With schools coming under pressure to perform and produce outcomes, the caring practices of the institution have been increasingly framed around issues of achievement, excellence and outcomes. In this article, we examine how the performativity-driven practices of care impact on the possibilities of social inclusion for marginalised students.…

Fostering critical thinking abilities amongst students is one component of preparing them to navigate uncertain and complex social lives and employment circumstances. One conceptualisation of critical thinking, valuable in higher education, draws from critical theory to promote social justice and redress power inequities. This study explored how…

Educational research often portrays culturally, linguistically and economically disenfranchised (CLED) children's disengagement from school learning as individual behaviour, ignoring the contribution of race, gender, socio-cultural, ethnic and social class factors. This paper analyses a specific community engagement programme in Australia which…

Teacher education programs play a significant role in shaping pre-service English teachers' pedagogy. The incorporation of texts with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual/transgender, intersex, and queer/questioning (LGBTIQ+) perspectives in the curriculum is one mechanism for promoting inclusion as well as a means to address and combat homophobia…

Background: Issues of health and law are closely connected in people with chronic illness but as yet there is little emphasis in current health services funding and planning on establishing formal links between these two important areas. Context: The Mater Young Adult Health Centre and Health Advocacy Legal Clinic partnership offers an example of…

The notion of responsibility makes a significant appearance in a range of Westernised education policy documents concerned with student conduct, welfare and values. While policies may differ in the extent to which responsibility is explicitly defined or generally assumed, most seem to emphasise an ideal social subject who is accountable,…

This article investigates why young people with significant and continuing health conditions can easily be overlooked in education. The Keeping Connected study from Australia revealed much about the complicated lives of young people with chronic illness, and several unanticipated ways that health conditions impacted on education are reported here.…

Commonly, planning for children involves comparing what they know against a curriculum or learning framework which identifies what they should know. Early childhood educators are then expected to create learning opportunities to help fill the gap between these two extremes. In this paper I argue that such an approach does not honour the…

Worldwide awareness is slowly growing that Indigenous histories and perspectives are, or should be, integral to the attributes of global citizens graduating from our universities. In this context, an investigation of how Indigenous perspectives are being taught in Australian universities offered a heretofore underutilized avenue toward getting…

This paper explores how popular ideological discourses within public policy are influencing the views and practices of preservice teachers at a university in Melbourne. The research began by examining how educational success has been historically understood by individuals vis-à-vis government discourse. Three values and four corresponding…

Universities in the early twenty-first century have become captive sites of global capitalism. The role of universities in this neoliberal knowledge system is to produce consumable knowledge for transnational corporations and flexible, knowledge worker-entrepreneurs. It is difficult to see where the university's roles in social justice and equity…

Recent surveys have indicated a worryingly low level of support for democracy among Australian youth and around the world. For example, in the 2017 Lowy Institute Poll, 36% of Australians indicated that, in some circumstances, a nondemocratic government is preferable. Such concerns, while hardly new, have triggered calls for more civic education…

Remote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schools and communities are diverse and complex sites shaped by contrasting geographies, languages, histories and cultures, including historical and ongoing relationships with colonialism, and connected yet contextually unique epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies. This paper explores…

Computer science, like technology in general, is seen as a masculine field and the under-representation of women an intransigent problem. In this paper, we argue that the cultural belief in Australia that computer science is a domain for men results in many girls and women being chased away from that field as part of a border protection campaign…

This unique Australian paper presents a study involving a Western Victorian District High School year nine mathematics class using social justice pedagogy to learn Mathematics. The class was comprised of gifted students, mainstream students and students who had diagnosed learning disabilities, all key foci in Australian Education research. The…