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This paper draws on Bernstein's educational sociology to illustrate how a language-focused "subversive" pedagogic approach (Martin, 2011) was systematically realised through classroom interactions. While educational inequalities are often addressed at the level of policy and budgets, this paper provides a perspective on inequality and differentiated student outcomes within the classroom. Our research context is Australia, where we have a seemingly intractable gap between mainstream educational outcomes and those of disadvantaged groups. We present a study on how teachers' conscious pedagogic choices worked to support marginalised students. The participatory research focused on a series of science lessons, conducted in a suburban primary school, with a high proportion of students of refugee background. We explain how, in collaboration with teachers, we reframed Bernstein's abstract notions of regulative and instructional discourses into practical, intentional pedagogic strategies. We describe how these strategies were named and implemented, how they became a shared heuristic for the research team, and the empowering effect they had on teachers and students. The study demonstrates the potential of bringing educational and linguistic theories into practice as classroom pedagogic dialogue, with the empowerment of marginalised students in mind.

Critical literacy approaches to English teaching have existed in Australia for more than two decades. Despite this, they continue to be criticised by the media, especially during times of perceived "literacy crisis" and curriculum review. In addition, teachers and academics continue to explore their worth and meaning for English teaching contexts. This paper discusses the findings of the research project Critical literacy in Australia: affordances, tensions and hybridisations which investigated constructions of critical literacy in secondary school English curricula and teacher discourse in Australia. Three major themes emerged from the data which provided insights into the state of critical literacy in Australia today. These themes related to the following areas--curriculum affordances of and teacher engagement with critical literacy; the impact of critical literacy discourses on teachers' ideological becoming and hybridisation of critical literacy; and tensions arising from critical literacy pedagogies.

Ability grouping of students into separate classes within a school can be called 'between-class ability grouping'. This practice has persisted in Australia despite evidence that it is socially inequitable and does not improve academic outcomes. A systematic review of peer-reviewed literature about between-class ability grouping in Australia from 2012- 2022 reveals only N=28 papers that meet the inclusion criteria. These papers are critiqued and synthesised into four main findings that characterise Australian research about between-class ability grouping from 2012-2022. The findings reveal a lack of substantive inquiry with most studies having limited scope and drawing on outdated or overly generalised data. International studies gloss over vital details about how between-class ability grouping is practised in Australia, while research conducted from within Australia reflects enduring tensions between gifted and talented, and social equity agendas. Further research that characterises the range of Australian grouping practices and their effects on students could be used to inform decisions about how to group students into classes in secondary schools.

International migration is attaining new records, diversifying nations' cultural-social landscapes. The number of international migrants is estimated to be about 272 million globally, with nearly two-thirds being labour migrants, surpassing historic projections. Concomitantly, migrant teachers are becoming more prevalent in educational markets; spaces that may serve as institutional vehicles promoting social cohesion and tolerance. Acknowledging that such spaces have an increasing share of faith-based schools--settings that foreground particular groups' cultural and social values--this critical analysis seeks to identify how migrant teachers' aspirations are shaped and ethically negotiated in seemingly exclusive educational sites. Drawing upon migrant teacher interviews from American and Australian faith-based schools, and utilising concepts of "motility" and "institutional viscosity," this paper captures the schools' 'viscous' conditions and complex facilitation through which educators professionally move and ethically navigate their practice. Bourdieu's thinking tools of "field," "habitus," "capital" and "symbolic violence" provided a supplementary theoretical framework that draws attention to the evolving discourse of the subordinate 'invisible foreign educator' in the faith-based educational setting. The paper portrays strategies of initial institutional welcoming; enabling migrant educators a smooth spatial mobility into the field but challenging them to work against their social mobility aspirations. It illustrates the educators' failed attempts to negotiate intra-institutional transitions; experiencing feelings of trepidation about future professional moves and ethical conflicts between their obligation to adhere to institutional procedures and commitment to operate from an ethic of care. The paper argues for education policies that enable motility over time and empower ethical skilled migration.

Taking up a theme raised by Stuart Cunningham in a recent issue of the "AUR"--that the innovations of Australia's humanities, creative arts, and social sciences are not getting the recognition that they deserve from the nation's government--this paper, dealing only with the social sciences, offers a cautionary note. If the social sciences are to hold the serious attention of the government of any modern Western nation, including Australia's, they cannot continue to fall prey to the tendency, displayed by too many of their practitioners, to criticise ceaselessly such government. That is, to employ a style of criticism called here "unengaged critique". This style of criticism targets modern Western governments because they are not seeking perfection, because they are seeking only to do the best they can with the resources they have at hand. The paper offers an explanation of the basis of this tendency, an explanation focusing on one of two understandings of "the social" or "society" available to the social sciences--the abundant reason-natural morality understanding--and it offers a means of avoiding it, by using the rival to this understanding--the politico-legal understanding.

As sites of human social activity, schools must engage in challenging conversations between staff, students and their communities about social disharmonies. This paper presents interview data from a case study of Eucalyptus High School (not its real name), a large multicultural school located in a middle-class area in suburban Victoria (Australia). The paper examines the school's engagement in 'challenging conversations' about socially and politically volatile issues as part of a holistic approach to building school culture, highlighting certain limitations in this approach. An 'ecologies of practice' model is used to critically explore these, which could be used to support schools to adopt a broad and critical examination of the possibilities and limits of their cultivation of inclusive and nurturing environments.

This paper outlines the complex contemporary milieu of Australian teacher education within which curriculum leaders responsible for designing teacher education programs must make their program design decisions. Particular attention is paid to the collision of vertical ("hierarchical" or "academic rationalist") and horizontal ("flat" or "student-centred") curriculum discourses as a program design problem that has emerged within the current context; how it is intensified by an unexpected alliance between progressivist and new managerial curriculum discourses; and how this problem may be amplified in graduate entry teacher education programs. This paper concludes with a provocation to see the curriculum tensions and conditions outlined as offering a challenging design problem for the current generation of curriculum leaders responsible for the assembly of teacher education programs.

This paper explores student self-censorship within an online learning environment. Self-censorship in group activity can be seen as a two-edged sword. While it can be advantageous that a student censor personal frustration and angst when working with others, if the self-censorship impacts on the cognitive contribution a student makes then this may significantly impact upon the overall quality of the group's collective knowledge artefact. This paper reports on a study where it was found that students had self censored both their feelings and ideas as they collaboratively worked together. (Contains 1 footnote and 3 tables.)

Within political philosophy and particularly in the work of Chantal Mouffe and Hannah Arendt, "agonism" has been described as representing the notion of being able to challenge and dissent in a productive way. However, little is known about how agonism is used in the educational literature, other than some applications relevant to democratic education. This paper considers the use of agonism in the educational literature drawing on the findings of a systematic scoping review exploring how it has been used in the context of education. Five databases were searched for literature published using agonism within the context of education to map the existing body of work in a systematic fashion, and to explore how agonism has been differently conceptualised and utilised by researchers in the field of education. The findings suggest that there have been a range of attempts to apply agonistic principles in different educational sub-fields (including, citizenship education, early years education, initial teacher training, arts education and international education), and different interpretations of such principles into education based on different philosophical underpinnings (dissociative and associative approaches). As agonism is mostly explored in a theoretical way, we also discuss the potential of abstract theoretical agonistic principles from different philosophical traditions to be translated into meaningful practical applications for education in order to inform curriculum development, infuse democratic principles into classroom practice, and help to negotiate deep-running tensions amongst key stakeholders in education.

In this paper, we consider educational populism on social media in England and Australia. In both contexts, academics are positioned as a key constituent of an unjust elite with previously voiceless teachers (UK) and students (Australia) framed as the 'just people'. While populism often speaks to nations and nationalism, as 'the people' against an 'unjust elite' or 'other', micropopulism concerns a particular community against an elite. Although educational micropopulism has been catalysed by social media, there is an underlying political project growing from the New Right coalition of economic liberals and social conservatives. New Right 2.0, a contemporary reformulation of New Right, has an agenda that goes beyond promoting free-market hegemony to promoting civic capitalism and exploits a hybridised media environment to set a policy agenda through provoking polarisation. While there are similarities in New Right 2.0 strategies in England and Australia, the key difference is the way in which micropopulism has emerged and how it plays a role in the hybridised media ecology. We develop a theoretical account of the phenomena of educational micropopulism and offer an understanding of contemporary forms of populism that reflect the sub-national as well as international dimensions of micropopulist.

The examination of work-integrated learning (WIL) programs in the undergraduate Human Resource Management (HRM) curriculum is an area under-represented in the Australian literature. This paper identifies the challenges faced in implementing WIL into the HRM undergraduate curriculum. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 38 participants including academics, careers advisors, professionals and students from nine Australian universities. The findings show that a lack of resources, a clash of agendas, legal and ethical issues, expectations, the HRM profession and academic perspectives of WIL, are impacting on how WIL programs in HRM are being developed. Recommendations are made for the future development of WIL in HRM.

Parent-child communication about gender and sexuality has received increasing attention since the late 1990s, in response to growing awareness that open dialogue plays a vital role in sex and relationships education, and improving sexual health outcomes for families and young people. However, the insights gained from this literature have been under-researched in Multicultural and Multifaith communities. Research of this kind is vital because such families often face 'intergenerational' conflicts that emerge through the process of migration, and which largely result from differing sex and gender norms in the country of origin and country of resettlement. In this paper, we argue that current research on migration and 'intergenerational conflict' has particular import for progressing research on parent-child communication that attends to the diverse range of cultures and communities living in Australia. We draw on pilot research in South Australia with parents and children from various African countries, which offers insights for the production of culturally appropriate knowledge and support material. We also provide suggestions on how to address parent-child communication that is alive to the nuances and complexities that emerge across race, sexuality and migration.

This paper explores the idea that rurality is important in children's learning even though it is in conflict with dominant educational discourses. Crucial to identifying this was the use of research methods that focused on rural meanings. In this paper we report on an ethnographic study that explored the experiences of parent supervisors of primary school distance education students. The parent supervisors identified that they chose distance education because it enables them to live their rural lifestyle, which in turn reflects the worldview they aim to bring their children up in. However, the schooling they receive values a different, metropolitan-cosmopolitan worldview (Roberts, 2014). In semi-structured interviews parent supervisors described how they would initially focus on conforming to the expectations of schooling, before then realising this was problematic for their students. They would then instead focus on doing what worked for them, which were actions based on their rural ways of being. Ethnography as an approach enabled this research to focus on rural meanings, which identified that parent supervisors work hard to ensure rural perspectives are included when they teach their children because they know this is necessary to meet their children's learning needs. This leads to an important message for school authorities: rurality does matter in education, and education is not confined to the criteria set by school authorities. Importantly, the situated perspective that is implicit in the actions of parent supervisors indicates that adopting a place-conscious (Gruenewald, 2003) approach to schooling would help to sustain rural lifeworlds.

This article reports the results of a discourse-theoretic study that considered the perspectives of one group of preservice mainstream teachers in Australia concerning their preparedness to teach English language learners (ELLs). Framed by a theory of teacher identity and using in-depth interviews, the paper explores the perceptions and experiences of six preservice teachers, revealing the presence of two dominant discourses of ELLs: a discourse of equity and inclusiveness and a discourse of difference. The results suggested that these discourses interacted in ways unanticipated by policy makers and that an unintended consequence of this discursive interplay was that participants experienced conflict between the professional identity positions that were made available to them within these discourses. The ways in which this conflict might be overcome to support the identity construction goals of teachers of ELLs are discussed and suggestions for future research considered.

In various parts of the world, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are actively working towards Reconciliation. In Australia, the context in which we each undertake our work as educationalists and researchers, the Reconciliation agenda has been pushed into schools and English teachers have been called on to share responsibility for facilitating the move towards a new national order. The recently introduced Australian Curriculum mandates that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures be embedded with "a strong" but "varying presence" into each learning area (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2013). In this paper we consider the tensions between policy and practice, when discourses external to education are recontextualised into the discipline of English. We do so by applying an analytical framework based on Bernstein's (1990, 1996, 2000) sociological theories about the structure of instructional and regulative discourses. Our findings suggest that the space to exert Reconciliatory agendas in the Australian Curriculum English is ambiguous and thus holds the potential to not only marginalise Indigenous knowledges but also to create tensions between policy and practice for non-Indigenous teachers of English.

As a result of globalisation, the boundaries that once limited the trade of ideas and culture have largely dissolved. In Australia, the fruits of intercultural exchange have largely been enjoyed, yet this expansion of Australian interaction with diverse Others has posed a perceived threat to some. This parallel expansion and contraction of cultural engagement demonstrates the need for Australia to represent diversity more adequately as a part of our society. A central point of tension in this discussion is religion. This paper reports on a study that explored the question: Why is it so hard to talk about religion in public classrooms? This narrative inquiry attempts to unpack some of the challenges facing Australian educators at present. This study brings out the conflicting priorities and pressures of the secular system against student needs and puts forward an argument for the development of social literacy education that addresses education about religion in Victorian public schools.

This paper details how educational policy is developed in an educational authority in a political environment of a hung parliament. The paper begins by looking briefly at the difficulties facing educational policy rollout in Tasmania during the years 2000-2011, and then details how an educational policy dealing with school closures was reshaped in the face of intense political pressure, as it came under pressure from a multitude of interest groups. Analysis is provided through the lens of Kingdon's Agendas.

This paper examines the foundation and development of universities in Australia and New Zealand and demonstrates how these universities were established on a secular basis. Educators from other continents with a mainly Christian history are often surprised that there is so little evidence of Christian input into the university sector in Australasia. This paper addresses the development of theological education in Australia and helps to explain why churches and other Christian institutions contributed little to the development of Australasia's higher education.

This paper uses a narrative constructed from diary entries made over the course of a year teaching English as a platform for examining some of the political, economic, educational and socio-cultural contexts into which the Digital Education Revolution (DER) was launched as policy. It analyses the underlying imperatives, components and balance of the current educational reform agenda in Australia and how it might impact on English pedagogy and curriculum. In doing so it argues that the delivery of a reform program with considerable promise requires greater attention to the equilibrium of its constituent parts. Additionally it suggests that the priorities for the enacted curriculum in English classrooms are set according to the evaluation of content knowledge and more recently by the prescription of performance measurements of students' literacy and numeracy skills. Finally this paper argues that in order to support investment in the DER, the role of digital technology should be inscribed in National Curriculum documents relating to the study of English from the rationale through to assessment.

This paper documents and analyses a range of literature and policy statements that identifies issues and looks at the role which adult education plays in building communities and peace in post-conflict states. This paper explores and documents these developments in countries in close proximity to Australia which have been viewed by the former Australian government as constituting an "arc of instability". This is a term which will be critically discussed in the paper for the way in which it positions the nations of the Pacific and Australia's foreign policy as well as its aid and development policy. This paper reviews existing orthodox approaches to the region and development and discusses the criticisms that have been levelled at the status quo. (Contains 1 table.)

This paper is concerned with enduring histories and micro-geographies of the (post)colonial Australian nation, played out through contemporary connections between Aboriginality, inner Sydney and educational policy change. This paper traces the "racialization" of space and place in the Sydney inner city suburb of Redfern, including the Aboriginal--"owned" residential area commonly known as the Block; it then outlines aspects of an educational policy change in inner Sydney, specifically the relationship of policy proposals to the positioning of Aboriginal people; and, last, focuses on connecting the notions of Aboriginality and space to educational policy change through Derek Gregory's idea of the "colonial present". It explores how the idea of the "colonial present" as "performance of space" might help to understand the racialisation of the inner city and education policy discourses. It concludes that the "colonial present" is a way of understanding how the "racialisation" of the inner city and education policy discourses can, on the one hand, "reaffirm" deficit views of Aboriginal people as irredeemably "Other" and as "failure", yet, on the other hand, can however precariously mobilize undo colonial enclosures. (Contains 6 notes.)

This paper reports on accidental ethnographic research. It arose unexpectedly out of the everyday teaching of first-year pre-service primary teachers at an Australian university. Via narrative, self-reflexivity, and student responses, we explore the interwoven workings of heteronormative, gendernormative and misogynist discourses when a chapter from "Queering Elementary Education" in the Course Reader created controversy, moral panic and resistance among students. The paper then charts the implementation of various strategies and interventions by the three authors of the paper: Greg, the lecturer; Maria, the Reading's author; and Steph, the Reading's protagonist. While outlining the subsequent shifts in student responses and discourses, we also problematise particular aspects of the processes of intervention where they still point to the insidious power and overarching framework of heteronormativity and gendernormativity that require ongoing challenges.

In 2011 the author taught, for the first time, the well-established unit CCA3101/4101 Environmental Humanities in the School of Communications and Arts at ECU (Edith Cowan University) in Western Australia. The unit has a 20-year history through associate professor Rod Giblett and parallels the development of the environmental humanities as a field in Australia, advanced since the 1990s by environmental scholars Deborah Bird Rose, Val Plumwood, Libby Robin, and Rod Giblett. The interdisciplinary field represents growing scholarly interest in the ecological aspects of humanities disciplines--including literature, visual arts, theology, philosophy, and cultural studies--and the development of humanities-based approaches for addressing environmental problems. In this paper, the author argues that the CCA3101/4101 unit is a key ecopedagogical resource, particularly with regard to ECU's recent development of sustainability as a core institutional value. The ecopedagogical principle of critical environmental awareness through radical political theory is a point of intersection with CCA3101/4101. The unit challenges students to analyze the political underpinnings of nature and its representations in the media. The author argues for the complementarity between the environmental humanities and ecopedagogy through the following themes found in the unit: (1) nature as a contested political construction; (2) bioregional and place-based awareness; and (3) equity focus, particularly through aboriginal Australian perspectives on the environment. (Contains 4 figures.)

Purpose: Leadership is as widely used as it is misused and misunderstood. This paper seeks to argue that in an educational context it is important not only to revisit and reframe conceptions of leadership but also to see it as having an essentially subversive purpose. The paper aims to discuss subversion in an intellectual, moral and political sense, as a sacred mission to confront the "noble lies" of politicians, the superficiality of the designer culture and the line of least resistance opted for by overworked and demoralised teachers. Design/methodology/approach: The empirical base for this paper is a seven-country three-years study entitled Leadership for Learning which brought together staff from 24 schools in seven countries to explore the connections between learning and leadership and to arrive at some common understanding which could be tested in practice across national and linguistic boundaries. Findings: While recognising the unique contexts and differing cultural traditions as diverse as those of Australia and Austria, the USA and Greece, engaging in an international discourse through face-to-face workshops, virtual conferencing and exchange visits led one to five key principles held in common. Originality/value: The paper offers intriguing and insightful discussion into the subject of leadership as a subversive activity. (Contains 4 notes.)

The aim of the study reported in this paper was to develop an understanding of how the key stakeholders in Western Australia (WA) "dealt with" the teaching of Modern Greek (Greek) as a second language under the "Seconded Teachers from Greece Scheme" (STGS). It addressed a deficit in research in the field not only in relation to WA, but Australia-wide. We report that the stakeholders moved through three stages, namely, the stage of idealism, the stage of conflict, and the stage of cooperation. The study has implications for the development of policy, practice, and future research for the STGS and other similar schemes.

This paper reports findings from interviews with fourteen Australian artist academics, who discuss the complex relationships between their Arts practice, their Research and their Teaching. We refer to this as the ART nexus because of the strong flow of information reported between these three activities. However, this information flow is not achieved without conflict. Conflict arises over the balance of time available and different mindsets required for differing activities, and there can be hesitation about analysing intuitive creative thought. The findings reveal ways in which information is "translated" for different audiences including undergraduate and postgraduate students, who are both recipients of and contributors to the nexus. The article problematises the ART nexus in an attempt to offer greater insight into the ways in which individual artist academics teach through their arts practice and their research, within a university system that struggles to accommodate this breadth of endeavour. (Contains 2 tables.)

Faced with the paradox of a large global increase in conservation reserves and a simultaneous global decrease in actual effective protection for biodiversity, conservation scientists and policymakers are questioning established conservation theory and practice. I argue that the fundamental premises, the foundational myths, for Western-style conservation also need to be questioned. The statistics on Indigenous land claims, and conservation reserves, in Australia and more specifically the state of New South Wales (NSW), reveal a landscape of policy failure in both arenas. Focusing on Australia, I use spatial analysis and policy histories to demonstrate converging trajectories of land use priorities for conservation needs and Indigenous peoples' needs. This intersection, while generating much potential for conflict, also creates new political landscapes. A combination of spatial and cultural analyses can create a clear picture of new "operational landscapes", and an understanding of the (sometimes) complementary values of different cultural groups negotiating about these landscapes. From the basis that environmental problems are fundamentally social problems, this paper contributes to explorations of new paradigms supporting new social-ecological relationships, and new relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

How do academics make sense of university policies and strategic initiatives and act on them? Interviews were conducted with 27 mid-career academics in different disciplines, different research-intensive university environments and two countries (England and Australia). Data were analysed iteratively utilising a critical realist perspective, specifically, Archer's modes of reflexivity. The paper argues that individuals' responses to university policies and initiatives, to changes in policy and policy conflicts, can at least partially be understood through interrogating the modes of reflexivity they employ.

This paper focuses on the voices and experiences of teachers, who are key stakeholders in the sustainability and future growth of vocational education and training (VET). It presents implications arising from qualitative research on the dilemmas that VET teachers face in teaching international students. In-depth interviewing with 15 VET teachers from several Australian public and private VET institutions identified that teachers experience various inter-related professional, educational and personal dilemmas. These dilemmas result from ethical tensions that teachers experience in their interactions with international students, teaching colleagues and their employing institutions, and highlight significant implications for teachers, students, VET institutions and the government at a time of rapid economic, political, cultural and educational change. They contribute evidence for ongoing review and development of student enrolment and teacher employment in 20 the culturally-diverse VET sector, and thus, further goals of educational equity and quality learning experiences and outcomes.

This paper draws on the experience of one of the authors, an ethnographic researcher who, in the course of her investigation into the everyday work and communication cultures of Australian public transport officers, spent 12 weeks undergoing training as a rail transit officer before spending four months on the job where she was rostered on duty alongside the regular transit officers. In addition to immersing herself in the world of the transit officers the ethnographer conducted extensive interviews with trainees, experienced officers and supervisors. The object of the research was to determine strategies to reduce risk and injury to the rail transit officers. Two specific recommendations are made. Firstly, that CCTV footage is used to provide training and professional development support across the organisation, and secondly, that field officers be recruited from within the workforce to support on-the-job induction. The four year project was funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage grant.

The framing of "implementation" of learning technologies in universities can have profound effects on approaches to teaching and learning that may be insufficiently acknowledged by practitioners. This paper investigates a case that demonstrated the formation of strong connections between technology and pedagogy, in which a learning content management system called for a series of accommodations between technology work and academic work. The site for this study was the meso-level in the university: those practitioners working in-between academics and institutional learning technologies, and draws on the accounts of practice by learning technologists during this implementation. The discussion of practice that emerges from these accounts draws on "sociomaterial" perspectives to draw attention to the contingencies of particular connections during the implementation process. This study does not assume that the work of implementation follows naturally from plans and intentions of human actors, rather it investigates actual arrangements and the entangled practices that bring significant unintended consequences. The findings suggest the need to attend to the potential for conflicting practices when system technologies become a key component of e-learning, and I argue for implementation to be scoped early to encompass pedagogical goals, and for interventions by learning technologists and teaching academics over all the social, material, and discursive factors that are critical to e-learning practice. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, and 2 notes.)

This paper reports on research conducted in alternative schools/flexible learning centres designed to support young people marginalised from mainstream schooling in Australia. Many of the young people attending these centres had left school due to difficult personal circumstances and/or significant conflicts with schooling authorities. We argue that the ways in which these schools construct their learning environments, teaching programmes and pedagogical relationships are conducive to encouraging such young people to re-engage with educational processes and thus should be supported as viable alternatives within schooling sectors. Moreover, we contend that data gathered from these sites should be used to inform many of the practices within mainstream schools that currently contribute to the marginalisation of certain categories of youth. (Contains 1 table and 2 notes.)

Drawing on agency literature, this paper demonstrates how teachers' professional agency emerged when seemingly conflicting strategies were imposed on them in policy reform. Policy discourse is often linked to performance and accountability measures, which teachers respond to in a number of ways. Some education researchers identify tensions caused by such strategies; others warn that if outcomes are defined by mechanical techniques that are practised and imposed rather than constructed and negotiated then there is a danger that teachers will be re-shaped as technicians. A number of debates discuss de-professionalism, the erosion of status and new definitions of the role of the teacher. This ethnographic study examines how the implementation of policy requirements for writing student reports, stipulated by two levels of government, emerged through the practices of the teachers in an Australian non-government school. The analysis of the data is located within the policy in/as practice literature. The evidence illustrates that, despite the strategies of performance, accountability and control mechanisms in policy text, the presence of strong collegial relationships enabled the teachers to construct their professional agency by adaptation and adoption of policy requirements to fit some practices and reshape others. (Contains 1 note.)

In this article, the authors examine contemporary pluralistic, technologically-driven societies where human spirituality, in terms of human experiences of connectedness, is eroded and overwhelmed by high levels of cultural and religious diversity and hi-tech devices. Without connectedness, empathy and compassion become missing elements resulting in conditions that are conducive to bullying. Not surprisingly, there have been many anti-bullying programmes introduced into schools in Australia and elsewhere in the past couple of decades. Within this context, one individual's response to the London bombings in 2007 was to approach two primary schools and invite them to participate in a programme she devised: "The Act of Kindness". This programme, while it began as an individual Australian's response, fit well into the values-based education agenda that was current at the time since it incorporated many of the nine values identified by the Federal Government. Three years later, there were more than 40 schools participating in the programme. At that point, the authors conducted a research study to examine the effectiveness of The Act of Kindness programme in changing a school's culture as well as raising awareness of Other. The findings are presented in this paper and the authors identify appropriate links to and implications for the issues related to difference, bullying and violence. (Contains 9 notes and 2 tables.)

Understandings of young children as active and capable citizens, while evident in discourses of early childhood education and research, are not widely reflected in the policy for the early years of schooling in Australia. This paper makes an analysis of the gaps and tensions between discourses of young children as active citizens and policy for citizenship education at the national level in Australia and at the Queensland State level. There is a widespread discourse within early childhood that regards young children as citizens and democratic participants in their own lives, as a reflection of the oft-cited Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, educational policy and curriculum for citizenship in Australia, by and large, adheres to age and stage understandings of children that deem young children unable to conceptualise and/or articulate ideas of what it means to "be a good citizen". We ask which discourses are being harnessed in educational policy for citizenship in Australia, what discourses are silenced or ignored and what this tells us about how young children are thought about in Australian politics and education.

Of concern is an international trend of students' increasing reluctance to choose science courses in both their final years of secondary school and tertiary levels of education. Research into the phenomenon indicates an influencing factor to be the "uninteresting curriculum" (OECD "2006") of school science. This paper presents an exploration of what biotechnology key ideas students and teachers consider to be interesting. A survey was constructed and completed by 500 Australian students and their 35 teachers. Interviews were conducted with a sample of students and teachers. The Chi-square statistics revealed a significant difference between the student and teacher survey responses in four of the six a priori factors. A rank ordering of the key ideas, based on whole group mean scores, indicates only a small overlap in modern biotechnology key ideas of interest to both the students and teachers. The results suggest the key ideas teachers are interested in and incorporate into their curriculum, are not the key ideas students are interested in learning about. This mismatch is particularly prevalent and problematic in situations where curriculum choice is available within a mandated framework or syllabus, which is the case for these teachers and students. The study also found students withdrawing from biology courses in post compulsory settings due to lack of interest and perceived lack of relevance of the course.

In late 2007, a proposal for an Islamic school in Camden, a semi-rural area located in the greater Sydney region, sparked concern among local residents. This paper examines the discourses relating to representations of young people in Camden at that time, as expressed by both young people and adults. It explores the prominent literature on moral panics and includes a brief discussion of the moral panics and controversies surrounding Arab and Muslim youths. It then outlines the events involved in the Camden controversy, and examines the discourses and operations of young people in this controversy. (Contains 2 notes.)