This article examines teachers' work as part of the everyday life of classrooms, schools and communities--as curriculum design, dynamic pedagogies and as an oeuvre which is assembled over time. One of the hardest aspects of the everyday work of teachers, and perhaps one of the most under-rated and under-studied, is listening, really listening.…

Lately I have been thinking and writing about the idea of a teacher's oeuvre -- the notion that over time teachers create a significant body or work that might be compared to that of an artist or composer. I have argued that too often the contributions that teachers make remain invisible, under-valued and unknown in the field of education. This is…

As educators encounter a policy landscape where increasingly the education lexicon includes keywords such as data, evidence, quality, and standards, it is interesting to revisit Garth Boomer's contribution regarding teachers as researchers. In "Fair Dinkum Teaching and Learning," Boomer (1985) clearly named at least two key problems that…

Schools bring people together. Yet for many children there are major discontinuities between their lives in and out of school and such differences impact on literacy teaching and learning in both predictable and unpredictable ways. However if schools were reconceptualised as meeting places, where different people are thrown together (Massey, 2005)…

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research…

This article focuses on how teachers worked to build a meaningful curriculum around changes to a neighborhood and school grounds in a precinct listed for urban renewal. Drawing on a long-term relationship with the principal and one teacher, the researchers planned and designed a collaborative project to involve children as active participants in…

This article considers teachers' work as they grapple with theories in practice in the everyday worlds of their classroom. It argues that Bourdieu's theory of practice and the concept of habitus may be useful in moving past theory/practice dichotomies. After establishing the historical context for teacher research in South Australia, the work of…

The fact that children growing up in poverty are likely to be in the lower ranges of achievement on standardised literacy tests is not a new phenomenon. Internationally there are a myriad of intervention and remedial programmes designed to address this problem with a range of effects. Frequently, sustainable reforms are curtailed by deficit views…