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Full Text, Thesis (Masters), Master of Education and Professional Studies Research (MEdProfStRes), School Educ & Professional St, Arts, Education and Law, Mental health issues are prevalent in society and the issue of adolescent mental health is becoming increasingly scrutinised. It is estimated that, during adolescence, one in five young people within Australia will experience a mental health problem (Mission Australia, 2017). As Australia’s young people spend the vast majority of their time within a school environment, educators have a unique opportunity to recognise and help support young people with mental health concerns. The purpose of this study was to explore beginning teachers’ perceptions of their understanding and skills when responding to issues of student mental health. The study further sought to determine the level of perceived competence and mental health literacy among teachers in their first five years of teaching. The conceptual lenses that underpinned the investigation were teacher perceived efficacy and the influence of the environment on a person’s development. These concepts draw on Bandura’s social cognitive theory and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory. The research focused on one school environment as a single intrinsic case study, generating qualitative data. The school principal, a school psychologist, and five beginning teachers within their first 5 years of teaching were interviewed, and relevant school and government mental health and wellbeing documents were analysed. Three major findings from this research were identified. The first finding encompasses beginning teachers’ perceptions of their role, including responding to concerns and events, referring students appropriately, and responding to the complexities that can develop in the classroom as a consequence of poor student wellbeing. The second finding involves teacher-level challenges, including difficulty accessing information, a lack of specific pre-service teacher training, and the impact on teacher wellbeing. The third finding centres upon school-level challenges, including limitations in school structure and resources

Full Text, Thesis (PhD Doctorate), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), School of Education and Professional Studies, Arts, Education and Law, This research investigated the online participation of Australian girls 13 years of age. The study was framed in the broad context of networked culture and the changing social environment associated with the Web 2.0 phenomenon. The participatory character of this space was considered critical to investigating teen girls’ online participation. In this landscape, new technologies and social media applications were understood to offer greater means for teen girls to engage with peers and close friends. It was presupposed that teen friendship was shifting towards more complicated and overlapping communication arrangements. The study was concerned with identifying the ways in which teen girls managed and navigated their everyday experience with peers and close friends in this context. The literature review highlighted the changing sociocultural context of everyday interaction. In particular, attention was drawn to the influence of new technologies on young people’s online safety. Online risk dominated the research scholarship and gendered practices emerged as critical avenues for exploring teen girls’ online experience. The regulatory influence of dominant discourses on teen girl’s everyday interactions and online practice came into question. Online interaction, rather than an isolated set of online actions came to be understood as a complex organisation of micro-interactions and macro-structural forces. The theoretical framework was built on the understanding that teen girls were active participants of their own experience but that this practice was situated in socially-defined parameters of structural discourses and technological opportunities and constraints.

Teachers’ beliefs about what it is (or is not) possible to achieve with digital games in educational contexts will inevitably influence the decisions that they make about how, when, and for what specific purposes they will bring these games into their classrooms. They play a crucial role in both shaping and responding to the complex contextual factors which influence how games are understood and experienced in educational settings. Throughout this article the authors draw upon data collected for a large-scale, mixed-methods research project focusing on literacy, learning and teaching with digital games in Australian classrooms, to focus explicitly on the attitudes,understandings and expectations held about digital games by diverse teachers at the beginning of the project. They seek to identify the beliefs about games that motivated teachers’ participation in a digital games research project while focusing, as well, on concerns that teachers express about risks or limitations of such a project. The authors’ aim is to develop a detailed picture of the mindsets that teachers bring to games-based learning environments, and the relevance of these mindsets to broader debates about the relationship between games, learning and school.

D'Art CCAC, student publication, vol.II November, 1939