This essay emerges out of conversations with early career English teachers about their experiences of teaching literature. During those conversations, they reflected on their own literary socialisation, including the reading they did at home and at school, as well as their tertiary education. They then considered what they had learnt as teachers…

Communities of Practice are an increasingly common tool used to support novice academics in higher education settings. Initiated in 2015 at a Western Australian University, TLABs is an acronym for 'Teaching and Learning for Level A and B' academic staff and was designed to build a community of practice to mentor junior academics; help them develop…

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause global upheaval. It had a significant impact on the field of education, with multiple lockdowns changing the nature of teaching. This has been particularly challenging for early career academics (ECA) who already experience heightened stresses in the field of academia. This article explores the impact of…

Teacher educators are an occupational group who appear to suffer from an identity crisis. They do not seem to be able to agree on what their role or professional learning needs are. This situation has dire consequences for the next generation of teacher educators who enter the field in the same rather haphazard and ad hoc way as the ones before.…

Drawing upon data from an Australian study, this book gives voice to beginning teachers navigating their way through their first year of teaching and discovering what it means to be professional learners. The chapters within provide rich insights into the ways in which beginning teachers make sense of the new and challenging experiences they face…

Pedagogy of the Rural is an approach to capture the complexities of rural space and place by challenging simple understandings of what it means to be a teacher in rural settings. Using Harré's positioning theory, Baudrillard's concepts of simulation and simulacra, and Lefebvre's space and economic geographies to form a composite theory through…

First year Australian Initial Teacher Education students are at a high risk of not completing their studies, particularly in the transition into their tertiary studies in first year, and then if achieving graduation, many are likely to leave the profession in the early years. While the reasons vary, it is known that early departure from a career…

This article takes up questions about knowledge and the school curriculum with respect to literary studies within subject English. Its intention is to focus on literary studies in English from the context of current waves of curriculum reform, rather than as part of the conversations primarily within the field of English, to raise questions about…

Despite reported shortages of teachers world-wide, around 50% of teacher education students do not establish themselves in the teaching profession. It is therefore important to confirm the career pathways these students undertake and that teacher education degrees are of benefit to them throughout their career. This paper describes the method used…

Exposure to the various presentations and discussions on that workshop day in 2014 highlighted the largely uncritical way in which I had previously understood the complexity of rurality and its educational and social implications. This suite of papers makes a valuable contribution to better understanding the issues confronting the current state of…

Of issue in this paper are the ways in which different forms of narrative may be of value in undertaking research in potentially thorny situations. The project that inspired this paper saw 30 Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy (PESP) Early Career Academics (ECAs) from more than 20 universities across Australasia, North America and Europe,…

Pre-service teachers need to be prepared to teach in both rural and urban contexts. Preparation to teach multi-grade classes in rural schools is excellent preparation for teaching any class, including urban single-grade classes. Based on our previous research and experience, we designed a unit to prepare our pre-service teachers for the issues…

Transitions from "industry" to "academia" represent a unique type of career change. Although such transitions are becoming increasingly common in Australian universities and beyond, there is no coherent framework for making sense of the multiple and intersecting factors involved in these inter-domain movements. This form of…

Working with beginning teachers to assist them to begin to "think what we do" (Arendt, 1998) in both mainstream and Indigenous education is problematic. This is particularly so because the majority of our teacher candidates, and indeed most of their university lecturers, are positioned close to the racial, social and cultural centre of…

This paper presents a theorised classroom-based account discussing the author's interdisciplinary approach to engaging first-year teacher-education students in self-critical inquiry using creative writing techniques as an entry point into Arts-based three-dimensional storytelling. Via an interpretation of Lacan's "speaking…