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Demands that Initial Teacher Education (ITE) prepare teachers who can equip students to be agile real-world problem solvers are frequent. Guidance about ITE integrated curriculum approaches to achieve this aim is harder to find, a significant gap given increasing time and policy pressures for ITE educators. Drawing from an Australian context, this systematic review investigates how integrated curriculum is conceptualised and enacted in secondary schooling ITE courses. Three conceptions of integrated curriculum for ITE are highlighted -- Interdisciplinary, Disciplinary Literacy, and Transdisciplinary approaches -- alongside benefits and barriers to enacting integrated curriculum. Recommendations for further research and practice around integrated curriculum are proposed.

Internationally and in Australia, there is growing evidence that graduate teachers feel under prepared to teach diverse groups of children. This study, using a social lab and drawing on theories from Archer and Foucault examined Australian teacher educators' views on knowledge about diversity and the enabling and constraining factors that influenced their teaching around diversity in their universities. Eleven discourses emerged, revealing knowledge associated with teaching "about" and "to" diversity, rather than teaching "for" diversity. The authors argue that all three facets are necessary for thorough preparation of preservice teachers for today's diverse classrooms.

Recent research points to the importance of teacher educators teaching "for" diversity in initial teacher education programmes. Teaching "for" diversity is an approach to teacher education in which an understanding of specialist literature and a focus on critical thinking supports a social justice agenda as opposed to merely using different tips and tricks to prepare future teachers for teaching diverse learners in the classroom. In this study, we explored how Australian and New Zealand teacher educators negotiated a social justice agenda in teacher education programmes, using a new transdisciplinary framework of epistemic reflexivity. The "Epistemic Reflexivity for Teacher Education" (ER-TED) framework draws on epistemic cognition (Clark Chinn's Aims, Ideals, Reliable epistemic processes -- AIR -- framework) and Margaret Archer's reflexivity to explore knowledge claims in teacher educators' pedagogical decision-making. The findings identified how teacher educators in our study discerned and deliberated with respect to epistemic aims for justification, which involve transformative critical thinking and critical thinking for self. They reported good knowledge (ideals) as being scholarly in nature, and reliable epistemic processes based on higher-order thinking (analysis and evaluating competing ideas) or engaging with multiple perspectives. The teacher educators in our study are clear examples of how strong overall evaluative epistemic stances enable teaching for social justice. We argue that the ER-TED framework can help us as a profession to address teaching "for" diversity in teacher education programmes based on the belief that the pursuit of social justice requires an evaluativist epistemic stance.

The recasting of accountability in teaching and teacher education as a problem of impact across many countries has seen a proliferation of policies and strategies that datify the work of students and teachers. The enactment of such policies can be interrogated from the perspectives of multiple policy actors to understand the effects of the 'impact agenda'. We use the conceptual framing of policy enactment along with discourse analysis to investigate the interpretations and negotiations of the impact agenda by twenty teachers, principals, teacher educators, regulators and policymakers from across Australia. Ten discourses were evident across interpretive, material and discursive aspects of policy enactment. Key findings include a real tension between holistic views of impact and reductive views that rely on data analytics, as well as standardisation versus the importance of accounting for the contextual conditions that influence learning and teaching. We argue that educators must be positioned as key policy actors in driving the way impact is understood and measured.

There have been at least 100 governmental inquiries into teacher education in Australia since the 1970s, making thousands of recommendations, the majority of which have never been fully actioned or realised. Additionally, there is minimal evidence about the efficacy of this continuous review cycle. Here, we problematise these issues by conducting a comparative analysis of the Bassett report, "Review of Teacher Education in Queensland," the first review of independent teacher education in Australia conducted in 1978, and the most recent review by the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, "Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers." Applying discourse analysis techniques associated with Foucauldian archaeology, findings reveal: a self-referential use of policy is accelerating; those involved are less likely to have knowledge of the discipline of education; similarities in the discourses despite the 40-year timeframe; and increased marginalisation of teacher educators. In the light of these findings, the authors highlight the need for teacher educators to be politically savvy about the mythologising and canonising of allowable problems in teacher education. Teacher educators need to challenge policy and enter the public sphere in doing so.

There is growing international concern about the extent to which teachers are prepared to work with an increasingly diverse student (and community) population. To date, research into the relationship between teacher preparation and preparedness to teach diverse learners has not focused on teacher educators' understandings about teaching to/about diversity. Such understandings can be informed by epistemic aspects of professional work. Epistemic cognitions (cognitions about knowledge and knowing) allow professionals to generate perspectives necessary to tackle new and old challenges. The social lab reported in this paper investigated 12 Australian teacher educators' perspectives about teaching to/about diversity using the 3R-Epistemic Cognition (EC) framework. The findings showed that the 3R-EC framework could be useful for capturing epistemic reflexive dialogues about teaching to/about diversity, although some aspects of the framework were identified by the teacher educators as challenging. On the basis of these identified challenges, refinements concerning communication and use of the 3R-EC framework were identified. The feedback also led to some refinements of the social lab methodology for use in the larger national study.

The recasting of teaching as a technical enterprise rather than as a space for intelligent problem-solving means that governments around the world will continue to pursue agendas to regulate and prescribe teacher education. Teacher education reform has been attempted for over 30 years in many countries around the world, yet the crucial priority of preparing teachers for increasingly diverse classrooms has not been addressed. We used reflexivity theory and an innovative social lab methodology to investigate the conditions of teacher education experienced by 12 teacher educators at a metropolitan university in Australia. Personal, structural and cultural emergent properties were evident and were experienced variously as both enablements and constraints. Our findings show that these teacher educators were more constrained than enabled in their reflexivity for teaching to and about diversity. We argue that teacher educators need to form deep and enduring inquiry relationships with schools and communities in order to develop context-specific solutions to address the complexities of teaching to diversity.

Pre-service teacher educators, both nationally and internationally, must negotiate a plethora of expectations including using Professional Standards to enhance teacher quality. In Australia, the recent Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) report highlighted weak application of Standards in Initial Teacher Education (ITE). However, recent reports suggest that many education stakeholders feel positive about the implementation of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APSTs). This study responds to these differing viewpoints by exploring how teacher educators in a large metropolitan university in Australia account for the use of Standards in their work. Discourse analysis techniques in conjunction with socio-spatial theory make visible particular metaphors of practice as teacher educators negotiate the real-and-imagined spaces of regulated teacher education programmes. The findings highlight the importance of investigating the utility of Standards in the lived experiences of teacher educators, as they are responsible for preparing quality, classroom ready graduates.

Quality in education at the tertiary level is constantly questioned, and increasingly "professional standards" are offered as the solution to the perceived decline in quality. Foucauldian archaeological analysis of teacher graduate and geography graduate standards in Australia is conducted, revealing tensions between the different document sets. Teacher graduate standards reflect two discourses (one of knowledge and understanding, and one of skills) that are anti-intellectual and based on jargon and formulaic prescriptions. In contrast, disciplinary standards give primacy to geography as an intellectual inquiry such that its knowledge and understanding, skills, and concepts lead to progressively higher order thinking in graduates.

School curriculum change processes have traditionally been managed internally. However, in Queensland, Australia, as a response to the current high-stakes accountability regime, more and more principals are outsourcing this work to external change agents (ECAs). In 2009, one of the authors (a university lecturer and ECA) developed a curriculum change model (the Controlled Rapid Approach to Curriculum Change [CRACC]), specifically outlining the involvement of an ECA in the initiation phase of a school's curriculum change process. The purpose of this article is to extend the CRACC model by unpacking the implementation phase, drawing on data from a pilot study of a single school. Interview responses revealed that during the implementation phase, teachers wanted to be kept informed of the wider educational context, use data to constantly track students, relate pedagogical practices to testing practices, share information between departments and professional levels, and own whole school performance. It is suggested that the findings would be transferable to other school settings and internal leadership of curriculum change. The article also strikes a chord of concern: Do the responses from teachers operating under the current accountability regime live their professional lives within this corporate and globalized ideology whether they want to or not?

In Australia, for more than two decades, a "social science" integrated framework was the favored approach for delivering subjects such as history and geography. However, such interdisciplinary approaches have continued to attract criticism from various parts of the academic and public spheres, and since 2009, a return to teaching the disciplines has been heralded as the "new" way forward. Using discourse analysis techniques associated with Foucauldian archeology, the purpose of this article is to examine the Australian Curriculum: Geography document to ascertain the discourses necessary for pre-service teachers to enact effective teaching of geography in a primary setting. Then, based on pre-service teachers' online survey responses, the article investigates whether such future teachers have the knowledge and skills to interpret, deliver, and enact the new geography curriculum in primary classrooms. Finally, as teacher educators, our interest lies in preparing pre-service teachers effectively for the classroom, so that the findings are used to inform the content of a teacher education course for pre-service primary teachers.

Many governments in Western democracies conduct the work of leading their societies forward through policy generation and implementation. Despite government attempts at extensive negotiation, collaboration and debate, the general populace in these same countries frequently express feelings of disempowerment and undue pressure to be compliant, often leading to disengagement. Here we outline Plan B: a process for examining how policies that emerge from good intentions are frequently interpreted as burdensome or irrelevant by those on whom they have an impact. Using a case study of professional standards for teachers in Australia, we describe how we distilled Foucault's notions of archaeology into a research approach centring on the creation of "polyhedrons of intelligibility" as an alternative approach by which both policy-makers and those affected by their policies may understand how their respective causes are supported and adversely affected.

Since public schooling was introduced in the nineteenth century, teachers in many western countries have endeavoured to achieve professional recognition. For a short period in the latter part of the twentieth century, professionalism was seen as a discourse of resistance or the "enemy" of economic rationalism and performativity. However, more recently, governments have responded by "colonizing" professionalism and imposing "standards" whereby the concept is redefined. In this study, we analyse transcripts of interviews with 20 Queensland teachers and conclude that teachers' notions of professionalism in this second decade of the twenty-first century are effectively reiterations of nineteenth century disciplinary technologies (as proposed by Michel Foucault) yet are enacted in new ways.

An external change agent (ECA) was recently employed in three Queensland schools to align the school curriculum with the requirements of the state's high stakes test known as the Queensland Core Skills test (QCS). This paper reports on the teachers' perceptions of a change process led by an ECA. With the ever-increasing implementation of high stakes testing in Australian schools, teachers are under mounting pressure to produce "results". Therefore, in order to maximise their students' success in these tests, schools are altering their curricula to incorporate the test requirements. Rather than the traditional method of managing such curriculum change processes internally, there is a growing trend for principals to source external expertise in the form of ECAs. Although some academics, teachers, and much of the relevant literature, would regard such a practice as problematic, this study found that in fact, teachers were quite open to externally led curriculum change, especially if they perceived the leader to be knowledgeable and creditable in this area.