In recent years a suite of policies and practices that are strongly influenced by efforts to make the work of educators and education providers more accountable, have had a powerful impact across the sector in settings such as Australia. In part, this goes some way to explaining why many working in the teaching profession report being dissatisfied…

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…

This article considers Participatory Arts and sociocultural understandings of justice and praxis through the example of Big "h"ART, an Australian multi-award winning provider where both artists and participants -- often disenfranchised and marginalised young people -- co-create the work (Matarasso, 2018). Enacting social justice…

The contemporary #MeToo moment has led to renewed concern about issues of masculinity and gender justice. This moment provides a strong warrant for critically analyzing different programmes for boys and men in relation to their capacity for gender transformation. This paper presents three such programmes located in Victoria (Australia) as case…

Reflecting an international shift from punitive to more rehabilitative responses to youth offending, many Australian youth justice systems are undergoing significant revision and reform. The urgency of these changes are intensified by longstanding inequities pertaining to the gross overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth…

The education of students with disability has changed dramatically over the past 50 years. Universal declarations and conventions have underpinned many of these changes at both an international level and within Australia. In the early 1970s, the philosophy of John Rawls provided a theory of justice to preserve social justice and individual liberty…

Care in the early years entails more than childcare. This paper has three major sections. In the first section, I begin with an introduction and a quick overview of the ECEC system in Australia. This snapshot of the Australian ECEC system presents a messy map of the care and education system for young children under a neoliberal political economy…

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

The concept of the Citizen Scholar highlights the potential for universities to act as vehicles for social change by supporting the development of active, engaged graduates who are geared to respond to current and future global challenges. This demands a radical shift in teaching towards more interactive pedagogies, which may prove difficult for…

Arts and cultural practice are gaining attention in numerous disciplines and sectors as a vehicle for community building, and to promote wellbeing and social change. In this article we overview the links between community and liberation psychologies, community arts, and public pedagogy. We put forward the notion of community pedagogies to capture…

Concepts of social justice have strong historical roots, while more contemporary notions of social justice coincide with human rights, equity, fairness and facilitation of social change with lasting impact. In higher education, evident examples of social justice include widened university access facilitating a diverse student body and graduate…

In democracies such as Australia and New Zealand, education policy increasingly seeks to foster active citizens who are committed to social justice and change. Whilst many aspects of these initiatives are to be applauded for their commitment to empowering young people, in this paper we describe some of the ambiguities that attend young people's…

Youth with refugee backgrounds face challenges in their journey towards successful integration in Australia. Some challenges relate to macro-level changes occurring in the world of work and some to their transition from an agrarian or industrial society to a post-industrial Western country. Addressing the future career development of youth with…

This research investigates the potential of service-learning to develop a situated, embodied and critically reflective human agency for sustainability. It employs document analysis to review the intended curriculum and the institutional contexts of national and international cases wherein service-learning is a component of pre-service teacher…

A remarkable feature of the sociology of education is its proliferation under a broad gamut of research themes and topics. Understanding the relationship of education to social reproduction and social change are pivotal to the sociology of education, and have fruitfully informed research in fields such as gender and education, vocational education…