Search

This paper investigates the complex factors that lead to early career teachers (ECTs) deciding to leave the profession. It extends prior studies to show the associations that different elements of preservice education (PSE), early career support, and on-the-job satisfaction have with the intention to leave the profession. The study uses data from 2,144 Australian ECTs to explore these relationships. Results highlight the importance of teachers' collegial relationships with their peers, and replicate prior findings showing the significance of mentoring and induction programs. Results show that elements of job satisfaction are strongly associated with intention to leave the profession, leading to a number of implications for achieving the twin goals of higher teacher retention and job satisfaction.

Purpose: To explore the conceptualisation and operationalisation of authentic assessment in work-based learning and research. Design/methodology/approach: The relationship between authentic assessment and work-based learning and research is examined using a postgraduate degree program at a regional university in Australia as a case example to identify unique pedagogical features of work-based learning as they are linked to assessment. Findings: A dynamic is created between formative and summative authentic assessment practices and the cross-current nature of learning in work and research, leading to a range of lifelong learning outcomes. A framework for such a dynamic is presented. Originality/value: The pedagogy informing work-based learning emphasises developing higher-order thinking through reflective practice, developing competencies and capabilities associated with professional practice and developing academic writing and research skills to enhance professional identity at the postgraduate level for mid- to senior-career professionals. However, the relationship of authentic assessment to work-based learning and research has not been explicated in the literature and its application in post-COVID work environments has yet to be fully examined.

Currently, an almost exclusively female workforce provides the government mandated adult supervision of Australian primary and secondary school students enrolled in distance education, including geographically isolated learners. These Remote Education Tutors (RETs) include unpaid family support providers and externally employed governesses and home tutors who are paid by the children's families. This crucial position has no prerequisite qualifications, which in turn generates occupational invisibility and an absence of recognised career pathways for the individuals fulfilling the responsibilities of this role. In response, we propose innovative partnerships for credentialling the experiences and effectiveness of Australian RETs, in order to recognise their professional status and to contribute to a sustainable rural education workforce. Such credentialling will entail dynamic and mutually responsive collaborations among the distance education stakeholders, including the tutors, the children's families and the universities charged with administering such credentialling. Evidence to support this proposal is provided by selected data from a 2021 national survey completed by 575 current and former RETs in most Australian States and Territories. These data underwent descriptive analysis that elicited four themes that encapsulated key elements of the RETs' lives and contexts: career pathways, economic disadvantage, gender roles, and educational equity. This account framed by Cardini' s (2006) politicised conceptualisation of partnerships highlights both the urgency and the complexity of envisaging and enacting situationally responsive rural community-university collaborations to support this vital yet invisible segment of the Australian educational workforce.

This paper examines the values of the CHE principles of Connectivity, Humanness and Empathy as a guiding framework for maximizing the ethical and methodological advantages of semi-structured interview research practices. The authors draw from two separate educational studies and apply the CHE principles to analyse and evaluate the effectiveness of decision-making in facilitating sustainable relationships with the participants in each study. Findings highlight that dialogical relations with participants were evident in both studies, and identify significant junctures where decision-making and actions influenced effective rapport-building and respectful and reciprocal relationships with participants in the research. The CHE principles emerge as providing a robust framework for educational researchers to employ when auditing their decision-making prior to and during their engagement in qualitative interviews.

This paper explores the implementation of a Flickr (Web 2.0 photo sharing software) learning task in a first year primary education course. The context for the task was a Multiliteracies course where students designed digital media activities for later use with primary age students. The Flickr task was constructed to determine how a learning activity might be designed to afford the best opportunities for emergent learning (Kawka, Larkin & Danaher, 2011). The paper analyses data collected in phase one of an emergent learning project (Semester Two, 2011), discusses the outcomes of the learning task and questions whether the opportunities provided for interaction and communication between students resulted in emergent learning. Initial data suggests that, although the Flickr environment affords opportunities for emergent learning, for this group of students within the confines of the particular task and learning environment, evidence of emergent learning was minimal. This has ongoing implications for designing teacher education courses that incorporate blended learning pedagogies. (Contains 1 figure and 5 pictures.)

Central Queensland University (CQU) is a highly complex institution, combining campuses in Central Queensland and distance education programs for Australian domestic students with Australian metropolitan sites for international students and a number of overseas centres, also for international students. In common with many other universities, CQU has recently reviewed its course management systems (CMSs). In doing so, CQU has signalled its desired strategic position in managing its online learning provision for the foreseeable future. This paper analyzes that strategic position from the perspective of the effectiveness of CQU's engagement with current drivers of change. Drawing on online survey results, the authors deploy Introna's (1996) distinction between teleological and ateleological systems to interrogate CQU's current position on CMSs--one of its most significant enterprises--for what it reveals about whether and how CQU's CMSs should be considered an accelerator of, or a brake on, its effective engagement with those drivers of change. The authors contend that a more thorough adoption of an ateleological systems approach is likely to enhance the CMS's status as an accelerator in engaging with such drivers. (Contains 1 figure and 7 tables.)

This paper analyses data from two sources of stakeholder feedback--first year pre-service teachers and supervising teachers/centre directors--about the issues involved in creating more collaborative approaches to the first year early childhood teacher education practicum at an Australian regional university. The collection of this feedback was part of a broader participatory action research project directed at maximising both the effectiveness of the pre-service teachers' knowledge acquisition and meaning-making and the sustainability of the partnership underpinning the practicum. The paper provides new insights into a hitherto under-researched area, that of pre-service early childhood teachers' professional learning experiences in child care contexts. It uses, as a basis, the work of Cardini. The main findings are that there are multiple viewpoints and competing interests, resulting in asymmetries, dissonance and the potential for conflict. (Contains 1 figure.)

While diversity and commonality are not necessarily contradictory aspirations in relation to contemporary teaching in higher education, they exist potentially in a state of dynamic tension, fostered by market-based and government-induced policies that strive to have the largest and widest possible client- or customer-base, while reducing costs by standardising delivery and assessment. This paper explores this dynamic tension between diversity and commonality through three empirical cases of different types of students at Central Queensland University in Australia: Indigenous, pre-undergraduate and international students. The paper presents an analytical synthesis of the particular teaching strategies developed by academic staff working with students in each case: experiential learning, transformative learning and culturally-situated pedagogy. The authors argue that these strategies constitute a potentially effective means of helping to resolve the dynamic tension between, and of unravelling the Gordian knot linking, diversity and commonality in Australian contemporary higher education.

Australian occupational Travelers such as circus and fairground people often enter territories normally occupied by permanent residents. This article examines the ways in which these Travelers act as "space invaders," disrupting the boundaries between urban and rural, and as pedagogical innovators, when they develop pioneering approaches to their education. The findings indicate the efficacy of the concepts of multidimensionality, fluidity, and instability in analyzing and understanding the dynamics that occur between the occupational Travelers and permanent residents. The findings also demonstrate possibilities for educational provision that have been achieved for the children of one group of Australian occupational Travelers.

This opening article in this special issue about Australian rural education research develops three key points. First, the Australian literature reflects the complexities of defining the terms "regional," "rural," and "remote," with many definitions deriving from a fixed and disabling urban-rural binary. That literature also contains a number of success stories of educational innovations in rural Australia. Second, the conceptual and methodological resources underpinning the Australian literature need to be interrogated to ensure that they avoid deficit constructions of rural Australia in favor of more productive understandings that recognize and value rural educational innovations. Third, the articles in this collection provide points of potential dialogue between American and Australian rural education researchers committed to mapping and celebrating diversity and innovation.

Uses semi-structured interviews with Australian show people, children and adults, and their home tutors and teachers to show how the Traveller people's dissatisfaction with the learning opportunities available in the past has fueled their determination to have a separate school for show children. (SLD)

Examines the field of international traveler and nomadic education research and argues for the need to extend the boundaries of this "field" significantly. Research on the education of travelers and nomads is mobile and fluid, but the approach used in this collection, the mapping and celebration of international diversity, is needed to expand contemporary understandings of itinerancy. (SLD)

Examines the benefits of language laboratories for learning Japanese. After reviewing related literature and selected issues on educational technology, the article presents results from a survey of Australian college students using a language laboratory. Overall, students appreciated and were positive about the language laboratory, though some had concerns about its promotion of interaction and their degree of control over it. (SM)

Considers three social theories--actor-network; marginalization; and intentionality and action--that can be used to reconceptualize open learning to reconstruct openness through research conducted in remote primary home schools and itinerant primary classrooms in Australia. The notions of center/periphery and mobility/immobility are examined. (PEN)

This study examined issues related to improving the quality of distance education courses that were raised by university students in Australia. Focus group sessions were held in rural and urban areas in Queensland that discussed student interaction with lecturers, assessment tasks, flexibility, study materials, mentors, and educational technology. (LRW)