Kirsten Lambert (PhD)

Many pre-service teachers prolong studies or fail to complete teaching degrees due to financial hardship. This attrition exacerbates the teacher shortage in Australian schools. Our research uses critical theory to explore the challenges for pre-service teachers as they complete the compulsory professional experience component of initial teacher education. This phenomenological study, based on interviews with eight pre-service teachers at a university in Western Australia, gives voice to pre-service teachers experiencing placement poverty, revealing the difficulties faced in their quest to become teachers. The findings highlight the importance of addressing the financial barriers that hamper students' abilities to become quality teachers.

Royal commissions are powerful symbols of truth-telling, underpinned by restorative justice, aiming to address historic mishandling by giving voice to survivors of prejudice, abuse, and institutional injustice. The Australian Federal Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (2019–2023) exposed routine violence, abuse, and exploitation of people with disability. The Commission made recommendations to federal and state governments in Australia that, if accepted and implemented, will bring about far-reaching changes. Previous royal commissions resulted in high acceptance rates: 79% for Aged Care and 85% for Child Sexual Abuse. However, the response to the Disability Royal Commission (DRC) has been disappointing, with only 8% of recommendations accepted. This paper focuses on government responses to DRC recommendations related to Volume 7: Part A: Inclusive Education, using critical discourse analysis to highlight how empty language promotes inclusivity whilst maintaining ableist cultural hegemony and normative policies.

This research paper explores the experiences of pre-service teachers (PST) with disability undertaking high-stakes teacher tests in Australia. In 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 PSTs who are undergoing their initial teacher education studies. However, our research highlights how high-stakes teacher tests that all Australian PSTs must pass in order to graduate, fail to differentiate for disability. Our research findings shed light on how PSTs with disability have a passion for differentiation and are developing disability identity and advocacy. Yet ableist practices, including the costs of disclosure and inadequate assessment accommodations, marginalise and exclude these valuable teachers.

Teacher attrition is a significant issue that has been the subject of much recent critical research and public debate. What is less often explored in the literature is the gendered nature of teaching and the unique struggles female teachers face in the workforce, particularly in remote, regional and rural (RRR) schools. As a historically female-dominated profession, women, particularly teacher-mothers face a distinctive set of barriers to career progression in these schools. We apply a critical feminist lens to qualitative data generated from interviews with 21 teachers from 6 different schools in RRR locations in Western Australia. Data reveals a toxic intersection between teacher attrition and frontier masculinity. Our research has significant implications for education policy in the context of teacher attrition as it sheds light on why dedicated female teachers reluctantly leave the profession because of a lack of opportunity for themselves and their families.

Workforce shortages in the education sector have reached crisis levels, particularly in regional, rural and remote (RRR) communities. While teacher attrition is the subject of much critical research and public debate, understanding the reasons teachers remain in these communities is less frequently explored. Our phenomenological study, based on interviews with 21 teachers from six RRR schools in Western Australia, reveals that the merging of personal and professional identities fosters a sense of validation and belonging. The profound impact of strong bonds with colleagues, students, and their families significantly enriches these teachers' lives and is a key reason for their decision to stay.

This paper shares data from a longitudinal study into secondary performing arts teachers’ perceptions of their first five years of teaching. Utilising Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizomatic becomings and Braidotti’s posthuman knowing subject, our research explores the embodied, relational, and fluid identities of early career teachers. This is important when exploring nascent teacher becomings because it takes into consideration the configuration of bodies and hyper-performative expectations in neoliberal educational assemblages. Our longitudinal qualitative research in Western Australia revealed that early career teachers (ECTs) experienced concerning levels of mental ill-health in response to insecure employment, high stress, long hours, performative school cultures, the COVID-19 pandemic, teacher shortages, and normative socio-cultural [mis]conceptions of what counts in education. This intersection of factors resulted in 35% of our participants resigning from the profession in the first five years.

The tyranny of distance is often perceived as the greatest challenge for teacher retention in rural and remote schools in Australia. Perhaps more accurately, it is the tyranny of placelessness. In this paper, we explore the role of place-connectedness and racial literacy in shaping the interactions of 21 primary and secondary teachers with the social space and place of one Western Australian remote town. Data were collected through interviews and focus groups and analysed with an emergent approach. We propose three levels of place-consciousness to describe the depth of awareness, skill and integration with which a teacher might connect to place and space: place-connectedness, place-willingness, and place-ignorance. We suggest that teachers who are place-connected, considering themselves not just geographically situated in a place but intrinsically connected to the people and culture of that place, are far more likely to achieve a sense of fulfilment and commitment in their roles as rural educators. These teachers value the capital within rural communities, move beyond the teacher social space to the community social space, and respectfully respond to Indigenous space and place. From our exploration, we make recommendations for the conscientisation of place in Initial Teacher Education and graduate teacher induction.

This paper offers a brief yet evocative glimpse into marginalised pre-service teachers’ (PST) experiences of teacher testing in Australia’s High-stakes Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE). Utilising Critical Disability Theory (CDT)in particular, Goodley’s (2016) concept of neoliberal-ableism, we problematise teacher testing as a gatekeeping tool for students undertaking teacher education. The article highlights how neoliberal education policies in Australia have disempowered and turned away talented and empathetic future teachers. By illuminating their embodied experiences of stress and anxiety, we interrogate neoliberal discourses of power and how teacher testing is used as a blunt instrument to solve complex problems and funnel public funding to private corporations. As part of a larger longitudinal research project, we offer four narrative portraits giving voice to vulnerable PSTs who have become unwitting victims of the high-stakes test juggernaut. This article focuses on five emergent themes from the research: (a) the embodied impact of stress and anxiety on test-takers, (b) withholding of information regarding testing processes and support, (c) the lack of differentiation available to PSTs (d) impacts of edu-businesses and the business of education on vulnerable participants and (e) a passion for differentiation.

This study guide covers the Drama ATAR Units 3 and 4. The purpose of this guide is to assist students in their preparation for tests and examinations in the ATAR Drama course for year 12 students. The guide has deliberately been kept short so that students use it and view it as a manageable revision tool and not just one kept to the side. The structure of the topics will allow students to use the book throughout the year.

Each chapter starts with a checklist taken from the W.A. School Curriculum and Standards Authority ATAR syllabus. The chapter then provides a summary of the required content for students to revise. Questions covering the content are provided at the end of each chapter. Answers to these questions are at the end of the book.

Trial Tests covering the content for both Unit 3 and Unit 4 have also been provided at the end of the book along with full solutions. Students are advised to practise the Trial Tests and the Chapter Review Questions many times over throughout the course of the year. We hope that this study guide will help students to better understand the concepts they will encounter and to achieve greater success in the subject.

Teacher attrition is a salient issue across the Western world. Whilst this has been widely discussed in the literature , what is missing in the discourse, is a gendered focus. This narrative inquiry into the experiences of Australian women who resumed teaching after becoming parents offers insight into how parenthood can complement and enhance teachers' pedagogy and relationships with students. Narrative portraits also reveal how the intersection of normalised performative expectations of performing arts teachers and inflexible leadership is not conducive to emotional or financial wellbeing. Findings show how leadership and culture marginalise these teachers leading to burnout, guilt, and attrition.