals of contemporary schooling. In Australia, the National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests have assessed these skills since 2008. Previous research found a significant gender gap in favour of females for the NAPLAN writing test, yet no study has examined whether gender gaps exist for reading and numeracy or their developmental pattern across the school years. Given the educational and public interest in NAPLAN and its considerable costs, it is important to understand what these tests reveal about student outcomes. The paper presents the first investigation of patterns of male and female student achievement on the NAPLAN reading and numeracy tests from 2008 to 2021. It applies the equivalent year level technique to explain the pedagogical significance of NAPLAN achievement and compares the findings with the writing gender gap to present a fuller picture of male and female achievement.

This paper examines the psychometric properties of an existing school-based Parent Opinion Survey (POS) in order to investigate its validity as a measure of parent sentiments which may (eventually) be used to better inform the decision making of school leaders. The study focusses on the POS administered by all Victorian public schools at the time of this study, and uses Rasch analysis to identify a subset of items which form a psychometrically robust, unidimensional measure of parent sentiment. We propose that 13 items identified through this analysis could lay the foundation for providing policy makers who currently manage the distribution and collation of this survey, as well as school leaders, with a more reliable and valid overarching POS Scale score. Such an approach could better inform and support the home-school partnership that forms a crucial part of the Victorian Framework for Improving Student Outcomes (FISO) school improvement continuum.

As the university student body becomes more diversified and students' lives less linear, student retention carries increased importance for universities, including the conversion of deferrers and the re-enrolment of leave-taking students. This paper is based on a broader research project which explored national patterns of deferral and leave of absence in Australia and the policies and strategies for re-engaging the students who defer or take leave. Through a mixed research design, the study explores the extent to which students are positioned at the centre of deferral and leave of absence policy, informed by relationship marketing concepts. This study suggests that many universities have moved towards greater consideration of student perspectives and individualised approaches to building a trustworthy and supportive relationship with deferral and leave-taking students, based on data analytics of individual students' information and circumstances. Despite such efforts, there remain both limitations and tensions within these approaches.

Access to quality career advice is important for economic, personal and equity reasons, yet, in many countries around the world, career-education provision is of varying quality and quantity within school settings. Given the inconsistencies in career-education resourcing and provision, what is not clearly understood is how students from low socioeconomic status (low SES) backgrounds experience career-education provision and the extent to which it shapes their post-school futures. Drawing on Australian research, this paper explores the career-education experiences of high-school students from low SES backgrounds. Bourdieu's tools of field, habitus and capital are used as a theoretical framework to understand how career education can influence students' imagining and achieving their career goals. The findings reported in this paper contribute nuanced understandings of career education to students from low SES backgrounds and recommends how all students can benefit from an embedded approach to career education in schools.

Amid the increasing digitisation of schools, relatively little work has examined the ways in which digital technologies are reconfiguring the work of school principals. With an approach based on the sociology of work, this paper draws on 19 in-depth interviews with Australian school principals to examine their everyday experiences of digital work--with particular attention paid to the enduring influence of email as a key work tool. On one hand, email was seen as a constant and unremarkable feature of 'modern' school leadership. Yet, these accounts also highlighted how the intensification and extension of individual principals' labour practices were being exacerbated by multiple layers and technologies of surveillance, expectations of constant availability, and increased accountabilities imposed through email. Of particular significance were the detrimental ways in which email-based work was described as reshaping the affective dimensions of principals' work. Against this background, the paper considers what steps might be taken to mitigate such pressures, and perhaps move towards alternate forms of digitally-supported work that are more sustainable.

This paper provides a snapshot of Indigenous Early Career Researchers in Australia derived from demographic information collected in the first stage of the 'Developing Indigenous Early Career Researchers' project. Analysis of the data to date has evidenced much diversity across this cohort. However, one commonality across all Indigenous Early Career Researchers was a commitment to the value and validity of Indigenous Ways of Knowing in the higher education sector. With the use of Tribal Critical Race Theory this paper explores the ways in which Indigenous Early Career Researchers disrupt Western-based academies and schools of thought and proposes that Indigenous Early Carer Researchers grow 'pearls' of experience and knowledge within the higher education sector that are essential to the development of a richer academy and stronger Indigenous communities.

The vocational experiences and skills of young adolescents could be infused into formal education by identifying career competencies to be taught within the academic curriculum. Such curriculum practices that embed educational and career pathways must also include the perspectives of students and the community, particularly those from marginalised groups. Drawing on data from 111 teachers, principals, carers and students, this paper presents research undertaken to co-design career education lesson plans within an infused model of the curriculum for early Middle Year students from regional, rural, and remote Australia. The lesson plans and activities were designed to allow for meaningful self-reflection and goal-setting that could be seamlessly infused into the formal curriculum and help embed early-stage career education. The paper concludes by projecting opportunities and challenges for seamless curriculum integration, while pertinent to the Australian context, can also be read with broader relevance to other educational systems and schools.

For over a century, since Aboriginal children were permitted to access mainstream Australian schools, there has been a significant gap in academic achievement between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students. Community engagement by schools is recognised as a key factor in Aboriginal student success, but school approaches to community engagement remain inconsistent and driven by deficit thinking. As part of the Aboriginal Voices Project, this paper explores community engagement at six New South Wales (NSW) public school sites and applies Decolonising Race Theory (DRT) as a critical Indigenous lens to interpret and understand the challenges that students, families, and schools face within their relationships. While we find evidence of school-community partnerships that prioritise Indigenous healing, for the schools in this paper, there is a complexity within relationships with community that reflects the interaction between assimilationist positioning of Aboriginal students that often contains positive and negative elements simultaneously.

The Aboriginal Voices project has sought to understand how Aboriginal students and parents tackle pervasive discourses that largely characterise these students as failures, disinterested in education, or without aspiration. This paper presents the conceptual and methodological approach to a multi-site case study of six whole-school communities, adding to the 10 systematic reviews of literature provided in the first phase of this project. Working through Moodie's Decolonising Race Theory framework, we describe the methodology, research questions and methods adopted in this empirical extension of the project. This paper emphasises the perspectives of Aboriginal students and their communities on schooling structures, common pedagogical and curricula practices, as well as the importance of cultural activities and connection. Moodie's framework enables us to provide a holistic analysis of daily classroom discourses, how these discourses impact young people and their families, and contributes to the interruption of settler colonialism in Australian schooling systems.

The 2014, 41st Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) presidential address is both inspired and guided by the discursive genres of presidential addresses and the role of the president in a member association such as AARE. In the address, typically the president speaks to the members on an issue or issues that are to shape or conclude their term of office, as it is in my case. Like many of the 40 AARE presidents who have gone before me, I will embed some things that are professional, personal and political--not in the interests of advancing my research agenda, but to add "to the weave and pattern of the association's history" (Reid 2010, p. v). Threads of my research since completing my PhD in 2000 will appear to support the broad argument. Also, I will draw on the outcomes of the 2014 Australian Research Council Discovery round (see Australian Research Council: ARC archives 2016) to encapsulate my key argument that "educational research and its (ex)changes are being reshaped: in a post human digital age, the tree of knowledge is mutating." To make my argument, I will review how the thinking and doing of educational research mid-way through the second decade of the twenty-first century is constructed and ask what research endeavours might be created to make the best possible worlds for our member community and the aspirations of the association.

The capacity to aspire for young people is significant, as they cannot choose to be what they cannot experience or imagine becoming. Student exchange programmes that expand experiences of STEM may increase opportunities, interests, and participation for rural young people in the STEM subject field. This paper creates a cartography with data created from self-reported Year 10 students' affective responses to experiences undergone during a three-week rural exchange (RE) programme. Students reported increased feelings of belonging to both school and STEM subjects during and after participating in the RE programme. The data created with students during this study provided a deep insight into the positive affective impact of the experiences undergone. Students' increased aspirations and motivation to continue in STEM fields were reported as sustained on return to their home rural school.

The role and significance of schooling in maintaining and renewing social disadvantage is particularly evident in upper secondary education, and especially so in the high-stakes final examination at the end of Year 12. This paper focusses on Senior English in this context, with specific regard to the Australian state of New South Wales. Building on a recent study of the outcomes of the Higher School Certificate (HSC) in 2017, it analyses what the data reveal about the relationship between Senior English and social inequality in this instance. It does so with reference to a brief account of the history of English teaching and senior secondary curriculum policy in New South Wales and also, comparatively, a now well-established comprehensive study of senior secondary schooling in Victoria. It concludes with some implications of this account for further investigations of Senior English and subject English more generally, as well as of the social meaning of senior secondary education in Australia, in particular with regard to the nexus between curriculum and assessment, knowledge, and power.

Remote Education Tutors (RETs) are central to the delivery of distance schooling in Australia and are accountable for the face-to face supervision and educational support of students. They act as the government mandated adult supervisors of Australian primary and secondary school students enrolled in distance education, including geographically isolated learners. This paper draws on statistical data from a national survey (N = 575) that was designed to map the perceptions of Australian RETs. These data confirmed that RETs act as a conduit between the distance schooling teacher and student, and that their role requires complex capabilities to be performed within a structured framework. Time restrictions with competing demands present a constant challenge to the RETs' work satisfaction. Constraining this occupation is the reality that there is no formal qualification available for RETs. Without specific credentialling, it appears that the RETs' (in)visible role risks being overlooked as a substantive educational occupation.

Global policy development in schooling often looks to solutions that embrace technology and articulate a 'what works' approach to practice. This paper takes as a case study the Australian Government's "Through Growth to Achievement" report on achieving school excellence. It analyses the report through the lens of 'sublimes', which provide insight into the way certain policy rhetoric can become reified. "Through Growth to Achievement" emphasises technological solutions which align with and reify an aesthetic notion of good teaching that draws on the 'what works' literature. This analysis argues that certain assumptions about technology, teacher practice and the 'evidence' for good policy are based on these reifications. A sublimes analysis makes these unspoken assumptions explicit and reveals the way they reinforce globalised policy approaches and foreclose others.

Force majeure circumstances, such as those witnessed in the COVID-19 pandemic, have been used to justify new technologies of governance as policy-makers around the world began to realise the magnitude of the problem and its political implications. In Australia, the coronavirus crisis focussed attention on the vital role education plays in society and was used as an opportunity by policy-makers to reinforce an agenda that, over the past two decades, has tied education policy-making to the economy and 'national interest'. Indeed, Australia's growing federal involvement, with respect to schooling policy was continued in the pandemic as the Australian Prime Minister (PM) created a national cabinet to deal with the crisis, consisting of the PM and state and territory leaders. However, despite the ongoing ambition of a national policy agenda pursued by federal policy-makers, fault lines appeared. Informed by Foucauldian notions of discourse, governmentality and biopolitics, this paper explores how Australia's federal Coalition government endeavoured to manage the population at the outset of the pandemic and subjectified teachers as responsible in the service of the economy. While COVID-19 was a crisis in search of a narrative, federal policy-makers experienced pushback as state and territory leaders assumed control and teachers refused subject positions.

Practice and pedagogy, influenced and informed by the approaches used in the preschool programs of Reggio Emilia is widespread across many early childhood settings in Australia, however, is less commonly used in Australian primary and secondary schools. Little research exists which focuses on the experiences of students in schools where this pedagogical approach is adopted. This paper draws from the findings of a 2019 study undertaken across three Australian schools implementing a pedagogical approach inspired by Reggio Emilia. The voices of students from one of these schools will be used to shed light on their perceived learner identity. The study found that the expressed learner identities were multifaceted. On one hand the students considered themselves to be informed, confident and passionate learners, shaping their world as democratic citizens. However, they also positioned themselves as citizens of the future, sharing perceptions regarding their capacity to compete as successful productive members of an economic society.

This paper reports on Indigenous early career researchers' experiences of mentoring in Australian higher education, with data drawn from a longitudinal qualitative study. Interviews were conducted with 30 Indigenous participants. A consistent theme in the findings and contemporary critical literature has been a reaction against institutionalised and hierarchical cloning and investment models of mentoring that reinforce the accumulation of White cultural capital, in favour of strength-based relational models tailored to build Indigenous cultural wealth in parallel with career development. We write from an equity-based standpoint addressing mentoring as a complex and raced space where individual Indigenous ECRs articulate a desire and will to develop a successful and meaningful career, rich in cultural wealth and with their identity intact. It is our intent that these findings will also have global significance and support the more sustainable and ethical career development of First Nation early career academics in relationally like colonised contexts.

This paper argues for the need to better understand the role of mothers and schooling in shaping modern conservative cultural politics. Arguing that 1970s-1980s was a critical period for anti-progressive politics surrounding schooling, the paper examines the activism of Australian Christian morals campaigner Rona Joyner. Joyner's successful provocation of a 1978 governmental ban on social science curriculum materials was a signal event in an international Anglophone reaction against what she and others theorised as dangerously permissive forces in public culture. Pitting 'Christian' parental authority against 'humanist' state overreach in relation to the upbringing of children, Joyner created a detailed vision of the cultural-moral corruption of schools and other social institutions. This paper demonstrates how Joyner represented her labour as a project of both public motherhood and grassroots community activism, and how activist women like Joyner were foundational to the growth of a new contemporary grassroots conservatism expressed as a popular politics of 'the people' against the state.

In Australia, a range of financial services, including education bonds, high interest personal loans and credit card debt, have long been used to help families pay for the cost of schooling. However, innovative financial technology (fintech) solutions are emerging which align with the growth of a lower risk 'buy now, pay later' phenomenon. Fintechs claim to expand financial inclusion to more people, particularly when their lending activities are compared to traditional banking services. This paper focuses on Edstart, a fintech edu-business that provides low-risk lending for families managing the cost of school fees. In conducting qualitative content analysis of Edstart's website and blog, I catalogue its market-making activities and how it is leveraging logics of school choice to create a new education service market in Australia that normalises school privatisation and the payment of school fees. I end this paper with a discussion of how school choice--as a key policy reform of governments--is associated with the rollback of the welfare state and increased levels of individual financialisation. I argue that parent consumers have become increasingly invested in choosing the 'best' school for their children, and that this often increases their level of private debt.

Globally, technology is now a vital element of the school curriculum. Technology has changed the way children learn, and when teachers integrate technology into pedagogical practices, resources, and assessment it expands the way teachers teach. This paper explores how initial teacher education (ITE) programs across Australia position the Technologies Curriculum. It uses data provided at a symposium of teacher educators who deliver ITE in the use of technologies. The paper maps data from 32 universities, including primary, secondary, undergraduate and postgraduate programs. It also investigates the naming conventions of courses in these programs and exemplifies the student experience by providing three vignettes from three programs in three different states. The findings suggest that Technologies education in Australia is offered in many ways to pre-service teachers, thus the landscape of this teaching area is diverse. This paper contributes to the field in being the first research to explore how Australian universities teach Technologies within their ITE programs. It offers a snapshot of how technologies are positioned in Australian ITE programs.

Casual relief teachers (CRTs) are a significant part of the Australian education system. This paper reports how executive staff, such as principals, deputy principals, and head teachers, support CRTs, and the perceptions that executive staff have about CRTs who work at their schools. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with a self-selected sample of 10 executive staff in Australian primary and secondary schools who responded to information about the study posted on social media platforms. The interview transcripts were analysed according to the three elements of practice architecture theory: the sayings (cultural-discursive dimension), the doings (material-economic dimension), and the relatings (social-political dimension). Results indicate that executive staff value the contributions of CRTs in ensuring minimal disruption to school routines despite staff absences. Support is provided to CRTs through access to technological and physical resources to conduct their lessons. However, the transient nature of work for some CRTs means that access to support for accreditation, professional learning and mentoring can be limited. This study has implications for further research about the role and impact of executive staff on experiences of CRTs working at their schools. In addition, this paper contributes to the existing literature on the experiences of CRTs by examining the role of executive staff using practice architectures as a theoretical framework.

For millennia, stories and oral histories have been a fundamental way of sharing knowledge in many Aboriginal cultures. Honouring the role of stories can address a continuing lack of Aboriginal voices in Australian educational research literature. In this paper, we describe the philosophical underpinnings and methodology of our research, which aimed to learn from Aboriginal people about their post-school experiences, particularly in remote communities. The uniqueness of the project included training currently enrolled students as researchers to interview past students through yarning and storying. The collected stories were then interpreted and represented in audio recordings later developed into podcasts, writing, and through art. The aim of these research outcomes is to inform relevant policies and the development of teaching and learning resources for Aboriginal students. The way the methodology of our study evolved in response to the participants' input is another key focus of this paper as well as having implications for future research.

Australian early childhood education positions literacy learning as a set of social practices contextualised by one's unique experiences and knowledges. Despite widespread agreement about the need to teach phonics and other code-breaking practices, the ways early childhood educators integrate "constrained" skills are not well understood outside the education profession. Current public discourse is generating ever-increasing pressure for the adoption of explicit teaching of phonics, however, teaching skills in isolation from reading and writing can be problematic, especially for marginalised learners. Challenges lie not only in learning to apply skills later but also in the impingement on time for more sophisticated concepts such as comprehension or vocabulary. This paper's focus on pedagogies in early childhood educational settings prior to compulsory formal school sits within a larger project examining literacy demands for learners across school. In this paper, we argue for greater recognition of early childhood educators' expertise in planning for and facilitating a diversity of practices that can address all learners' needs.

Disadvantage in schooling is often constructed as a crisis in need of fixing. Global policy reforms tend to emphasise that solutions for disadvantage often lie beyond the capacity of the state, necessitating private/philanthropic intervention. This paper seeks to contribute to this line of analysis by investigating the rise of philanthropy in Australian public schooling. Our analysis focuses on the intermediary organisation, Schools Plus, which works to connect donors to disadvantaged public schools. Through qualitative content analysis and stakeholder interviews we demonstrate how philanthropy has come to be seen as a solution to the complex problem of disadvantage, or more specifically in this case, the perceived inadequacies of public education provision. The consequence of this, we suggest, is the changing of responsibility for addressing disadvantage from government to individual schools that have been able to establish an entrepreneurial culture to market their disadvantage.

A staffroom plays a number of roles, from café, through professional learning space, to independent work area. As a place of community, personal and professional relationships and camaraderie can thrive in a staffroom. Conversely, it can be a place where personal and professional relationships become fractured, resulting in a negative emotional response for the individual teacher. This qualitative case study explored the social and micropolitical factors that existed within a staffroom and played into the daily interactions and relationships of 17 Australian secondary school teachers who shared the same space. Individual interviews were conducted, focussing on emotions and emotional experiences encountered in the staffroom. This paper examines collegial relations and their impact on the emotional disposition of the individual teacher while sharing a staffroom. Thematic analysis revealed three principal factors as being in operation when participants discussed the nature of their relationships with colleagues in the staffroom: the role of emotional labour and emotional work, the sense of surveillance from visiting senior staff members, and the influence of different forms of collegiality developed with their peers. Findings emphasise the important effect of staffroom relationships on the professional and personal emotionality of a high school teacher, an underexplored area of teachers' work.

As the third-largest export industry, international education occupies an important place in the Australian economy and society. Employing Bacchi's "What is the Problem Represented to be" (WPR) approach, this paper critically analyses four key policies pertaining to international students in Australia since the 1990s. Drawing upon theorising of the globalisation of international education policy, we uncover contestation and problem representation in discourses around the economisation of education and of international students' experiences. The findings reveal multiple discourses of the problematisation of diversity at play, including a "pivot" towards protection of international students' rights as consumers and as potential future citizens, and increased attention to the intrinsic value of international students as people, and not simply as economic agents. The findings have implications for other national contexts, in which international students contribute to the economic viability of education, and in which internationalisation of education in universities has the capacity to foster enhanced cross-cultural understanding.

Play-based learning is an approach used in early childhood education that is well supported by research on its varieties and effectiveness for young children's learning. Play-based learning meets the developmental needs of young children, but new research presented in this paper suggests that teenagers learn through play too. The experience of 25 Year 10 students in three Western Australian government schools was drawn upon to generate grounded theory about how students experience their teachers' expectations of them, which included findings that playful learning approaches communicated high teacher expectations. The students were shadow-studied in their classrooms and interviewed at the end of each day. Teachers were appraised as having high expectations when they included a playful learning approach, characterised as creative, exploratory, hands-on, fun and non-didactic. The students reflected that this led to increased motivation and academic success. A foundation for conceptualising play in teenagers' education is provided, suggesting how secondary school educators can harness play and communicate high expectations for learning through their pedagogical approach.

This paper provides an overview of the Reading Wars as a site of discursive struggle. Using a digital sociological account of online events associated with the 2018 Phonics Debate hosted by the Australian Centre for Educational Research and the think tank the Centre for Independent Studies, this paper works to illuminate and challenge contemporary understanding of the politics of literacy teaching. If educational researchers are to clarify the relationship between politics and literacy in the twenty-first century we must understand how boundaries are negotiated using digital tools and how the literacy professional community is imagined. Using a Bourdieu-facilitated digital sociology, this paper will present a case study of the 2018 Phonics Debate to illustrate how literacy researchers and cognitive scientists have used social media as a space to navigate, negotiate and reimagine the contours of the field of literacy itself.