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While attempts to decolonise the school curriculum have been ongoing since the 1970s, the recent Black Lives Matter protests around the world have drawn urgent attention to the vast inequities faced by Black and First Nations peoples and people of colour. Decolonising education and other public institutions has become a front-line public concern around the world. In this article, we argue that poetry offers generative possibilities for the decolonisation of Australian high school (and university) curricula. Inspired by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approaches to knowledge creation as "intergenerational," "iterative" and "intercultural," and by postcolonial and decolonial theories, we explore ways in which poetry events can begin decolonising and diversifying the school curriculum. We suggest that poetry creates spaces for deep listening with the heart ("dadirri") that can promote truth-telling about colonial histories and the strengths, achievements and contributions of First Nations Australians. These decolonising efforts underpin the "Wandiny" (Gathering Together) -- Listen With the Heart: Uniting Nations Through Poetry research that we discuss in this article. In these ways, we argue that decolonised curricula create the conditions for cognitive justice in schooling that is an important precursor to other forms of social justice, such as equality, diversity and inclusion.

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.

Teaching the General Capability of Intercultural Understanding is an Australian government mandate, but an ongoing challenge for teachers, many of whom may have little or no experience dealing with the teaching of intercultural understanding and lack confidence to embed this focus in their classrooms. Hence, teacher preparation is a priority to enable this mandate to be fulfilled. This research project reports on the development of intercultural capability as a result of a short-term overseas Wider Field Experience undertaken by preservice teacher education students attending a regional university in Australia. The results were analysed according to two published frameworks. Survey results and qualitative analysis from 22 participants indicated that the wider field experience enhanced preservice teachers' intercultural capability and their readiness and ability to teach this priority upon graduation.

This paper reports on a project aimed at investigating teacher wellbeing in remote communities in Australia. It utilised a multiple case study methodology to investigate the lived experiences of remote Australian teachers, particularly how remote teachers simultaneously manage the wellbeing and academic needs of their students. Findings show how the challenges of working in remote places impact teacher wellbeing and provides six practical recommendations about how to better support remote teachers. There is a present need to develop a framework of remote teachers thriving, so systems and communities are not over-reliant upon teachers' individual resilience in hard-to-staff places.

This paper investigates intersecting rights and ways of thinking in faith-based schools. It outlines current legislative attempts to manage anti-discrimination in Australian schools and proposes a dialogic model of reciprocal anti-discrimination for educational leaders and administrators. This paper proposes that reciprocal anti-discrimination will require rigorous clarity in organisational beliefs, values and philosophies of education. Differences of power, prejudice and assumptions are also addressed. The goal of the proposed model is to find a way forward where rights and values intersect while supporting student and staff wellbeing and preserving religious and moral conscience.

The "Wandiny" creative gathering of Indigenous and non-Indigenous poets, artists, Elders, and participants across Australia actively sought to foreground First Nations voices, stories, poetry, art, and ontology. This paper presents the auto-ethnographic reflections from the event organisers, demonstrating that participation in a gathering that honours Eldership and Country is a profoundly personal and spiritual experience. Following a call-and-response format, the event promoted deep listening and responsive writing contributed to a cultural sense of being and understanding.

A deeper understanding of how teachers bridge cultural differences in teacher-student relationships provides insights into the cultural, social and emotional capabilities needed in teachers. This phenomenographic study investigated the experiences and conceptions of Anglophonic Western trained teachers who worked in non-Western institutions with the aim of understanding how teachers working in cross-cultural contexts bridge cultural differences to engage students in learning. Findings show that teacher humility and compassion were antecedents to confidence in students. Further, findings reveal a need for systems administrators and teacher educators to make investments into teachers' and pre-service teachers' cultural, social and emotional capabilities for the sake of student confidence and engagement in learning. The study further revealed that student confidence is often evidence of a teacher's cultural capability.

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 seeks to explore the lived experiences of teacher educators working in the midst of the current tumultuous and highly regulatory policy landscape. The paper will briefly outline the politics and policies that have profoundly shaped teacher educators' work in Australia over the past 10 years. We write from our own experiences, as three actively-teaching teacher educators, working with a diverse and nontraditional student population in regional Queensland. We seek to illuminate these experiences through a series of narrative (re)presentations, drawing attention to what we see as important questions regarding the enactment of policy reforms, paying particular attention the impacts on teacher educators and preservice teachers.

Youth mental health in Australia is concerning with 25% of young people reported as experiencing mental health issues in a 12-month period. Meanwhile, Australian schools march forward with academic improvement agendas. Survey research conducted among primary and secondary school teachers, most drawn from the Australian state of Queensland, revealed that although teachers value student well-being initiatives, they are experiencing very real tensions dealing with student mental health concerns and performance targets, which is complicated by a lack of confidence in the efficacy of well-being programs in schools. These findings raise concerns about the need for government authorities, school leaders, and teacher education providers to further investigate the need for balance between school performance improvement agendas and student well-being concerns.

This paper articulates lessons learned about without-prejudice teaching and learning from a researcher-practitioner who has experience in both developing and developed contexts. Developing countries often look to Western countries for education standards, but Western countries rarely look to developing contexts where theory is being generated about divisions and access to education. This comparative study integrates lessons learned from both contexts. It uses an auto-ethnographic methodology and draws upon phenomenographic research and critical theory. The need for "emic" (insider) without-prejudice teaching and learning practices is articulated in three lessons: 1. culture privileges for or prejudices against students' access to education; 2. beliefs systems allow or deny access to learning opportunities and environments; and 3. student--teacher relationship can interrupt prejudice.

This paper demonstrates that the phenomenographic methodology -- the study of variations of lived experience -- has the capacity to manage cultural and paradigmatic differences between researchers and participants in cross-cultural research. The process of cross-cultural research presented herein makes a contribution to the existing body of knowledge about the efficacy of phenomenography. This process was developed from a phenomenographic research project in Northern Uganda and from due consideration of other cross-cultural phenomenographic studies. The study of experience in cross-cultural education projects provides an opportunity to understand participants' conceptions of inner (psychological) and outer (sociocultural) learning processes. A phenomenographic methodology necessitates the organization of categories of description into a holistic 'mental model', which may comprise metaphoric representation. The use of metaphor in phenomenography to depict the categories of description as a whole was found to be particularly powerful in this cross-cultural research study as metaphor helped to establish common understandings between researchers and participants. Furthermore, phenomenography also has the potential to help manage the influences of internationalization in local contexts as its methods give primacy to local participants' experiences.

The education for peace model (EFPM) presented in this paper was developed within a theoretical framework of complexity science and critical theory and was derived from a review of an empirical research project conducted in a conflict affected environment. The model positions belief systems at the centre and is socioecologically systemic in design to capture the holistic dynamic of education within community. There is increasing interest, in both academic and development communities, in closing the gaps that exist between theory and practice in educational development in conflict affected settings and providing practioners with practical models. This paper makes a contribution in this through the presentation of the EFPM and the theory that informed its development. There are five key components to the EFPM: belief systems, learning experiences, students, teachers and schools. Belief systems are core as knowledge is generated from culture. Learning experiences are viewed as opportunities for growth, and schools are viewed as environments that provide opportunities and engender cultures for learning and conflict resolution. Teachers, drawn from the local community, are co-creators of these cultures, environments and opportunities and agents of effective change.

Survey research among Australian teachers revealed that teachers experience tensions between student well-being concerns and the demands of academic performance and improvement agendas. Qualitative findings revealed teachers view student-teacher relationships as imperative to student well-being and academic development. However, in a time of metrics-based education systems and pre-packaged programmes, a focus on strengthening teacher-student relationships is somewhat incongruent with current content-delivery trends and funding priorities. Teachers promoted a concept of holistic education that accorded with socio-ecological models of living and learning. These findings point to a need to better understand how to best resource student-teacher relationships for productive learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on social psychological and neurobiological models of human development, this paper proposes that the role of the teacher is central in the rehabilitation of children who have suffered the effects of stress and trauma. The purpose of this paper is to describe the experiences of educators regarding children's learning. This study used a qualitative methodology to categorise the variation of experiences regarding children's learning as described by 10 school teachers and six school leaders from two government and two non-government primary schools in Northern Uganda. Among the significant findings of the study were the categorical descriptions of children's learning as "fragmented" and "hijacked" due to the debilitating effects of stress and trauma. Educators thought children had many "gaps" in their learning as a result of war and associated disease and poverty. This paper demonstrates the salient role of educators in the neurological, psychological and sociological rehabilitation of students and provides strong evidence for education being a means of positive change.