Equity and widening participation (EWP) initiatives in Australia are increasingly reimagined in policy as sites where participants are constructed as competitor-individuals, with education considered only in terms of employability, social mobility and nation-state market competition. In the context of EWP outreach, and with school students in…

Over the last forty years, Australasian researchers have witnessed problems and negative trends relating to academics and students from marginalised groups operating within the higher education sector. This article demonstrates that these researchers have become increasingly aware of the need for more equitable practices in higher education.…

Under neoliberalism, parents as consumers are expected to provide their children with opportunities to get ahead. Governments defend elite schools on the grounds that 'diversity' and 'choice' are in the public interest but not everybody has an equal opportunity to choose. School websites act to promote specific images of schools with opportunities…

Access to quality career advice is important for economic, personal and equity reasons, yet, in many countries around the world, career-education provision is of varying quality and quantity within school settings. Given the inconsistencies in career-education resourcing and provision, what is not clearly understood is how students from low…

This paper investigates readers' recognition of unsourced evidentials in texts in association with critical reading. To this end, we involved four Iranian postgraduate students at an Australian university in a collective case study where each student read four Persian texts and participated in in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Data…

This paper will explore the key findings identified in the five arts discipline-specific papers which comprise this special theme issue. Each of the participant researchers have situated Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts within the context of the "Australian Curriculum: The Arts" and what they characterise as its social…

Young people who graduate from high school are more likely to transition into further study or training, get a job and earn higher wages. However, many young people with the highest needs leave or become excluded from mainstream school settings and some complete their education in alternative education contexts. This paper shares reflections from…

Context/Background: This article provides an introduction to the special issue. It includes an overview of a collection of articles from scholars across the globe who are committed to deepening an understanding of the experiences of trans students and gender-expansive education in schools. The special issue grew out of concerns about the need to…

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…

The ideas of the Cuban 'School of Literacy' are much less well-known in the west than Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This paper is an exploration of the theoretical and practical links between these two historic examples of popular education. The analysis is informed by our direct experience working and undertaking participatory action…

Background/Context: In this article, we draw on Villegas's explanations of beliefs as precursors to social justice dispositions and Mills et al.'s Australian research about social justice dispositions as either affirmative or transformative. These conceptual positions assist us in understanding the beliefs that are derived from applicants'…

The global forces shaping international education requires us to explore how transnational pre-service teachers navigate new and unfamiliar education contexts. Within studies of transnational pre-service teacher education, the voice of the Chinese diaspora remains largely on the periphery. This article aims to redress this paucity by applying…

The power of the coloniser within colonial Australia is clear when we consider how central to the teaching and learning and schooling in Australia is the privileging of Standard Australian English. Prior to 1788, the peoples and the lands of this country were abound with languages. That was until the coloniser exerted their power and insisted on a…

Transcultural doctoral education has become a space to create opportunities for candidates to construct transcultural knowledge from the Global South. Rancière's ideas about the ignorant schoolmaster and the role of dissensus have created cosmopolitan pedagogies in doctoral education. However, the role of history in transcultural doctoral…

This mixed-methods study considers 'permanent expulsionary punishments' (PEP) from government schooling. Analysis considers the literature, available PEP data from two jurisdictions, and attitudinal data from Australian staff, in considering the contribution of policy, agency, and discourse (PAD) to the causes of PEP. It compares attitudes in a…