EduResearch Matters

EduResearch Matters is a blog for educational researchers in Australia to get their work and opinions out to the general public. Please join us here. We would love to get your comments and feedback about our work.

Are teacher educators really doing a bad job?

initial teacher education

The announcement of  another review into Initial Teacher Education ( ITE) has sparked a flurry of responses from a range of players, even as many of the profound reforms  from the previous Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group  (TEMAG) in 2014 still being bedded down. While there is evidence  to suggest otherwise, a premise that underpins the new review is that initial teacher education programs in Australia are ineffective, and by association, those of us who work in initial teacher education need to lift our game.

Initial teacher education remains  a political football. 

Some see this new review as an opportunity to build on the success teaching educators have built over the past seven years, unions are concerned that professionalism and standards for teachers may be eroded,  others  argue that  universities have dropped the ball  on producing  quality teachers. It is still unclear how contributions can be made to the new review, and whose voices will be listened to, and whose will be ignored? And, most importantly, will those who work in initial teacher education be rendered invisible in the debate? 

This politicisation of what’s important to the profession has a real risk of side-lining professional educators who know, based on their research and scholarly works, what the problems are.  

So, what do teacher educators say about their work?

Coincidentally—or perhaps serendipitously—we have been leading a research project since 2020 where we asked those who work in ITE to share their views about various aspects about their profession. As such, we see our work as very timely for this touchstone moment to ensure the stories of those who work at the chalkface of ITE are heard and seen.  Through  our research  teacher educators provided  postcard style responses (with a combination of both image and short text). We share here some of the words teacher educators from around the world used to describe the complex nature of their work, along with a few  of the images they provided, which also offer  powerful visual metaphors about working in ITE.  

The privilege of shaping the future of education and teaching

Teacher educators spoke of the delightful aspects of working in teacher education, where there is “the opportunity of working with and learning from so many different people – academics, pre-service teachers, professional staff and feeling like you are part of something really important”. 

Several teacher educators relished being involved in shaping the future of education—and by extension—the lives of early career teachers: “It energises me and reminds me of the privilege of being able to shape the future of education in Australia”.

But there are challenges    

Despite being part of a profession with potential to change others’ lives, teacher educators identified some troubling aspects of their work. Several referred to the “increasing control” and a perception that we are undermined in the work we do by the “constant critiques of teacher educators that suggests low standards and [we] don’t care about the profession”.  

It’s not that regulatory oversight of the profession in itself is the problem, teacher educators said; It’s the decreased control by the profession of the profession that is of great concern: “The constant intervention by bureaucrats and policymakers, most who have never been teachers who impose unhelpful demands on the teaching profession and teacher educators.”  

Teacher educators find it troubling that sometimes people outside the profession think we “don’t know what we are doing” and that somehow, “politicians think they know better”. It can be stifling and take teacher education in the wrong direction.”

“The constant government blame and mistrust of teacher educators…and the “countless inquiries that lead nowhere and undermine public respect and confidence”, prompting feelings of teacher education being “such a heavy gig, carrying the weight of expectations of students, universities, communities, employers and governments”.  This perceived distrust, and “not quite knowing what policy imperatives are around the corner and dealing with political influences that are not informed by evidence”, is certainly having an impact on some teacher educators.

Working to change and improve the system from the inside

Despite the draining and debilitating effects of never-ending reviews and public critique, our research shows that teacher educators nevertheless remain hopeful: “We continue to find interesting and creative ways to do things and it gives…hope that we might change the system from the inside”. They carry out their work in ways “in which the meaning and purpose of education emerges out of silence and stillness, rather than the sound and fury”. 

Away from the sound and fury that can be whipped up, working with pre-service teachers and watching them develop, provides a sense of optimism and hope for many teacher educators: “Despite the challenges administratively and in delivering a crowded curriculums the high level of expertise demonstrated by graduates is quietly fulfilling. Classroom readiness is outdone by passionate and gratifying stories from the field”. 

Teacher educators say they are inspired in their work by “the enthusiasm, compassion, courage and energy of many early career teachers [who] have the potential to speak up and not accept the controls that are constantly being placed on the profession. They will need to be strong and tenacious and not accept the blame so often heaped on our profession”.

Where next with the ITE political football game? 

In 1997, a group of teacher educators known as the Arizona Group wrote, “The unseen children in our schools ignite our passion for knowledge, our commitment to passion, and our desire to improve future teachers: we feel a moral obligation to the students of our students”. Our research highlights a similar concept at play in the work of teacher educators—they recognise the privileges and the responsibilities they have to the profession, future teachers and to the students of their students, however they must grapple with the shifting and ever-increasing levels of accountability that are imposed. 

While in the public realm teacher educators are often ‘invisible’ or easy targets for political point-scoring, the snapshots we have shared here highlight the capacity, commitment, and care of those working in the field of teacher education, and their willingness to advocate for their profession, their students, and students in schools.  This may be an opportunity to build on the ‘good work’ in ITE, but it is also high time that the government listened in meaningful and authentic ways to the voices of teacher educators in this latest review of teacher education. 

In summing up, our key moves and ideas in this current game of ITE football are outlined in the following game plan. 

About the study

Over 100 participants who work, or have recently worked, in teacher education—predominantly within Australia but also internationally—were involved in the project, which commenced in September 2020. We used an online survey instrument to invite our participants to share postcard style responses (both image and short text in an approach that mirrors earlier research) in response to prompts about the troublesome, delightful, ambiguous, and hopeful aspects of working in the field of teacher education. The juxtaposition of text with images  through arts-based research (ABR) genres offers opportunities for new and unanticipated meanings. 

AUTHORS

Amanda Belton is a data creative working with education and arts researchers to visualise research information. She works with playful approaches and empathetic design principles to communicate research data visually into the digital realm. Amanda’s work combines an obsession with gifs, a keen interest in animation and mixed reality with interactive information design. Amanda is on Twitter @DataCreative

Robyn Brandenburg is an associate professor and the associate dean, research at Federation University Australia. She researches teacher education and mathematics education and is the immediate past- president of the Australian Teacher Education Association. Robyn is on Twitter @brandenburgr

Ron “Kim” Keamy is an associate professor and teacher education researcher in the Centre for Program Evaluation in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne. His recent research is in the area of educators’ professional learning where he is increasingly using arts-informed research methods, and research into the implementation of a teaching performance assessment—the Assessment for Graduate Teaching (AfGT). Kim is on Twitter @KKeamy 

Sharon McDonough PhD is a researcher in teacher education with advanced disciplinary knowledge of sociocultural theories of teacher emotion, resilience and wellbeing. Sharon brings these to explore how best to prepare and support teachers for entry into the profession, how to support the professional learning of teachers and teacher educators across their careers, and how to support wellbeing in education and in community. Sharon is on Twitter @craftyacademic      

Mark Selkrig is an associate professor in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. He works in the fields of teacher education and creativities and the arts. His research and scholarly work focus on the changing nature of educators’ work, their identities, lived experiences and how they navigate the ecologies of their respective learning environments.Mark is on Twitter @markselkrig

The perils and pressures on teaching world languages

Languages learning, pedagogy, timetabling,

Over the last 30 years, the number of Australian secondary students graduating with a world language (WL) has remained stagnant at around 10%. The steady succession policies, reports, and enquiries commissioned over this period have failed to leave more than a temporary dent in the landscape of languages education in Australia.

Things were not always this way. Australia was once considered a pioneer in language-in-education policy amongst many predominantly English-speaking countries. The 1987 National Policy on Languages was heralded widely as “the first multilingual language policy in an English-speaking country”, and in the 1960s, when studying a language was a requirement to university entry, up to 50% of students graduated with a WL subject.

Since then, “languages continue to struggle to achieve recognition” as a learning area, despite the increasingly recognised multilingual makeup of Australian society. The latest instance of this paradoxical condition is a fee-reduction incentive for university students to study a language, which, in practice, only stands to further weaken the availability of language offerings in many higher education institutions. Overall, the current state of language program provision nationwide remains fragmented and fragile, largely due to a weak language policy environment and the loss of collaborative language policy processes across sectors, states and territories.

In an upcoming paper, we offer the imagery of circularities and ripples as a useful lens for exploring the challenges facing WL education in Australia, and their eroding impact across sectors. We discuss how issues in the sector often transcend the traditional delineation of macro, meso, and micro levels of policy and planning, as challenges go both in circles within the same level (circularity) and flow outwards to other levels (ripples). Thinking of challenges through this lens highlights how siloed approaches to funding, policy and scholarly research all contribute to an ongoing state of inertia.

Rippling circularities in Queensland case study

As in the rest of Australia, the proportion of Queensland students graduating high school studying a WL has consistently lingered – at a rate slightly below the national average (8%). To better understand the challenges and enabling factors around languages education in schools, we interviewed 18 School Principals and Heads of Language departments in 10 South-East Queensland state high schools. From this data, we found many examples of rippling and circular challenges that initiate in the secondary school level but ripple out and circle back to other levels across educational sectors.

One example was the seemingly trivial, administrative area of subject timetabling – which was the most common school-level issue discussed by participants in our study. Within a crowded curriculum, participants reported that WL subjects are often perceived as less crucial, pitted against other non-compulsory courses, or restricted due to limited numbers of qualified teachers. The impact of a seemingly inconsequential administrative decision of subject offerings in the first year of high school has flow-on effects (or as we propose, rippling circularities) for many years to come, not only across the next five years of education and graduation but – when we consider that higher education study and career pathways are strongly influenced by the subject areas studied in secondary schooling – the flow-on effects go well beyond this. The effects ripple so far out they in fact circle back to the beginning: fewer students studying language in high school leads to fewer language students in higher education, and fewer qualified language teachers available to be able to timetable subject offerings.

A second example of the rippling, circular challenges in WL education concerned teachers’ pedagogical skills for engaging students, a challenge that was referenced frequently in interviews. We know from the literature that the perceived or actual shortages of skills around engaging and motivating pedagogies not only have a negative impact on the students’ learning, but also, on that teacher’s own plans to remain in the profession. WL teacher efficacy has also been found to be related to their future vocational plans and whether they plan to remain teaching or leave the profession. Teachers who are more effective in their practice (as measured by the assessment scores of their students) are less likely to leave the teaching profession. Given the existing critical shortage of WL teachers is predicted to become more severe as student numbers increase and current teachers reach retiring age, this challenge is particularly worrying.

‘Staying with’ a troubling reality

At the beginning of this research project, one of the envisaged outputs was the formulation of recommendations or suggestions for future policy enhancement. However, sitting with the troubling realisation that through presumptions of fixability, our own research was at risk of contributing to the reification of such circular narratives in the field, we were inspired by the call to ‘stay with the trouble’, that is, to disinvest ourselves from the need to find solutions, and to sit instead with the discomfort of irreducible complexities that characterise the current Australian (and worldwide) eduscape.

This decision led us to use our Queensland data as a case study enabling us to illustrate what we have come to term the “rippling circularities” of the deeply entrenched challenges facing WL education. Here, we offer a number of questions for researchers, practitioners and policy makers to open up to new, generative conversations:

  • How may our practices and research foci be complicitly contributing to the perpetuation of various rippling circularities?
  • How may our research help change these narratives to break free from these silos?
  • What are our ethical responsibilities (within languages and education departments) in researching these issues in a way that can open up networks and honest conversations across sectors to effect an impact on policy?
  • How can language educators and staff in positions of leadership in primary and secondary schools contribute to these conversations?

Acknowledging our roles and responsibilities in the perpetuation of these cycles is but a first step in engaging productively with the possibilities of leveraging these circularities. 

From left to right:

Adriana R. Díaz is Senior Lecturer in the Spanish and Latin American Studies Program at The University of Queensland’s School of Languages and Cultures. Her research centres on learning more about how insights from critical pedagogy and decolonial critique can help us un/re-learn the ways in which we engage with languages education. She is author of Developing Critical Languaculture Pedagogies in Higher Education: Theory and Practice (2013, Multilingual Matters), co-editor (with Maria Dasli) of The Critical Turn in Language and Intercultural Communication Pedagogy (2017, Routledge) and co-author (with Chantal Crozet) of Tertiary Language Teacher-Researchers Between Ethics and Politics – Silent Voices, Unseized Spaces (2020, Routledge).

Marisa Cordella is Associate Professor in Spanish linguistics at The University of Queensland’s School of Languages and Cultures. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from Monash University, Australia. Her research expertise and postgraduate supervision lie primarily in the field of discourse analysis: medical communication, intercultural and intergenerational communication, ageing across cultures, language education and translation studies. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, authored book chapters and two books on medical discourse (one sole and one co-authored), and recently published a co-edited book on intergenerational and intercultural communication.

Naomi Fillmore is a PhD candidate and Research Assistant at The University of Queensland’s School of Languages and Cultures. She is a language and education researcher and practitioner, with experience spanning government, non-government, and academic organisations. Her research focuses on the role of language in education policy, programming, and assessment in the early years. She has published in several edited volumes, including the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education.

A Brief History of ‘The Reading Wars’

Phonics, Reading, teaching reading, ,

The so-called ‘Reading Wars’ have a long history within reading education. They began as a series of competing pedagogies, ‘Method A’ versus ‘Method B’ arguments, which were hotly defended and/or attacked by advocates and adversaries within the professional bodies representing reading education and resurface regularly, often fueled by media’s tendency to polarise the debate.

In the 1950s (when I began teaching) these debates involved a choice between two pedagogies, one based on a ‘look-and-say’ or ‘whole word’ based on visual-recognition-of-word-shapes principle, the other based on a transform-the-visual-signs-to-speech-sounds principle or ‘phonics’.

The debates about these two pedagogies can be traced back to a German educator, Professor Friederich Gedike.

who in 1779 wrote an essay in which he argued that reading instruction should go from whole words to the parts of these words, i.e. the letters. Since that time the debate between whole-to-part advocates and part-to-whole advocates has been a recurring feature of reading education. 

In the modern era this debate was re-ignited with the 1967 publication of Chall’s classic volume, Learning to Read: The great debate. Although Chall renamed the two approaches as ‘code-based’ versus ‘meaning-based’, reading pedagogy was still framed as an either/or choice between two theoretical options. By ‘code-based’ Chall meant the part-to-whole process of transforming the visual display to sounds and blending these sounds together to make words. By ‘meaning-based’ she meant the ‘whole-to-part’ process of accessing meaning directly from the visual display without first accessing sound.  Despite the renaming of the issue, it was essentially a continuation of the ‘look-say’ vs ‘phonics’ debate. By the seventies and eighties this code-based vs meaning based debate had morphed into a series of variant strains of the same dichotomy such as ‘literature-based’ versus ‘skills-based’, ‘implicit’ versus ‘explicit’, ‘holistic’ versus ‘fragmented’ and ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’. 

The term ‘whole-language’ as a variant of ‘meaning-based’ first appears in the literature in 1992 in a Canadian publication, Whole Language Evaluation for Classrooms by Oran Cochran. It quickly spread to the USA where ‘whole-language’ versus ‘phonics’ became the main way of describing the issue. However, the term ‘whole language’ doesn’t appear in the Australian reading community till around the mid-nineties.

Such a long history means that today’s teachers are heirs to a long tradition of (often acrimonious and unhelpful) debate about pedagogical methods, which are presented either as bi-polar opposites, or positions along a bi-polar continuum of some kind. It’s as if the field of reading has, for a long time, suffered from something analogous to serious bi-polar disorder.

From the late nineties to the present time these dichotomies seem to have coalesced into something more complex. They are no longer perceived as ‘debates’. Rather they seem to have assumed the stature of ‘wars’. 

Thus, we now have the so-called ‘reading (or literacy) wars’. Instead of debating the pros and cons of a simple bi-polar dichotomy, the profession seems to be immersed in an all-out ‘take-no-prisoners’ war often led by psychologists and other experts in related disciplines standing outside the classroom.

The use of this military metaphor first appeared in an article entitled, From a ‘Great Debate’ to a Full-Scale War: Dispute over teaching reading heats up,by Robert Rothman in the 1990 edition of the journal, Education Week. It was quickly picked up by a Californian grandmother named Marion Joseph. She claimed to be concerned that her grandchildren were being denied access to becoming literate because Chall’s research was being ignored by the Californian system. With the help of a Californian superintendent, Bill Honig, she mounted a relentless media campaign using the term ‘reading wars’ to force the Californian government to mandate a phonics first program in public schools. This notion of ‘reading wars’ began appearing in the Australian context in the mid to late 90s and has ebbed and flowed since then. Most recently in Australia the ‘wars’ have been characterised as ‘synthetic phonics’ versus ‘balanced literacy’ although ‘balanced literacy’ has often been erroneously conflated with ‘whole language’.

A consequence of these ‘reading wars’ was the demand that only pedagogies, which are ‘evidence-based’, or ‘scientifically derived’ should be applied in the nation’s literacy classrooms. However, invoking ‘science’ and ‘evidence-based research’ as a way to reduce the theoretical confusion surrounding literacy education doesn’t seem to have helped much.There are quite distinct views of ‘good science’ and ‘good evidence’ held within the education research community. All that seems to have happened is that a new round of argument and debate about whose science and whose evidence should be considered, has begun. 

Such a state of affairs begs the following question: Why is reading education so pedagogically confused? The answer to this question lies in history as well as in different understandings about what reading is.

My research and the hundreds of research papers written on this topic have led me to believe that the notion of ‘teaching phonics effectively’ is contingent on how one defines, thinks, and talks about such concepts as ‘effective reading’ and ‘effective learning’. Until the community comes to some agreement on what these terms actually entail in the 2020s and beyond, the same theoretical squabbles will continue to plague education. Such theoretical arguments are not helpful for the teaching profession or the teaching of reading. To date, not enough attention has been paid to educators’ experiences and their evidence in helping children learn to read in classroom contexts.

Brian Cambourne is principal honorary fellow at the University of Wollongong and foundation patron of the Foundation for Learning and Literacy. He is a lifelong researcher of literacy and learning. He completed his PhD at James Cook University, was a post-doctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Fulbright Scholar.

References

Australian Literacy Educators Association, Summary of the ALEA Submission to the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy. Accessed at: www.alea.edu.au/ 

Chall, J. (1967). Learning to read: the great debate. New York: McGraw Hill.

Cochran, O. (1992). Whole language evaluation for classrooms. Accessed at:

https://www.loot.co.za/index/html/index2784.html

Ewing, R. (ed). (2006) Beyond the reading wars. A balanced approach to helping children learn to read. Primary English Teaching Association Australia, Newton.

Paisey, D. Learning to read: Professor Friederich Gedike. Primer of 1791. Accessed at: https://www.bl.uk/eblj/1978articles/pdf/article11.pdf

Rothman, R. (1990). From a ‘Great Debate’ to a Full-Scale War: Dispute over teaching reading heats up,Education Week. Accessed at: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/from-a-great-debate-to-a-full-scale-war-dispute-over-teaching-reading-heats-up/1990/03

Snyder, I. (2008) The literacy wars: why teaching children to read is a battleground in Australia. Allen & Unwin, Sydney.

The Reading wars are over: Whole language vs. Phonics Accessed at: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Reading_wars_are_over:_Whole_language_vs._Phonics 

To cite this paper: Cambourne, B. (2021) A brief history of the ‘reading wars’ https://foundationforlearningandliteracy.info 

The cover image: George Hodan has released this “Child And Books” image under Public Domain license.

Six things schools need to do now to stop gendered violence

emotions and gender in education, respectful relationships, social and emotional competence, teaching gender respect, ,

Wesley College refers sexual assault and harassment complaints to police (ABC News, March 2021)

Abuse Scandal Shocks St Kevin’s College (Star Observer, February, 2020)

‘Do they even know they did this to us?’: why I launched the school sexual assault petition (The Guardian, 15 March, 2021)

Outrage over Victorian high school’s rape culture apology (NineNow, April, 2021)

If recent media headlines are anything to go by, schools are floundering in their efforts to address the prevalence and severity of gender-based violence. For some school communities, there seems to be a general sense of surprise or shock that sexual harassment and assault happens in their schools. For others, well-intentioned attempts to address these issues have been met with strong backlash. The reality in schools is far more complex. Most schools are inclusive spaces, and many principals and teachers are doing great equity work. But this work is difficult.

Schools have long been charged with addressing gender-based violence and it has always been fraught with contention and backlash. This is perhaps because the spectrum of gender-based violence has been so normalized that many find it difficult to see and name – whether through private school boy sexist chants, sexist language or jokes, inappropriate touching to more serious sexual harassment and assault. For a long time, the sexual harassment and abuse experienced by girls and female teachers in schools was trivialized and minimized. Perhaps now, with the strength and power of young women’s voices such as Chantel Contos, Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame and the sustained public and media interest in gender justice issues (post #MeToo) there will be real change in how schools are supported to address gender-based violence.

OurWatch in partnership with the Department of Education and Training (DET) and Deakin University has recently released the findings of an evaluation into the implementation of a whole school approach to Respectful Relationships Education (RRE) in 18 primary schools in Victoria and Queensland. The findings of this mixed methods study, drawing on survey, interviews, and classroom observation data, show promise in the potential of this program to begin shifting gendered attitudes in Year 1 and 2 students (on survey items measuring change in attitudes associated with which gender should perform stereotypically masculine and feminine jobs and activities) and to support positive behaviours, as one student commented in an interview:

‘“Respectful relationships” is about friendship, teamwork, helping, being nice, you get to know more people, stop fighting, stop bullying, fewer rude words, more teamwork, not being mean, how people feel, being nice and not mean, to listen, “do things that help people, from being angry to happy”.’

Findings also show promise in the program’s potential to support teachers to critically reflect on the gender bias in their teaching and relations with students: 

‘I don’t want to admit this but … when the boys are fighting at lunchtime and the parents are like, why are they doing this and I just – I’m like oh, sometimes boys will be boys.’ (Teacher)

‘It’s not necessarily that you want to have attitudes which are discriminatory or mean but it’s been so deeply seeded that it comes up without being conscious. It’s not necessarily a conscious thing that happens. Only by people sitting and going well, do I think that? Why do I think that? Where would I have got that idea from? That reflectiveness is not something that is a naturally occurring thing for the majority of people.’ (Leader)

These are important findings that build on decades of research that argues the significance of 1) schools working with young children to challenge their gendered attitudes and behaviours; 2) teachers developing critical awareness of how gender informs their teaching and 3) a whole school approach to gender inclusion and respect. 

What is Respectful Relationships Education?

The Royal Commission into Family Violence (Victoria) conducted in 2016 recommended that respectful relationships education (RRE) be mandated in every school from prep to year 12 (Royal Commission 2016). In the State of Victoria, RRE is currently being rolled out in over 1850 government, catholic and independent schools. 

RRE is a primary prevention program for schools that seeks to prevent violence before it occurs. It is based on evidence that gender-based violence is driven by gender inequality. Its major focus is on challenging and finding alternatives to the rigid gender roles that support gender inequality. RRE’s whole school approach supports schools to review all aspects of their operation and culture in relation to gender inclusion and respect. 

The gender inequality that leads to gender-based violence permeates all institutions, including schools. Schools are microcosms of society and thus reflect its biases and injustices. Gender and heteronormative bias are evident in school leadership positions and practices, staffing roles and responsibilities, teachers’ gendered perspectives and practice, what knowledge is valued in the curriculum, what sports are most revered, how students are disciplined and how they relate to each other. In order to redress the gender inequalities that lead to gender-based violence, these areas of bias in schools must be addressed. 

The findings of the RRE evaluation in primary schools

The findings of the primary school pilot resonate with the findings of a similar secondary school pilot of RRE led by OurWatch in 2015 – which highlighted that effective implementation of RRE requires:

  1. comprehensive and ongoing professional learning for teachers to deliver respectful relationships education,
  2. an explicit focus on addressing the drivers of gender-based violence in the curriculum,
  3. strong and long-term commitment to the program from the school community (i.e., teachers, school leadership and parents),
  4. policy and resource support from education systems, 
  5. school readiness to implement and integrate the program into school structures and practice, 
  6. support and planning to monitor the ongoing progress of the program, 
  7. support for staff to respond to disclosures of violence from students and staff.

Key considerations for schools to support RRE

There are six parts to a whole school approach to respectful relationships education: 1) school culture and environment, 2) leadership and commitment, 3) professional learning, 4) support for staff and students, 5) teaching and learning and 6) families and communities. Gender bias and discrimination can be found in all of these areas. It is in these key areas that RRE schools are concentrating their efforts to identify and transform gender-based violence. Some important considerations within each area are: 

  1. School culture and Environment: How is the school culture and environment gendered? How does gender (and other intersecting forms of identity) inform what is valued (e.g., curriculum, extra-curricular activities) and who is valued (which teachers, which students)? How is resistance and backlash against efforts for gender reform articulated and managed? 
  2. Leadership: How is leadership gendered? How does gender (and other intersecting forms of identity) inform who makes decisions and how are they made? How does gender inform staffing decisions?  
  3. Professional Learning: How are leaders and teachers professionally supported in their gender justice work, e.g., to understand concepts such as gender, heteronormativity, gender lens, gender equality/inequality and the complexities of gender-based violence (e.g., its intersections with poverty, Indigeneity, ethnicity, sexuality, disability etc.), and how these concepts are translated in their leading, teaching and relations with students?
  4. Support for Staff and Students: What processes and support are in place for staff and student survivors of gender-based violence? 
  5. Teaching and Learning: How is teaching and learning gendered? Is there an explicit focus across the curriculum on identifying and challenging gender stereotypes and biases? Is there a critical awareness amongst staff and students about their own gender and other identity biases and how they impact on their relations with others?
  6. Families and Communities: How does the school connect with the broader school community including families, local services and sporting clubs to challenge gender bias? 

Gender-based violence is shockingly prevalent but it is also preventable. While schools should not be positioned as a panacea for this social ill, they can make a difference. They can be sites of resistance and transformation of gender-based violence towards a more equal and just society.

Amanda Keddie is a Professor of Education at Deakin University. Her research examines the processes, practices and conditions that can impact on the pursuit of social justice in education settings. Amanda’s qualitative research has been based within the Australian, English and American schooling contexts. Follow her on @amandamkeddie

Image by Adobe Stock

The terrible trap of temporary teaching: I need to do more to get a job next year

early career teachers, talking about teachers, talking about teaching, Teachers' work, Temporary teachers, , , , , , ,

These days, there’s a new kind of teacher in NSW public schools: the ‘temporary’ teacher. 

The category of temporary employment, a version of fixed-term contract work, was introduced in 2001. The category has been steadily growing while the proportion of permanent positions has declined and casual positions have remained relatively stable, as indicated in Figure 1 below. Today, about 20% of NSW public school teachers are in temporary positions. 

Figure 1: Permanent, Casual and Temporary union members, 1970-2017 (percent of total)

Source: NSWTF Annual Reports, 1970-2017. Data for 2004 are not published.

While a teacher employed in a casual capacity is employed day-to-day, a teacher employed in a temporary capacity is employed full-time for four weeks to a year, or part-time for two terms or more. Temporary teachers tend to be newer teachers – but beyond this, there is  very little known about how this category of employment is experienced. 

Our research, recently published in the Journal of Educational Administration and History with a free version available here, drew on a large state-wide survey on teacher workload conducted in 2018 – you can find the full report here. We disaggregated the data from more than 18,000 teachers to identify 3,689 temporary teachers and examine both quantitative and qualitative data on how their experiences of workload might be similar or different to that of teachers in permanent and casual roles.  

This is what we found.

Quantitatively, teachers in temporary roles report similar levels of workload to their permanent counterparts, both of which are considerably higher than those in casual positions. Teachers in temporary roles estimated working an average of 56 hours per week during term time, compared to 57 hours for those in permanent positions and 40 hours for those employed as casuals. In addition, while 72% of permanent teachers and 70% of temporary teachers report that their job ‘always’ requires them to ‘work very hard’, this is only the case for 58% of casual staff members. Similarly, while 66% of permanent staff members and 62% of temporary staff members report never or rarely having enough time to complete work tasks, this is only the case for 40% of casuals. We note that in these figures, numbers are still high for casual staff – just not as high as they are temporary or permanent teachers.  

Yet interestingly, teachers in temporary positions feel like they work harder than those in permanent ones. As one respondent put it, ‘I work as hard if not harder than many permanent teachers’.  

This feeling of working harder may be due to the temporary, and more precarious, nature of their roles. These teachers know that their continued employment depends on ‘impressing’ those around them, particularly the school principal. There was a sense of an ‘unspoken pressure for [temporary] teachers to ‘do more’ in order to heighten their chances to get work for the next year’. This need to impress was not, however, felt by those in permanent positions. This appeared to be leading, for some teachers, to tension between staff in different employment categories. As one respondent recalled, ‘two permanent teachers have even stated, “I don’t have to do anything else, I am already permanent”’; another described experiences of permanent teachers ‘prey[ing]’ on temporary teachers by ‘shift[ing] work’ to them. 

An additional dimension of our investigation arose when we looked at the differences between men and women teachers in temporary, permanent and casual roles. More men reported being in permanent employment than women, with women being much more likely to be temporary than men. With the tendency of teachers to be predominately women, we found that, in fact, there are more temporary teachers than there are the total number of men teaching in NSW public schools. Our data also suggest that women may also stay longer as temporary teachers than men do, with potential implications for future career opportunities and leadership positions in schools. 

Finally, it is worth noting that, in our data, only 27% of those in temporary employment were working in that capacity by choice.

Our findings would imply that something should be done about the growing category of temporary employment in NSW public schools. Addressing this issue has, in fact, been one of the recommendations of the recently released ‘Valuing the Teaching Profession’ report of the ‘Gallop Inquiry’. Working out ways to attract new teachers is also part of the terms of reference of a recently announced review of initial teacher education. 

We would also argue that, at system level, the conversion of, in particular long-serving women temporary teachers into permanent employment would be a good thing, signalling respect for the work they do and building benefits for the profession, schools and ultimately students. A widespread reduction in the overall proportion of temporary employees, as well as work hours and workload demands, is also needed. 

While teaching is a cognitively, emotionally, and physically strenuous job, historically it has relied upon its reputation as a secure, permanent, and stable career to attract strong candidates to the profession. As pay rates are now notably low, compared to other professions with equivalent levels of education, growing problems with the security, workload and work conditions of teachers become even more critical. Our new teachers, many of whom are temporary, will be tomorrow’s school leaders, and are central to the provision of public education. To maintain a strong teaching profession, it is important that we look after them.

From left to right:

Rachel Wilson is Associate Professor at The Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms. Rachel is on Twitter @RachelWilson100

Susan McGrath-Champ is Professor in the Work and Organisational Studies Discipline at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia. Her research includes the geographical aspects of the world of work, employment relations and international human resource management. Recent studies include those of school teachers’ work and working conditions.

Meghan Stacey is a former high school English and drama teacher and current lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. Meghan’s primary research interests sit at the intersection of sociological theory, policy sociology and the experiences of those subject to systems of education. Meghan’s PhD was conferred in April 2018. Meghan is on Twitter @meghanrstacey

Mihajla Gavin is a lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, and has worked as a senior officer in the public sector in Australia across various workplace relations advisory, policy and project roles. Mihajla’s research is concerned with analysing the response of teacher unions to neoliberal education reform that has affected teachers’ conditions of work. Mihajla is on Twitter @Mihajla_Gavin

Scott Fitzgerald is an associate professor and discipline lead of the People, Culture and Organisations discipline group in the School of Management at Curtin University. Scott’s research presently covers two main areas: the changing nature of governance, professionalism and work in the education sector.

How to turn students into active citizens

civics and citizenship education, Critical thinking, democracy in Australia, school-community partnerships


Australians are on the streets, protesting in large numbers about their displeasure with the government’s inaction on women’s rights and safety. This follows protests across Australian (and the world) in support of #BlackLivesMatter, as well as the #March4OurLives movement in the US. 

Young people, too, are in the vanguard of environmental movements, most notably the School Strike for Climate. While some might argue that these events presage a healthy and vibrant democracy – and I would agree – what is notable about these examples is that they took place despite the failure of civics and citizenship education (CCE) in Australia, not because of it (and often despite the condemnation of politicians who suggested young people’s place was in the classroom, and not in a protest march).

These movements are diverse and it would be foolish to suggest that there is much commonality in their practices or causes (Castells, 2015), but it certainly appears that people around the world are increasingly likely to take to the streets to communicate their displeasure. 

There is an increase in civic activism and protest in some countries but elsewhere, for example the storming of the US Capitol in December 2020, showed more than the usual discontent with the status quo of democracy. The rise of authoritarian governments around the world, and the move towards what is sometimes called democratic deconsolidation (Keane, 2020) – long considered not possible in established democratic nations- is a cause for some concern.

In many democratic countries around the world, it appears democracy itself is teetering on the edge. Some research has indicated that, more than the usual discontent with politicians, young people are increasingly unhappy about democracy as a system of government, and favour more authoritarian approaches (Foa & Mounk, 2016). While these findings are disputed (see, for example, Alexander & Welzel, 2017), it certainly lends focus to what appears to be an era of increasing discontent with democratic institutions and processes. 

The recent National Assessment Program – Civics and Citizenship (NAP-CC) results provide further evidence for concern about the quality of civics and citizenship education in Australia. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the recent results is how unsurprising they are – certainly, the poor results from the sampled students in terms of civic knowledge and literacy are part of an ongoing trend stretching back more than a decade. Ultimately, we must confront the prospect that current models of civics and citizenship education are not delivering the civic literacy outcomes which we expect. If less than half of Year 10 students were literate or numerate – as they are in civics and citizenship education –  there would be an outcry. Yet that is exactly what we are facing with students and their civic literacy – and that is despite the Melbourne Declaration and the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Declaration emphasising the important role of active and informed citizens/ members of the community within the Australian schooling framework. 

So what is going wrong with civics and citizenship education in Australian schools? In the past, significant amounts of money have been invested in teacher professional development, and high quality resources have also been developed, such as Discovering Democracy. Excellent programs and practitioners have been celebrated, and third party organisations like the Australian Electoral Commission, the Museum of Australian Democracy and The Whitlam Institute have also developed their own programs aimed at engaging young people and teaching them about their role as citizens. Yet none of these have made any significant change to the level of civic literacy.

The reasons for this failure are varied, ranging from concerns about the qualifications and civic knowledge of teachers, to the nature of the content within the Australian Curriculum. In New South Wales, for example, CCE is increasingly being pushed to one side, either to make room for more focus on History and Geography, cross curriculum priorities and general capabilities, or more focus being placed on literacy and numeracy programs aimed at arresting Australia’s slide in international rankings. There are also more demands for teachers to address other topics – like domestic violence, and road safety, and others.

This is not to say that any of these are less important than CCE; indeed, a case can be made for all of them and their role in Australian schooling. But curriculum timing is a finite resource, as is government funding. Any CCE program that is going to be successful needs to be one that is cost-efficient and scalable. The current CCE curriculum is content-heavy, and in many aspects focuses more on a history of Australia’s democratic institutions than on the practice of being a citizen in Australia in the 21st century. 

The reason for this rests on a limited conception of the purpose of civics and citizenship education. There is a fundamental question at the heart of CCE which sets it apart from other subjects within the school curriculum. The question is this: should children learn about their role as citizens of the future, and the mechanisms and institutions that support this citizenship by passively storing up knowledge until they formally become citizens? Effectively, are they ‘citizens-in-waiting?’ 

Or should students instead learn to become active citizens by adopting the practices of citizens, within their schools and communities, from a young age – that is, ‘citizens-by-doing’? Many current models of civics and citizenship education lean towards the former – and not surprisingly, as it is easier to manage, teach, resource and assess. But, in the interests of Australian democracy, it’s worth asking: what might the latter look like in an educational setting?

These were questions that motivated my research into civics and citizenship education. As a high school teacher, I’d long been the teacher to organise groups like the Student Council, or the Environmental Club. I was interested in helping students become active in their schools and communities – and I was frustrated at what I felt was a curriculum that was often tokenistic, certainly out of date and, perhaps most concerningly, did little to engage young people in the topics that mattered to them, or equipped then with the skills to advocate for change.   

This challenge informed the development of Justice Citizens, a model of civics and citizenship education inspired by Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) conception of justice-oriented citizenship. Delivered in a Western Sydney high school, for one hour per week over a period of 6 months, the Year 9 students who took part in Justice Citizens examined ‘justice’ – or the lack of it – within their local communities, interviewing local community members, working with journalists and filmmakers, and then presenting their findings, in the form of short films, back to the community. They made films about refugees, about climate change and about teenage pregnancy – and lots more!

The research I undertook as part of Justice Citizens led to the development of what I have described as Justice Pedagogy, a framework for developing Active Citizenship amongst young people. Unlike other models of civics and citizenship education, it embraces a surplus model of young people, privileging their concerns and extant knowledge as a starting point for the development of civic action and activism. 

In this way, it is much more than teacher-centred or even student-centred; indeed, I describe it as student-led, with students in this case determining what is meant by justice, and making creative decisions about how best to shoot, edit and publish their film. It is a pedagogy that is unashamedly experiential, arguing that the best way to become an active citizen is to start being one, and in doing so, it supports a much broader definition of ‘citizen’ than a strictly socio-political one. Indeed, this definition of citizen is more in keeping with the ‘members of the community’ phrase from the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Declaration. And the focus is on action- something that I describe as ‘action-oriented’ learning. For Justice Citizens, unlike the current CCE syllabus, it is not enough to simply plan campaigns or community education programs: students must be involved in them, advocating for systemic change – for the simple fact that this is one of the best predictors of future civic engagement.  In order to do this, schools should seek to make use of the resources available within their local communities, via school-community partnerships. Perhaps even more importantly, though, by engaging in these activities, in the real world, and working with diverse members of the community, students can practice the kind of critical literacy that is increasingly becoming important in our information saturated and algorithmically-mediated world.  

The advantages of Justice Citizens are significant. Unlike other models of CCE, there is no need for significant background knowledge regarding different civic institutions and knowledges. There is also no need to spend significant amounts of time and resources trying to make the vagaries of the democratic process engaging for all students. Instead, Justice Citizens seeks to leverage the networks and resources available within a school’s community to create an environment in which young people can develop their knowledge of civics and citizenship by engaging in the very practice of active citizenship.

References

Alexander, A. C., & Welzel, C. (2017). The myth of deconsolidation: Rising liberalism and the populist reaction. Journal of Democracy. Available here: https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/online-exchange-democratic-deconsolidation/

Castells, M. (2015). Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the Internet age. John Wiley & Sons.

Foa, R. S., & Mounk, Y. (2016). The danger of deconsolidation: The democratic disconnect. Journal of Democracy, 27(3), 5-17.

Keane, J. (2020). The New Despotism. Harvard University Press

Dr Keith Heggart is an early career researcher with a focus on learning and instructional design, educational technology and civics and citizenship education. He is currently exploring the way that online learning platforms can assist in the formation of active citizenship amongst Australian youth. Keith is a former high school teacher, having worked as a school leader in Australia and overseas, in government and non-government sectors. He has also worked as an organiser for the Independent Education Union of Australia, and as an independent Learning Designer for a range of organisations. He tweets @keithheggart

Dr Heggart’s book, Activist Citizenship Education (2021) is available through Springer. 

Why appeasing Latham won’t make our students any more remarkable

ACARA, data collection by schools, educational reform, NAPLAN, School attendance, school success model, , ,

Are our schools making the kids we think we should? The tussle between politics and education continues and Latham is just the blunt end of what is now the assumed modus operandi of school policy in Australia. 

Many readers of this blog no doubt will have noticed a fair amount of public educational discussion about NSW’s School Success Model (SSM) which, according to the Department flyer, is ostensibly new. For background NSW context, it is important to note that this policy was released in the context of a new Minister for Education who has openly challenged educators to ‘be more accountable’, alongside of an entire set of parliamentary educational inquiries set up to appease Mark Latham, who chairs a portfolio committee with a very clear agenda motivated by the populism of his political constituency.  

This matters because there are two specific logics used in the political arena that have been shifted into the criticisms of schools: the public dissatisfaction leading to accountability question (so there’s a ‘public good’ ideal somewhere behind this), and the general rejection of authorities and elitism (alternatively easily labelled anti-intellectualism.)  Both of these political concerns are connected to the School Success Model.  The public dissatisfaction is motivating the desire for measures of accountability that the public believes can be free of tampering, and ‘matter’.  Test scores dictating students’ futures, so they matter, etc. The rejection of elitism is also embedded in the accountability issue. That is due to a (not always unwarranted) lack of trust.  That lack of trust often gets openly directed to specific people. 

Given the context, while the new School Success Model (SSM) is certainly well intended, it also represents one of the more direct links between politics and education we typically see.  The ministerialisation of schooling is clearly alive and well in Australia.  This isn’t the first time we have seen such direct links – the politics of NAPLAN was, afterall, straight from the political intents of its creators.  It is important to note that the logic at play has been used by both major parties in government.  Implied in that observation is that the systems we have live well beyond election cycles.

Now in this case, the basic political issues how to ‘make’ schools rightfully accountable, and at the same time push for improvement. I suspect this are at least popular sentiments, if not overwhelmingly accepted as a given by the vast majority of the public.  So alongside from general commitments to ‘delivering support where it is needed, and ‘learning from the past’, the model is most notable for it main driver – a matrix of measures ‘outcome’ targets.  In the public document that includes targets are the systems level and school level – aligned.  NAPLAN, Aboriginal Education, HCS, Attendance, Students growth (equity), and Pathways are the main areas specified for naming targets.

But, like many of the other systems created with the same good intent before it, this one really does invite the growing criticism already noted in public commentary. Since, with luck, public debate will continue, here I would like to put some broader historical context to these debates, take a look under the hood of these measures to show why they really aren’t fit for purpose for school accountability purposes without far more sophisticated understanding of what they can and can not tell you.

In the process of walking through some of this groundwork, I hope to show why the main problem here is not something a reform here or there will change.  The systems are producing pretty much what they are designed to do.  

On the origins of this form of governance

Anyone who has studied the history of schooling and education (shockingly few in the field these days) would immediately see the target-setting agenda as a ramped up version of scientific-management (see Callaghan, 1962), blended with a bit of Michael Barber’s methodology for running government (Barber, 2015), using contemporary measurements.

More recently, at least since the then labelled ‘economic rationalist’ radical changes brought to the Australia public services and government structures in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the notion of measuring outcomes of schools as a performance issue has matured, in tandem with the past few decades of an increasing dominance of the testing industry (which also grew throughout the 20th century). The central architecture of this governance model would be called neo-liberal these days, but it is basically a centralised ranking system based on pre-defined measures determined by a select few, and those measures are designed to be palatable to the public.  Using such systems to instil a bit of group competition between schools fits very well with those who believe market logic works for schooling, or those who like sport.

The other way of motivating personnel in such systems is, of course, mandate, such as the now mandated Phonic Screening Check announce in the flyer.

The devil in details

Now when it comes to school measures, there are many types we actually know a fair amount about most if not all of them – as most are generated from research somewhere along the way. There are some problems of interpretation that all school measures face which relate the basic problem that most measures are actually measures of individuals (and not the school), or vice-versa.  Relatedly, we also often see school level measures which are simply the aggregate of the individuals.  In all of these cases, there are many good intentions that don’t match reality.

For example, it isn’t hard to make a case for saying schools should measure student attendance.  The logic here is that students have to be at school to learn school things (aka achievement tests of some sort). You can simply aggregate individual students attendance to the school level and report it publicly (as on MySchool), because students need to be in school. But it would be a very big mistake to assume that the school level aggregated mean attendance of the student data is at all related to school level achievement.  It is often the case that what is true for individual, is also not true for the collective in which the individual belongs.  Another case in point here is policy argument that we need expanded educational attainment (which is ‘how long you stay in schooling’) because if more people get more education, that will bolster the general economy.  Nationally that is a highly debatable proposition (among OECD countries there isn’t even a significant correlation between average educational attainment and GDP).  Individually it does make sense – educational attainment and personal income, or individual status attainment is generally quite positively related.  School level attendance measures that are simple aggregates are not related to school achievement (Ladwig and Luke, 2011).  This may be why the current articulation attendance target is a percentage of students attending more than 90% of the time (surely a better articulation than a simple average – but still an aggregate of untested effect).  The point is more direct – often these targets are motivated by an goal that has been based on some causal idea – but the actually measures often don’t reflect that idea directly.

Another general problem, especially for the achievement data, is the degree to which all of the national (and state) measures are in fact estimates, designed to serve specific purposed.   The degree to which this is true varies from test to test.   Almost all design options in assessment systems carry trade offs.  There is a big difference between an HSC score – where the HSC exams and syllabuses are very closely aligned and the student performance is designed to reflect that; as opposed to NAPLAN, which is designed to not be directly related to syllabuses but overtly as a measure designed to estimate achievement on an underlying scale that is derived from the populations.  For HSC scores, it makes some sense to set targets but notice those targets come in the forms of percentage of students in a given ‘Band.’

Now these bands are tidy and no doubt intended to make interpretation of results easier for parents (that’s the official rational). However, both HSC Bands and NAPLAN bands represent ‘coarsened’ data.  Which means that they are calculated on the basis of some more finely measured scale (HSC raw scores, NAPLAN scale scores).  There are two known problems with coarsened data: 1) in general they increase measurement error (almost by definition), and 2) they are not static overtime.  Of these two systems, the HSC would be much more stable overtime, but even there much development occurs overtime, and the actual qualitative descriptors of the bands changes as syllabuses are modified.  So these band scores, and the number of students in each, is something that really needs to understood to be very less precise than counting kids in those categories implies. For more explanation and an example of one school which decides to change its spelling programs on the basis of needing one student to get one more item test correct, in order for them to meet their goal of having a given percentage of students in a given band, (see Ladwig, 2018).

There is a lot of detail behind this general description, but the point is made very clearly in the technical reports, such as when ACARA shifted how it calibrated its 2013 results relative to previous test years – where you find the technical report explaining that ACARA would need to stop assuming previous scaling samples were ‘secure’.  New scaling samples are drawn each year since 2013. When explaining why they needed to estimate sampling error in a test that was given to all students in a given year, ACARA was forthright and made it very clear: 

‘However, the aim of NAPLAN is to make inference about the educational systems each year and not about the specific student cohorts in 2013’ (p24).

Here you can see overtly that the test was NOT designed for the purposes to which the NSW Minister wishes to pursue.  

The slippage between any credential (or measure) and what it is supposed to represent has a couple of names.  When it comes to testing and achievement measurements, it’s called error.  There’s a margin within which we can be confident, so analysis of any of that data requires a lot of judgement, best made by people who know what and who is being measured.  But that judgement can not be exercised well without a lot of background knowledge that is not typically in the extensive catalogue of background knowledge needed by school leaders.

At a system level, the slippage between what’s counted and what it actually means is called decoupling.  And any of the new school level targets are ripe for such slippage.  Numbers of Aboriginal students obtaining an HSC is clear enough – but does it reflect the increasing numbers of alternative pathways used by an increasingly wide array of institutions? Counting how many kids continue to Year 12 make sense, but it also is motivation for schools to count kids simply for that purpose. 

In short, while the public critics have spotted potential perverse unintended consequence, I would hazard a prediction that they’ve just covered the surface.  Australia already has ample evidence of NAPLAN results being used as the based of KPI development with significant problematic side effects – there is no reason to think this would be immune from misuse, and in fact invites more (see Mockler and Stacey, 2021).

The challenge we need to take is not how to make schools ‘perform’ better or teachers ‘teach better’ – any of those a well intended, but this is a good time to point out common sense really isn’t sensible once you understand how the systems work.  To me it is the wrong question to ask how we make this or that part of the system do something more or better.

In this case, it’s a question of how can we build systems in which school and teachers are rightfully and fairly accountable and in which schools, educators, students are all growing.  And THAT question can not reached until Australia opens up bigger questions about curriculum that have been locked into what has been a remarkable resilience structure ever since the early 1990s attempts to create a national curriculum.

Figure 1 Taken from the NAPLAN 2013 Technical Report, p.19

This extract shows the path from a raw score on a NAPLAN test and what eventually becomes a ‘scale score’ – per domain.  It is important to note that the scale score isn’t a count – it is based on a set of interlocking estimations that align (calibrate) the test items. That ‘logit’ score is based on the overall probability of test items being correctly answered. 

James Ladwig is Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle and co-editor of the American Educational Research Journal.  He is internationally recognised for his expertise in educational research and school reform.  Find James’ latest work in Limits to Evidence-Based Learning of Educational Science, in Hall, Quinn and Gollnick (Eds) The Wiley Handbook of Teaching and Learning published by Wiley-Blackwell, New York (in press). James is on Twitter @jgladwig

References

Barber, M. (2015). How to Run A Government: So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy: Penguin Books Limited.

Callahan, R. E. (1962). Education and the Cult of Efficiency: University of Chicago Press.

Ladwig, J., & Luke, A. (2013). Does improving school level attendance lead to improved school level achievement? An empirical study of indigenous educational policy in Australia. The Australian Educational Researcher, 1-24. doi:10.1007/s13384-013-0131-y

  Ladwig, J. G. (2018). On the Limits to Evidence‐Based Learning of Educational Science. In G. Hall, L. F. Quinn, & D. M. Gollnick (Eds.), The Wiley Handbook of Teaching and Learning (pp. 639-658). New York: WIley and Sons.

Mockler, N., & Stacey, M. (2021). Evidence of teaching practice in an age of accountability: when what can be counted isn’t all that counts. Oxford Review of Education, 47(2), 170-188. doi:10.1080/03054985.2020.1822794

Main image:

DescriptionEnglish: Australian politician Mark Latham at the 2018 Church and State Summit
Date15 January 2018
Source“Mark Latham – Church And State Summit 2018”, YouTube (screenshot)
AuthorPellowe Talk YouTube channel (Dave Pellowe)

What to do when our schools run out of the teachers they urgently need

Out-of-field teaching, quality teaching, , , ,


When faced with a teacher shortage, often schools need to ‘make do’ and ask teachers to teach away from their area of expertise in order to staff classes. That’s called teaching out-of-field and sometimes teachers, put in that position, can feel unsupported and overwhelmed.

The issue of teaching ‘out-of-field’ persists in Australia and internationally –  and has for some time. Out-of-field teaching refers to when teachers teach subjects they are not ‘qualified’ (or specialised) to teach (Weldon, 2016; Hobbs), that is, they do not have the undergraduate study recognised by the state registration/accreditation body nor the teaching methods. 

The question of suitability of a teacher to teach a subject or group of students can be a tricky one in schools. Quality teaching can occur when teachers have gathered expertise over time to teach a subject even when they do not have the relevant ‘qualification’. However, teachers with qualifications or specialisations and a background in the latest teaching methods for the subject are more likely to provide quality teaching.

Faced with an inadequate teacher supply, how do schools address this problem?

In Victoria, the State Government has committed funds to the Secondary Science and Mathematics Initiative (SMSI). We at Deakin have been contracted to design and deliver graduate certificates in secondary mathematics and science. The courses are being delivered online because of COVID restrictions through intensives and offer a mix of content and discipline-specific pedagogy. Supports are provided for teachers as they are challenged to return to study and complete the course while continuing to teach in their schools.  

Teachers from Government schools who are teaching out-of-field in mathematics or science are funded to undertake the graduate certificates. This ‘upskills’ them, makes them qualified, and therefore no longer ‘out-of-field’ but ‘in-field’. 

Why are upskilling programs like the Victorian SMSI important?

1. Research shows that teaching is a ‘learning profession’, where teachers are constantly undergoing professional development, often want to be challenged to try new things by learning ‘on-the-job’ and want to have some agency as to how their career progresses (Hobbs, 2020). Research also shows that teachers who have a background in a subject often lead to better outcomes for their students (Shah, Richardson & Watt, 2020). Some research has shown quite negative impacts for some students and teachers when teachers are given teaching duties beyond their fields of expertise (Du Plessis, Gillies & Carrol, 2014). 

Teachers can feel as if they are in a holding pattern until they can teach what they are passionate about (Hobbs, 2020) and teacher confidence and expertise can be challenged. Students can feel unsupported, and student achievement can be negatively impacted.    

2. Teachers generally feel valued when they are remunerated and recognised for professional learning (Hobbs & Törner, 2019). It is essential funded Government initiatives, university programs, or subject association initiatives deliver outcomes for teachers and schools that make a difference in the classroom and in the professional lives of teachers. The SMSI will focus on contemporary science or mathematics pedagogy, knowledge and practice as integrated, and will be firmly based in teacher practice. The design of the courses and funding arrangements acknowledge the busy lives of teachers and attempts to support schools as they release their teachers. 

3. Upskilling programs specifically designed for out-of-field teachers are not common, although they are available at some universities (e.g., University of Melbourne [https://handbook.unimelb.edu.au/2021/courses/gc-mthed10], Queensland University of Technology [https://www.qut.edu.au/courses/graduate-certificate-in-education-stem-in-education]) and sometimes through professional associations as professional development programs. 

Often teachers receive no recognition or renumeration for undertaking additional qualifications. Therefore, there is little culture of formally upskilling by teachers in some states and territories. Also, research shows that teachers tend to prefer to undertake professional development in their in-field subject (Hobbs, Campbell, Delaney, Speldewinde and Lai, 2020).

The New South Wales teacher accreditation system is such that teachers gain approval to teach subjects when graduating from initial teacher education. These approvals can be updated as teachers undertake studies and meet the requirements for additional subjects. Victoria, however, has no similar mechanism as teachers are registered as ‘teachers’. As with other states and territories in Australia, teachers are required to undertake professional development to renew their registration, although most teachers will choose their in-field subject as the focus of this development. Thus, the value of the SMSI is that funding is provided for teachers to undertake the Graduate Certificate and schools are renumerated for having their teachers out of the classroom while studying. This incentive is needed for teachers to see that the benefits outweigh the costs.

How will a program like SMSI create change?

Two ways. 

  1. The first relates to the fact that the Victorian State Government (like the Tasmanian State Government in 2015) is funding teachers (especially from rural areas) to gain qualifications in out-of-field subjects. This illustrates that there is formal acknowledgement that out-of-field teaching occurs, that it needs to be attended to, and that schools and teachers need to be supported through funding in order to build the pedagogical and content-related expertise. The Victorian Government has applied this strategy with the STEM Catalyst program and the Primary Mathematics and Science Specialists (PMSS) program, illustrating a commitment to upskilling teachers in the ‘STEM’ areas [https://www.education.vic.gov.au/about/programs/learningdev/vicstem/Pages/schools.aspx].
  1. Secondly, such acknowledgement and commitment will have the effect of generating conversation around the ‘out-of-field’ issue more broadly. Whole of system engagement is required, including those responsible for setting policy, school leaders who enact policy, teacher/discipline/principal associations that inform policy and curriculum.  Additionally, teacher unions that represent and protect the rights of educators and school leaders, and universities and academics who provide teacher-ready candidates and support teachers and schools with professional development and research must be engaged.

Change can be created through a national conversation about:

  • system pressures and mechanisms for responding to the issue of teacher distribution, teacher supply and school leadership practices that lead to out-of-field teaching;
  • our expectations for our teachers and schools in terms to teacher ‘qualifications’ versus ‘experience’;
  • developing school practices that minimise the need for out-of-field teaching, and assesses and reduces the potential risk implicated in teaching out-of-field; 
  • how to present this issue to the public; and
  • the data needed to monitor who is teaching what and under what circumstances.

Ultimately, upskilling teachers is one response. The challenge now is for all relevant stakeholders to work together to develop strategies with coordinated actions that demonstrate how Victoria and Australia can lead the world in responding to this pervasive issue. 

Declaration: Deakin University has been contracted to provide the Graduate Certificates in science [https://www.deakin.edu.au/course/graduate-certificate-secondary-science] and mathematics  [https://www.deakin.edu.au/course/graduate-certificate-secondary-mathematics ] and will do so alongside a rich research program that will evaluate the participating teachers’ experiences throughout their qualification.

From left: Associate Professor Linda Hobbs is a Science and STEM educator and has researched in the area of out-of-field teaching for over 12 years. Professor Russell Tytler is Alfred Deakin Professor of Science Education at Deakin University, and has published widely on student and teacher learning, and interdisciplinarity in STEM. Dr Peta White is a science and environmental education senior lecturer at Deakin University with research interests including science and biology education; sustainability, climate change, and environmental education; and collaborative/activist research. Dr Jill Brown is a mathematics educator and researcher and Course Director of the Graduate Certificate Secondary Mathematics

References

Du Plessis, A. E., Gillies, R. M., & Carroll, A. (2014). Out-of-field teaching and professional development: A transnational investigation across Australia and South Africa. International Journal of Educational Research, 66, 90-102. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0883035514000457 

Hobbs, L. (2020). Learning to teach science out-of-field: A spatial-temporal experience. Journal of Science Teacher Education. Published online 29 Jan 2020 https://doi.org/10.1080/1046560X.2020.1718315 

Hobbs, L. & Quinn, F. (2020). Out-of-field teachers as learners: Influences on teacher perceived capacity and enjoyment over time. European Journal of Teacher Education, DOI: 10.1080/02619768.2020.1806230  Published online: 01 Sep 2020. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02619768.2020.1806230 

Hobbs, L. & Törner, G. (2019b). The out-of-field phenomenon: Synthesis and taking action. In L. Hobbs & G. Törner (Eds.), Examining the Phenomenon of “Teaching Out-of-field”: International Perspectives on Teaching as a Non-specialist (pp. 309-321). Dordrecht: Springer. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811333651 

Shah, C., Richardson, P., Watt, H. (2020). Teaching ‘out of field’ in STEM subjects in Australia: Evidence from PISA 2015, GLO Discussion Paper, No. 511, Global Labor Organization (GLO), Essen. http://hdl.handle.net/10419/215639 

Australian curriculum review: strengthened but still a long way from an amazing curriculum for all Australian students

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Curriculum review, NAPLAN, PISA,

There is much to admire in the proposed revisions to the Australian Curriculum, which were released for public consultation this week. I’d give it a B+.

The curriculum content organisers and core ideas have been revised to ensure that they are more closely aligned, with some trimming of content to enable greater depth of study. There is also less prescription to enable a broader range of curriculum opportunities within the framework of the Australian Curriculum.

However, perhaps the most remarkable shift is the clear break from Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire’s 2014 curriculum review, which called for greater emphasis on Australia’s Western cultural canon and Judeo–Christian heritage. The proposed changes have a clear commitment to cultural diversity, plurality and inclusion of multiple perspectives, which is embedded throughout multiple aspects of the revised curriculum.

This can be most clearly observed in the revisions to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures cross-curriculum priority, which emphasise ‘truth telling’ and deeper, more honest engagement with the complex and confronting histories and experiences of First Nations Australians.

Terms such as ‘occupation’, ‘colonisation’ and ‘invasion’ are embedded into the conceptual bedrock of the curriculum, which sits in stark contrast to the recommendations posed by the Donnelly–Wiltshire review.

Cue outrage from the conservative commentariat.

Almost immediately, the Institute for Public Affairs decried the changes as demoting the values of Western civilisation and Christianity, while also forcing the curriculum to become ‘monocultural’, with the Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program, Dr Bella d’Abrera, claiming that ‘children will be taught the historical lie that Australia was invaded by the British’.

Donnelly also quickly sprang into action, criticising the proposed changes as being ‘politically correct’ and enforcing a ‘cultural-left interpretation of the nation’.

Even the federal education minister, Alan Tudge, was quick to express concern that the proposed curriculum changes came at the risk of ‘dishonouring our Western heritage’.

The culture wars are far from dead and we can expect to hear more public proclamations of the calamity that will surely befall society if Australian students learn the truth about the histories and cultures of First Nations Australians in the classroom.

Another concern about the ‘decluttered’ curriculum revisions is the emphasis, yet again, on increasing the focus on literacy and numeracy in the early primary years. Schools already emphasise the ‘basics’ in the first years of schooling, with many public schools timetabling only one or two lessons each week for the arts.

Any curriculum that focuses on literacy and numeracy at the expense of the arts, humanities and social sciences is an impoverished curriculum.

The perennial argument that we need to go ‘back to the basics’ to fix declining performance on standardised tests misunderstands the problem. Take the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for example, which is a triennial test of 15-year-old students’ performance in reading, mathematics and science. While the national aggregated data demonstrate a small decline in performance over the past couple of decades, when the data are disaggregated, a much more nuanced picture appears.

Australia has one of the worlds most segregated and inequitable schooling systems. Performance on PISA is intimately tied to socioeconomic status and geolocation. The basic correlation is that the closer to the city and the more money and education that your parents have, the better your chances of performing well on PISA.

NAPLAN is much the same.

The MySchool website includes a series of technical reports that explain the correlation between school performance on NAPLAN and its Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA), which is based on parental education and occupation, geolocation and percentage of Indigenous student enrolments. The annual ICSEA technical reports consistently demonstrate approximately four-fifths of the variance in schools performance on NAPLAN is accounted for by ICSEA.

In plain language: what happens in the lives of young people has a much bigger effect on their success on NAPLAN and PISA tests than the curriculum or pedagogy they experience in school.

Australian schooling is starkly divided into those who can afford independent school fees and/or to supplement school learning with extra-curricular activities such as music lessons, dance and art clubs, sporting teams and the like.

However, for young Australians living in poverty and complex situations, including those in out-of-home care, or who do not have access to rich extra-curricular opportunities, the school curriculum is the only place where they have an opportunity to be exposed to the rich diversity of culture and creativity that is available through the arts, humanities and social sciences.

A greater emphasis on the basics in the curriculum might produce a small bump in test results, but the effects of an impoverished curriculum will be much longer lasting, especially for those students who are most marginalised and disadvantaged.

As such, we need to shift the debate away from one that engages in endless cultural and ideological dispute, or one which focuses on the lowest denominators of basic literacy and numeracy, to one that asks how we can meaningfully ensure that all young people, but especially those least advantaged, have access to an engaging, high-quality and rich curriculum.

The proposed changes are a good start, but we still have a long way to go.

Dr Stewart Riddle is an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Southern Queensland. His research interests include social justice and equity in education, music-based research practices and research methodologies. He also plays bass in a band called Drawn from Bees.

The photograph used in the header image is of Kevin Donnelly. The author of the image is credited as “wife of Kevin Donnelly”. Image hosted here. It is available under a Creative Commons license.

Meet our remarkable guardians of play, protecting children from screens

digital footprint of children and young people, digital technology in schools, Early Childhood, ,

Digital technologies are a prominent and integral feature of daily living and are present in our homes, educational settings and communities. This week research from the Gonski Institute for Education at UNSW revealed parents see digital devices as necessary for their kids’ learning but worry about the distraction and activities they’re missing out on. So how soon is too soon for digital devices in the lives of young children?

Alongside considering age, it is even more important to consider how, when and why digital technology is being used – a child spending hours in solitary screen time consumption compared to video calling Nana and Poppy to share their latest LEGO creation are vastly different digital experiences. There are strong opinions voiced  on both sides, vehemently for or against children’s use of digital technology.

The push for digital technology integration

Policy developments, curricula and initiatives designed to develop children’s digital competencies have been implemented to prepare children to meet society’s digital demands. But should that learning be at the expense of play?

This blog post shares the research undertaken to investigate that question and reveals the findings of the study, published in the International Journal of Early Years Education.

Our research took place in Queensland kindergartens with early childhood teachers. We found that the narrative of concerns and negativity that can surround young children’s use of digital technologies was well-known and strongly articulated.

Children were seen to be enticed by digital technologies and highly motivated to play with them. Digital technologies were viewed as being all-consuming and concerns were raised that children would self-select digital experiences over non-digital ones and would spend excessive periods of time on digital devices if allowed. Children’s extended use of digital technologies were positioned as presenting a potential risk to children’s speech language, social, physical and emotional development.

Digital technologies were confidently used by the early childhood teachers to fulfil the requirements of their role; however, children’s engagement and play with digital technologies was viewed as contentious.

Traditional play-based teaching approaches were valued centred on children’s active engagement and socialisation – playing in the mud, talking to one another, learning to share. Whereas, digital technologies were viewed as being anti-social, and leading children to engage in passive consumption and screen time.

In response to the narrative of concerns about digital technologies, early childhood teachers implemented protective measures to restrict and regulate children’s access to, and time spent interacting and playing with digital technologies. Actions taken included physically removing digital devices from the classroom, and using a timer and roster to monitor, restrict and regulate children’s access and use of digital technologies. Play was positioned as being exclusive of digital technologies and outside the boundaries of delivering a play-based early learning program. 

“It is more important for people to become personable to other people, to share, to say hello, to talk, to play” (Heather, kindergarten teacher and director).

“I think it needs to be limited as well… a lot of children come from home and talk about how often they’re using their iPads… so I think this is a good environment for us to say, well we don’t have these things here, so we’re going to play” (Jasmine, early childhood teacher).

“When these brains are young and forming, I hate the thought that’s going to be something they spend copious hours on each day. I’ve reservations because I want this to be a place where children get their hands in mud and get dirty and play and have agency and talk to one another and I would never I think be happy for children to be sitting in a line of computers playing games, because I reckon they do it at home .” 

Aster, early childhood teacher and director

The expectation to support and facilitate children’s learning with digital technologies begins in early childhood settings with children aged from birth to five years, with the inclusion of digitally-focused learning outcomes in Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia:

Outcome 4: Children are confident and involved learners:Children resource their own learning through connecting with people, places, technologies, natural and processed materials

Outcome 5: Children are effective communicators: Children use information and communication technologies to access information, investigate ideas and represent their thinking.                                                                                                

An expectation is placed on early childhood educators to be an active user and facilitator of digital technologies and to possess the skills, knowledge and techniques required to enhance children’s play and learning, and to explore new information and represent ideas. In light of curricular expectations and the increasing presence of digital technologies the question arose; how are early childhood teachers managing their changing roles with digital technologies?

They take this role very seriously and see themselves as guardians of play.

How was this research undertaken?

Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were undertaken with nineteen practising early childhood teachers at nineteen different kindergartens, including community kindergartens, kindergartens in a long day care centre and kindergartens co-located on a school site. Each early childhood teacher had a Bachelor’s degree qualification, and held the position of kindergarten teacher, responsible for delivering an early learning program to children aged three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half years old.

The early childhood teachers had between three and thirty-eight years of experience working in early childhood education. The early childhood teachers were interviewed in person, regarding how they were managing their changing roles with digital technology within their kindergarten.

The methodological approach of grounded theory was used to inform the processes of data collection and analysis and revealed the perspectives early childhood teachers held about digital technologies and the actions they took to guard children’s play from digital technologies.

Moving Forward

The counterargument to restricting and regulating digital technologies is to harness and support young children’s desire for digital play and engagement. As a profession we can move beyond a conceptualisation of digital technology as being ‘negative’ and a perception that children’s use of digital technology is ‘solitary consumption’ in need of adult regulation and restriction, towards a vision of children as agentic, capable and confident users and creators with digital technologies.

Professional development is required to support early childhood teachers to integrate digital teaching approaches in ways that work in partnership with their existing strategies, to deliver a play-based early learning program. In doing so, early childhood teachers can be empowered to reconceptualise the role of digital technologies and in doing so the need to monitor and regulate children’s digital experiences fades.

Allowing a child to spend hours, alone, watching cartoons on an iPad is a different situation to empowering a child to take photos using a digital camera while on a nature walk, to encourage investigation, appreciation, discussion, and reflection. How and why we are using digital technologies needs to be at the centre of decision-making to support, enhance and facilitate young children’s play, learning and engagement. 

Image of Vicki Schriever

Dr Vicki Schriever is a Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her research interests include understanding how early childhood teachers manage their changing roles with digital technologies, pedagogical approaches and the role of digital technologies, and using digital technologies to foster relationships with families.