Rachael Dwyer

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.

As a response to the corporatization of the university, nine scholars worked together to create spaces that fostered the possibility of collective dissensus. Using scholarly performative methods, we have sought to push back against the increasing corporate incursions into our institutions of higher learning—the over-valuing of money, measures, and metrics which encroach upon our capacity to think. This one-act ethnodrama below is one of our responses to the new corporatism of higher education. In the generation of this scholarly work, we have created the space and time to reconnect as colleagues and as scholars.

This paper presents the start-up methodology for a project that leverages the opportunities that social media affords to give teachers voice and agency. In response to negative press about teachers in mainstream media, coupled with research that shows that teachers are working hard to meet student academic and wellbeing needs, the researchers employed the assertive technologies of social media and started a campaign to promote the work of pre-service and in-service teachers. The paper presents the theorising behind the start-up methodology for the social media campaign and outlines a response to an identified opportunity. It argues that social media provides new opportunities for professional connectedness, story sharing and collegial support.

Many Australian young people experience mental health concerns, academic and study-related stresses, and socio-economic pressures. Phenomenological research conducted among primary and secondary schoolteachers in four Australian states investigated how teachers manage student wellbeing concerns and academic pressures and stresses. Findings identify key stresses that affect students’ performance and how teachers respond to these stresses to progress student learning. Creating space, finding margin, mitigating and reducing pressures and stresses, while upholding academic rigour, are the salient capabilities described by teachers in this study for simultaneously managing student wellbeing concerns and academic performance.

Conference attendance is a feature of contemporary academic work and an accepted way of building academic identities and networks through the dissemination and promotion of ideas, achievements and research. However, our personal experiences have caused us to problematise the traditional conference and consider alternatives which mitigate its associated problems yet achieve its aims. In this paper, we use collaborative autoethnography to engage in inquiry about the roles of conferences, and their inhabited notions of representation, membership and inclusion/exclusion. We use personal experiences of virtual confer-ring to highlight that many agreed-upon purposes of attending conferences can be effectively achieved through other means. We explore how particular ways of engaging with technologies enable responsive gathering spaces, relational knowledge production, kinship and community; and facilitate the development, and promotion of scholars and scholarship. We offer a view that confer-ring interactions in online/virtual spaces can support collegial, feminist and egalitarian sharing and knowledge exchange.

This paper seeks to explore the lived experiences of teacher educators working in the midst of the current tumultuous and highly regulatory policy landscape. The paper will briefly outline the politics and policies that have profoundly shaped teacher educators' work in Australia over the past 10 years. We write from our own experiences, as three actively-teaching teacher educators, working with a diverse and nontraditional student population in regional Queensland. We seek to illuminate these experiences through a series of narrative (re)presentations, drawing attention to what we see as important questions regarding the enactment of policy reforms, paying particular attention the impacts on teacher educators and preservice teachers.