Alison L Hilton EdD

Educating students with disability rests on the precipice of significant transformation in Australia. Recommendations resulting from the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability have highlighted the need for significant change in the way in which people with disability are educated. This has triggered a wave of reviews and reforms in Australia. However, the path forward remains tangled, divided and deeply complex. This presentation explores one teacher education provider's innovative journey to re-weave their initial teacher education programs and addresses the needs of the evolving school cohorts in Western Australia, and to provide and celebrate course offerings for those seeking primary and secondary school qualifications. Utilising the qualitative methodological approach of weaving an otherwise (Tachine and Nicolazzo, 2022), we approach this research design considering Before, During and After. Weaving an otherwise considers giving voice to the silenced, dehumanised or erased in our communities. We offer narrative vignettes from diverse perspectives-including teacher educators, classroom teachers and other educational leaders. who co-designed these courses. The questions we seek to explore relate to the concept of problematising the education of students with disability as well as identifying both the challenges and opportunities in the schools and teaching workforces related to inclusive education and positive reform of teacher education. Importantly, how do we gain the trust and build a community to co-create in a space that has often been forgotten or misunderstood? This requires, on some level, active resistance to the dominance of policy and practice that limits the preparation of pre-service teachers. Providing education to students of all abilities requires intentional mobilisation of resources, re-imagining of priorities and a determination to persist in the face of reform and negativity, to effect meaningful change. Join us as we discuss what comes “After”.

The worldwide teacher shortage is widely discussed in the media, schools and with politicians. One strategy to help fill the void in Australia is to use pre-service teachers. The permission to teach is not a new phenomenon; however, how policy and conditions exist in each state in Australia vary considerably. How do pre-service teachers navigate the world of permission to teach? What are the conditions and concerns expressed by those in this setting?

This presentation examines the conditions that exist in two separate but contextually similar jurisdictions within Australia. Both jurisdictions discussed in this presentation have a history of granting permission to teach, particularly in rural and remote areas. Comparing policy, conditions and support materials from Teacher Regulatory Authorities provides insight into how pre-service teachers are informed about the conditions that exist. Join with me as we explore the gaps and overlaps of information and communication available to pre-service teachers as they navigate this complex space between university study and employment in a school.

What do they feel are reasons for beginning teaching before course completion? This presentation looks at why undergraduate pre-service teachers undertake teaching as an unqualified teacher and identifies four key drivers that are discussed by participants. The voices of participants provide a strong emphasis on how this engagement provides real-life experiences, improves classroom management skills, promotes confidence and fills the needs of employers in an environment of teacher shortages.

Across the globe, we have seen an increase in the number of unqualified teachers working in schools before receiving formal qualifications. Unqualified teaching is not new, it has been used to fill gaps in the teaching workforce for several decades, typically in hard to staff, rural and remote locations. This strategy has now been included in the Australian policy setting by being one of the recommendations within the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan. The conditions for unqualified teachers vary across Australian states and between employment processes. The progression in their course, work fractions and other conditions for employment vary greatly.

What is less known is why pre-service teachers choose to become an unqualified teacher before course completion. There is even less evidence around why undergraduate pre-service teachers choose this pathway, their course progression, the impact that the role has on them and their retention in the workforce. The qualitative research reported here is the first phase of a longitudinal study and investigates the perspectives of a group of undergraduate pre-service students who have or want to undertake unqualified teaching.  Key drivers of why they have chosen or intend to choose this path are highlighted through their voice using a case-study approach. A range of drivers are explored along with future directions for the research study.

The 2024 Nationally Consistent Collection of Data (NCCD) statistics indicate that nearly one in five (24.7%) of school aged children have a disability and are needing additional supports (or differentiation) in the classroom. In our increasingly diverse classrooms, teachers are expected to provide a range of differentiation strategies in their learning and teaching to ensure all students are included in classrooms. This need for appropriate classroom differentiation is mandated to pre-service teachers (PSTs) via AITSL standards. Further changes are on the horizon as a result of the Disability Royal Commission (Sackville et al., 2023) which highlighted the need for further positive reform in schools to ensure all students with a disability receive a quality education. Focus is currently highlighting school students with disability, but what of their teachers and those studying to become teachers who live with disability? This paper explores the experiences of preservice teachers’ (PSTs) and teachers with disability undertaking a high-stakes teacher tests in Australia. Utilising Critical Disability Theory (CDT), in particular Goodley’s (2016) concept of neoliberal-ableism we explore some of the challenges and strengths relating to supporting PSTs with disability in Australia undertaking the high-stakes standardised test LANTITE. Data is presented as narrative vignettes (Clandinin, 2020) giving voice to those whose experiences are complex and layered. Our research findings shed light on how PSTs with disability have a passion for differentiation, with some students becoming passionate advocates for disability and difference in their classrooms. Yet ableist practices, including the costs of disclosure, and inadequate assessment accommodations marginalise and exclude or traumatise these valuable teachers. With increasing demands on the teacher workforce to be better prepared to differentiate their teaching and assessment for the one in five, there is opportunity to reform and consider how we train and retain our teachers with disability in classrooms. For the one in five students in the classroom, disability representation is important for their growth and learning journey. Having teachers with disability in the classroom is both a reality and a gift for all students. Ensuring equitable and inclusive education for all requires challenging our neoliberal-ableist policies and practices in Australian education.

Professional Experience (Work Integrated Learning) within Australian initial teacher education is a mandated and essential component of learning to teach. Resources developed and employed to promote, assess and report on pre-service teachers’ professional learning are critical to the practice of high-level knowledge workers (the mentor teachers and university-based teacher educators) who support it. At a time of significant reform in initial teacher education and in the ways school-based and university-based teacher educators work across institutional boundaries to support this work, this paper reports on a project where university-based teacher educators’ perspectives were sought on enhanced assessment and reporting resources designed to strengthen practice and outcomes. To support and promote pre-service teacher professional learning and development across course trajectory, new assessment and reporting documents were developed to provide supervising mentor teachers with explicit guidance on indicators of practice. This followed previous iterative cycles of resource development involving university- and school-based teacher educators. These indicators were developed through consultation with a range of stakeholders connected to Professional Experience delivery and provided a course-level scope and sequence of development up to the Graduate Teacher Standards (pre-graduate indicators). The focus of this qualitative inquiry was to understand the application and implications of the course-level assessment scope and sequence through the perspectives of university-based teacher educators through semi-structured interview. The context in which Professional Experience is currently enacted includes (a) increasing shortages of experienced supervising mentor teachers, (b) more frequent use of inexperienced colleagues to mentor pre-service teachers, (c) reported workload pressures making it difficult to secure sufficient placements for pre-service teachers, and (d) reported increase in complexities being managed within many schools. As a result, policy setting is currently focused on minimising administrative workload for supervising mentor teachers, which is logical within this stated complexity. To date, policy responses have included intentions to produce and disseminate assessment templates to be implemented across the nation. These standardised assessment templates have been developed within the express purpose of reducing teachers’ workload. An unintended risk of this type of approach, like system-level adoption of standardised assessment practices, may include the removal of mentor teachers from the critical work of driving pre-service teacher professional learning and development. University-based teacher educators’ perspectives on the implementation and impact of innovative assessment resources offer opportunities to understand the implications of enhanced assessment resources (and teaching practice) within the schools, how this knowledge is reported back to universities and how it is then communicated for various purposes around pre-service teacher development and capacity. This project is significant as it responds to the needs of multiple stakeholders and environmental pressures to ensure mentor teachers are able to provide quality support and feedback to PSTs to enhance the future teaching workforce. Furthermore, it provides pre-service teachers with a scaffolded trajectory towards graduate teacher level.

Inclusive education rests on the precipice of significant transformation in Australia. Recommendations resulting from the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (Sackville et al., 2023) have highlighted the need for significant change in the way in which people with disability are educated and this has triggered a wave of reforms in education policies in Australia (Department of Education, nd). However, the path forward remains tangled, divided and deeply complex. Utilising the metaphor of a Gordian Knot, this presentation attempts to unravel the needs, perspectives, challenges and opportunities to re-weave the education of pre-service teachers who seek to work with students with disability in Western Australian schools. This presentation offers vignettes from the different communities involved in inclusive education, where we invite participants to listen to the perspectives and reflect on the issues, standpoints and their interlacing themes. Our exploration of these will be influenced by qualitative methodological approaches of weaving an otherwise (as expressed by Tachine and Nicolazzo, 2022) to observe the interconnectedness and divergence of the vignettes. The questions we seek to explore relate to the concept of problematising the education of students with disability as well as identifying both the challenges and opportunities in the schools and teaching workforces related to inclusive education. We reflect on what has been, the process undertaken to re-design and re-imagine pre-service teacher education where students with disability and the communities that support them to re-weave a different knot. Rather than problematising the knot and seeking to ‘solve it’ – we imagine it as a thing of beauty, uniqueness and as an opportunity to begin in a place to disentangle and re-weave the Gordian knot. Our journey to create pathways for pre-service teachers in both primary and secondary school contexts has been complex, creative and continues to evolve as we re-imagine inclusive teaching and schools. This requires, on some level, active resistance to the dominance of policy and practice that limits the preparation of pre-service teachers to dominant and traditional frames of reference. These inadvertently submerge the perspectives and needs of children and young people and inhibit opportunities to enact contemporary pedagogies and person-centred and responsive provisions for these students required within all learning environments. Providing inclusive education to students of all abilities requires intentional mobilisation of resources, re-imagining of priorities and determination to persist, in order to effect meaningful change. These insights highlight to us the need for cultural shift, to overcome resistance, micro-aggressions and casual ableism that makes change difficult to achieve and progress towards it slow.

What does migration politics have to do with education? How might culturally diverse teachers impact the teaching and learning cultures in Australian schools? What happens if teachers do not identify with the system? Teacher attraction, recruitment, and retention in the Australian education system are in focus at a time when Australia is experiencing a critical labour shortage. Meanwhile, recent shifts in politically charged immigration policies and changes to education policies and curriculum are transforming the Australian school landscape. Despite the diversity of the populations in Australia and Australian schools, the teaching workforce does not reflect this diversity, with teachers from Sub-Saharan African backgrounds being particularly under-represented. This mixed-methods study explores the unique perceptions of these teachers regarding the challenges, barriers, and opportunities they face within the Australian education system. By examining their lived experiences, the research aims to understand how these factors influence their perceptions and participation in shaping school culture. The study follows a multi-dimensional conceptual framework and employs a sequential explanatory research design, allowing for an in-depth exploration of relational realities in critical multicultural spaces within Australian schools. This research contributes to a better understanding of the experiences of Sub-Saharan African migrant teachers, with the goal of informing strategies to enhance their attraction and retention and fully leverage their cultural capital. It is hoped that the insights gained will aid in developing policies and practices that foster a more inclusive and supportive environment for all educators, thereby enriching the educational landscape in Australia.