About
Biography
Dr Rachael Dwyer (she/her) is an educator and researcher working in teacher education policy, music and arts education, and anti-racist practice. Her scholarship is focused on creating social change, through decolonizing, arts-based approaches to teaching, advocacy and research, and sharing her scholarship in ways that impact policy and practice. Rachael has published extensively for a range of audiences, and has received research funding from International Teaching Artist Collaborative (ITAC) and Alberts | The Tony Foundation. Rachael’s current research is focused in two main areas: how the arts afford opportunities for meaningful embedding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives in school curricula, leading to rich cultural learning and positive education outcomes for students; and ways in which schools can be welcoming and inclusive workplaces for teachers from diverse cultural, linguistic and racial backgrounds.
Rachael is also active in arts professional associations, and has expertise in research communication strategy, which provides a valuable skillset that can be leveraged to enact advocacy and social change. She is on the editorial board for the Australian Journal of Music Education, regularly sits on review panels and committees for national and state-based curriculum authorities, and is the national Vice President of the Australian Society for Music Education.
Teaching areas
- Teaching Arts in Primary School (EDU349 & EDU777)
- Professional Experience: Orientation to the Profession (EDU114)
- Communicating Education Research (EDN704)
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Organisational Affiliations
Highlights - Outputs
Journal article
The crucial need to support culturally diverse students in Australian music classrooms
Published 2023
Australian Journal of Music Education, 55, 1, 48 - 59
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.
Journal article
Published 2021
Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies, 21, 5, 413 - 423
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.
Journal article
Engendering belonging: thoughtful gatherings with/in online and virtual spaces
Published 2020
Gender and Education, 32, 1, 115 - 129
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.
Journal article
Published 2020
Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 48, 5, 572 - 585
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.
Identifiers
Metrics
- 14402 Total output views
- 1222 Total file downloads
- Derived from Web of Science
- 114 Total Times Cited