Rachael Dwyer

This chapter is a response to the impact of the prevailing neoliberal discourse of corporate managerialism in universities. It contains the authors’ communal experimentation with collaborative gameplay as an intentional and collective form of arts-based activism and intervention focused on subverting and unravelling the finite and managerial games at work in their universities. As a way of giving pause to how the pandemic and related workforce crises have intensified power dynamics and precarious work, authors use arts-based and poetic offerings to reflect on the role of power operating in their work/lives. Their creative methodology provides a site for playful protest and resistance to the competitive individualism and win/lose outcomes so treasured across the academy. It also offers space for authors’ realisation that while they desire to be radical, they are mostly compliant in their academic work. Subsequent insights about their ‘playing with power relations’ but also how they are ‘being played’ by succumbing to managerial demands helps them stop and ‘ask questions’ and ‘think outside the game’.

Recruitment of more culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) teachers is considered a strategy to address the current national teacher shortage and increasing community diversity in Australia. However, the success of this strategy is cast into uncertainty when considering the historical underrepresentation of CALD school leaders and teachers in Australia. We approach this issue through policy analysis and examine two questions: How are CALD teachers represented in Australian policies about teacher workforce and teacher education? How can CALD teachers be better supported through inclusive policymaking? Using Bacchi’s WPR approach, we analyse the problematisations, assumptions, silences, and contradictions in the representations about CALD teachers in Australian federal policies. Findings show a blurred picture and a deficit view of the cohort without genuine understanding of their backgrounds, distinctive contribution and additional challenges they experience. We argue that future policymaking should critically and differentially support CALD teachers towards sustainable careers in Australian schools.

The quality of teachers and teacher-education continues to be a contentious focus of political debate internationally. Many have identified predominantly negative discursive representations of educators in politics, perpetuating myths of sub-standard teacher and teacher-educator quality. Much research has investigated the incentives and effects of these prevailing political discourses, but less researched is how such discourses operate and the textual features that characterise them. We employ critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore some specific textual features that construct teacher quality and initial-teacher-education (ITE) quality as a problem in Australian political texts. Through a micro-level analysis of 14 political speeches, media releases, and debates spanning a ten-year period we identify several recurring presuppositions about teacher ‘quality’. These problematic assumptions include the belief that teacher quality does not meet public expectations, that ITE is inadequate and fails to appropriately select and prepare graduates, and that there is one universal form of ‘best’ teacher and best way to prepare them. We also identify and problematise representations of educators as inept, irresolute parties, dependent upon the guidance of the Government, who is positioned as steadfast and proficient, and perfectly placed to solve the ‘quality problem’. These discursive constructions perpetuate myths surrounding ‘quality’ despite counter-evidence with significant implications for teachers, teacher-educators, and public confidence in the profession.

This paper draws together academic and policy literature around the value of a culturally, linguistically and racially diverse (CLRD) teacher workforce in Australia. While Australia's population is becoming more diverse, the teaching population is significantly less so, with far fewer teachers born overseas and/or speaking a language other than English at home. This paper seeks to address some reasons for this lack of diversity, and the lived experiences of teachers from diverse backgrounds, including the unique contributions CLRD teachers make to their school communities and the challenges they face. We begin by describing how CLRD experiences are understood within the Australian education context, and the contributions made by CLRD teachers to their school communities, the barriers to entry, and the experiences of exclusion and discrimination faced by many CLRD teachers in Australian schools. We conclude by highlighting the critical need to support CLRD teachers, by ensuring that schools are culturally safe and inclusive workplaces for teachers, as a necessary precursor to ensuring the same for students.

The authors investigated the benefits and pitfalls of social media use for schoolteachers. The benefits included opportunities for teacher agency, a resource for teacher wellbeing, and an efficacious communications and marketing tool for schools. However, along with these benefits were associated pitfalls including challenges to esteem and threats to authenticity in the profession. This study employs hermeneutic phenomenology, investigating teachers' lived experiences in the world of social media, and generates theory around how teachers make meaning in social media contexts. A key finding of this study is teachers' desires to be in a professional community outside their employment system. Teachers actively exert agency and professional identity on social media platforms to help and support each other. In this way, social media is shaped by teacher agency and used as a tool for social good.

Australia's cultural and ethnic diversity raises many opportunities, but also challenges, for school music education. There is widespread recognition that the educational needs of all students need to be considered in the educational environment, however there is a paucity of empirical studies that consider the experiences of culturally diverse students in Australian music classrooms. This paper draws attention to the need for a deeper understanding of ways to support culturally diverse students, in the hope of identifying ways forward for music education to become more inclusive. This includes looking at the impacts of the population mismatch between diverse students and an ethnically homogeneous teaching population, the need for a musically broad and inclusive pre-service music teacher education, and the importance of a culturally inclusive music classroom. Key words: cultural and linguistically diverse (CALD), cultural inclusion, music education, music teacher education.

This chapter, authored by the editors of the volume, provides a theoretical frame for the chapters within the book. The chapter begins by exploring the issues that arise when an academic career intersects with caring responsibilities, most intensely felt by (but not limited to) mothers who are primary caregivers. The chapter explores the responsibilities that often confront academic mothers, such as parental leave, negotiating workload, juggling feeding while working, childcare, career progression, managing travel, and more. None of these issues are new, and yet many academic mothers find themselves feeling isolated, with few others within their institutions and networks who have had similar experiences. The chapter then considers the role of social media networks and groups as a form of social support for academic mothers as they navigate these issues. The discussion in the chapter will be considered through a lens of intersectionality, drawing attention to the ways in which these challenges of academic motherhood are magnified for those who identify as people of color, disabled, non-native dominant language speakers, and LGBTQ+.

Features the first collection of research on motherhood and academic careers in digital contexts

Centers diverse voices from graduate students, academics in alt-academic careers and non-tenure track faculty

Provides practical findings that can help academic mothers build online communities