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.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0) is characterized by rapidly changing technologies and workforce demands. Educational systems seek to respond to these changes. Little is known about ways in which Teacher Training Institutions (TTI) are preparing preservice teachers to address these educational demands. This scoping review examines the high-quality literature with respect to initial teacher training activities and challenges, specifically focusing on 21st century skills and technology integration in the context of IR 4.0. The results show TTI requires coherence throughout the organization to effectively respond to shifting needs and contexts. The development of IR 4.0 technologies move swiftly, providing new opportunities for developing preservice teachers' 21st century skills. Such technologies could reframe the role of TTIs and teacher educators. Contrastingly, the pressure for TTI and teacher educators to maintain required skills increases alongside technologies. This scoping review concludes that research on this topic remains valuable and critical to further inform initial teacher training in IR 4.0 to facilitate the development of preservice teachers’ 21st century skills.

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.

What do we really know about the literacies teaching and learning experiences of early career teachers (ECTs)? In Western Australia, as in other Australian states, ECTs are impacted by neoliberal policy reforms pursuing standardised and didactic literacy teaching and learning. Many scholars argue that such reforms impoverish literacies learning for both teachers and students. To explore how ECTs perceive and shape literacies teaching and learning in these policy conditions, the present author facilitated a series of café based discussions. During interactions, ECTs reflected on their professional work over two calendar years, in metropolitan, regional and remote schools. Adopting a comparative case study approach, ECT meaning making was framed by interweaving the content and pedagogical Design focus of Multiliteracies Theory (Bull & Anstey, 2010; Cope & Kalantzis, 2013; Garcia, Luke & Seglem, 2018; New London Group, 2000), and the expansive learning schema derived from Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engestrom, 2001, 2011). The interpretive approach integrated visual topic mapping, critical discourse analysis, and identification of emergent correspondences between pedagogical Design and expansive learning processes. Key findings highlight, that across the groups, possibilities for ECTs' teaching and learning for literacies in schools were constrained by pervasive promotion of routinised and componential approaches to reading and writing, and commercially driven professional development and literacy resourcing. Becoming increasingly insightful about limitations in these policy aligned priorities and conditions, the ECTs responded over time by questioning, resisting and in some cases innovating Available Designs in lieu of contradictory professional goals. In the main, this innovation took place in the absence of systemic or school based support. Such results conflict with deficit readings of ECT learning articulated in current policies. Implications may be of interest to school leaders, policy writers, teacher educators and other teachers wishing to support participatory teaching and learning for literacies.

The Australian Curriculum positions literacy as a general capability to be taught across all subject areas. While schools may design agreements and policies to formalise the position of literacy as a whole-school priority, there is relatively limited research guiding the structure and content of these planning documents. We contend that reading engagement should have an important place in such planning documentation, despite the Australian Curriculum's relative silence on this aspect of literacy learning, as it is a valuable facet of literacy promotion, with research strongly supportive of the relationship between reading skills and will. We conducted a content analysis to determine if available whole-school literacy policy plans, agreements and policies were supportive of fostering reading engagement at school, and the extent to which they fostered home and school partnerships around reading engagement. Mirroring absences in the curriculum, we found that few schools promoted reading engagement strategies as a whole-school priority, and where strategies did feature, these varied widely.

Current policies guiding literacy and teacher professional learning in Australia, tend to foreground the importance of standardised practice and assessment in classrooms and schools. However, enactments of print-oriented literacy and professional learning in alignment with this emphasis stand in contradiction with contemporary approaches, which implicate consideration of diversity and contextual relevance. This paper positions teacher problematisation and negotiation of this contradiction as key for broadening literacy learning horizons. Incorporating multiliteracies, Cultural Historical Activity Theory and sociocritical perspectives on policy and professional learning, the authors propose a multidimensional framework for exploring and supporting dynamic and conflictually sensitive teacher learning processes. Such visioning is important if teachers, school leaders, pre-service educators and researchers are to enable learners with adaptable literacy repertoires with relevance to rapidly evolving twenty first century communications and social interactions.

Although the status of human rights with respect to diversity in gender and sexuality has improved over the past two decades, discrimination against LGBTQI individuals in Australia remains unacceptable in terms of social attitudes, policies and practices (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2015). Young LGBTQI people, in particular, face discrimination in many aspects of their daily lives. Educational experiences can be especially negative, with schools identified as sites where students are often at risk of bullying, harassment and other forms of violence in relation to their diverse or perceived diverse genders or sexualities (Greytak, Kosciw & Diaz, 2009; Hillier, Jones, Monagle, Overton, Gahan, Blackman & Mitchell, 2010; Kosciw, Greytak, Boesen, Bartkiewicz & Palmer, 2011; Robinson, Bansel, Denson, Ovendon & Davies; Taylor et al., 2014). When LGBTQI identifying young people or those from LGBTQI families feel unsafe in schools or unrepresented by the curriculum, the Australian education system’s capacity to promote mental health, well-being and academic outcome s for all students is compromised. Given legislative requirements, human rights are the business of all educational stakeholders, with teachers playing a key role in making a positive difference to young people’s lives. Supporting gender and sexual diversity in high schools: Building conversations for LGBTQI human rights in the English classroom is based on a Young and Well CRC research project that examines the perceptions and practices of a group of high school English teachers who were exploring ways to work in this area. The discussion that follows is informed by the words and experiences of the teachers interviewed for this project.