In recent years, laptop and 'Bring Your Own Device' (BYOD) programs have become an integral part of teaching and learning in many Australian schools. For history teachers, the presence of BYOD in the classroom potentially provides the opportunity to align two key teaching goals: historical research skills; and information, communication and…

With a challenge to conceptualize an environmental/sustainability education that employs imaginaries and praxis for learning our way through and beyond our planetary crisis, we consider how posthuman creativity articulates into pedagogical practice. We share insights from our researcher/practitioner experience in two different educational…

In Australia coeducation dominates government schooling, with single-sex institutions usually being the preserve of selective government schools and private, often elite, institutions. For marginalised young people who 'drop out' or are forced to leave the coeducational mainstream system, flexible and/or non-traditional schools provide alternative…

Purpose: This paper presents a descriptive analysis of elite women's biographical sketches in Who's Who-type collections, now out of copyright, published in Australia in the 1930s--Victoria (1934), New South Wales (1936) and Queensland (1939). It concentrates on information given about their schooling. Design/methodology/approach: The biographical…

Although gender expansive views are increasingly evident amongst young people, segregation according to binary notions of gender underpins the organisational structures of single-sex secondary schools. While claims of educational benefits are common, particularly for girls, gender is difficult to disentangle from socioeconomic advantage and other…

Improving learning through interdisciplinary STEM has come to the forefront of educational discourse, as schools attempt to attract more students to STEM study. However, little is known about how successful STEM curricula are established and sustained. This study details the establishment and sustaining of an exemplary STEM learning ecosystem in a…

This paper details the gendered oppressions of young female teachers in three elite boys' private schools in Australia. Drawing on Foucauldian analytics and the theory of practice architectures, we explore the discourses and practices that work together to silence and disempower female teachers in these schools. There is an unevenness in these…

In this paper, we analyse results from one classroom session within an 8-week program in which Year 10 students constructed 'trash' puppets of endangered Australian animals. In making the puppets and using them as part of a 'theatre in a suitcase' performance at Melbourne Zoo, students were expected to integrate both scientific and artistic goals…

Under neoliberalism, parents as consumers are expected to provide their children with opportunities to get ahead. Governments defend elite schools on the grounds that 'diversity' and 'choice' are in the public interest but not everybody has an equal opportunity to choose. School websites act to promote specific images of schools with opportunities…

The debate on the relative merits of single-sex and co-educational schooling for girls and boys persists. There are also on-going concerns in Australia about declining enrolments in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines at both the tertiary and school levels. In this article, we summarise some core findings from…

A whole school (K-12) "Reading for Pleasure" program was implemented at an independent girls' school in Sydney, Australia. This paper reports on the results of a teacher survey conducted one year into the implementation of the program. Qualitative data were collected from 105 teachers on the perceived benefits and challenges of the…

Australian educators teaching in the early years of formal schooling find themselves grappling with the dilemmas of preparing learners to sit performance-based assessments in later years and their sense of pedagogic responsibility towards designing competency-based assessment. Studies have explored this tension in the primary and middle years…

We investigated academic buoyancy - and its predictors and outcomes - among female students attending all-girls and coeducational schools. We examined data from 1,254 female students. Structural equation modeling revealed that students' perceptions of three instructional climate factors (teacher-student relationships, useful content, engaging…

Explorations of the national NAPLAN numeracy data consistently reveal a strong relationship between achievement on these tests and students' socio-economic background. A small but persistent pattern of gender difference favouring males in mean NAPLAN numeracy scores is also reported. Whether these patterns are replicated for students attending…

Structural inequalities and stereotypes are held out as explanations for gender differences in reported levels of confidence. However, while it is reported that in the absence of stereotypes women and men should possess identical levels of self-confidence, no study to date has tested this hypothesis. Single sex schools were identified as an…