Wendy Cumming-Potvin

To improve Indigenous students’ learning outcomes and all students’ participation in reconciliation and cross-cultural awareness, The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (2016) identified the Cross-Curriculum priority of Indigenous histories and cultures. In addition, the Melbourne Declaration (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2008) and the Mparntwe Declaration (Education Council Australia, 2019) have underscored the significance of providing all young Australians with high quality, discrimination-free education, which builds on cultural experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, in tandem with local communities. However, researchers have raised concerns about schools’ lack of emphasis on Indigenous curriculum and teachers’ confusion about how to teach this content (Booth, 2019; Harvey & Russell-Mundine, 2019; Turner, Wilson & Wilks, 2017). This qualitative study reports on early career teachers’ strengths, starting points and challenges for becoming culturally responsive educators, who use multi-modal, Indigenous texts in the primary school setting. Results suggest that the practice of yarning (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010) can be used to reflect on teachers’ experiences of infusing Indigenous texts in the primary classroom as well as to develop decolonising knowledge in the curriculum. Our presentation will redirect participant engagement through yarning and the use of multi-modal, Indigenous texts.

A report from Australia’s Office of the Chief Scientist (2020) outlines that women are valuable to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), but are underrepresented, especially at the higher pay scales. In STEM professions, inequalities regarding a lack of women in leadership positions have been further complicated by the recent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This phenomenon aligns with Australia’s national gender pay gap, which is currently at 13.4% (Australian Government, 2021). This presentation reports on insights from pilot interviews in a qualitative research study, which aims to understand women’s perceptions of and experiences with STEM leadership and gender (in) equity in the private sector of Western Australia. Attention will be drawn to the role of the pilot interviews in directing and refining both interview and research questions (Turner, 2010), thereby highlighting women’s narratives about opportunities and challenges in STEM professions. Key interest groups for dissemination of findings are educational stakeholders and decision-making leaders in the private and public sectors.

In contemporary Australian society, many LGTBI individuals face discrimination, with homophobia posing a danger to the health and well-being of vulnerable youth. Drawing on technology and literacy, the purpose of this research is to challenge inequities faced by LGBTI youth in Western Australia. This large 4-year project, currently in progress, focuses on engaging a group of LGBTI participants and their allies with multiliteracies, specifically digital storytelling to transform personal experiences and acknowledge diverse voices in the community. In collaboration with researchers, representatives from volunteer organizations and teachers, the study provides opportunities for LGBTI stories to be de-constructed, re-constructed and celebrated across communities. The approach is qualitative, focusing on words rather than numbers. Such an approach assumes that reality is complex and truths are multiple. Seeking deep understandings based on life worlds of participants, qualitative methods acknowledge the non-neutrality of researchers, research questions and theoretical frameworks. Integrating elements of an action-research process, the study provides opportunities for participants to creatively evaluate and design literacy activities using on-line and off-line technology. As content is disseminated in the local community and beyond, project results aim to transform community and institutional perceptions about LGBTI issues. Implications for pre-service and in-service teacher development are discussed.

This paper reports findings of a project funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and titled Engineering Education for Social and Environmental Justice (EESEJ). In a context of rapid globalisation, the EESEJ project aims to increase tertiary student learning for social and environmental justice through a new critical approach to engineering education, encouraging student engineers to situate their technical expertise and respond ethically in social, economic and environmental contexts, both locally and globally (see Baillie & Catalano, 2009). A multidisciplinary research team in Australia, the UK and USA engaged in a range of activities, such as designing and implementing critical problem solving in undergraduate engineering courses and undertaking collaborative writing tasks in small research teams. The EESEJ project is based on several assumptions: that social and environmental justice are interwoven and the holistic curriculum approach recommended by Engineers Australia is valid, with students undertaking community projects in ways that responsibly consider social, economic, cultural, environmental and ethical factors. The work of socially just engineers is integrated with community consultation and governed by anti-oppressive principles (Young, 2000), so as to avoid exploitation, marginalization, cultural imperialism, powerlessness and violence in communities. The aim of this paper is to describe the experience of a group of participants in the EESEJ project, the methods they used and the outcomes they achieved.

Australian school teachers currently face many dilemmas about global technological change and national curriculum reform. It is now imperative to equitably promote literacy for 21st century futures against the backdrop of an increasingly divisive and market driven educational environment. The new national curriculum requires all primary teachers to provide learning experiences with 'multimodality', a concept arising from expanded notions of literacy in a digital world (New London Group, 1996). Yet, it is not clear how teachers might attempt this, when new terminology is dissociated from theory in curriculum documents, and professional learning is dominated by a print-focused standardised assessment regime. This qualitative case study explores how a 'multiliteracies book club' can support the collective literacy learning of a group of primary teachers from low socio-economic schools. Aiming to generate participatory approaches to professional learning and knowledge building, the study integrates a framework of multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). Critical discourse analysis is expected to reveal emergent multiliteracies' perspectives and knowledge, scaffolded within a community of practice. Keywords: multiliteracies; community of practice; professional learning

Although there is disagreement about what constitutes good educational research (Yates, 2002), the focus has often been on methodology rather than the well-being of students, teachers and communities (Hostetler, 2005). The predominance of procedure over ethics has also been observed in contemporary educational discourse, correlating academic outcomes with teacher accountability and test-driven curricula (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 2007). Woven into the educational landscape of many post-industrialized countries, including Australia, this focus on professional standards can camouflage qualitative aspects of schools, impacting negatively on teachers’ development (Tuinamuana, 2011) and research. In such environments, weekly professional instruction for increasing standardized test scores is not uncommon, and the role of educational research has become increasingly aligned to improving teachers’ technical competencies. As the Australian political climate melds with standardized testing, literacy education is characterized by the quest for excellence in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development results. Paradoxically, this back-to-basics reasoning is juxtaposed against a post-modern reality of deepening sociocultural diversity, which demands a complex approach to researching, learning and teaching a range of literacy practices (Cumming-Potvin, in press). Recounting a tertiary journey of subtle resistance to a technical approach in literacy education, this paper describes how groups of pre-service teachers and post-graduate students were afforded learning opportunities to integrate qualitative research with reflection and teaching practice. Processes incorporating critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970) and multiliteracies (The New London Group, 2000) aimed to unite theory with practice.

In this paper we describe the use of learning analytics to provide indicators of students’ behaviour in technology-enhanced learning environments. We first provide an overview of the emerging field of learning analytics, and then describe a learning-analytic tool which reports student use of the Lectopia lecture capture system across the weeks of a semester, both collectively and individually. Observation of the data provided by the system enabled us to develop a set of proto-theoretical categories of behaviour, with associated algorithms to numerically identify these categories. Finally, we describe the use of the learning-analytic tool in a mixed methods approach to investigate in depth how students, with different characteristics, engage with and learn from technology-enhanced learning environments.

The analysis of student access to learning management systems and web-based lecture capture systems is a growing area of interest for teachers in higher education wishing to improve the student learning experience. The data trails left by students as they engage in these environments can be accessed and analysed for meaning. This paper describes a study conducted as part of a wider multi-university study into student study behaviour. It offers a detailed snapshot of four students whose access to Lectopia recordings were tracked and analysed, and who were subsequently interviewed to confirm or disconfirm assumptions made about their study methods from the analysis. The data revealed that a surface analysis using learning analytics was largely insufficient to determine student study characteristics, but qualitative data provided rich information to supplement the analysis. Suggestions are made for further research into how this emerging methodology can be further developed and strengthened.