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Expert secondary Arts teachers are highly trained specialists well versed in face-to-face individual and group teaching pedagogies. Given the highly personalised nature of Arts teaching practice, the shift to online teaching resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns presented many with challenges for which they had little or no formal training. Many teachers felt stressed, isolated and unsure about where to turn for help. As there are demonstrated links between stress and attrition, it is important to reflect upon the experiences of these teachers with the aim of developing future mitigation strategies. The research reported here synthesises the online teaching experiences of 15 expert Arts specialists in Western Australia and revealed that being a digital native was not in itself sufficient to ameliorate online teaching challenges. Rather, the study found that teachers with deep pedagogical practice knowledge and a reflexive/flexible approach fared better than those with high levels of technology familiarity. The importance of collegiality and mentoring in an online setting, along with a reappraisal of teaching priorities emerged as key findings and serve as a timely reminder of the importance of collaboration, especially in testing times.

The creation and maintenance of inclusive learning environments is a key responsibility of all teachers working in Australian schools. Most Australian universities embed inclusion education training for pre-service teachers (PSTs) in coursework. There is an implicit assumption in these arrangements that the study of inclusion and of special needs education completed at university will translate into practice when PSTs are working in schools. This phenomenological mixed methods research design investigated how effectively inclusion education translated into practice. The results revealed that while PSTs were aware and supportive of inclusion, no clear links were made between theory and practice.

Despite the known affordances of Arts-Based Research Practice within the international education environment, its use remains relatively uncommon in Western Australia. The reasons for this are likely the contested nature of quality criteria by which Arts-Based Practice is evaluated as well as the challenges associated with the dissemination of research findings. Mixed-methods research is increasingly recognised as an appropriate and practical approach for education phenomena, and within this domain, inquiry that combines traditional qualitative and arts-based strategies offers the education researcher advantages that are not readily available through other approaches. As professional artists and researchers we share our experiences in employing our visual arts specialism within a qualitative approach. Our focus for inquiry was a "Digital Sabbath" intervention (a practice of regularly unplugging from all technology/devices with the aim of increasing social connectedness and mitigating stress) with seven early career visual arts teachers whose voices and experience of the digital disruption might otherwise have remained silenced. The importance of the study was both that we trialed a well-being intervention, but also that we innovated our methodological research repertoire by combining traditional and contemporary elements of the Qualitative paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]