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This paper describes a public pedagogy project embedded into The Global Teacher, a subject within the Bachelor of Education program for student teachers at an Australian university. The subject provides a global perspective on socio-political issues that shape education. In 2013, The Global Teacher introduced an approach that asked student teachers to create a museum-style exhibition depicting six global education themes. This exhibition was displayed in the State Library and the public were invited to engage with the installations and the student teachers who created them. Our paper describes how the project was implemented by means of close collaboration between the QUT teacher educators, curators at the State Library of Queensland (SLQ), and student groups working on visually translating their understandings of global educational issues into a public exhibition. We discuss what was learned by our students and ourselves, as teacher educators, by engaging in this public pedagogy.

The author of this paper considers the influence of Paulo Freire's pedagogical philosophy on educational practice in three different geographical/political settings. She begins with reflections on her experience as a facilitator at Freire's seminar, held in Grenada in 1980 for teachers and community educators, on the integration of work and study. This case demonstrates how Freire's method of dialogic education achieved outcomes for the group of thoughtful collaboration leading to conscientisation in terms of deep reflection on their lives as teachers in Grenada and strategies for decolonising education and society. The second case under consideration is the arts-based pedagogy shaping the work of the Area Youth Foundation (AYF) in Kingston, Jamaica. Young participants, many of them from tough socio-economic backgrounds, are empowered by learning how to articulate their own experiences and relate these to social change. They express this conscientisation by creating stage performances, murals, photo-novella booklets and other artistic products. The third case study describes and evaluates the "Honey Ant Reader" project in Alice Springs, Australia. Aboriginal children, as well as the adults in their community, learn to read in their local language as well as Australian Standard English, using booklets created from Indigenous stories told by community Elders, featuring local customs and traditions. The author analyses how the "Freirean" pedagogy in all three cases exemplifies the process of encouraging the creation of knowledge for progressive social change, rather than teaching preconceived knowledge. This supports her discussion of the extent to which this is authentic to the spirit of the scholar/teacher Paulo Freire, who maintained that in our search for a better society, the world has to be made and remade. Her second, related aim is to raise questions about how education aligned with Freirean pedagogy can contribute to moving social change from the culture circle to the public sphere.

In this paper I discuss some of the approaches that I take in challenging student teachers to understand education in global context, rather than in a decontextualized or instrumental way. These approaches draw on my experience of being an educator from the "global South" (the Caribbean) now working in the "global North" (Australia). As the first black teacher that most Australian student teachers have encountered in their entire education, I find that I can offer them provocative educational narratives and questions stemming from a lifetime career in education, studying and working in various roles in schools, colleges, universities and ministries of education in Jamaica, Grenada, Hong Kong, the UK, the USA and Australia. I set out to disrupt the preconceptions of my students as a starting point in a collective journey of thinking differently about education.

This study explores various elements in the struggle for a post-colonial refashioning of cultural identity through education. Drawing on experiences in Australia and the Caribbean, the author illustrates how educational systems undergoing decolonisation reflect socio-cultural tensions of race and power. The author discusses the complexities for comparative educators in engaging with suppressed knowledge, recognising the yearnings of the marginalised, challenging the conditions that lead to poverty, and refashioning education for social justice in an era when the achievement of justice seems increasingly difficult. She argues that comparative educators can benefit from using post-colonial thinking to understand cultural complexity and promote life-affirming practices in educational change.

This paper explores the social and educational implications of the "Secondary Schools Scholarship Project" (SSSP) in which Australia gave over 1,000 adolescents from Papua New Guinea three-year scholarships to study in Australian high schools. Drawing from postcolonial theory, the paper uses concepts of ambivalence, hybridity, hegemony, contradiction, and national discourse to analyse an array of issues which would not be in the purview of dependency theory. These issues include not only the cultural "border-crossings" and tensions experienced by the Papua New Guinean scholarship winners during their Australian sojourn and return to Papua New Guinea, but also the complex ambiguities in the outcomes and implications of a foreign aid project for a decolonising country. The scholarship programme illustrates the politics of foreign aid in education, including the contradictions of receiving aid from a donor country which is garnering substantial benefits from the recipient country, and the complexity of the postcolonial challenge of utilising this aid in a way that meets national educational goals in a globalising world.

A cornerstone of the author's pedagogy as a teacher educator is to help students analyse how their culture and socialisation influence their role as teachers. In this article she shares the reflections of her Australian students on their culture. As part of their coursework in an elective subject, "Cultural Diversity and Education", students reflect on and address questions of how they have been socialised to regard Anglo-Australian, Indigenous and non-British migrant cultures in their society. Some recall that their early conditioning cultivated a deep fear of Aborigines, and a tokenistic understanding of ethnicity. Others talk of their confusion between the pulls of assimilation into mainstream "whiteness" and of maintaining a minority identity. This, combined with an often Anglocentric education, has left them with a problematic foundation with regard to becoming teachers who can overcome prejudice and discrimination in the classroom and the curriculum. This article argues that in grappling with the negative legacies of neo-colonialism and its "race" ideologies, teachers need as a first step to analyse discourses of ethnicity and how these discourses construct "white", "ethnic" and Indigenous Australians. This groundwork is necessary for the further steps of honouring the central role of Indigenous people in Australian culture, recognizing how interacting cultures restructure each other, contributing to initiatives for peace and reconciliation, and promoting the study of cultural diversity in the curriculum--all essential components of an intercultural pedagogy. (Contains 4 notes.)

Case studies of Eurocentric versus culturally relevant educational practices with Indigenous students were carried out in four Australian and U.S. schools that were mainstream or community-controlled schools. Comparisons focus on colonial versus postcolonial perspectives on curriculum content, the dilemma of unsuitable high-stakes assessments linked to monocultural mainstream standards, the teaching of Indigenous languages and cultures, and needs for teacher education. (SV)

Discusses results of an Australian study showing how wealthy schools use their greater material and human resources to establish a relatively sophisticated computer education culture, compared with poorer schools. Students from well-off families, especially boys, benefit by being prepared for elite jobs. Educators committed to equity must be mindful of such discrepancies to address inequality issues. (24 references) (MLH)

Explores issues relating to black identity in four Australian feature films where aborigines play an important role. Ways in which white English and Australian filmmakers construct aboriginal identity; Ideological significance for blacks within the framework of Australian society; Focus on the movies `Walkabout,' `Bitter Springs,' `Jedda' and `The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.'