The Australian Educational Researcher最新文献

This study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of student engagement in online learning by exploring the effects of salient online learning environment conditions on student engagement and the motivational pathways through which they affect engagement. Survey data were collected from 351 undergraduate students enrolled in various online undergraduate programs at a large open university in Vietnam. Results of structural equation modelling revealed that course clarity and task relevance had significant indirect effects on students’ behavioural, cognitive, and affective engagement via their expectancy and task value beliefs. Teacher support was found to have indirect effect on student engagement only via expectancy beliefs whereas student connectedness predicted neither students’ motivation nor engagement in online learning. Results of the study are discussed in light of existing theoretical and empirical evidence on the intricate relationships between learning environment, motivation, and student engagement. Implications for practice are also offered to help create an online learning environment that has potential to foster student engagement and alleviate disengagement and dropout.

Understandings of gender diversity have increasingly recognised the rights and experiences of children and young people (Meyer & Pullen Sansfaçon, 2014, Smith et al., 2014). A small, but significant body of work focusses on the schooling experiences of gender diverse children/young people. The critical role parents play in supporting gender diverse children/young people is acknowledged (Davy & Cordoba, 2020; Riley et al., 2011), including their involvement in negotiating schooling. This research uses a qualitative research design to explore the schooling experiences of five parents with gender diverse children, attending primary or secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia. A feminist poststructuralist framework was used to analyse the complex factors that influenced school choice, and to explore the challenges or opportunities they had encountered during their child’s schooling years. The participants in this study highlighted the qualities of schools they believed to be inclusive, which affirmed their own school choice. However, participants also reflected on their sense of rejection when their children were not accommodated at school, or when they had to find a new school. Negotiations around school choice were made easier with economic and social capital. These findings highlight the layered inequalities of the Australian educational marketplace.

The declining wellbeing of Australian teachers is a longstanding problem, with much attention on retention, stress, burnout, and poor resourcing and conditions that impact wellbeing. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has further illuminated these challenges. This qualitative study aimed to explore Australian teachers’ perceptions of their wellbeing needs with a focus on asking the questions that are often not asked—what is working, what are we learning, and how can we move forward to support teacher wellbeing? The voices of teachers revealed findings that support a much-needed shift in teacher wellbeing rhetoric in Australia. We illuminate five key areas that influence teacher and sector perceptions of wellbeing: (1) school leadership, (2) professional development, (3) workload and work-life balance, (4) relationships, and (5) stress, positive emotions, and accomplishment. These findings contribute to the need for a change in how teacher wellbeing is approached and highlight the possible implications of what is working, needs, barriers, and insights for preservice teacher education and professional development of teachers.

Slow violence occurs gradually and out of sight, an attritional violence of delayed destruction not usually viewed as violence at all. Relative to more immediately perceived and recognisable forms of violence, the temporal, spatial, and sensational invisibility of slow violence can hinder efforts to act decisively towards it. Drawing on material from ethnographic research in an outer-suburban Melbourne secondary school, I examine how attending to affective dissonances experienced by students and staff led me to witness the school’s first Pride Club meeting, the group’s decline, and its transformation into Stand Out Club. This transformation lifts to view a move beyond the politics through which the group was initially conceived into an ethical response attentive to queer students’ lives. Slow violence, conceptually, has much to offer, including the possibility for recognising and responding to slow violence with an ethics of nonviolence.

School teachers have demonstrated poor mental health and low levels of wellbeing, globally. Despite the high prevalence of depression, burnout, stress, and anxiety, few programs have been developed in collaboration with teachers that are appropriate for their needs and circumstances. The current mixed-methods study involved consultation with members of the teaching workforce in Australia to understand their preferences for a program to address their mental health and wellbeing. The sample included teachers and other key representatives from the education sector in New South Wales, Australia. There were 47 participants who completed online surveys, with a subset (n = 16) also attending two group workshops (n = 10 in the first workshop, n = 6 in the second workshop). Data were collected between May 2021 and October 2021. Descriptive statistics were calculated to summarise quantitative survey data, and thematic analysis was used to analyse qualitative data. Results from surveys and workshops found that a new approach is needed to address teacher mental health and wellbeing in schools. Participants expressed a preference for a strategy that combined a face-to-face approach with a digital component and focused on three areas: staff relationships, supportive leadership, and practical skill development. The results of this study provide guidance about areas to target to improve teacher mental health and wellbeing.

While school policies are not a panacea, gender and sexuality diversity-inclusive policies have the potential to relieve educators’ concerns about what they are ‘allowed’ to engage with in respect to GSD inclusivity and to guide their proactive efforts to support gender and sexuality diverse (GSD) students. Unfortunately, policies enabling educators’ proactive, positive support for GSD students are far from systematised in schools across Australia’s eight states and territories. This paper presents an audit of publicly available policy guidance for educators in Australia’s government schools, analysing these against an original evaluative set of best-practice criteria developed from research recommendations from the field of GSD-inclusivity in K-12 schools. Analyses for each state/territory are provided. Results from this audit highlight the unevenness in articulated policy support available to Australian educators and illustrate the criticality of developing Australian federal policy mandates with respect to GSD inclusivity and professional development for educators, including both articulated expectations for the creation/maintenance of a safe and affirming environment as well as pragmatic support for how to create school cultural change.

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a critical qualitative study on trauma-informed teaching of English as a second language (ESL) at Australian universities. Post-traumatic stress affects verbal learning, yet most ESL teachers do not receive training in trauma-informed teaching. The field has suffered from a dearth of empirical studies and absence of student voice. This study used a validated tool to measure the post-traumatic stress of 39 participants, including international students and former refugees. Twenty of these completed semi-structured interviews about the ESL learning environment, based on a framework of trauma-informed principles. Data were analysed using critical, qualitative methods through a trauma-informed lens. A major theme in the findings was the importance of ESL teachers’ understanding of students. Within this theme, four sub-themes are explored: personal engagement and attention, acceptance and understanding of the learner role, understanding the lives of students outside the classroom and an understanding of students’ cultures.

While research exists on what constitutes meaningful learning, our study reveals the term meaningful is an ill-defined concept that is interpreted in multiple ways, often from a teacher-centric perspective. Less is known about what constitutes meaningfulness in the context of higher education, particularly in business education. This qualitative study seeks to identify postgraduate student perspectives on what is meaningful in higher education to inform the design of authentic and transformative learning experiences. Focus groups were conducted to gain insights into students’ most meaningful learning experiences across four postgraduate business subjects. We conducted a thematic analysis of the student data by inductively coding the transcripts and comments. Students derived the most value from learning experiences that incorporated real-world connections, social encounters, or productive challenges. We also found that students’ discussions of meaningfulness were relatively superficial, suggesting that postgraduate students may not be primed to consider meaningfulness in relation to their learning. We thus problematise the term meaningful and conclude by proposing ‘learning highs’ as a new tentative conceptual frame for future research identifying learning situations in which meaningful experiences occur.

Recent studies and media articles draw attention to gender imbalances in the music industry, both locally in Australia and globally. In Australia, there have been calls to overhaul tertiary music programmes to support and encourage female students into careers such as sound production, screen composition and contemporary music performance, where women are greatly underrepresented. Taking up this call, we investigated the experiences of women in a music degree programme at a regional university. Positioned as a music education study at tertiary level, we focussed on any barriers female students perceived to be affecting their participation in specific music courses. We took a phenomenological approach, collecting data through focus groups and examining the data through a ‘possible selves’ framework, as described by Markus and Nurius. The findings from the focus groups indicated that female students felt unconfident about some career paths, which they described as male-dominated, notably in the STEM-focussed music technology courses, and perceived some learning environments as not gender-inclusive. The ‘possible selves’ framework pointed to the role of emotions in female students’ learning experiences. The importance of positive emotions for confident learning is applicable to other higher education disciplines, particularly those in STEM.