Purpose: This paper presents a descriptive analysis of elite women's biographical sketches in Who's Who-type collections, now out of copyright, published in Australia in the 1930s--Victoria (1934), New South Wales (1936) and Queensland (1939). It concentrates on information given about their schooling. Design/methodology/approach: The biographical…

This paper details the gendered oppressions of young female teachers in three elite boys' private schools in Australia. Drawing on Foucauldian analytics and the theory of practice architectures, we explore the discourses and practices that work together to silence and disempower female teachers in these schools. There is an unevenness in these…

Among a sample of 2,071 Australian high school students nested within 188 science classrooms, the present study explored the role of science teachers' "load reduction instruction" (LRI; instruction that seeks to reduce cognitive load by appropriately balancing explicit instruction with guided autonomy) in student- and classroom-level…

Professional learning is a significant focus of discussion in most schools but it is not all that common for these conversations to be informed by teachers' needs and expectations. Instead, they tend to be driven by external factors, such as accreditation, mandated professional development requirements and policies. Based on an in-depth study of a…

The purpose of this paper is to report on how the concepts of autonomy and ideology are perceived by scholars, educators and researchers. The project is a preliminarily study to investigate the connections between the language and computer literacies, that would lead to further influences the implications on the development of traditional language…

This paper furthers a discussion about the ways in which idealised versions of gender permeate the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. Specifically, we consider how the written text, layout and images used in 12 Australian private girls school prospectuses function in constructing discourses of…

Developing a conceptual understanding of elementary algebra has been the focus of a number of recent articles in this journal. Baroudi (2006) advocated problem solving to assist students' transition from arithmetic to algebra, and Shield (2008) described the use of meaningful contexts for developing the concept of function. Samson (2011, 2012)…

Research with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, queer, questioning (LGBTQ) and genderqueer (GQ) students has highlighted the links between school-based marginalisation and decreased school outcomes. This paper applies stage-environment fit theory to an investigation of school 'gender climate', the official and unofficial policing of gender…

This phenomenological study explored the lifeworlds of 27 academically advanced elementary students in three very different schools that endeavored to meet their diverse needs. Schools that had established formal social and emotional structures were found to have student populations far more accepting of diversity. As a result, academically…

High fee-charging non-government schools for boys comprise a small but significant sector of the Australian schooling market. In different ways in different historical periods these schools have represented themselves as being concerned with more than just an instrumental or utilitarian education, making both explicit and implicit claims about the…

Over the last decade, education researchers have been concerned with the "impression management" activities of schools in the current climate of school corporatisation. Among these activities is the dissemination of school prospectuses that, far from being merely arbitrary sources of information, are seen as strategic texts that…

This article focuses on the continuing impact of recuperative masculinity politics in the schooling of economically advantaged boys (elite and middle class); yet, it also indicates resistance to this politics. An understanding that the gender order is unstable and that variants of hegemonic masculinity continue to morph in the context of…

This article continues a discussion about the ways in which gender is constructed in the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. While before we focused on the construction and promotion of valorised masculinities in elite private boys school prospectuses (Gottschall, Wardman, Edgeworth, Hutchesson…

The dialogic nature of discourse which stems from the work of [Bakhtin, M. (1994). Speech genres and other late essays. In P. Morris (Ed.), "The dialogic imagination" (pp. 81-87). London: Edward Arnold. (Original work published 1986)] provides important understandings in an investigation into the nature of classroom discourse. Using…

This paper describes an instance of continuing professional development and explores the contribution it might make to the ongoing international dialogue of professional development. It reviews the way features of the current debate on effective teaching, teacher learning and continuing professional development overlap and feed into each other and…