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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.

The article focuses on the significance of education programs in Theatre companies. It is stated that the lives of young people could be transformed by great arts education and powerful arts experiences that also help build capacity to journey through life and to contribute to its betterment. Observation of leading arts educator, Professor Robyn Ewing of the University of Sydney, regarding the impact of arts education on people is discussed.

The article offers information on Health Through Arts: Connecting People & Communities, A Sidney De Haan Research Centre Webinar Series, Kent, Uk, January–June 2022.

This paper argues for the value of post-performance workshops in extending the memories of theatre for young people. It examines research that investigated the 'impact' of touring theatre for young people in regional settings through discussion of two contemporary productions, 'I Call My Brothers' and 'Melbourne Talam'. The workshop methodology explores student's complex negotiations of place, subjectivity and belonging by individually and collectively re-assembling the dramaturgy of each production. By activating theatre memories, it suggests young people practise modes of spectatorship in which they recover knowledge of 'self and other' in relation to broader cultural and political questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article lists the journal's editors including Diane Mayer, Julianne Moss and Robyn Ewing.

Based on literacy policy educational reform in Australia, this article explores the role of new media, policy labor and what small data analysis can reveal about parents and carers as networked policy actors. Using qualitative critical network (QCN) analysis, legacy and social media data, this article provides a snapshot of how policy actors interact online to labor for education reform. This article shows that parent and carer advocacy is central to the success of the universal synthetic phonics (USP) social media campaign in Australia. It also shows that analysis of the new media networks that connect policy actors should be a core part of understanding policy dynamics in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decision-makers in the field of education have always faced questions about the purpose of school and education. Is education meant to develop intellectual capacity, or does it have the role of developing skills and competences, of preparing the workforce for a constantly changing economy? The current discourse in education focuses on the adoption of standards, but they will matter less in a cyber world, in which, much more important will be the way of using the information. This study includes the role of art in education, focusing on how arts education could provide a way to adapt to this ever-changing environment, more energy, flexibility and confidence. Education for tomorrow does not mean limiting learning only to the assimilation of basic knowledge, through art or any other form of learning, but to how we can invest more closely and more carefully in the role that creativity can and should play in the training and preparation of young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study draws a specific link to the practice of action learning (AL) in China. We organized ourselves into an AL set and used Revans' AL, as interpreted by Marquardt (2004), to create a post-teaching dialog to examine the experience gained from delivering an interdisciplinary course online—a novice situation—in a Chinese transnational university. AL's questioning insight occurred after conducting an evidence-based evaluation of online teaching in an interdisciplinary higher education course that used Debattista's (2018) online teaching effectiveness rubric. The rubric offered rich 'programed knowledge' that triggered our question-based inquiry. We conclude that our AL approach is valuable for teacher professional development and offers our rationale for why this particular AL practice would be suitable for the Confucian culture, teaching of interdisciplinary courses, and in novice situations. By conducting AL, we identified a list of key findings, such as proactive communication among teachers in an interdisciplinary course, was vital when teaching to a large group of students. We offer recommendations to improve interdisciplinary online course design and delivery in the future based on reflections from the AL. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses early career teaching. Topics include research has shown early career teachers experience additional responsibilities, student behavioral issues and lack of support; Stoicism demonstrated that education is about self-knowing and thus enables people to better shape their communities through inclusivity, tolerance and peace; and meditation with reflective, visualization and practical exercises helps teachers to establish professional identity.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on initial information-gathering for a collaborative autoethnography on the development of an arts-based pedagogy in a school in Singapore for students with learning differences. The school, referred to in this article as the Rain Tree School, is a private school in Singapore, catering to students with some form of commonly perceived learning disability, or as referred to in this article, learning difference. In the Rain Tree School, students are referred to as having learning differences as a way of avoiding labeling in a culture where the term disability has been seen by some as a misfortune to the family, and the person with a disability has been considered useless and helpless. The researchers--an academic consultant and the school-based arts integration teacher--were part of the implementation team to introduce an arts-based pedagogy. To begin their collaborative autoethnography, the researchers gathered information from teachers about their attitudes to and experience with arts integration. This article reports on their initial findings regarding teachers' attitudes and experiences and how they were critically reflected on for use as the school progressed toward a school-wide arts-based pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actors create theatre with and for with children in diverse theatrical, educational and therapeutic contexts but little is known about the 'artistry' of their practice. This paper analyses a theatrical encounter between a child and an actor and identifies four key qualities of 'pedagogically tactful' (van Manen 2016) actor practice: listening, reciprocating, imagining and empathising. In doing so, the artistry of actors who work with children is interpreted as 'aesthetic judgement', involving a relationship between theatrical craft, pedagogy and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the journal's editorial board which includes Poonam Batra, Christopher Day and Tara Goldstein.

This article offers an examination of three Arts teacher professional learning initiatives implemented in Australia. Through a process of developing storied vignettes for relational encounter and meaning making, the article identifies some key factors that operate across contexts to enable and/or inhibit Arts teachers to achieve and embody transformative outcomes for Arts learning and pedagogy. Adopting an iterative collaborative process individual storylines become an entwined meta-narrative in which vignettes of recent Arts teacher professional learning exemplars disrupt the deficit storylines of competition and conflict that have operated historically to marginalise the Arts in education contexts. We suggest that such deficit storylines can be reimagined as generative spaces for possibility. Subject or discipline borders in context can be viewed as thresholds to enliven rather than fragment the presence and purpose of future oriented agendas for Arts education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offering an overview of the Romanian theatre for children and teenagers, the present paper is mapping the existing public or private institutions and theatre companies that function in Romania. The main points of interest presented and discussed are: the question of the audience (age, social milieu, the means this young audience comes or is brought to the theatre, the marketing strategies elaborated by the companies); the theatre men and women (stage directors, set designers, puppeteers and playwrights or dramaturges) specialized in performances for youngsters, as well as the tendency of well-known artists to try their hand in this specific direction; the important number of festivals and theatrical encounters that appeared after the communist period and in the last years, revealing an increasing interest for this kind of theatre, coming from the professional artistic field as well as from the young and adult Romanian audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The article lists the members of the editorial board of the periodical which includes Craig Kridel, Poonam Batra, and Ann Schulte.

This article explores the potential impact of expressions of gratitude to and for our teachers on teacher retention and resilience. It is widely acknowledged in educational circles that upwards of forty percent of Australian teachers leave the profession within the first five years. With teachers struggling under the pressures of increased social and political scrutiny and associated increases in societal and workplace expectations, teacher burnout and attrition remains a substantial issue in Australia. Despite the scholarly research that has identified the high levels of teacher attrition, the difficulties of the teaching profession go largely unacknowledged by a public who see media commentary around teacher work and lives dominated by references to short hours and long holidays. In addition, this narrative is often dismissive of the positive influence of good teaching and dedicated teachers. Using the case study of a recently retired career teacher known to the researchers, this article identifies the potential impact on teacher resilience and retention of a disruption of the negative public discourses around the work and lives of teachers. In doing so, we illustrate the need to balance dominant negative discourses with ones that acknowledge and celebrate the positive impact of teachers in the lives of their colleagues, students and the wider community. The authors employ an a/r/tographic inquiry that uses relational art inquiry tools to highlight the attributes of resilient teachers, and how teacher resilience and in turn retention might be cultivated through expressions of community gratitude. In doing so, we argue that when teachers feel valued and are cognisant of the gratitude felt by students, staff and parents, their professional resilience is bolstered and the likelihood of attrition reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]