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Dewey (1938) once wrote that the most effective forms of learning connect intellectual processes with emotion, which is able to inspire curiosity and excite the learner. This paper adds to the body of research that attests to the transformative role of affect in teacher education, which is able to be cultivated through arts-based service-learning experiences. Pre-service teachers at two universities in Sydney, Australia were placed in service-learning settings that were based around participatory experiences in drama and storytelling, music, dance or visual art. The pre-service teachers' reflections on the placement revealed a transformative experience which combined emotional learning with critical analysis of social justice issues as they relate to education. As part of their placement, they experienced arts engagement that utilised affect and emotion as a transformative pedagogy. They broadened their understanding of the role of teachers, both in an institution and in society. These emerging understandings led them to find voice as advocates, investigate arts education and community projects as alternative career paths and re-evaluate their own perceptions of quality teaching. Some participants continued engaging with the community arts projects after the placement had concluded, and others became advocates for the arts in education and society. Finally, they adopted a critical stance on social justice issues, and shed light on the ways that arts learning service-learning placements can become deeper engagements, leading to sustainable benefits for all parties.

Initial teacher education programs regularly engage students in service-learning programs, providing an additional pathway to personal, professional and pedagogical transformation in their learning journey. One of those pathways is through service-learning placements in community arts projects. This paper reports on a study of arts-based service-learning programs at two universities. Eight initial teacher education (ITE) students were interviewed after their placements and a number of key themes emerged. These include the importance of productive discomfort as part of the service-learning experience and transformative pedagogy resulting from the art-based experience. This paper also explores some critiques of traditional service-learning models that have opened spaces for critical service-learning approaches. The analysis of ITE students' narratives led to findings about the path of transformation from traditional to critical service-learning approaches through arts-based projects, an area which has been largely unexplored in previous research. The paper concludes with discussion of future avenues for related research that orientate service-learning in the arts towards social and creative justice.

In 2020 when schooling was abruptly reconfigured by the pandemic, young people were required to demonstrate new capabilities to manage their learning and their wellbeing. This paper reports on the feelings, thoughts and experiences of eight Year 9 and 10 students in NSW and Victoria about the initial period of online learning in Australian schools that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond dominant narratives of vulnerability and losses in learning, our participants offered counternarratives that stressed their capacities to rise and meet the times. We trace three central themes on how they: found moments of agency that increased their confidence, reconfigured resilience as a socially responsible set of practices, deployed sociality as a resource for the benefit of themselves and others. The pandemic opened up conversations with young people about where and how learning takes place and how schools might adapt and respond to young people's growing sense of urgency about the future of schooling.

2020 has been marked by disruption on a global scale due to a range of compounding crises including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Many community arts responses to the pandemic originated from individuals rather than by means of concerted or sustained sectoral responses. This paper uses reflections from Ireland, Australia, and Mexico to discuss the precariousness and vulnerability of the community arts sector and the artists and educators within it at this profoundly difficult time. We reflect upon some of the artistic and educational innovations and experimentations that have come about. We simultaneously examine the work of artists and arts organizations on a paradigmatic level by reflecting upon the role we play in perhaps involuntarily sustaining inequalities despite articulating a desire for change in the work that we do. We argue for the community arts sector to draw upon its imagination and bravery to reflect, assume responsibility, and recast the world into what we want it to be, rather than rebuilding the old, broken one in an attempt to return to what is perceived to be normal. Finally, in turning to arts education policy, we interrogate the barriers and enablers of change in the arts in a post-COVID world, discussing the influencing policy factors of sectoral weaknesses; individual resourcefulness and resilience; the desire for revolution; and the importance of love.

Disruptions to learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been one of the most concerning consequences of school closures in Australia during 2020. Carefully planned curriculum sequences and learning progressions were flipped into online formats, with teachers having very little time to prepare and students being unused to learning away from each other and from their teachers. In this paper, we turn to the early moments in the Australian educational response to the pandemic when schools pivoted to online learning. We address the potential that emerged for localised, creative ways of thinking and educating under these conditions. We examine how an English class in a western Sydney school quickly adapted a writing task in a unit on "Macbeth" for COVID-19 conditions, and the varied ways that the students responded to their teacher's invitation to write their own soliloquies. We consider how writing creatively in English created opportunities for students to begin to process the barrage of conflicting emotions precipitated by the COVID-19 crisis. We examine how textual form and convention, paradoxically, opened spaces for creativity in their writing. Students found distinct routes and modes of expression for conveying what they were feeling, thinking and experiencing about coronavirus during the initial school lockdown. We consider how theories of creativity within constraints help us to think through what students were learning about language, about themselves and about their text in the context of socially distanced English.

Ongoing and regular assessment is a critical component of the Drama classroom. Australia has a state-based system of education, in which states and territories are responsible for their own assessment policies. Each Australian state and territory has a different system of assessing Drama in the senior years, accompanied by varying methods of grade verification or moderation. This paper reports on an Australian study on the ways that performances are assessed in Senior Secondary Drama in The Australian Capital Territory (ACT), New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland. During this study, significant differences in cultural aspects of Drama were noted, influenced by the state/territory syllabus and assessment requirements set out in policy. This paper examines the significant features of the state/territory Drama assessment cultures and the cultural differences to arrive at conclusions about ways policy can be improved to help bring about better assessment practice in Australia.

Vocational decisions made at school have significant long term impacts on young people's life chances, their opportunities for securing decent jobs and economic growth for themselves, their families and communities. In the short term, their aspirations dictate the decisions they make about educational pathways in post-compulsory years of schooling and vocational and higher education. For young people from already marginalised backgrounds, the quality of support they have in making these decisions is crucially important. This paper examines a rapidly expanding vocational education program specifically designed for students with refugee backgrounds that was codeveloped between a state education authority and a community service provider in Sydney, Australia. Through an ecological understanding of individuals as nested within interrelated networks, this paper explores the perspectives of stakeholders ranging from the educators, careers teachers, employers, civic partners, and, crucially, the young people themselves in order to determine whether and through what means key program elements meet the needs of students from a refugee background and where gaps in the program ecology need to be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a collaboration between advocacy organisation, Sweltering Cities, artists and researchers who developed a multi-site research project that provided South West Sydney residents an opportunity to engage in drama and poetry workshops that gave voice to their lived experience of rising surface temperatures, as well as their desire for environmental protection and climate action. The research featured in this paper contributes to previous research that finds aesthetic modes of engagement to be powerful with regard to ecological awareness, capable of being a positive motivator of small shifts in thinking which are a precursor to climate action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment in aesthetic fields presents a myriad of challenges in the higher education environment. This paper uses a metaphorical representation to explore the role of assessors within aesthetic assessment settings in higher education. It begins with a discussion of aesthetic fields and an exploration of the role of assessment in this area. Following this, the relationship between teachers and learners in aesthetic assessment settings is explored, as are some of the tensions that accompany assessment in aesthetic fields. This paper reports on a narrative and ethnographic study that explores the role of assessors in the context of aesthetically rich assessment tasks. The study, which uses five participants teaching in higher education settings, arrives at a metaphor which likens the assessors' role to that of an artistic curator or art critic. The students' place within that metaphor is also explored. Finally, conclusions are drawn about the nature of assessment in aesthetic fields and areas for further investigation identified.

2020 has been marked by disruption on a global scale due to a range of compounding crises including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Many community arts responses to the pandemic originated from individuals rather than by means of concerted or sustained sectoral responses. This paper uses reflections from Ireland, Australia, and Mexico to discuss the precariousness and vulnerability of the community arts sector and the artists and educators within it at this profoundly difficult time. We reflect upon some of the artistic and educational innovations and experimentations that have come about. We simultaneously examine the work of artists and arts organizations on a paradigmatic level by reflecting upon the role we play in perhaps involuntarily sustaining inequalities despite articulating a desire for change in the work that we do. We argue for the community arts sector to draw upon its imagination and bravery to reflect, assume responsibility, and recast the world into what we want it to be, rather than rebuilding the old, broken one in an attempt to return to what is perceived to be normal. Finally, in turning to arts education policy, we interrogate the barriers and enablers of change in the arts in a post-COVID world, discussing the influencing policy factors of sectoral weaknesses; individual resourcefulness and resilience; the desire for revolution; and the importance of love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disruptions to learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been one of the most concerning consequences of school closures in Australia during 2020. Carefully planned curriculum sequences and learning progressions were flipped into online formats, with teachers having very little time to prepare and students being unused to learning away from each other and from their teachers. In this paper, we turn to the early moments in the Australian educational response to the pandemic when schools pivoted to online learning. We address the potential that emerged for localised, creative ways of thinking and educating under these conditions. We examine how an English class in a western Sydney school quickly adapted a writing task in a unit on Macbeth for COVID-19 conditions, and the varied ways that the students responded to their teacher's invitation to write their own soliloquies. We consider how writing creatively in English created opportunities for students to begin to process the barrage of conflicting emotions precipitated by the COVID-19 crisis. We examine how textual form and convention, paradoxically, opened spaces for creativity in their writing. Students found distinct routes and modes of expression for conveying what they were feeling, thinking and experiencing about coronavirus during the initial school lockdown. We consider how theories of creativity within constraints help us to think through what students were learning about language, about themselves and about their text in the context of socially distanced English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ongoing and regular assessment is a critical component of the Drama classroom. Australia has a state-based system of education, in which states and territories are responsible for their own assessment policies. Each Australian state and territory has a different system of assessing Drama in the senior years, accompanied by varying methods of grade verification or moderation. This paper reports on an Australian study on the ways that performances are assessed in Senior Secondary Drama in The Australian Capital Territory (ACT), New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland. During this study, significant differences in cultural aspects of Drama were noted, influenced by the state/territory syllabus and assessment requirements set out in policy. This paper examines the significant features of the state/territory Drama assessment cultures and the cultural differences to arrive at conclusions about ways policy can be improved to help bring about better assessment practice in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]