This research adopts post-qualitative inquiry to trace the teachings and learnings with an environmental sustainability subject for preservice teachers at an Australian university. Humanist discourses of 'education for sustainability' and 'default environmental practices' often act to heavily stratify educational spaces, becoming obstacles for…

This work focused on increasing Year 3 students' use of critical thinking and taking the "second-person perspective" (2ndPP) when interpreting and resolving life issues. Previous research indicated the Personal Viewpoints Pedagogy (PVP) elicited social thinking that exhibited strong perspective-taking and precursors to critical thinking…

'Representing Race and Gender' was the first course in the undergraduate curriculum of the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney to foreground race. This paper provides a critical reflection of our embodied and affective experiences teaching this course as women of different racial and cultural backgrounds (Korean…

This paper aims to explore young Chinese girls' aspirations and ideal environments for engagement in Health and Physical Education (HPE) and physical activity (PA) in Greater Western Sydney. Interviews are used to elicit these girls' perceptions of their future and ideal environments in relation to HPEPA. Their data offer insights into key…

The study examines how white teachers talked to children about national identity and cultural diversity by drawing on qualitative research with eight- to 12-year-old students and their teachers from four Australian primary schools with different racial, ethnic and cultural demographics. Despite a range of explicit and implicit approaches that…

Given that postsecondary institutions are increasingly seen as sites to promote health, critical scholars are calling attention to how the contemporary Western weight-centred health paradigm reinforces a "size matters" message that is fueling harmful attitudes towards and judgments of bodies. As such, research that highlights strategies…

This article draws on data from qualitative research that was conducted with children between 6 and 13?years of age as a part of an 18-month project that explored respectfully engaging with cultural diversity in Australian primary schools. We used persona dolls as a research tool to enable children to explore and articulate their knowledge of…

This paper discusses pre-service teachers' responses to a critical analysis of gender/power relations using examples from a final assessment for an intensive elective unit called Teaching Sexuality in the Middle Years. This unit critically examines gender/power relations, the production of difference, heteronormativity and pleasure and desire,…

The field of physical education (PE), as it exists in teacher education, is dynamic as ways of preparing teachers to meet the needs of young people in contemporary times change. Such endeavours are underpinned by concerns about school-based PE, the alienation of students from PE, and responsibility for producing healthy students. Concerns also…

In this paper, we investigate primary school teachers' reflections on addressing the topic of same-sex families and relationships in their classrooms. Informed by queer theoretical and Foucauldian analytic approaches, we examine teachers' potential use of texts, such as picture storybooks, which introduce representations of same-sex relationships…

Researchers at "Facebook" and the University of Milan have dismissed the idea of 6 degrees of separation between two people and maintain that it has shrunk considerably in the past few years to 4.7 degrees. This may not seem surprising until they realise that the original experiment published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram…

The stigmatisation of mental illness in Australian and other Western societies is now well documented. This article presents a description of the "stigmatisation" problem associated with mental illness, and discusses the impact that this problem has had on the demand for Psychiatry as a career. The approach taken at UWA to address the…

In this article we draw on queer theoretical and critical literacy perspectives to investigate elementary school teachers' pedagogical approaches to addressing same-sex parenting and non-normative sexuality in the elementary classroom. Through undertaking case study research, we examine two Australian elementary school teachers' reflections on…

Sport-crazy Australia embodies in the public imagination a "fair go" ethos, giving everyone an equal opportunity to participate regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or religion. At the same time, sport can be seen by others to be the last bastion of male power, which can make sport participation difficult for those perceived to be or…

Why would boys want to dance? Why would anyone want to dance? The argument prosecuted in this paper is that dance educators have tended to see dance as a self-evidently good thing with self-evident benefits for children who learn to dance. In other words, dance educators tend to concern themselves with why students should dance rather than why…