This article builds on the work of Professor Robyn Jorgensen and Associate Professor Peter Games and others on social justice and mathematics and links to the Ethical Understandings capability of the "Australian Curriculum." Presented in this paper is an argument for the importance of a social justice approach to teaching mathematics,…

Fairy tales are ubiquitous in Australian primary schools. Drawing on a review of key literature, this paper aims to determine the implications of teaching fairy tales in the twenty-first-century primary classroom. Research points to the benefits of including fairy tales as a tool to improve all subject areas of the curriculum. Fairy tales present…

The teaching of white privilege in Australian tertiary settings is beset by a number of obstacles arising especially from resistance, disbelief and outright obstructionism in white students, and occasionally colleagues. The article summarises the historical and societal context regarding race relations, racism and white hegemony in Australia, then…

In this article, two autoethnographies from Australia and New Zealand provide a means of engaging students in difficult histories of colonial nations. The first looks to knowledge as a basis of understanding others, and the second focuses on concepts of empathy and vulnerability as a way of understanding difficult histories. Each of these…

Background: The imperative for social justice in education means that pre-service teachers should learn how to teach for and about social justice, including pedagogical and content knowledge. Understanding how physical education (PE) pre-service teachers and teacher educators construct and develop their knowledge of social justice pedagogies and…

Progress towards equitable schooling and educational outcomes in Australia has been notoriously slow, with countless reports highlighting stark inequities between rural areas and urban centres. Most reforms have been grounded in distributive notions of social justice -- addressing funding, staffing, and resourcing -- but fail to address other…

New Zealand and Australia introduced health and physical education curricula espousing a socially-critical perspective more than two decades ago. Yet, despite growth in advocacy and teaching resources, there is little research exploring how HPE teachers are enacting these pedagogies. This article addresses the challenge of understanding what six…

The paper critiques the curriculum construction of historical consciousness within Australian school systems. National and trans-national discourses about identity, culture, gender, race and class influence the development of historical consciousness in Australian classrooms. During this unprecedented period of shared grief and global trauma,…

In what ways can a community music education project based on historical re-enactment be a vehicle for transformational learning, empowerment and reconnection with community? In 2018, Serenading Adela was performed to celebrate and remember the 100th anniversary of a moment in history when women sang under the prison cell window of Adela…

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Australia has long been associated with the concept of social justice, however, a clear understanding of what it looks like across diverse services and communities is not available. This article reports the process of inquiry, as well as the outcomes, of a small-scale study designed to uncover the…

In this article, we discuss the role of affective learning and arts-based inquiry as a catalyst for providing transformative learning experiences in teaching social justice issues related to Indigenous cultures and histories. The research was conducted with first-year pre-service teachers studying an Indigenous Knowledges course as part of their…

Purpose: To explore a teacher educator professional learning opportunity within the context of a taught unit of work at a government primary school in Canberra, Australia's national capital. The unit of work focus was a traditional Australian Aboriginal game taught using a Game Sense Approach to deliver a socially just version of quality physical…

Drawn from an ethnographic study of spoken word poetry in Australia, this article offers case studies of two youth poets and follows their journeys with spoken word over three years as they performed in community-based slams, engaged with the New South Wales English Extension 2 curriculum, and served as mentor poets in culturally and…

This paper reports on continuing professional development (CPD) innovations in an Australian university to address challenges commonly faced by sessional academics teaching progressively diverse student cohorts. With the impact of Widening Participation (WP) policy increasing university participation of students in recognised equity groups,…

This paper explores the role of the Senior Project Officer: The Arts for the Australian Curriculum Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA) in facilitating the writing of the foundation "Shape of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts" (2011) paper for the national curriculum, with a particular focus on the discipline area of music. The…