The Australian Educational Researcher

Narrative studies with migrant teachers offer new perspectives on local educational practices and policies. As part of a study investigating German migrant teachers’ experiences in Australian language classes, this paper uses narratives to evaluate present language education strategies in Germany and Australia. It examines the provision and uptake of foreign languages as a subject area in the two countries and compares existing educational goals and arrangements regarding language education in Germany and Australia. The German migrant teachers’ accounts illustrate how current school policies and the value placed on language proficiency and multilingualism in the two countries’ education are impacting on learning and teaching in the language classroom. The findings have significant potential to inform and stimulate the evaluation of recent national initiatives in language education in Australia.

Recent policy changes connect play in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings explicitly to learning, and to later school-learning outcomes, calling on early childhood (EC) educators to incorporate intentional teaching into their practice. Given these recent policy changes, the purpose of this propositional article is to raise awareness and promote discussion about the current place of play in initial early childhood teacher education programs in Australian universities and the vocational education and training (VET) sector. The article initiates dialogue by contributing a rhizomatically-informed analytical snapshot of publicly available information from course outlines and subject guides in EC initial teacher education (ITE) in 20 Australian universities and the VET sector. This rhizomatically-informed analytical snapshot showed that the word ‘play’ was absent or occurred at relatively low frequency in course and subject descriptive material. The least frequent occurrence was in materials from ITE degree-level courses. While the snapshot does not delve into the full course and subject content (and makes no claims to do so), the rhizomatic methodological approach used leads us to ask whether ‘play’ is being overlooked in the delivery of ITE and VET courses for ECE. Recent quality ratings of ECEC services in Australia support the idea that for beginning and experienced educators, the knowledge base may be less robust than assumed when it comes to combining intentional teaching with play-based learning and the achievement of child outcomes. At the very least, we propose that this warrants further investigation.

This paper presents findings from the validation of a survey instrument constructed in response to what Indigenous parents/carers and students believe constitutes culturally responsive pedagogies that positively influence Indigenous student learning. Characteristics of culturally responsive pedagogies established through interviews with Australian Indigenous parents, community members and students generated themes which were distilled into survey items by a team of Indigenous and other educators. The instrument was then put on trial with 141 teachers for statistical validation. Analyses employing the Rasch model confirmed that the instrument measured a unidimensional latent trait: culturally responsive pedagogy. Seven subscales, content validities of which were determined by a panel of experts, were also confirmed. Results highlighted differences between primary and secondary teachers’ self-reported practice, and important facets of teacher pedagogy in the two different school contexts emerged. Analyses of four of the subscales of the instrument—Indigenous cultural value, self‐regulation support, literacy teaching and explicitness—are presented in the context of current emphases on quality teaching and Indigenous student outcomes. The instrument can be used to measure teachers’ nuances in pedagogy, and the resulting teacher profiles can be used to assist teachers to focus on particular aspects of their pedagogy to meet the needs of their students.

A partnership project was developed in which parents volunteered to support teachers in training years 1-3 children in computer skills at a primary school in a small, low socio-economic community. This article identifies the ways teachers and the ‘tutors’ (as the volunteers were called) understood the value of the project. ‘Being a teacher’ and ‘being a volunteer’ were structured by different forms of social engagement, which in turn influenced the ways individuals were able to work with each other in collaborative processes. We argue that the discursive practices encoded in homeschool-community partnership rhetoric represent ruling-class ways of organising and networking that may be incompatible with those of people from low socio-economic backgrounds. When such volunteers work in schools their attendance may be sporadic and short-term whereas teachers would like ‘reliable’ ongoing commitment. This mismatch wrought of teachers’ and volunteers’ differing everyday realities needs to be understood before useful models for partnerships in disadvantaged communities may be realised.

The aim of this study is to better understand the role of researchers and school leaders in supporting school improvement through data feedback in the context of more responsive forms of accountability in the Netherlands. A process evaluation was conducted concerning the first three years of a collaborative project of a multi-management group of 18 primary schools and a group of researchers. The results show that implementing a system of data feedback starting from a shared vision on the need to learn from data, fostered processes in the school of learning from data for school improvement. The results also show a growing inquiry habit of mind amongst school principals, whereas the researchers learned how to take their role in the collaboration by providing conditions that enhance school improvement from data feedback. The results indicate that the collaborative process can be characterised by several learning functions and thus contribute to a better understanding of how the conditions for data feedback and school improvement can be enhanced.