Judith MacCallum

As leaders of school communities, principals have a significant impact on school culture and teachers’ well-being at work. A school principal’s positive or negative emotions can influence the mood of their teaching staff and can enhance or hinder a teacher’s resilience. Unfortunately, though, many school principals suffer from their own high levels of stress, emotional exhaustion and fatigue-related issues, whilst concurrently being tasked with the responsibility and management of the well-being of their staff. In this chapter, we explore the role of mindfulness and self-care in promoting resilience as a way for school principals to meet the challenges of their role. Principals who are mindful and employ self-compassion are better placed and more resilient to positively impact others and flourish in their role. Leadership does matter and ensuring that we address leaders’ well-being and resilience will mean they will be better equipped to engender resilience in their staff.

This chapter brings together the research on teacher resilience and approaches to supporting resilience and wellbeing discussed in this volume. As many of the approaches utilised aspects of the BRiTE and Staying BRiTE projects, I highlight common themes as well as the different ways the authors developed and implemented their work to reflect their specific contexts and participants. I also reflect on broader issues related to conceptualisation of resilience, consider where responsibility for resilience lies, and explore future directions. The chapter also provides some insights regarding the collegial collaboration that has made the body of work possible.

Developing relationships with colleagues has been identified as one way to enhance teacher resilience and assists in negotiating a professional identity. For early career teachers, opportunities to participate in induction and mentoring programmes and engage in professional learning can assist in developing these relationships. However, for early career teachers who can only obtain casual work and work intermittently often in many different schools, these opportunities may be limited. This chapter presents longitudinal, qualitative research that explores how early career casual teachers negotiated their teacher identity. Drawing on data from focus groups, semi-structured interviews and reflective tasks, the chapter shares insights into how relationships are pivotal in the development of a strong teacher identity.

In this chapter I bring together the different lines of research presented in this volume to examine the tensions and challenges of innovating and researching in schools and consider possible future directions. Three main strands are woven through the chapters and form part of the title of the volume: curriculum, schooling, and applied research. The sections group the chapters into challenges and issues/tensions in three “main critical areas”: global system and policy, school and teacher, and researcher. These may be the principal focus of chapters in these sections, but every chapter addresses some aspects of the other areas, revealing that even though authors may foreground one area or plane for the purpose of analysis (Rogoff, 2003) all areas are necessary to provide a holistic view.

Students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds and schools in the southwest corridor of Perth, Australia, are far less likely to enter higher education than those from a high SES background. On-campus university outreach programs have long been the tool of choice to engage with low SES students to raise and support their aspirations for higher education. The Murdoch Aspirations and Pathways for University Project sought to engage with secondary-level students through school-based outreach programs that were developed and offered as long-haul, curriculum-based activities with university and industry professionals as mentors and role models. The project sought to promote and support inclusion and diversity in higher education (HE) and contribute to the literature on HE participation for low SES youth in Western Australia. Twelve hundred and twenty-three students across 23 schools participated in the program. This chapter discusses the effects of the programs on aspirations for higher education participation, how their aspirations were supported by important socialisers at home, school and in the neighbourhood. Students also reported personal changes and stronger social and cultural connections with their parents and carers, teachers and friends; thus providing them with supported strategies to achieve school completion and to realise their expectations for a transition to higher education after school graduation.

In chapter 8, Judith MacCallum and Kimberley Pressick-Kilborn discuss the potential of sociocultural theory for examining change in motivation. While they acknowledge that the nature of motivation has been examined from many different perspectives, they argue that motivation research has rarely explicitly addressed the nature of change, how it is conceptualized, or how motivation develops over time in classroom contexts. In their chapter, MacCallum and Pressick-Kilborn discuss the limitations of traditional views of change and examine how sociocultural theory provides new ways to understand change in motivation. They then illustrate their argument by describing recent research using sociocultural theory to examine change in motivation to further explore the potential of sociocultural theory in motivation reserach.

The Reporting Values Cluster Values in Action: Building Resilience and Inclusion project was framed around reporting values to parents in accordance with the Western Australian Department of Education requirement that teachers report on ‘attitude’, ‘behaviour’ and ‘effort’. The WA report format includes a list of seventeen capability descriptors. The project aimed to review and make recommendations for amending that list; it also aimed to support teachers in making evidence-based, rather than subjective, judgements about student behaviours and attitudes.

Until recently, motivation has been considered to be an individual phenomenon. Motivational theorists have accordingly conceptualised key constructs in individualistic terms and emphasised the individual origins and nature of motivation, although they have also long recognised that contextual or social factors have a significant influence on these individual processes. Recently this conceptualisation has been questioned as theorists have suggested, after Vygotsky, that motivation, like learning and thinking, might be social in nature. This idea was first suggested by Sivan (1986) more than twenty years ago but it received a major impetus with the publication of an article by Hickey (1997) eleven years later. Since that time interest in the social nature of motivation has grown as a small number of book chapters and journal articles have been published and conference papers have been presented on the topic. Although some motivational theorists remain sceptical (e.g. Winne, 2004) of this theoretical development, the inclusion of a section on sociocultural approaches to motivation in Perry, Turner, and Meyer's (2006) chapter on classrooms as contexts for motivating learning in the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Educational Psychology suggests that this perspective is being seriously considered by motivational researchers. Similarly, the inclusion of a chapter (Walker, in press-b) on the sociocultural approach to motivation in the 3rd edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education indicates that this approach has achieved some recognition.

"I can't do it" was a phrase Gemma uttered frequently. Like Martin and Lindsay, she initially found it difficult to participate in the collaborative activities in her classroom. We know that learning occurs from our observations, conversations, and our everyday experiences (Renshaw, 2003; Rogoff, 2003). By making explicit the social practices of the classroom to create a safe inclusive environment, teachers can provide opportunities for students to observe, make positive social connections with peers, and participate more fully in their own learning. Motivation develops with changing participation.