Veronica Gardiner PhD

Australian universities, and their students, continue to navigate shifts to online teaching and learning, accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic. This presentation explores the importance of questioning and disrupting assumptions about this shifting landscape, from the perspective of diverse students. To gain access to these perspectives, the present study facilitated a focus group with a small number of students from different study areas in one metropolitan Australian university. Framed through Lefebvre's heuristic describing inter-related spaces within a given social context, the study highlights how students construed their lived space of online teaching and learning, as well as how they perceived the practices and resourcing of their educators, and arrangements at an institutional level. Interpretive analysis through the lenses of Lefebvre's spatial frame and Gee's critical discourse analysis, suggests that students foregrounded their own diversities and learning needs, and attributed impacts in regard to time and flexibility for study, teaching and learning communications, the quality of online formats, availability of opportunities to participate in different ways of knowing, and educator workload. With the caveat that the study comprised a small pilot, early findings appear to disrupt the accepted premise that students prioritise socio-relational aspects of teaching and learning, with implications for future designs.

Current educational reforms in Australia clearly prioritise the politicised need to lift student performance on broadscale, standardised assessments. At both national and state-levels, these reforms emerge from increasingly neoliberal policy-making. Under this neoliberal influence, experienced and early career teachers (ECTs) are responsible for aligning professional and student learning to the production of measured improvements. However, many scholars of education point to such alignment as leading to narrowed situated constructions of literacy, teaching and learning, and student diversity. A convincing body of empirical research reports associated trends towards traditional rather than contemporary pedagogies, and reduced responsiveness to linguistic and sociocultural diversities. To explore how Western Australian ECTs perceive and negotiate literacies teaching and professional learning against the current policy backdrop, the present study fostered a series of 'café' dialogues with ECTs in metropolitan, regional and remote locations. Adopting a qualitative comparative case-study approach, the study highlights the dynamic ways in which ECTs construed and navigated systemic discourses and arrangements, as well as local factors. Through layered analyses, ECT 'voicing' of perspectives, dilemmas, and pedagogical goals was mapped to Engeström's 'expansive learning' cycle, as well as processes of Multiliteracies pedagogical design. Findings illustrate that initially, ECT perceptions of student diversity, homogenisation and inclusion were strongly framed by structured and scripted literacy pedagogies perceived as school priorities. However, evidence also reflects how ECTs gradually questioned situated priorities, and sought to approximate aesthetic, expressive, and participatory possibilities for their own and other's learning. The study suggests that ECTs worked to reframe student and teacher diversity, and to counter deficit readings of their own professional capacities. This conference presentation will highlight key excerpts from 'café' dialogues, which illustrate ECT's evolving perceptions of context, and expansive learning. Frequently, these excerpts foreground how ECTs catalysed professional growth in spite of little systemic or institutional support. Implications emerge for the ways in which ECTs in Australia are helped or hindered to formulate socially just and inclusive notions of literacies and pedagogy.

Early career primary teachers currently navigate a backdrop of standards-based reforms and accountability mechanisms. Recently in Australia, these reforms have been articulated through broad-scale federal government policy initiatives such as StudentsFirst, and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership’s Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. In the rationales of these ensembles, professional learning is often equated with implementation of standardized ‘best practices’, purported to lead practitioners toward quality teaching and learning. However, sociocritical researchers in Australia suggest such reforms are problematic in light of empirical findings, pointing to a concomitant narrowing of content and formats in relation to literacy practice and teacher learning processes. This presentation draws on a study incorporating Multiliteracies theory, Cultural Historical Activity Theory, and critical perspectives on teacher professional learning. From this vantage, the study aims to support rich professional learning for teachers through contextually sensitive, socially dynamic and dialogic opportunities. Additionally, the study aims to position early career teachers to negotiate tensions between standardized approaches to literacy learning, and contemporary approaches resourcing sociocultural and communicative diversity. Methodological flexibility emerged as an ongoing, complex and ‘wicked’ problem in developing this positioning. This complexity lead to deep entwinement of theoretical rigor and methodological adaptability, particularly when seeking ways to: access teachers in diverse metropolitan, regional and remote locations of Western Australia; build relational and dialogic connections across this broad geographical terrain; and facilitate context-relevant interactions through social media and face-to-face formats. This entwinement is viewed as pivotal for transformative educational research in the current Australian landscape, and for informing sociocritical debate in the field of teacher professional learning.

Early career primary teachers currently navigate a backdrop of standards-based reforms and accountability mechanisms. Recently in Australia, these reforms have been articulated through broad-scale federal government policy initiatives such as StudentsFirst, and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership's Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. In the rationales of these ensembles, professional learning is often equated with implementation of standardized 'best practices', purported to lead practitioners toward quality teaching and learning. However, sociocritical researchers in Australia suggest such reforms are problematic in light of empirical findings, pointing to a concomitant narrowing of content and formats in relation to literacy practice and teacher learning processes. This presentation draws on a study incorporating Multiliteracies theory, Cultural Historical Activity Theory, and critical perspectives on teacher professional learning. From this vantage, the study aims to support rich professional learning for teachers through contextually sensitive, socially dynamic and dialogic opportunities. Additionally, the study aims to position early career teachers to negotiate tensions between standardized approaches to literacy learning, and contemporary approaches resourcing sociocultural and communicative diversity. Methodological flexibility emerged as an ongoing, complex and 'wicked' problem in developing this positioning. This complexity lead to deep entwinement of theoretical rigor and methodological adaptability, particularly when seeking ways to: access teachers in diverse metropolitan, regional and remote locations of Western Australia; build relational and dialogic connections across this broad geographical terrain; and facilitate context-relevant interactions through social media and face-to-face formats. This entwinement is viewed as pivotal for transformative educational research in the current Australian landscape, and for informing sociocritical debate in the field of teacher professional learning.