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This study investigates and compares elements of creativity in secondary schools and classrooms in Australia and Singapore. Statistical analysis and qualitative investigation of teacher, student and leadership perceptions of the emergence, fostering and absence of creativity in school learning environments is explored. This large-scale international study (n = 717) reveals the impact of teacher behaviours, teaching environments and school leadership approaches that promote and impede the enhancement of creative, critical, and innovative thinking, organisation, and curriculum structures. Implications for Australian schools and teaching urge for secondary education to challenge current, practices, pedagogies and environments, arguing for school-based strategies and considerations that enhance creativity and critical thinking and the fostering of creative ecologies within Australian schools.

Notions of creativity are increasingly central to educational scholarship and policies, but few studies attend to the intersection between "Health and Physical Education" (H/PE) and "creativity." In this paper we explore the literature on creativity in education and identify how creativity is represented across a broad spectrum of enquiry yet limited in relation to specifically H/PE. Writing from an Australian context, we examine how the key ideas and propositions from the "Australian Curriculum for Health and Physical Education" and the "Critical and Creative Thinking" capability raise important questions regarding the social emergence of educative creative purpose and potential in H/PE. We outline the utility of a 'creative ecologies' conceptual framework to consider contemporary practices in H/PE, and apply this to two purposively selected resources; to showcase their contextual eminence for creative learning in H/PE pedagogy and practice. The first resource, "Phenomenom!," was funded by Horticultural Innovation Australia to develop food literacy and is linked to cross-curriculum learning outcomes. The second resource, "Fitter. Faster. Better," is a St Martin's Youth drama-arts performance where students were prompted to design and perform a fitness programme for adults. Utilising the creative ecologies framework we illustrate the complexity of interconnected creative processes in H/PE as a series of networked elements and cultural flows (policies, practices, products, process, material environments, and partnerships). This framework is then used to identify how the two educational resources exemplify and open up a socially creative practice in both H/PE and everyday life. Our theoretical developments offer new ways to identify, design and enact quality creative and contemporary socio-cultural H/PE curriculum within a broader creative ecology.

How creativity in education is applied by teachers to secondary school contexts is dependent on how the term 'creativity' is grounded, politicised, and practised. This paper reports on an international study of secondary schools in Australia, USA, Canada, and Singapore investigating how creativity is understood, negotiated, valued and manifested in secondary schools, focusing on teacher and student understandings, actions, benefits and impediments to creative and critical thinking. Participant reflections revealed inter-, trans- and cross-disciplinary learning shaped by teacher collaboration, dialogue and classroom organization that fosters critical and creative thinking. Implications are made for the ways practicing teachers develop and foster creativity via pedagogical approaches that enhance connectivity and interdisciplinarity of teaching practices between domains of learning. An education-based Creativity Index through which administrators and teachers can gauge, assess and implement creative skills, capacities, pedagogic practices and assessment of creativity within secondary schools is posited. Implications for STEM/STEAM education and centralizing creative capacities in teaching, learning, and educational change are offered.

Creativity in education is currently dominated by discourses pertaining to both a neo-liberalisation of arts education and a more widespread attention to the economic potential of diverse creativities. This study applies new thinking regarding creative educational advancement that is adaptive and critically reflexive to the tasks of reconciling the need for safe, ethical and empathetic learning environments and the production of adaptive and innovative twenty-first century workforces. This study of Australian secondary schools analyses perceptions, understandings and actions, and impediments to creativity in classrooms. This study asserts significant implications for the need to foster effective environmental and ecological approaches to engaging in creative practices in Australian secondary schools. It establishes a creativity index through which school leaders and teachers can routinely measure, develop and adjust their school environment's, students' and teachers' creative skills and capacities, pedagogic practices and assessment of creativity across the 'education lifespan'.

Schools' administrators and teachers feel the necessity to apply creative education within their learning environments, despite grappling with understandings of what creativity is and how best teachers can foster it in their students. This qualitative international study spanning the USA, Canada, Singapore, and Australia investigates teachers' perceptions regarding creative pedagogies that enhance creativity. Analyzing teachers' reflections on classroom pedagogy and school practice, this study explores ways teachers nurture critical thinking that foster creative intelligences. This study identifies pedagogical practices involving dialogic scaffolding, inter-disciplinarity, and creative environments and school practices that promote learning and thinking "out-side the box" in secondary school learners. This article posits a creativity index through which schools can gauge and assess attributes to nurturing creativity.

Australian universities, through their graduate attributes, claim that graduates have the ability to communicate, an attribute encompassing, at the least, written and oral literacies. Despite this claim, Australian universities have been criticised over the past decade for their lack of rigour in assessing this attribute; a criticism generally linked to perceived weaknesses in graduates' English language proficiency (ELP). Indeed, evidence suggests that programmes designed to develop students' English language skills are invariably add-ons, despite ELP being a significant facet of the ability to communicate. This paper explores the development, over a six-year period, of wide-ranging ELP policy and strategies within one Australian university. Basing decisions on research pointing to good practice, evidence collected through various trials, dialogue with stakeholders, and ongoing evaluation of all actions, this paper illustrates key factors in moving towards the integration of ELP within courses.

Traditional ties between "arts" education (that is, discipline-based arts subjects and activities in schools) and an emergent notion of "creativity" in educational discourses and policy documents are loosening, with implications for both. While creativity seems to be on the ascent, the arts may not be as fortunate; creative skills and capacities are emerging as a central focus of twenty-first century learning, while the arts continue to fight for room in an overcrowded curriculum. In this article, we examine some policy-level shifts in focus towards creativity and its conflation with innovation, and its trickle-down effects in secondary and tertiary learning environments. Central to this analysis is the diffuse and often contentious constructions of discourses of creativity, and its inability to be clearly and consistently defined or measured in the education sector. The need to quantify creativity and its presence in schools is on the rise, and this article tracks its implications for teacher education, policy development and curriculum and pedagogical evolution in the twenty-first century.

This article problematises the uptake and use of digital technologies by migrant and refugee-background young people, through the lens of a site-based arts pedagogy program, Culture Shack (CS), in Melbourne, Australia. It argues that online pedagogies including animation, Facebook, photoshop, mobile phones and Youtube can be used effectively for bridging cultural, gender and educational gaps, if the ways in which they are applied engage with communication preferences and discourses of culture, ethnicity and digital media technology--including issues related to technological determinism. Drawing on Dimitriadis' attention to the power of public pedagogies and cyberculture theorists such as Leung and Nakamura, this article frames creative ICT use as not merely a tool but a contested, negotiated space in which young participants shape educational transits of being and becoming, and arts-based digital learning as twenty-first century global pedagogies.

This paper draws on related research studies in two urban centres (Melbourne and Adelaide, Australia) with South Sudanese men and women engaged in varying degrees with higher education. The co-authors examine some gendered differences in the process and demands of resettlement, including within employment and education, and its implications for rapidly changing public versus private gender roles. We argue against essentialising discourses of the "liberatory" nature of education in the west, versus constructions of "cultural knowledge" as innate, burdensome, and less useful in western contexts. Drawing on Ahmed's critique of discourses of the "melancholy migrant" which position western knowledges and gendered practices as progressive and therefore more desirable, the authors interrogate the possibility of multiple forms of knowledge and new migrants--especially South Sudanese--as enriched by their previous experiences and knowledges, rather than impoverished by them.

Using collaborative performance ethnography in community- and school-based settings, sex education has the potential to challenge at-risk narratives for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) youth. This paper problematises the youth-led drama project "Epic Queer" to test the "queer" potential of youth-driven initiatives at the school and community level, and to reject the singularity of victimised and "at-risk" narratives so pervasive in sex education internationally about queer youth. By drawing on the "It Gets Better Project" as an example of widespread but narrowing social media texts encouraging normativity, deferred pleasure and a happiness narrative, this paper argues for the potential of performance-based arts engagement for re-expanding queer youth subjectivities.

Recognition of human rights on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status by the United Nations has led to the development of new policies concerning homophobia and transphobia in educational contexts. This paper examines new Australian education policies impacting gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (GLBTIQ) teachers. A policy review uncovered a range of protections for GLBTIQ teachers in contexts such as the State of Victoria, alongside restrictions. Experiences of policy discussed in pilot study data from surveys of 63 Victorian GLBTIQ teachers, and in-depth interviews with nine Victorian GLBTIQ teachers, revealed that GLBTIQ teachers were relatively unaware of the protections available to them, compared to their awareness of protections for students. Many teachers were out as lesbian or gay to some staff members but fewer had come out to students. Teachers in religious schools had more difficulties, causing some to leave the sector. Further promotion of protections and more research are recommended.

For Asante our "battle is intense, the struggle we wage for status power is serious and we cannot communicate as equals when our economic position is that of servants" (2008, p. 49), words that resonated with the author throughout her research with Sudanese Australian young women about their educational experiences, as captured in co-created short films. While the work moved between social science and arts-based research the author questioned the basis of her relationship with the co-participants, and the possibility of fluid status positions within educational contexts. This paper interrogates the im/possibility within neoliberal secondary school contexts for activist educational research (Giroux, 2005) to be the kind of "interchange" of which Asante speaks, a source of creative understanding for researchers and co-participants, if it cannot address co-participants' (and teacher/student) unequal material conditions. In the case presented in this article, materially-influenced communication challenges reflect current curricular and pedagogical tensions, especially for refugee-background students. Where racial, cultural and socio-economic marginalities intersect, pedagogical and curricular possibilities are sometimes foreclosed before students even enter "neoliberal" classrooms.

Taking Butler's notion of embodied performativity in relation to education and global flow, this article uses one example of Samoan cultural dance within a community arts education programme to argue the need for localised, context- and culture-specific arts pedagogies which incorporate diversity in all its expressions, suggest an emerging "critical race pedagogy", and celebrate the power of difference rather than marketplace uniformity. Though this can be confronting especially for educators, it points to a new possibility in what might be considered a new "pedagogical imaginary", which extends the notion of "a new research imaginary" and in which cultural dance and other forms of creative cultural expression are productive pedagogical portals for both academic and intercultural learning. Drawing on both Australian and international trends in cultural and arts education policy, the author highlights the power of space and place-based learning that draws productively on cultural, gender and creative interventions. (Contains 1 note and 2 figures.)

This paper offers a performative autoethnography in order to make transparent-in-context relationships and research data arising from an ethnocinematic doctoral study entitled: "Cross-marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education". The performative structure of this paper reflects contemporary developments in qualitative and education research that acknowledge researchers/educators as gendered, sexualized, and racialized. From these subjectivities we engage in communities of practice in ways that are both intercultural and intergenerational and, as such, experimental performative narratives are increasingly considered to be both "reliable" data while simultaneously troubling notions of reliability. This paper explores these productive contradictions as they appeared to the educator-author at a Sudanese beauty pageant in Melbourne, Australia, and the implications for her own sense of race, refugeity and sexual identity that this scene evoked. This and other texts that are created to be spoken aloud are "performance ethnographies about self and society", and as such they blend layers of past and present in provocative ways. (Contains 2 notes.)

This article examines the ways in which Sudanese Australian students from refugee backgrounds are often perceived in their high schools as transgressive, and how this transgression--perceived or real--may become for them a liberatory invitation for both students and teachers, and a means to a reconstruction of self, educational contexts, and freedom (hooks). Through discussion of the ethnocinematic research project "Cross-Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education," the author comments on the complexities of the performance of identity for teachers, researchers, and coparticipants across differences of age, race, sexuality, geography, and class.

This article examines the ethnocinematic research project "Cross-Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education", and its relationship to the evolving notion of public pedagogies. The project explores the potential of alternative pedagogies, which include popular culture, especially audiovisual forms, to engage teachers and learners with one another in collaborative pedagogical methods. The author's collaborative work with students from refugee backgrounds involves what Giroux calls a "spectrum of social practices" utilising a variety of media platforms. This article draws from the lived experiences of one particular co-participant, Achol Baroch, and her 15 Sudanese Australian co-participants. Their experiences of secondary education are traced through this arts-based participatory project using the emerging practice of "ethnocinema", a type of ethnographic documentary film which is generative, interculturally collaborative and aligned with the transformative goals of critical pedagogy. (Contains 4 notes and 5 figures.)

There are no closed systems...every system has a gap...in that space is a place of possibility (hooks 2003, 23). "Cross-Marked: Sudanese-Australian Young Women Talk Education," a seven-part ethno-cinematic film series exploring Sudanese-Australian young women's educational experiences, is interested in this gap, this place of possibility, of which hooks speaks. The films use the emerging methodology of ethno-cinema to create community change, not only for the young women involved in the filmmaking, but also for their new Australian community. "Cross-Marked" took place in 2008-2010 in the multicultural western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, and engaged 16 Sudanese young women between 18 and 25 years, who were interested in learning the skills of filmmaking and who wanted to comment on their educational experiences in Australia. Drawing on performative public pedagogies, Sudanese young women have co-created ethno-cinematic films in order to reflect on their prior schooling, ongoing resettlement in the West, representations in the media, and offer advice to newly arriving African young women and the education system itself.

This article introduces "Cross-Marked: Sudanese Australian Young Women Talk Education", a series of seven short films made collaboratively with Sudanese young women from refugee backgrounds, examining their education experiences in Australia. The author frames this research through the emerging practice of ethnocinema and its relationship with ethnographic documentary. The coparticipants examine the prevailing social conditions for connectedness/disconnectedness in the context of a sometimes-hostile contemporary educational climate, as does the author/researcher through autoethnographic reflections on practice. The films use a "performative ethnography" to disrupt the folds and pleats of conventional stories told of and about the pedagogies of belonging and becoming. The films draw on the informants' social practices of self to trouble teleological narratives of identity, and they offer a territory of possibilities for learning to "see more critically, think at a more critical level, and to recognise the forces that subtly shape their lives" (Kincheloe & McLaren)