The Australian Educational Researcher最新文献

While the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it multiple challenges for families and the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) workforce, it also highlighted the essential role of ECEC in the lives of children and families and presented unique opportunities for innovation and learning. The current study sought to explore learnings from this uniquely challenging period, including the factors and strategies that best supported educator wellbeing and family engagement in ECEC settings, from the perspectives of families, centre directors and educators. In 2021, 104 Centre Directors/Educators and 102 families completed online surveys exploring wellbeing and educator–family relationships. Correlations suggest that robust professional wellbeing and resilience are potential enabling factors for strong family engagement, and that supportive organisational structures in ECEC settings are a protective factor for both educator wellbeing and family engagement. In addition, five effective family engagement strategies were derived from the qualitative data: (1) drawing on personal and professional knowledges to enrich children’s learning at home; (2) prioritising regular and reliable communication with families; (3) maintaining familiar relationships and a sense of community; (4) providing person-centred support and a bridge to other services; and (5) nurturing mutually supportive educator–family relationships. Learnings provide important insights that may inform ongoing quality improvements across different ECEC contexts, and to help safeguard against the negative impacts of future global crises.

Schools play significant roles in promoting pupils’ well-being. This study explores teachers’ experiences using the research-based, psychoeducational method Let’s Talk about Children (LTC) to support pupils’ well-being and identify possible risk factors in cooperation with home and school. The study’s data comprise 83 LTC training participants’ writing about their experiences with the method as first-time users. The results indicate that the teachers noticed several benefits and potential uses of LTC, but they reported that the method requires adaptation. The experienced LTC benefits were early intervention, increased knowledge about pupils, encouragement and improved relationships with families. Challenges included a poor fit with teachers’ work, rigid materials and challenging interactions. Teachers noticed benefits from LTC use, but adjusting the method to their work was challenging. These results will enable the method’s further development.

Coding and computational thinking are being hailed as the new literacy for the twenty-first century, and have become increasingly common in schools world-wide. At the same time, the sector is facing a global shortage of technology teachers, and technology lessons are frequently being delivered by non-specialist teachers. Therefore, some have suggested integrating coding into other curricula as a practical solution for non-specialist teachers to deliver outcomes in both Digital Technologies and their own subject areas, whilst also developing general capabilities. To better understand the benefits and practicality of integrating coding into the English curriculum, we present a detailed case study of an Australian Year 5/6 classroom where students engaged in learning units integrating both Digital Technologies and English curriculum outcomes. We explored the nature of students’ interdisciplinary learning and general capabilities development through two learning units in which they coded animated narratives (CANs). We also built understanding of how non-specialist teachers in regular classrooms can develop the necessary technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) to facilitate cross-curricular learning involving coding, and at the same time, promote general curriculum capabilities. Findings challenge the commonly held assumption that integrating coding can be a universal solution to specialist staff shortages and an overcrowded curriculum, and reveal the challenges faced by non-specialist teachers and school organisations that need to be overcome for successful implementation. However, they also indicate that when these challenges are met, integrated approaches can result in interdisciplinary learning, high levels of student engagement, and provide effective environments for general capability development.

This paper examines competitive grants for public schools, as a form of additional funding from the government. We draw on interviews with principals from different states in Australia to examine systemic impacts of competitive grants for public schools, exploring this in relation to school autonomy. Public school principals are labouring to generate additional school funding via competitive applications from the traditional state government, to supplement their core or regular government funding. The competitive applications are to fund what many would consider rudimentary or fundamental resources, such as school infrastructure and student wellbeing programs. For the interviewed principals, the drive to generate more funding was anchored within significant government funding shortfalls in public schools. The majority of interviewees did not find the funding model to be ‘needs-based’ or responsive. Autonomous public schools presented many paradoxes and contradictions, particularly in under-funded contexts; whilst on one hand, principals are tasked with managing their budgets, the majority experienced the environment as highly inflexible and often punitive, laden with bureaucratic red tape. The majority of interviewees expressed notions of responsibilisation for generating additional funds. In this context, we found that competitive funding applications increase school principal work intensification, with principals spending excessive time labouring to generate additional funding via competitive grant applications, in order to fund essential school projects. The labour involved in completing time-demanding funding applications supplants their traditional responsibilities and is critically reshaping their role as a school principal, to one of ‘grant applier’ and fundraiser, reinforcing the retreat of the traditional state.

The study of English is compulsory throughout all 13 years of schooling in Australia and, while there are differentiated options in the senior years of school, these do not have the same parity of esteem nor transactional value. Previous research has identified patterns of enrolment in high versus low-status subjects, reflecting differential access to powerful knowledge and further educational opportunity. To date, research has focused on patterns of inequalities in enrolment access along socioeconomic lines with comparatively less attention to the accessibility of pedagogy and assessment, particularly for students with high-incidence disabilities like Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In this study, we draw on individual achievement and interview data to consider the accessibility of subject English from the perspectives of 59 Year 10 students identified as having language and/or attentional difficulties consistent with DLD and ADHD. In describing their ease or difficulty with subject English, students reported attributions to self (e.g., their ability to write or to concentrate), and attributions to the subject (e.g., explicitness of success criteria, flexibility of assessment requirements, and the in/accessibility of teaching). Attributions to the subject dominated students’ responses, however, students also described a range of supportive pedagogical practices that—if implemented consistently and effectively—may help to increase the accessibility of subject English for students with language and/or attentional difficulties, providing more equitable opportunities for these students to gain from their participation in this important compulsory subject.

The paper studies the rise of neuroscience in initial teacher education, paying attention to the relatively recent Australian Government (2023) report titled ‘Strong Beginnings’. In taking up a critical policy sociology lens, we focus on the first priority within the reforms, which is mandating brain science and the ‘brain and learning’ as core curriculum within initial teacher education. The reforms will embed standardised curriculum into initial teacher education and tie this curriculum to graduate teacher standards, bracketed within prescribed texts, ideologies and agendas. The reforms are positioned within the ‘what works’ movement, increasing accreditation and certain types of evidence, and the role and authority of intermediary organisations, including the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). It promotes research that has been paid for by the think tank Centre for Independent Studies and aligned with the Australian Education Research Organisation and Education Endowment Foundation. In this paper, we endeavour to highlight how the singular and narrow focus on brain-based approaches is not only reductionist, but also potentially generative of oppressive technologies. The mandating of standardised curriculum and brain science undermines educators, including initial teacher educators, and bolsters private interests in education. The standardisation of core curriculum, which will be tied to accreditation processes and graduate teacher standards, is underpinned by a punitive-accountability based approach. Furthermore, whilst it is less visible, these reforms contain brain science tropes redolent of eugenics and deficit framings of low socio-economic status students.

An analysis of teacher metaphors has long been a feature of research into the development of early career teacher identity, however, the metaphors used to construct the ideal teacher in educational policy remains under-researched. These policy documents explicitly seek to frame what it means to be an effective teacher. As such, an analysis of the metaphors used in these documents to describe teachers ought to provide insights into how policy makers perceive teachers, particularly early career teachers, not least in how these metaphors differ from those held by early career teachers themselves. This research finds that a recent Australian government policy document Strong Beginnings, with the explicit aim to make initial teacher education courses more effective in producing teachers likely to stay in the profession, provides teacher metaphors that fall within three overarching categories: saviour, victim and compliant teachers. These categories of metaphor rarely overlap with those early career teachers use to describe either themselves or their profession. The teacher as compliant metaphor is mostly constructed indirectly by first making initial teacher education courses compliant in teaching core content. In this way policy proposes it is best placed to mandate changes to initial teacher education courses to ensure they produce effective teachers, and this effectiveness will be the deciding feature in keeping them in the profession long-term. This paper argues the mismatch of metaphors between those held by policy and early career teachers is likely to undermine this assumption.

This special issue presents a collection of recent papers drawing on qualitative research in and about schooling in Australia and the ways in which gender-related issues in the broadest sense continue to shape people’s educational experiences. These papers from the present are positioned in relation to the long histories of policy and research attention to gender equity in Australian education. We set the context for work in the present by scanning the past, noting the ambitions, the gaps and the failures of earlier policies, and drawing attention to the quality and volume of research that has previously been undertaken in this area. We explore the current policy vacuum regarding gender to consider some of the pressures and complexities that have led to the erasure or avoidance of gender-related issues. Each of the papers that form this special issue demonstrate—despite different methods, theoretical frameworks, settings and participant cohorts—how stereotypes and limitations circulate in everyday life in schools and beyond them, and how these impact on people. They each explore from a different starting point how gender injustices are perpetuated and produced, in often subtle and nuanced ways that require concerted effort to unpack. They simultaneously offer insights into the critical and creative ways that young people and those around them are reconfiguring gender and seeking more hopeful and more equitable educational experiences and outcomes. Collectively, the papers that form this special issue advocate for policies and practices that embrace the complexities of young people's lives and are oriented towards inclusive and equitable educational environments.

Despite the many benefits of play, within primary school, play is often reduced to lunch breaks, particularly as children move to higher grades. Loose parts play affords children opportunities to develop imagination and 21st-century skills (collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking). As part of a larger project, two Year 4 classes in an Australian primary school (two teachers and 46 children, aged 9–10 years) engaged in one hour of structured or unstructured loose parts play during class time for eight weeks using a Nüdel Kart (loose parts play cart). Children in the structured play group were set challenges and taught creative attitudes and processes. Data was collected through children’s surveys and focus groups and teacher interviews. Children and teachers were overwhelmingly positive about the play sessions. Children enjoyed the opportunities for construction, social skills and creativity, while teachers focused on inclusion and social skills. Future classroom practice recommendations include integrating both play types and meeting creativity and social and emotional curriculum requirements through loose parts play.

Current research and literature emphasize the crucial role of group experiences in children’s learning during early childhood. However, despite the frequent use of the term ‘group’, little attention has been paid to its position in children’s learning and the diverse perspectives that inform it. This study addressed this gap by applying a tri-partite lens, considering the perspectives of young children, parents and teachers in three preschools in Australia. We defined group broadly as any social context within preschool environments. Data were collected through focus group discussions with 24 children, individual interviews with six teachers and questionnaires completed by 48 parents in the preschools. The findings have conceptualised group as a complex interweaving of various elements, involving the dynamic tensions and relationships between children’s needs and adults’ expectations and practices. Central to this is the exploration of self and others, and an understanding of how children's desires for togetherness and belonging could stimulate thinking about what it means to be learning in groups.