Search

This paper analyses Twitter microblogs over a 3-day period, during the release of the results of PISA 2015 on 6 December 2016 by the OECD. We document a methodological approach to investigating the social mediatisation of policy and its inclusive potential for enabling the participation of multiple voices. We draw on two data sets from the 3-day period: first, a large data corpus (n = 17,260) of all microblogs about PISA, and second, a smaller cluster of selected participant groups, notably academic, OECD, and teacher union actors (n = 65). Our analytic tools provide a methodological heuristic for scoping social media networks. Our research is guided by questions about 'Who participates?' in PISA debates and 'What is being said?' and considers the volume, engagement, and content of the microblogs. Of the three participant groups, the academic actors authored the largest volume of microblogs across the corpus and cluster. The content of microblogs from the OECD cluster mainly provided information about and promotion of PISA, while the academic cluster emphasised commentary and critique, with all actors using an analytic tone. The OECD had the largest number of followers and the highest rate of social recommendations and engagement with their microblogs.

This article describes the use of a "Learning Commission" to experiment with conceptualising and implementing richer modes of educational accountability. A "Learning Commission" is a form for collaborative thinking that brings different kinds of knowledge and expertise to bear in relation to a common matter of concern: the role of schools in relation to the communities they serve. As part of a broader research project, we used a "Learning Commission" to co-produce knowledge about community expectations of schools in a regional area of Queensland, Australia. We analysed data generated through this process using a narrative approach and synthesised the findings in a conceptualisation of "rich accountabilities" that offers an alternative to top-down, test-based modes of accountability. Rich accountabilities raise anew the questions of who should be accountable, what counts and whose practices should be changed by accountability systems. The article thus describes (a) an alternative model of accountability in education and (b) an alternative theorisation of accountability informed by the implementation of this model as a method for co-producing research about schools and communities. The article provides significant conceptual and methodological resources for further experiments in enriching educational accountability.

This paper maps a teacher's pedagogic practices when teaching young children to produce texts using digital technologies during a literacy lesson for 7-8 year-old children. Pedagogies are broadly understood as what the teacher does in a classroom to facilitate learning in a twenty-first century classroom. The paper argues that the very notion of pedagogy places the teacher at the centre of learning practices, more so than other aspects of teaching such as the curriculum and assessment, which are heavily regulated by policy. Underpinned by understandings of sociomaterial assemblages, incorporating the material and the spatial, data were collected using time-lapse photography, classroom observations and field notes including classroom floor plans. The findings of a frame-by-frame analysis of the time-lapse photographs are reported through the three interconnected concepts of pedagogy, space and materials. The paper concludes by suggesting that an understanding of the material and spatial entanglements in a classroom through a mapping of pedagogies augments current knowledge, enabling a fresh understanding of teaching literacy and how young children learn to write as twenty-first century learners as children enact their journey of becoming-writer.

Examining how young children learn to write is increasingly important as global society moves further towards a knowledge economy, where the production of texts of various kinds is an increasingly ubiquitous practice in everyday life and work. While there has been recent policy and practice focus on children's writing performance in standardised tests, in this article, the authors focus on what can be learned by listening to children's voices as they are engaged in 'draw and talk' methodologies. While children's drawings have a material reality, they are also representations of children's perceptions of their experiences with learning to write. In this article, the authors explore the processes, practices and relationships involved in learning to write, depicted in children's drawings when they are asked to draw themselves learning to write. The authors identify representations of writing, evident in the children's drawings focusing the relational, the material and the spatial elements of writing.

This paper explores the 'media mentalities' about teachers and their work in the Australian print media. The notion of media mentalities draws on the theoretical concepts of discourse, mentalities, and mediatisation. This refers to the constructed realities and forms of thought in media coverage that circulate particular accounts. These are linked to institutional and journalistic practices in media that are governed by media logics. Drawing on newspaper text and interviews with journalists, the following practices are addressed: agendisation and accountabilisation which are both institutional practices; and the journalistic practices of factualisation, emphasisation, and sensationalisation -- all of which operate globally, to some degree, across and within media institutions and media practitioners, and produce the news about teacher's work within the framework of these practices.

Computational thinking can be defined as "solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behaviour, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science" (Wing, 2006, p. 33). There are strong links between computational thinking associated with coding and mathematical thinking (Wing, 2006). The digital technologies curriculum promotes children's use of "computational thinking and information systems to define, design and implement digital solutions" (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2018a, np). This article is an analysis of a learning activity that was completed as part of a larger research project conducted in two Brisbane primary schools. In this article, the authors describe a learning activity in which seven classes of Year 2 students investigated and subsequently developed coding sequences (of varying complexity) in order to solve simple spatial problems using Beebots.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in student and teacher voice in education. What distinguishes 'teacher voice' or 'student voice' from simply reflecting participants' views as a source of data is the placement of participants in an empowered participatory position. It is the positioning of their voice as consisting of more than a process, and as something with value and power that extends voice engagement as one beyond that of informant. While research might focus on either student voice or teacher voice in isolation, there are few studies that position voice as something with power, and integrate the perspectives of both groups as being views that matter. This systematic review investigates and describes the nexus between student voice and teacher voice in educational research over 25 years and provides a framework for identifying the extent to which certain views and perspectives are prioritised in research, and whether the participatory function of the positioned research is doing what it sets out to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has demonstrated that teachers who know more about the literate lives of their students outside of the classroom are more able to set up positive connections between home and school. In this article, we theorise the notion of 'deficit' discourses in education. Using two cases as examples, we seek to disrupt deficit discourses about children in communities of high poverty. The first case describes children's responses when asked to draw and talk about learning to write, and highlights children's explication of the role of the family in literacy learning. The second case describes an outside school media space where children engaged over time with a variety of new media and digital texts. These examples make the point that listening to young people can provide surprising insights into children's aspirations and their understandings of the affordances of learning literacy. Our findings challenge the assumptions that underpin deficit understandings of children and young people growing up in communities of high poverty, and suggest that listening to children and young people in schools may well support the goal of providing quality schooling for all students.

This article encourages approaches that develop children's understandings of data representations. In particular, when children develope flexibility in their approaches to data representation and understanding, the same data can be represented in different ways. Flexible and adaptive use of representations is part of mathematics competence which should be directly addressed in classrooms (Heinze, Star, & Vershaffel, 2009). Representations (e.g., drawings, tables and graphs) are both tools for problem solving and a means of explaining or communicating mathematical processes (Heinze et al., 2009). This article is an analysis of one learning activity that was completed as part of a larger research project. Seven Year 2 teachers and their classes conducted a series of learning activities that focused on data and different representations, across science, technology, engineering and mathematics contexts. All of the learning activities were designed to develop student understanding of various ways to represent data using a range of familiar contexts. This article focuses on the mathematics learning activity and reports research data from three participating teachers (co-authors) and 81 children who completed the mathematics activity in the seven classrooms.

This paper empirically documents media portrayals of Australia's performance on the Program for the International Student Assessment (PISA), 2000-2014. We analyse newspaper articles from two national and eight metropolitan newspapers. This analysis demonstrates increased media coverage of PISA over the period in question. Our research data were analysed using "framing theory", documenting how the media frames stories about Australia's performance on PISA. Three frames were identified: counts and comparisons; criticisms; and contexts. Most of the media coverage (41%) was concerned with the first frame, counts and comparisons, which analysed PISA data to provide "evidence" that was then used to comparatively position Australia against other countries, reference societies, which do better, with particular emphasis on Finland and also Shanghai after the 2009 PISA. The other two frames dealt with criticisms and contextual issues. This paper only focuses on the first frame. The analysis demonstrates the ways in which media coverage of Australia's PISA performance has had policy impact.

The affective dimension of teachers' work is a vital element in shaping inclusive, child-centred classrooms. It is particularly important for students who lack certain aspects of care and support within their personal lives. Recently, neoliberal educational paradigms of data gathering, external testing and competition have increased pressure upon students and teachers in mainstream schools. Many teachers feel that they have been taken away from their core business of teaching and caring for young people. Students with the highest needs often leave or become excluded from mainstream settings; some find their way to alternative/flexi/second chance schools. Our research indicates that within such sites, teachers and workers appear to be committed to the implementation of an educational environment and ethos "explicitly" framed by concepts of affective justice and an ethics of care. Despite its challenges "and" because of its rewards, they strongly assert the significance of their emotional labour when working with, usually disadvantaged, young people and helping them to overcome marginalisation. We contend that this redefinition of schooling as inherently "relational" implies forms of teacher activism that transcend the obligation to student "well-being" as commonly understood in mainstream settings, and which is failing to meet the needs of many young people.

Opportunities for students to speak and to be heard are important elements of democratic schooling processes but research into student voice has shown that a culture of silence is a more common feature of schooling. Efforts to re-engage young people in learning often recognise the importance of schooling processes that provide them with opportunities to participate meaningfully in schooling dialogues. This paper describes attempts to provide such opportunities for young people in an alternative school, who had been marginalised in mainstream schooling. Research was conducted over a period of 18 months, utilising a range of data collection methods, including interviews, observations, photography and the collection of artefacts, such as school documents. Drawing particularly on data related to a daily community forum, the paper explores how this routine afforded opportunities for student voice. The three-part structure of the forum produced a range of effects, including: a discussion of issues related to local and wider community news as well as college announcements; a check-in where each member of the community voiced their readiness (or otherwise) for the day's learning; and a sign-up process that incorporated informed decision making about the day's learning sessions. It is argued that the intentions that underpin the community forum are important and relevant in all forms of schooling, not just alternative programmes, but these intentions can produce unintended effects.

This article considers the ways in which three alternative education sites in Australia support socially just education for their students and how injustice is addressed within these schools. The article begins with recognition of the importance of Nancy Fraser's work to understandings of social justice. It then goes on to argue that her framework is insufficient for understanding the particularly complex set of injustices that are faced by many highly marginalised young people who have rejected or been rejected by mainstream education systems. We argue here for the need to consider the importance of "affective" and "contributive" aspects of justice in schools. Using interview data from the alternative schools, we highlight issues of affective justice raised by students in relation to their educational journeys, as well as foregrounding teachers' affective work in schools. We also consider curricular choices and pedagogical practices in respect of matters of contributive justice. Our contention is that the affective and contributive fields are central to the achievement of social justice for the young people attending these sites. Whilst mainstream schools are not the focus of this article, we suggest that the lessons here have salience for all forms of schooling.

Media reportage often act as interpretations of accountability policies thereby making the news media a part of the policy enactment process. Within such a process, their role is that of policy reinforcement rather than policy construction or contestation. This paper draws on the experiences of school leaders in regional Queensland, Australia, and their perceptions of the media frames that are used to report on accountability using school performance. The notion of accountability is theorised in terms of media understandings of "holding power to account", and forms the theoretical framework for this study. The methodological considerations both contextualise aspects of the schools involved in the study, and outline how "framing theory" was used to analyse the data. The paper draws on a number of participant experiences and newspaper accounts of schools to identify the frames that are used by the press when reporting on school performance. Three frames referring to school performance are discussed in this paper: those that rank performance such as league tables; frames that decontextualise performance isolating it from school circumstances and levels of funding; and frames that residualise government schools.

In this paper, we are concerned with the notion of "pedagogic voice" as it relates to the presence of student "voice" in teaching, learning and curriculum matters at an alternative, or second chance, school in Australia. This school draws upon many of the principles of democratic schooling via its utilisation of student voice in respect of the curriculum and pedagogy. We recognise that within the schooling context, voice can represent many things. Drawing on interview data, we outline two key areas of student voice: community membership associated with the ownership of practices and decision-making related to the young people's learning and improved engagement; and encouraging curricular choice and the inclusion of personal interests and strengths within a school environment that is flexible and encourages individual freedom while balancing these with a young person's required progress at school. Given that a lack of voice in schools has been attributed to many marginalised students' alienation from mainstream schooling, we demonstrate how attention to pedagogic voice can not only work to engage students in learning, but also improve civic engagement.

This paper reprises the argument for the emergence of a global education policy field and then focuses on the shared habitus of global and national policy actors and technicians. It is argued that this shared habitus is constituted as a reflection of and a contribution to the creation of the global education policy field. Bourdieu's approach to habitus as both methodological tool and concept is used and the significance of the interview encounter to understanding habitus is argued. The authors also draw on the content of interviews with five elite policy-makers and technicians. It was found that the policy actors and technicians shared a similar middle-class embodied habitus; in terms of schemes of perception, they identified with a high-modernist confidence in both science and technology; they identified with a cosmopolitan outlook and sensibility; and demonstrated scientistic approaches that held real confidence in understanding the social through quantitative social science methods.

This paper reports on an investigation into the representation of teachers in newspapers in five countries. An innovative methodology was used to develop a method of inquiry that supports a deeper understanding of media representations of teachers which can also be used by other researchers in comparative education. The paper explores relevant literature on teachers' work and media studies, and describes the decisions made about the selection of newspapers from the five countries and the analytical framework. Central to the project was the development of an analytic framework which we applied to our analysis of the media data collected from the five countries. The process revealed the construction of four categories of teacher identity: the caring practitioner; the transparent (un)professional; the moral and social role model; and the transformative intellectual. The aim was not to generalise categories but to offer them as they were found in newspapers during this time frame. The data analysis demonstrates the applicability of the innovative methodology while the project also contributes to locally translated understandings of teacher representations. The paper concludes with a reflection on the effectiveness of the methodology for comparative research.

This article reports on a study that investigates the possibilities of developing a professional learning model based on action research that could lead to sustained improvements in teaching and learning in schools in remote areas of Papua New Guinea. The issues related to the implementation of this model are discussed using a critical lens that questions the use of "western" constructs about "successful" professional learning and "quality" education in Papua New Guinea. In the article, we discuss the notion of "professional learning" and how action research can be conceived as a model for professional learning. Then, we discuss some of the issues and difficulties that are arising during the implementation of our study. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for future developments of professional learning for teachers in countries such as Papua New Guinea. (Contains 1 note and 1 table.)

Media sources can influence and shape attitudes and beliefs towards others. This study explored newspapers depictions of autism. All articles which included keywords relating to autism published in 2016–18 in Australian newspapers were read, coded, and categorised. In 2016, 428 articles relating to autism were published, 532 in 2017, and 391 in 2018. Only 7% of all articles demonstrated a high content focus on autism; most (59%) were heavily focused on opinion and less than 1% included first-hand perspectives from individuals on the spectrum. Over half the articles focussed upon health and medical issues (33%) and profiles of people on the autism spectrum (25%). To minimise the spread of misinformation around autism, the paper concludes with advice for those writing media articles related to autism. Newspapers provide a public account of autism and those with autism, therefore, media portrayals and what aspects of the condition are reported, inform public perceptions. Newspaper articles predominantly focus on the health and medical aspects of the condition, emphasising a 'cure' or treatments for autism. Articles tend to single out individuals with a diagnosis on the autism spectrum, through media depictions or characterisations. Media articles reviewed often only mentioned autism but did not explain or discuss the details related to the syndrome and rarely included the expertise of qualified practitioners. Only 1% of all news stories included first-hand perspectives from individuals on the autism spectrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]