Within the contemporary higher education landscape, maintaining student engagement and retention has become of critical concern to universities. Universities have mostly responded to this concern by implementing institutional engagement and retention initiatives by professional university staff. Thus far, however, the role that teaching academics…

This critical discussion paper explores the epistemic governance of "community readiness" in and for teacher education. Classroom ready is often interpreted as technical skill which places emphasis on practice to the detriment of more complex interpretations of the relational nature of teachers' work, leading to a potential narrowing of…

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.…

This paper investigates the insights that we, as parent-educators gained from our children's learning experiences throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and how this impacted our approaches to learning and teaching. All authors are teacher education academics working at a regional Australian university. The rapid and extensive changes in our personal…

There are many studies documenting the negative impacts of trauma in childhood. However, despite schools and teachers being a known protective factor which have the potential to modify the negative impacts of complex trauma, limited research examining the perspectives of primary teachers working with traumatised children and their perceptions of…

This qualitative study focused on educators' perspectives of teaching students with dysgraphia. Dysgraphia can be referred to as a specific learning disorder (SLD) in writing and includes difficulties with handwriting, spelling, and/or composition skills. To explore the educators' experiences, an interpretative phenomenological analysis method was…

Governments worldwide have invested in teaching standards and performance benchmarks to improve teacher preparation and teacher quality that impacts student achievement. As a means of addressing these imperatives, the Australian government has recently encouraged formal partnerships between tertiary providers, schools and education systems in…

In recent years, play-based learning (PBL) has attracted attention, debate and controversy across different national contexts. There is no definitional consensus which may have undesirable consequences for enacting its potential in professional practice. The aim of our study was to synthesize international research on ECE practitioners' views on…

Creativity in education is currently dominated by discourses pertaining to both a neo-liberalisation of arts education and a more widespread attention to the economic potential of diverse creativities. This study applies new thinking regarding creative educational advancement that is adaptive and critically reflexive to the tasks of reconciling…

Using the concept of a developmental lens (Brighton, 2007; Caskey & Anfara, 2014; Davis, 2006; J-F, Pullen, & Carroll, 2013; National Middle School Association, 2010; Peterson, 2010), this article focuses on young teenage students' perceptions of teachers. School teachers play an important role in the educational development of teenagers…

This article describes a small, collaborative, arts-based research project conducted in two rural early childhood centres in regional Australia, where the children made large-scale collaborative paintings in partnership with teachers and researchers. Observation of young children's artistic practices, in order to inform the development of…

Increasing numbers of international students are enrolling in Australian universities in early childhood teaching degrees. For many of these students understanding the early childhood education pedagogies and approaches is a different way of viewing teaching and learning from their own cultural perspective. Many of these students struggle to…

In this article, the authors argue that the notion of a teacher and the coexisting teacher education processes are being progressively emptied out, and replaced by the model of a corporate worker, serving the needs of a post-industrial financial capitalist society. They assert that teachers have had their identities stripped of their previous…

Young people entering homelessness often do so while still at school. This study explores Australian teachers' and other student support staff perspectives of the experiences of students who are running away from home, the barriers to student help-seeking, and how local youth services can best support secondary schools to provide necessary…

As a field, Teacher Education has lived with continued criticism from governmental and research bodies on the quality of professional preparation and the lack of a strong research base. We respond to such criticisms by considering possibilities for further exploration of the "research of practice" and the "practice of research"…