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The article offers the author's insight concerning her career as an educator and the vision of Australian Literacy Educators' Association (ALEA). The author says that she began her teaching career as a primary school teacher and has been employed as an Associate Dean at the University of Sydney. She states that the biggest literacy challenge faced by educators is how their profession is deskilled in their country. Moreover, she notes on the important role of ALEA's advocacy to educators.

This paper interrogates discourses of Aboriginality about, and by, early career Aboriginal teachers as they negotiate their emergent professional identity in specific Australian school contexts. These discourses position the respondents via their ethnic and cultural background and intersect with selfpositioning. This relates to the desire to be positioned as teacher rather than (only) as an 'Aboriginal' teacher. Consequently, the over-determination of Aboriginality includes such suppositions as the 'think-look-do' Aboriginality with a 'natural' connection to community, the 'good' Aboriginal teacher who fixes Aboriginal 'problems', the Aboriginal teacher as 'Other', and [the notion that] 'Aboriginal work' as easy, not real work and peripheral to core business. Through qualitative methodology, eleven Aboriginal teachers from the University of Sydney were interviewed. They were able to construct stories of early career teaching and the data was analysed to explore how the participants interpreted, accepted and/or resisted various discourses in their efforts to be agentic and resilient and to make a difference for the Aboriginal students they teach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic mentoring is increasingly being used by many universities as a tool to enhance the quality of research-led teaching, promote cross-faculty collaboration and encourage a mentoring culture and community. This article reports on a pilot project established to investigate the benefits of building flexibility into a structured academic mentoring program at the University of Sydney. Twenty-six academics from the Faculty of Business and Economics and the Faculty of Education and Social Work participated in the program. The mentors ranged in position from lecturer to professor and the mentees from associate lecturer to senior lecturer. Flexible arrangements were shown to be important in a variety of ways, from the pairing of mentor with mentee, to focussing on issues of work survival and life balance, research outcomes and career advancement. The project highlighted the lower number of male academics involved in formal mentoring, which merits further exploration. All participants reported positive outcomes, although refinement of the pairing process was recommended. A variety of unanticipated outcomes was reported by mentees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]