Twenty-four young teachers from urban backgrounds, teaching in two rural Queensland secondary schools, were surveyed about their relationships with students, the community, and administrators; teaching conditions; their satisfaction with teaching, in general and in a rural community; and their career plans. Contains 35 references. (SV)

The teacher reform debate in Australia is informed by contradictory individualist and work perspectives and assumptions. The challenge for policy is harmonizing perspectives to develop a basis for the practical politics of educational reform. The individualist perspective complements corporate managerialism, whereas the work perspective raises…

Interviewed staff in two Australian universities about sacrifices they had to make to do their jobs, using the greedy institution concept to describe the hold the universities had over their staff. Overall, there was a certain uniformity of response across sites, gender, and occupational status, which is the product of a masculinist discourse used…

Survey study of 53 foreign EFL teachers in Jeonju City, South Korea looks at causes of teacher stress and coping mechanisms between the years of 2004 and 2006. Results show foreign EFL teachers report moderate levels of stress and attribute stresses in roughly equal measures to student misbehavior and school director/administrative sources. Survey…

Leadership is a contested term in many contexts and means various things to different people. In early childhood education and care (ECEC) it is understood in multilayered terms. This paper draws on a qualitative research study which employed symbolic interactionism as a methodological tool and drew data from 26 participants from the ECEC field…

Many of the schools in regional and inland areas of Australia find it difficult to attract and maintain quality and experienced staff, as do some of the more difficult to teach in schools in urban areas. To help overcome these problems Tasmania has instituted a transfer policy for state school teachers, as had other Australian state systems.…

Education and teaching have changed in significant ways over the last decade. Since the late 1980s the Commonwealth of Australia has encouraged the development of "multi-skilled workers"; however, Alvin Toffler (1990) points out that changes in technology would create a deskilled work force with overly specialized, noninterchangeable…

Results of a self-report questionnaire indicated that female primary teachers in Australia report moderate levels of global, work, and family stress. Time and workload pressure was the major work stressor, and responsibility for child rearing the major family stressor. Work stress and home stress both impacted on each other. (EV)

This paper discusses representations of women teachers' work in early twentieth-century state schools, especially well-qualified and experienced women who taught in the city of Adelaide, South Australia. While there is a range of discourses that could be applied to these members of the profession, the paper focuses on three discourses in…

The aim of this research was to examine the relationship between exposure to classroom noise and the psychological well-being of full-time teaching staff in 14 preschool settings located across Western Sydney. The participants comprised 25 teachers, each of whom was administered a range of instruments. The results indicated that 40% of teachers…

In this study, 12 preschool teachers in Queensland, Australia were given opportunities to record and describe their work within their specific teaching context, as well as within the wider contexts of the school campus and the educational and social system. Subjects kept a reflective journal each day over a 2-week period, and entries frequently…

This survey was undertaken to build upon and validate understanding of teacher satisfaction and dissatisfaction, orientation to teaching, teachers' values, and teacher health. The purpose of this endeavor was also to develop an instrument suitable for identifying and quantifying the sources and relative strength of factors contributing to teacher…

This paper describes a study that investigated Western Australian senior high schools' cultures. Researchers developed the School Cultural Elements Questionnaire to examine six aspects of school culture: professional values, emphasis on learning, collegiality, collaboration, shared planning, and transformational leadership. A group of 422 teachers…

This study, which comprises part of a larger Western Australian research project on the relationships among teacher stress, perceptions of the school organizational climate, and beliefs in teacher efficacy, involves interviews with six secondary school teachers. The study focuses upon four major variables which may impact upon teachers' ability to…

Teachers' lives and teachers' work remain important areas of educational research today, particularly given the influence of school-based management and the significance of shared leadership in schools. Almost nowhere do the two research fields intersect more closely than in the remote school setting, where teacher turnover is high and the…