Languages curricula are an important, yet underutilized, site for students' development of intercultural knowledge, awareness and skills in higher education, though there has been little related empirical research. Given the key role teachers play in student learning, in the context of two Australian universities, this study explores language…

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…

This article presents findings from a study that evaluated the impact of an Australian sustainability initiative, with a view to unravelling the realities of teachers' implementation approaches. The paper outlines a study that reviews a government initiative in early years, primary and secondary educational settings that uses the Data Collection,…

Student attrition remains a persistent problem within the Australian higher education sector. Contributing factors include financial, reputational and quality issues, which can pose significant risks for a university's sustainability. Institutional culture is fundamental to decisions student make about withdrawing or remaining in higher education.…

A new survey for measuring students' astronomy and science attitudes that has been validated for use with high school students (with a future intent to expand to middle school and university) is presented. We initially present a short review of instruments in the literature that attempt to measure attitudes in astronomy together with the…

This article supports Bérubé's conclusion regarding the intellectual health of humanities scholarship. However, it argues that the case of "contingent faculty"--or academics with short-term or casual contracts--is in many respects different in Australia to the situation he outlines for the US. Whilst a variety of funding pressures have…

Quality assurance is a major agenda in tertiary education. The casualisation of academic work, especially in teaching, is also a quality assurance issue. Casual or sessional staff members teach and assess more than 50% of all university courses in Australia, and yet the research in relation to the role sessional staff play in quality assurance of…

The Indigenous education agenda in Australia remains focused on mainstream schooling contexts. Although overlooked in Indigenous education discourse, flexi schools appear to be engaging with disproportionately high numbers of Indigenous students and staff. The educative roles of Indigenous peoples in broader Indigenous education discourse are…

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is also known as SARS-CoV-2, has had a great impact in early childhood education programs. Since the effect of this epidemic was new, and little research had been conducted, this volume is devoted to understanding mutual and contemporary themes in the impact of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in early…

Cooperative learning (CL) has a strong research base, but it is underutilised. This can be explained by teachers' reluctance to experiment with pedagogies in an environment increasingly focused on high-stakes testing. Early career teachers (ECTs) need support to be innovative practitioners, particularly with such a complex one as CL. The teacher's…

Discussion of ethical considerations in Australian TESOL began 25 years ago, with arguments about the need for TESOL professionals to be aware of the potentially harmful consequences of their work, the loss of first language proficiency, and even the loss of languages themselves (Williams, 1992, 1995). The intervening quarter of a century has seen…

The changing roles of two primary (elementary) school music teachers are explored in this article, and how these changed roles have impacted on music programmes in their respective schools. Change readiness provides the theoretical framework for investigating the way both teachers responded to their changing roles. The first teacher's role changed…

This paper seeks to address a gap in the literature regarding lay teachers and their role and status within Catholic schools, studies have been carried out investigating this from the perspective of teaching religious and the Catholic Church but have yet to fully investigate this from the lay teachers' perspectives themselves. The period 1940-1980…

Modern school design continues to incorporate openness and irregularity as a means of achieving improvement. Irregular learning environments can act as a catalyst for student unsettling and enable possibilities of teacher practice. We outline a case study of teacher adaptation to irregular environments in a senior school setting. We argue that…

Multicultural Days are a regular event in Australian schools. While they are viewed as a vehicle for cultural inclusion and strengthening community, they have long been critiqued for their avoidance of a more critical engagement with deeper issues around cultural complexity. The intent of this paper is not simply to add to this critique but to…