Reflecting an international shift from punitive to more rehabilitative responses to youth offending, many Australian youth justice systems are undergoing significant revision and reform. The urgency of these changes are intensified by longstanding inequities pertaining to the gross overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth…

The education of students with disability has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. Universal declarations and conventions have underpinned many of these changes at both an international level and within Australia. In the early 1970s, the philosophy of John Rawls provided a theory of justice to preserve social justice and individual liberty…

Human rights activists aim to create social and political change. This article analyses the factors which influence and motivate human rights activists in Australia to want to be a part of this movement. Human rights education is an important part of activism. The pedagogy about, through and for human rights education was used in this study to…

Effectively addressing violations of human rights requires dealing with complex, multi-spatial problems involving actors at local, national and international levels. It also calls for a diverse range of inter-disciplinary skills. How can tertiary educators prepare students for such work? This study evaluates the coordinated implementation of human…

Non-consensual sterilization is one of the characteristic historical abuses that took place mainly in the first half of the 20th century. People with intellectual disability (ID) were a prime target as part of the ideology of negative eugenics. In certain jurisdictions, laws were in force for several decades that permitted sterilization without…

With the increasing acknowledgement of the benefits of early childhood education, there is a need to ask critical questions about whether ample leadership exists for guiding ambitious systemic change in the field. This review of leadership in early childhood educational contexts between 1995 and 2015 examines the epistemological assumptions…

This paper tells stories from a higher education study abroad collaboration entitled "Investigating Diversity, Human Rights and Civil Society in Japan and Australia." Starting from a pedagogical focus on students' active learning about human rights, this project has come to value relationship building--between academic institutions,…

Refugees are seldom admired or applauded for their resolve and resilience, and their post and pre-migration experience rarely serves as the basis for the development of educational practice or policy solutions. Using a postcolonial theoretical framework this paper argues that while the maligned mobility and disparaged figure of the 'refugee'…

Recent critiques of citizenship education have identified the need for curricula that cover not only civil, political, social and cultural aspects of political belonging and responsibility, but that orient students to the realities of global engagement and responsibility. Rather than focussing on national values, histories and political…

Colin Hearfield and Bob Boughton contend that, over roughly the past seventy-five years, a number of writers have attempted to underwrite the relationship between critical literacy and transformative social practice with an ethics of freedom and social justice. The first two such writers they address, Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire, draw on a…

In this article we review the medical, human rights, social and social interactionist models of disability, and consider how these differing perspectives have influenced the provision of educational services to students with disability in Australia. We contend that the shift in educational policy and provision, from supporting to including…

Concepts of social justice have strong historical roots, while more contemporary notions of social justice coincide with human rights, equity, fairness and facilitation of social change with lasting impact. In higher education, evident examples of social justice include widened university access facilitating a diverse student body and graduate…

This article discusses research on teaching and learning values education in schools. It offers researchers and teachers an insight as to why values education should be incorporated in classroom teaching. It is suggested that values education, in addition to focusing on moral education, is connected to active citizenship education, social justice…

This paper examines the nexus between Indigenous rights, the modern university, and graduate attributes and theorises the potential of the university in postcolonial democracies to address Indigenous rights in its professional education programs. It posits the postcolonial professional as one who has been educated about internationally recognised…

Australia is in the process of implementing a national geography curriculum to replace the separate state and territory curriculums. The paper describes the process of curriculum development, and identifies the different groups that were involved. These included the board and staff of the national curriculum authority, geography teachers across…