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Attracting high quality teachers to regional, rural, and remote locations has been an issue for school communities in Australia. Research has illustrated that innovative initiatives and experiences can change pre-service teachers’ attitudes, perspectives and perceptions about regional, rural and remote schools. What is less understood is the contribution of school leaders foregrounding a place consciousness approach to spark pre-service teacher interest in undertaking professional experience placements and possible employment in their RRR schools. This paper shares research findings that identified how Far North Queensland school leaders showcased “their place” with key stakeholders and in particular with pre-service teachers. The findings affirmed notions that school leaders understand the valuable connections between rural, regional and remote pre-service professional experiences and the potentiality for high quality teachers for the long-term. Implications are drawn in relation to how school leaders create partnerships and promote their school place intentionally.

As a response to the corporatization of the university, nine scholars worked together to create spaces that fostered the possibility of collective dissensus. Using scholarly performative methods, we have sought to push back against the increasing corporate incursions into our institutions of higher learning—the over-valuing of money, measures, and metrics which encroach upon our capacity to think. This one-act ethnodrama below is one of our responses to the new corporatism of higher education. In the generation of this scholarly work, we have created the space and time to reconnect as colleagues and as scholars.

This paper presents the start-up methodology for a project that leverages the opportunities that social media affords to give teachers voice and agency. In response to negative press about teachers in mainstream media, coupled with research that shows that teachers are working hard to meet student academic and wellbeing needs, the researchers employed the assertive technologies of social media and started a campaign to promote the work of pre-service and in-service teachers. The paper presents the theorising behind the start-up methodology for the social media campaign and outlines a response to an identified opportunity. It argues that social media provides new opportunities for professional connectedness, story sharing and collegial support.

Many Australian young people experience mental health concerns, academic and study-related stresses, and socio-economic pressures. Phenomenological research conducted among primary and secondary schoolteachers in four Australian states investigated how teachers manage student wellbeing concerns and academic pressures and stresses. Findings identify key stresses that affect students’ performance and how teachers respond to these stresses to progress student learning. Creating space, finding margin, mitigating and reducing pressures and stresses, while upholding academic rigour, are the salient capabilities described by teachers in this study for simultaneously managing student wellbeing concerns and academic performance.

This paper reports students’ perceptions of their learning of 21st century skills through a novel approach to delivery of the school program in Year 10. For 1 day per week, all Year 10 students at this school participate in The DeLorean Project, where they create, design and implement their own real-world projects with the assistance of teachers as facilitators. Student attitudes towards participation in the initiative were surveyed and analysed. Results indicated that students’ awareness of skills associated with the General Capabilities of the Australian Curriculum were explicitly developed as a result of participation in the DeLorean Project, particularly critical and creative thinking, ethical behaviour, and personal and social capability. Student voice in relation to the project gives rise to implications for further development and design of DeLorean as new approach to teaching and learning in Australian schools.