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The emotional labour of academic labour – it’s all related

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Here is another of our intermittent blogs during the #AARE2022 conference. If you want to cover a session at the conference, please email jenna@aare.edu.au to check in. Thanks!

Theory of practice architectures symposium H603 

The symposium was made up of members of PEP Victoria, with a focus on theory of practice architectures. The theory of practice architectures examines the ways that practices (sayings, doings and relatings) are made possible through social, political and economic arrangements. The focus of the symposium was on “relatings” and the affective aspects of practice. 

Part 1

Paper One: The emotional labour of educational leading: A practice lens 

Jane Wilkinson, Lucas Walsh, Amanda Keddie and Fiona Longmuir

The presentation draws on a 2017-2018 qualitative study of case studies of exemplary schools, who respond to social volatility in their communities. The school populations comprised diverse student populations. New aspects of a principal’s role, such as community building and trauma informed care, are often ignored in considerations of principals work. This emotional work is an integral aspect of 21st century principalship. 

Emotions play a transformative role in education practices, residing in the sayings, doings and the arrangements of practices. They are social, and a crucial aspect of how people come to know in a practice, emotions are a non subjective pattern that resides in the collective. Using a critical incident Wilkinson et al., gain a deeper understanding of the taken for granted, often invisible, practices involved with emotional work. A project of practice in the school was the “building of community” and “community making”. Using examples from a teacher and a principal the paper identifies how principals and teachers are involved in projects of practices that are “invisible” in market drawn systems that prioritise ‘professionalism’. These constrain and shape the ways that teachers and principals conceive and relate to students and each other.

Paper Two: The relational intensity of risk-taking in ECE

Mandy Cooke

A relational study in three early childhood services considered exemplary. Beneficial risk taking are acts that take someone outside of their comfort zone and are enacted in the hope of beneficial outcomes. It is an inherent part of life and education, however, current education systems are obsessed with removing risk. This study aimed to examine the lived experiences of educators who engage in risk taking. By understanding the role of emotions in risk taking, we are able to support and enable educators as they engage in these activities. There is a relational intensity associated with risk taking, and this is due to tensions between the beliefs of educators and maintenance of trust with the communities, colleagues and parents. There are three main tensions: learning vs duty of care, child vs family desires, autonomy vs collaboration. The tensions evoked negative emotions from educators, which may present a barrier to them engaging in risk taking. The educators used a range of strategies that neutralised, enabled or constrained risk taking, such as compromise, communication, collegial support, and adjustments. Cooke argues that engaging in risk taking could be considered mini critical incidents, that invoke increased emotional labour on behalf of the educators. Thinking-feeling praxis was evident in the educators practices and ways of doing, knowing and relating. When displays of emotions are not considered appropriate in professional settings, it is important to bring emotions to the fore, and to talk about them. 

A question was asked about “neutralising” practices and the extent to which this removed risk. Cooke identified these practices as identifying why  it is important to have conversations, rather than neutralising risk. Wilkinson suggested that there is a professional mask involved in this work.

Part 2

Paper Three: Relational intensities: The practices of education in international schools

Alexander Kostogriz, Megan Adams, Gary Bonar

International schools are an interesting product of the neoliberal market and the rising middle class. Kostogriz highlights the tensions that occur in international schools including relations of power between schools and local communities, creating enclaves, (re)professionalisation of teachers, pay disparities, loyalties to curricula and job insecurities. These tensions form an affective atmosphere in these schools, and there were positive aspects such as growing professionally, being supported and feeling part of a team. International teachers are part of the global precariat, and precarity becomes part of the relational work of teachers. The paper uses two case studies of international bilingual schools that cater largely to local populations, one in China and one in United Arab Emirates. Kostogriz makes an interesting comment on the architecture of these buildings and the ways in which they ‘stand out’ in the landscapes. The tensions in working in precarity were often overcome by affective dimensions of caring for others and establishing relationships with other teachers. Relational work of teaching is the foundational work, it is the “starting point” of doings and sayings.

Paper Four: Enhancing praxis in challenging times: Salutogenesis as theoretical resource for empowerment.

George Variyan & Kristin Reimer

Variyan and Reimer looked at academic practices through the Covid-19 pandemic, using data from the beginning and October. 21. They used an online survey and photo elicitation which Variyan called “playful methods”. They were interested in invisible aspects of academic labour, with particular understanding of the ways online work obscures these practices. Using an ecological perspective to build on the theory of practice architectures, they aimed to understand what are the accomodation practices and what are the niches of resistance? They categorised practices as manageable, comprehensible or meaningful to understand how academics were experiencing academic work during Covid-19. There were relational intensities that often went unacknowledged by institutions, such as connecting with colleagues and needing time with nature and away from screens. They looked at how relations to work, environment, each other and to self that were changing and which of these were supporting academics to cope, or which were constraining their practices. As ‘tentative’ concluding thoughts, they identify the need to move beyond simplistic conceptions of how the Covid-19 impact has changed or shaped academic practices. They also identify the ways in which some practices were quite simple, such as being with nature. 

Paper Five: Ethics as situated relational praxis 

Christine Edwards-Groves and Christina Davidson

This paper considers the nature of ethics as an in situ discursive spatial relational practice, and is a largely conceptual presentation. Using a three year project, Edwards-Groves identifies the “shifting sands” of longer research projects, and discusses the ways in which close proximity creates complexity that is often taken for granted. Edwards-Groves would like to “unsettle” the taken for granted complexity of working in schools on longer term basis. The school in which they worked had high levels of disadvantage and transience. Their project sought to develop capacity for oral language and supporting literacy across the school. The project was in situ that required flexibility and consideration of how to engage with teachers, stakeholders and leadership teams. Being in close proximity created pivotal moments or “critical happenings” that meant a shift of practices as researchers. These pivotal moments included miscommunication, disagreements and conflicts. Using the example of a gatekeeper who mediated the process of the research, they highlight the ways in which research may be shaped by practices of others, and the ways in which a gatekeepers sayings and doing shaped the sayings and doings of the research participants. 

Discussant: Dr Kathleen Mahon

Mahon began by discussing the invisible aspects of presenting, the feelings of nervousness before stepping onto a stage. She identified the collective nature of these emotions when she describes them, and how we may be triggered by others descriptions of emotions that we cannot help but respond to. She is nervous as she has been provoked but also hopes to provoke in her response – it forms a risk to act as discussant. Mahon ended by providing provocations for each of the papers to think through further.

In the symposium there is a rich conceptual contribution to our understanding of practices, and to some extent, speaking back to the theory. The papers challenge the way we think about relational practices across emotions, relational intensities. They highlight that emotions matter, particularly with the way relations unfold. Emotions are part of the practices, they are expressed in the sayings and doings, they inform our understandings of how to move forward. Emotions also shape emotional tensions and the demands on professionals in these spaces. There are social norms around what is acceptable to feel, and who can feel these things in particular roles. Making visible things that matter, is a key role for research. 

What’s happening in the collaboratories?

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Emergent Publics Through Research Symposium 

Organisers: Parlo Singh and Stephen Heimans

Presenters: Parlo Singh, Henry Kwok, Carla Tapia Parada & Sue Whatman (Griffith University), Stephen Heimans (UQ) & Andrew Barnes (DET QLD)

All authors: Parlo Singh, Stephen Heimans, Henry Kwok, Andrew Barnes, Gabrielle Ivinson, Roberta Thompson, Carla Tapia Parada, Debbie Bargallie

The four presentations in this AARE symposium explored ways in which research collaboratories can be designed and enacted to help disrupt cycles of educational disadvantage. This symposium brought together papers from an ARC funded project and PhD study at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia.

So, what are research collaboratories? These are designed to create distinctive moments where epistemological “business as usual” is put into question and where researchers have to earn their place at the knowledge generation table. We ask how researchers are relevant and to whom they are responsible. This is because the emphasis moves to trying to think through and work with the entanglements (where causal links between entities and events are not straightforwardly clear) between the ethics of research (in the strong sense of the word as concerning the taking of responsibility for the outcomes and impacts of the work), the ontological aspects of the research (what realities are being performed here that might not have existed before?) and the knowledge processes. 

Complex models of teaching, particularly in public schools servicing high poverty communities, are being displaced by learning and measurement discourses, overrun by “norms”, with a logic that has generated a marketplace for commercial providers promoting testing instruments, accountability schedules, scripted or teacher-proof lessons and curriculum packages. Similarly, complex models of research are being displaced by narrow definitions of ‘evidence’, ‘data’, and ‘learning gains’. Randomised control experiments are heralded as the gold standard of research. 

We make the case for thinking differently about teaching and research – not as an intervention (cause and effect), but as encounters for understanding, sense-making and wise judgements that promote human flourishing in open, uncertain, and complex schooling systems. Such an invitation requires a re-thinking of the resources deployed collectively by school leaders, teachers, researchers to generate educational-research practices.

The first presentation of the symposium was presented by Dr Henry Kwok on behalf of co-authors Stephen Heimans and Parlo Singh, on Standards, Normalisation, or Normativity? Re-imagining Teacher Professionalism in the Age of Performativity

Kwok set the scene that, over the past few decades and in the wake of ‘crisis’, global educational policy movements have converged upon standards-based reforms. Public statements about performance expectations, such as the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APSTs), are expected to cure all social and educational ills spontaneously. 

But, is it the reality? What is a teaching standard? Does it exist? 

Drawing on a collaborative ARC-funded research project with public schools serving high-poverty communities in Queensland, Australia, Kwok asked the audience to re-think teaching standards, drawing upon the distinctions made between ‘normalisation’ and ‘normativity’ by the French philosopher of medicine, Georges Canguilhem. 

Kwok presented a compelling argument that while teacher standards may share some features of ‘social norms’ and shed light on the direction of quality teaching, the challenges in the lived reality of education are more important than measurement and cannot be redeemed by the inscription of ‘standards’ alone, especially in communities experiencing historical, structural inequalities and complex intergenerational traumas. 

Kwok on behalf of his co-authors implored us to reimagine ‘teacher professionalism’ differently, noting that pedagogic practices can be envisaged in multiple ways, which should be more than performativity, beyond the policy speak of ‘excellence’, in order to reclaim the space for social justice and democratic professionality.

A question asked from the audience was how do schools, such as those in high poverty communities, escape the need to be compared to “norms”? Kwok and Singh asked in reply, why can’t schools generate their own unique norms, that make sense to the members of that school community? And articulate how they are “doing” against meaningful norms. It was a thought-provoking start to the symposium.

The second paper, led by Stephen Heimans from the University of Queensland and Andrew Barnes, a school Principal from one of the collaboratory sites, on behalf of co-authors Parlo Singh and Gabrielle Ivinson. They outlined what they meant by 

Play for Play’s Sake in Primary Schools: Exploring playfulness as educational subjectivity. 

During the initial COVID lockdown, the school, which serves a low socio-economic, culturally and linguistically diverse community, had to remain open for students who were deemed vulnerable and at risk. These students also had limited opportunities to engage with ‘online pedagogies’ as many homes relied on smart phones for internet connection rather than tablets and computers. The school day for these ‘most-at-risk’ students contained many opportunities for play. 

Staff noticed something transpiring through play: increased play seemed to equate with improvement in academic results, and reduction in behaviour incidents. The school took this experience of play and built a ‘loose parts playground’ based on the philosophy of ‘playwork’, a child-centred approach to thinking about education. 

In attempting to understand this ‘play work’, the presenters theorised different dimensions of child-initiated and led play in relation to emerging playful educational subjectivities as ‘minor’, ‘ludic’ and ‘speculative’ (drawing on process philosophical research). Multiple examples were provided by the team, such as how one child buried an old sewing machine deep in the playground, for someone else to ‘discover in the future’, and another play café offering a space for social and emotional care of peers. 

This collaboratory suggests that rethinking playfulness as a core educational ethic can be a way forward for schooling, a way which also delivers other educational priorities, particularly for students who live with intergenerational trauma, violence and the other enduring and daily situations of poverty.

Audience members commented on how this paper resonated pure joy, another commenting that they desperately wanted to play in the loose parts playground themselves.

Parlo Singh and Andrew Barnes presented on behalf of co-author Roberta Thompson Framing and Reframing Positive Behaviour Policies, using the lens of Goffman to explore how student behaviour is constructed in official policies. Against a context of increasing incidents of ‘behaviour problems’ and student suspension, and the increasingly younger age of those suspended, the research collaborators asked ‘What are students trying to communicate? Why are they using these ways of communicating? How might we teach children to communicate in alternative ways?’ 

Singh and Barnes also explored how this school used play or playwork in the loose-parts playground to encourage students to remake and reclaim the space of schooling. Is it possible that different kinds of play spaces that might be created as alternatives to marketized models of play which can provide children with opportunities for enhanced participation in school life? 

The final paper in the symposium was from Carla Tapia Parada and Sue Whatman, presenting on behalf of their colleagues, Parlo Singh and Debbie Bargallie, on  ‘Teacher Activism: Struggles Over Public Education in Chile’. A PhD project of Carla’s, there were highly interested audience members present who also have worked in Chile’s education sector and were keen to hear Carla’s insights as a Chilean Mestiza researcher and the interpretations of her co-theorist participants, following Bargallie (2020) via testimonio, photo-story and yarning.

Carla noted that while much has been written about student movements against the neoliberal privatizing of education in Chile, less attention has been given to teacher activism around educational matters. Drawing on these yarning stories from teacher activists in Chile and thinking together with them about what and who is engaged in these struggles over public education. The research sought to understand (1) what is entailed in strengthening public education? (2) what is the conception of the public in education? (3) how can covert or endo-privatization be undone?, and (4) can public education be strengthened by increasing individual rights and regulating the function of private institutions? 

Whatman introduced the concept of pedagogic rights from Basil Bernstein, a concept which developed out of little-known work he conducted and co-published in Spanish in Chile in the 1980s. This theoretical work on pedagogic rights and emergent publics is used to think with and about the yarning stories of teacher activists. Examples of enhancement, inclusion and participation were interpreted from the co-theorist teacher activists, further suggested as possibilities for democracy, where which teachers pedagogised their activism into their everyday teaching practices.

Each of the papers served the purpose of the symposium well to illustrate how research collaboratories can disrupt educational inequalities and disadvantage.

Evidence based practice - Community of practice

The perplexing political life of education online

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One of our intermittent blogs during the #AARE2022 conference. If you want to cover a session at the conference, please email jenna@aare.edu.au to check in. Thanks!

Online spaces have arguably given voice to more diverse actors and advocacy activities related to education policy. While policymakers have a responsibility to address areas of concern to Australian education, a highly digitised public sphere presents challenges to implementing appropriate reform. Online political machinations can open education policy decision making to moral panic, misinformation, and culture wars, but also offer new opportunities and hope. 

This symposium aimed to spark questions about the confluence of political shifts and online information sharing, commentary, and activism on the formation of Australian education policy. The series of papers presented in this symposium were a short overview of politics related to education online. Each raised questions about the influence of the Internet, and education-related information ecosystems, on education policy. The point of this symposium was to provide a national platform for discussing the challenges and possibilities of education projects that employ digital sociological approaches. The papers used a variety of online platforms and employed diverse methodological approaches to investigating education online. All projects are led by early career researchers and higher degree research candidates exploring cutting edge and traditional approaches to theory, qualitative and quantitative methods.

First, Barrie Shannon from the University of Newcastle spoke about how young people, especially young queer people, are looking online for relevant, affirming information about health, sex, gender and identity. Shannon explained that there is a wide body of knowledge that suggests young people in Australia are dissatisfied with the quality of the sexuality education they receive from school, that tends to take a heteronormative focus on puberty and reproduction, and the information that is presented is often piecemeal, irrelevant, or cautionary, framed as a minefield of potential risks and dangers. Further to this, contemporary political discourse in Australia positions trans youth in the fray of ongoing ‘culture wars’, with schools serving as central battlegrounds. This presentation drew on narrative data from trans, nonbinary and gender diverse Australians aged 18-26 who reported using social networking sites to find information, make friends and establish communities of care. Using the microblogging platform Tumblr as a case study, Shannon illustrated how the affordances of certain social networking sites facilitate alternative ways of communicating, peer-learning, and teaching that are not delivered by a formal authority figure and are not mediated by government policies or curriculum documents. 

Next, Blake Cutler from Monash University spoke about his work with Lucas Walsh, Libby Tudball, and Thuc Huynh surrounding  the rapid growth of the School Strikes 4 Climate movement over the past few years. Cutler argued that this movement has been an important way for young people to negotiate and enact their participatory citizenship and democratic rights, given the barriers they face to engage in formal means of civic participation. The presentation explored the role of Twitter in how young people identify with and express their political and civic identities in relation to the climate strikes. The team collected a total of 92,360 tweets from between 1 October 2018 and 5 October 2021 that contained the #auspol hashtag with at least one of the following: #climatestrikeonline, #fridaysforfuture, #climatestrike, #schoolstrike4climate. Using a novel deep learning algorithm they predicted the demographics of users to explore the role of young people (i.e., those under 29 y.o.) in this online space. 

Next, Keith Heggart from the University of Technology Sydney spoke about how Edutwitter is a fraught environment, with competing discourses about teaching approaches, how to teach reading, and the role of teachers in society. He explained how this space has become filled with a variety of third party actors, such as educational gurus, think tanks and institutes that work between politicians and the populace in the formulation of education policy. Heggart’s presentation examined the role of various non-governmental agencies in determining Australian education policy. Two sites were considered: Critical Race Theory in Australia, and the anti-vax movement amongst the Teachers Professional Association of Australia. These two sites provided evidence of policy borrowing (where policy is uncritically taken from other jurisdictions on the basis of its outrage appeal), policy washing (where extreme positions are cleaned through various interactions in order to appear more acceptable) and ideological absence (where organisations and other actors are quick to abandon principled positions in the pursuit of influence). 

Next, Naomi Barnes from QUT spoke about Wikipedia as a place where knowledge is contested and often vandalised. Unknown to many, Wikipedia communities have taken a major role in advocating for informed understandings of concepts like Critical Race Theory (CRT). As politicians increasingly do their policymaking in the media, Wikipedia stands as an important site of knowledge production. While ideas like CRT morph into policy objects, editors protect the page from misinformation and bad actors through a variety of editorial processes. Barnes explained this politics of knowledge protection and production within the context of the recent Australian Curriculum Review that saw both the Commonwealth and NSW Senates, courtesy of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party and Tasmanian Liberal senators, ban CRT for Australian schools. This replicates a pattern in the political spheres of both the USA and the UK and is a danger to evidence informed policy making. 

Finally, Jessica Prouten, an Educational Doctorate candidate at QUT, spoke about the link between the presentation of teacher identity on social media, looking at how practitioners manage the interplay between personal, professional, monetised, relational and activist spheres. The paper used Foucault’s ideas of governmentality as a lens to understand social media policy as related to teachers and how people manage behaviour and have their behaviour managed by a network of gazes. 

These papers, collectively, highlighted the simultaneous affordances and perplexities of online spaces, and prompted questions about the politics of education online, including:

  • What do these various online communities and spaces enable and constrain for those engaged with them?
  • What kinds of literacies do young people, educators, education leaders and policy makers and researchers need in navigating the politics of education online? and
  • What are the ethical considerations, for researchers, when working in these online spaces?

These papers, collectively, prompted a robust discussion of the politics of education online.

Dr Naomi Barnes is a network analyst and theorist interested in how ideas influence education policy. She is a senior lecturer in literacy teaching and has worked for Education Queensland as a senior writer and has worked as a secondary English, hstory and geography teacher in government, Catholic and independent schools.

Eve Mayes is a Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Pedagogy and Curriculum. She currently lives and works on unceded Wadawurrung Country. Her publications and research interests are in the areas of student voice and activism, climate justice education, affective methodologies and participatory research. Eve is currently working on the ARC DECRA project: Striking Voices: Australian school-aged climate justice activism (2022-2025).

When one shocking shortage led to another

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Here is another of our intermittent blogs during the #AARE2022 conference. If you want to cover a session at the conference, please email jenna@aare.edu.au to check in. Thanks!

Symposium: ‘Teacher shortages in Australian schools: reactive workforce planning for a wicked policy problem’ (post starts after the photos!)

With nine people sitting on the floor, six standing, and a long queue leading from the entrance, the symposium ‘Teacher shortages in Australian schools: reactive workforce planning for a wicked policy problem’ was forced to change venues before it could even begin. The overwhelming interest in this session speaks to rising concern and anxiety for the state of the teacher workforce around Australia today.

The first paper, from Jo Lampert, Amy McPherson and Bruce Burnett, featured an analysis of how 20 years’ worth of government and university initiatives have sought to recruit, prepare and retain teachers in ‘hard to staff’ schools, the impact of these initiatives, and the policy lessons that can be learned from them. The analysis found that mostly, these programs have emphasised recruitment over retention (a frustratingly familiar feature of current initiatives like the Teacher Workforce Shortages Issues Paper, too), with few featuring any formal evaluation process. Policy lessons included a need to focus on benefits, provide financial support, and focus on the wellbeing and working conditions of staff.

Scott Eacott’s presentation on the operational and strategic impact of a teacher shortage on school leadership argued that we have a social contract in Australian education which is not currently being fulfilled. Eacott pointed to the need for a whole-system response instead of a school system which “cannibalizes itself through poor design and incentives”.

Eacott’s paper was followed by work from Susanne Gannon, tracing the #MoreThanThanks campaign of the NSW Teachers Federation, which has sought improved wages and conditions for teachers in NSW public schools. Gannon drew on the work of Carol Bacchi to explore how the construction of the teacher shortage ‘problem’ in NSW has become combative space, from ministerial denials of a problem at all; to a swathe of positive press releases from the NSW government on how teachers are purportedly supported; to the use of the phrase “the committee divided” 93 times in the recent, ‘Great Teachers, Great Schools’ report. Gannon concluded by questioning whether perhaps it’s “not even thanks” that NSW teachers are getting, but instead, open ideological warfare.

The final paper in the session was from Dadvand, Dawborn-Gundlach, van Driel and Speldewinde, exploring career changers in teaching and why they stay or leave. Career change teachers are often positioned as part of the workforce shortage ‘solution’, yet these participants were unsure about their future as teachers. The paper used in-depth interview data to privilege teacher voice and highlight the issue of teacher working conditions and support whilst in the job as what needs to be, but is not often, the focus of reform. 

A clear thread across presentations was an explicitly identified tension between the needs and desires of the local, straining against the structures of the centre. Eacott, for example, pointed to the challenges created when substantive teachers take leave without pay, resulting in their position having to be filled by precariously-employed staff (if they can be found). Yet supportive and attractive working conditions – including but not limited to leave provisions – are arguably what need to be addressed if the teacher shortage ‘problem’ is to be meaningfully engaged with. And this, in itself, requires re-assessing just what the ‘problem’ actually is: one of teacher working conditions, and the need to build supportive structures around teachers’ work in all schools. As discussant, Professor Martin Mills, concluded the symposium by asking, “What would a school look like where people committed to social justice wanted to teach?”

Meghan Stacey is a senior lecturer in the UNSW School of Education, researching in the fields of the sociology of education and education policy and is the director of the Bachelor of Education (Secondary). Taking a particular interest in teachers, her research considers how teachers’ work is framed by policy, as well as the effects of such policy for those who work with, within and against it. She is an associate editor, The Australian Educational Researcher Links: Twitter & University Profile

The AI future for lesson plans is already here

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Another of our intermittent blogs during the #AARE2022 conference. If you want to cover a session at the conference or want to respond to something you’ve heard, please email jenna@aare.edu.au to check in. Thanks!

George Siemens gave the 2022 AARE conference keynote speech yesterday morning and the takeaway was this: artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing education in Australia whether we’re ready for it or not. He went on to suggest that unless we’re mindful we, as researchers and teacher educators, may not have a seat at the table in deciding what the future of education will look like. This blog post is about the future of AI-generated lesson plans and how we might think about this development today and into the future. Think of it as a concrete case study of exactly what George was talking about this morning where the conclusions might apply to other areas of education

What do today’s AI-generated lesson plans look like?

AI-generated lesson plans are already better than many people realise. Here’s an example generated through the GPT-3 deep learning language model:

Prompt: A lesson plan for English for teaching 16 year old students about the idea of “juxtaposition” within Romeo and Juliet.

Output from GPT-3 (verbatim, with formatting provided by the algorithm):

Background

Juxtaposition is the act of placing two things side by side, often for contrast. In literature, authors often use juxtaposition to create a certain mood or atmosphere, or to emphasize certain qualities of a character or situation.

 In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare uses juxtaposition extensively to contrast the two lovers and their families, the Montagues and the Capulets. He also uses juxtaposition to contrast the tragic events of the play with the light-hearted moments.

 Objectives

 By the end of the lesson, students will be able to:

 – Understand the concept of juxtaposition

– Identify examples of juxtaposition in Romeo and Juliet

– Explain how juxtaposition is used to create mood and atmosphere in the play

 Materials

 – A copy of Romeo and Juliet

– A whiteboard and markers

– A teacher-created handout with examples of juxtaposition from the play (optional)

 Procedure

 1. Introduce the concept of juxtaposition to the class. Explain that authors often use this literary device to create contrast and emphasize certain qualities.

 2. Ask the students to think of an example of two things that are often juxtaposed. Write some of their responses on the board.

 3. Tell the students that they are going to be looking for examples of juxtaposition in Romeo and Juliet. Explain that they should pay attention to how the contrast created by the juxtaposition contributes to the mood and atmosphere of the play.

 4. Give the students time to read through the play, or assigned sections of the play if time is limited. As they are reading, they should be looking for examples of juxtaposition.

 5. Once the students have finished reading, ask them to share the examples of juxtaposition that they found. Write these examples on the board.

 6. Finally, ask the students to explain how the juxtaposition affected the mood and atmosphere of the play. What did it emphasize about the characters or the situation?

 Extension Activity

 Have the students find additional examples of juxtaposition in other works of literature, or in everyday life. They can share their examples with the class and explain how the contrast created by the juxtaposition contributes to the overall effect.

Imagine that you’d set a task for a class of second year Bachelor of Education students to create a lesson plan with that same prompt. How do you think the AI response would compare to some of your students?

Anybody can generate their own lesson plans for a year level, subject area, and topic that interests them with a similar prompt: https://beta.openai.com/playground

Some concerns

It is trivially easy to generate useful lesson plans using this technique. One obvious upshot is that setting assessment tasks for any students in initial teacher education that involve them creating lesson plans isn’t a great idea any more—it’s too simple for them to generate one. Yet there are new opportunities that arise:

  • Why not get students to generate a few lesson plans, look at the patterns, and write something about the essential structure of this thing that we call a ‘lesson plan’?
  • Why not get them to take a generated lesson plan and improve it, annotating the reasons why their changes have made it better?

Another legitimate concern that arises is that inservice teachers might start to use the next generation of AI-generated lesson plans (which will undoubtedly be an order of magnitude more powerful) without critique—or worse, that some jurisdictions might actually request that teachers use such an approach in future.

A word that we need to look to is “design”

The issues raised by AI regarding lesson plans and in many places in education too can be addressed by consideration of design. When design in education is done well (whether that’s learning by design, design thinking, co-design, or within the subject area named “design”) it always places an emphasis on two things:

  1. Authentic problems: such that the learner must always construct an interpretation of the problem before they can address it
  2. Process and rationale such that the output that the student produces is impressive only if their process and rationale support what they’ve done.

When assessments follow these two ingredients then educators can give students free rein to use whatever tools they have at their disposal. The adoption of AI stops being a concern. When students are being assessed through their process rather than their output, students can use whatever tools are available. The challenge is integrating use of such tools into solving problems through collaboration, critical thinking, cultural understanding, and creativity.

Design as a response to “what should be taught”

George Siemens concluded his presentation by suggesting a list (controversially) of what should be taught in the context of an AI future. A summary/interpretation of his key points of what we should be teaching is:

  • Beingness: what it means to be human in the world, the interconnectedness of all things
  • Systems thinking: how systems change and what complexity is about
  • Technology and how to use it: machine learning and data literacy, computational thinking, collaborating with non-human intelligences

Increasingly, design has become a part of education: design for learning, learning by design, thinking, and so on. The epistemic fluency to design using computational tools in a way that enriches material life and human culture is at the root of all three of these areas. 

For any subject area, teaching using a design approach shifts the focus from knowing content to knowing process. It becomes less about how to get from A to B in a straight line and more about knowing how to frame problems, use tools, and communicate outcomes. More design in education provides one way of responding to this increase presence of AI in education, whether we’re ready for it or not.

It might even provide a response to George’s provocation about McKinsey, Deloitte, or Microsoft trying to get in on a slice of the education sector. Education conceived as design—process rather than output—prioritises the humans involved in the enterprise and makes it harder to sideline educators.

Dr Nick Kelly is a Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design at the Queensland University of Technology, in the School of Design. He is a genuinely cross-disciplinary researcher spanning the fields of Design and Education. He conducts research into design cognition (how designers think), metacognition in learning (how teachers and learners develop their metacognitive abilities), and places where these two things come together (design pedagogy, design for learning, learning by design, design of learning technologies). His specialisation is in the design, facilitation, and analysis of online communities.

Dr Kelli McGraw is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education Social Justice at QUT. Currently teaching units in Secondary English curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, her prior experience includes teaching high school English and debating in Southwest Sydney, NSW. Kelli researches the fields of English curriculum studies, secondary school assessment, teacher identity, digital literacy, popular culture and new media texts.

The last blog for the night – reading, shadow education in China, time poverty among teachers, philanthropy in schools

education in China, philanthropy in schools, Reading, teacher workload, , , , , , , ,

One of our intermittent blogs during the #AARE2022 conference. If you want to cover a session at the conference, please email jenna@aare.edu.au to check in. Thanks!

This blog was put together by Naomi Barnes of QUT, Rafaan Daliri-Ngametua of ACU and Kathleen Smithers of Charles Sturt University.

Naomi Barnes writes:

The University of Aukland represented well in the Policy and Politics SIG on Day 1 of the AARE conference with one paper on reading for pleasure in the NZ curriculum and shadow education regulation in China.

Ruth Boysak (pictured, left) challenged the individualistic approach to reading education that has come from the UK to dominate NZ education. Reading for pleasure has recently been inserted into the NZ curriculum but there is very little research on the activity in a social context. The idea of enjoying a book alone is deeply embedded in reading education and dominates how the practice is thought about in school, reseach and policy contexts. However, reading is an intensely social practice and there is virtually no research into social reading in NZ. Boysak explained that some NZ children preference their family and community activities over reading because reading is framed as an individual activity. We need to engage in more research about the sociality of reading if reading for pleasure is a new staple in the curriculum.

Carlos Liuning (pictured right) reported on a student-led project investigating the regulation of shadow education in China. In China shadow education is supplementary to the schooling the Chinese government provides – approximately 10 million tutors support this industry. Before 2018, shadow education was largely unregulated in China. In recent years the Chinese government has made it impossible for these private tutoring companies to operate leading to the mass unemployment of these workers. Liuning and colleagues are conducting their research to show the Chinese government that tutors are teachers and that there is still room in the regulated system for both private tutors and government teachers.

Two fascinating papers.

Rafaan Daliri-Ngametua writes on the Time Poverty Problem  

This morning I had the pleasure of attending the Teachers and Time Poverty presentation, in the Teachers’ Work and Lives SIG. A/Prof Nicole Mockler, Dr Anna Hogan, Dr Meghan Stacey, Dr Sue Creagh and Professor Greg Thompson (in absentia) introduced the Time Poverty Problem – it was a thrilling introduction to their ARC linkage project! Tackling the current, confronting and significant concerns around the intensification of teachers’ work, they presented a synthesis of existing, empirical research. More specifically, they explored how the concepts of workload and work intensification are being operationalised and how they may explain teachers and school leaders’ experiences of being time poor. Interestingly, they identified that ‘decision making’ practices and processes may be where the intensity of the work in schools manifests. Such ‘heavy hours’ (Beck, 2017) are in fact on an upward trend, with alarming negative impacts on job satisfaction and ultimately on the student experience. While the pressure to perform within the complex and multifaceted conditions of teachers’ work is not a new area of research, the work presented in this session introduced a seminal approach to tracking the granular details of how and where teachers are spending their time. While the project is hoping to capture the ebb and flow of the daily work of teachers, Anna rightfully pointed out that in fact there may be no ebb or flow but rather the intensity of the work of those in schools is seemingly sustained and unrelenting.  

The irony of this project was not lost on the presenters as they candidly discussed the complexity of researching and conceptualising time poverty and time poor teachers by necessarily taking up teachers’ time. However, to address this complexity they have developed a Time Tracker App – a methodological stroke of genius that allows for teachers to efficiently input their activities through various snap shots throughout their day. The data points from the initial pilot have produced fascinating outcomes and quandaries with vast implications on how we understand time in the teaching workforce. This presentation was moving and thought provoking. The captivated audience was enthralled by the teams’ academic rigour and scholarship, the innovative research approach as well as the timely and critical nature of the research problem and the ongoing implications. The second pilot of the research is currently underway! We will wait with great anticipation for more updates and outcomes from this formidable team and from what will be one of the pivotal projects of our time.  

Kathleen Smithers on philanthropy in Australian public schooling Symposium

Categories of philanthropy in Australian Public schooling from Anna Hogan and Alexandra Williamson

In this paper Hogan and Williamson map six categories of school funding to problematise the common argument that philanthropic funding in Australia is characterised by the “hyper agency of billionaires”. Indeed, they argue that it is both “easy and obvious to critique philanthropic funding”, but these philanthropic categories exist due to decreasing levels of school funding. They used desk research to identify the multiple forms of philanthropic funding, mapping these against the reforms set out by recommendation 41 of the gonski review. This paper sets the scene for the papers that follow, by identifying the landscape of Australian philanthropic funding. There are six categories identified: foundations, charities, intermediaries, not-for-profits, churches and Parent and Citizen associations. Hogan draws attention to the types of philanthropic funding that we may take for granted, such as Healthy Harold, and asks why we might question church funding of schools, but not other organisations.

Philanthropy, marketing disadvantage and the enterprising public school from Jess Gerrard, Elisa Di Gregorio and Anna Hogan

Following on from the previous papers mapping of philanthropy, they begun by identifying that Schools Plus is just one element of philanthropic funding in Australia. They argue that there are discourses which shape Australian schooling as “in crisis” and that this fuels the argument for philanthropic funding, which further fuels the idea of a “crisis” of funding in Australian schooling. Using interviews with people who work at Schools Plus and desktop review data, they unpack the conditions of possibility for philanthropic funding and the positioning of schools as entrepreneurs of their own futures. Interestingly, the administration of funding is mediated through a gate keeping process whereby schools must show some measures of ‘impact’ that can be provided to donors as evidence of their ‘legacy’.

The discussion that followed these papers explored the ways that Schools Plus administer funding and raised questions over who chooses funding? Who gets funded? And there were discussions about the missing links of fundings and the ways that schools are becoming entrepreneurs of gathering funding, with particular reference to P&Cs.

From global to local – how the world shapes learning

21st century teaching, quality teaching, talking about teaching, teacher workload, teaching workforce, , ,

Here is another of our intermittent blogs during the #AARE2022 conference. If you want to cover a session at the conference, please email jenna@aare.edu.au to check in. Thanks!

This blog, covering two sessions, was put together by Jess Harris at the University of Newcastle at the Teachers and Teaching Priority Research Centre

Kitty Janssen (top left), Russell Cross and Thi Kim Anh Dang (top right photo), Matthew Harper (middle left), Jacquie Briskham (bottom photo)

Jacquie Briskham: Prioritising Casual Relief Teachers through the provision of quality professional learning to Advance Teaching Capacity and Wellbeing

Casual teachers are in high demand. Despite the complexity of casual teaching, casual teachers have limited access to professional development, support and mentoring. Furthermore, casualisation can impact teachers’ career progressions, when they are competing for jobs with other teachers, who have been provided support, mentoring and ongoing professional development.

Jacquie reported that casual teachers are often left with superficial or simplified lessons that they have to redesign in order to help give engaging lessons.

This project engaged 32 casual teachers in Quality Teaching Rounds, with the support of the NSW Department of Education. Importantly, casuals were paid for their time, while they participated in four days of Rounds. After 6 days of professional development, there was a clear impact on the quality of teaching, the confidence of casual teachers and their morale. One of the highlights within the findings was that the provision of collaborative professional development supported casual teachers to feel a sense of belonging. They were able to develop a support network of colleagues with similar experiences. The network has endured beyond the project, with casual teachers supporting each other in schools and discussing their teaching practice. The principals noticed that QTR prompted casual teachers to engage in discussions about their teaching, a professional discourse that ‘wasn’t there previously’. Engagement in the PD has resulted in increased employment for many of the participants.

There is a call for more effective PD policy for all teachers, not just those who were in permanent positions. Responding to a question, Jacquie indicated that the development of networks for casual teachers was critical to supporting them to build a sense of belonging in the school and in the profession. There was some discussion about how you might take the program of PD for casual teachers to scale. There are issues with remuneration and across educational jurisdictions.

A question was raised about how to support casual teachers in high school settings, particularly when they were teaching out of field. Jacquie reported that the teaching standards were not as easily applied as a pedagogical model, like the Quality Teaching model, for improving every lesson. 

Dr Thi Kim Anh Dang and Assoc. Prof. Russell Cross: Globalizing Teacher Education through English as a Medium of Instruction: Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory Perspective.

Drawing on their latest publication, they look at context and teaching and teacher education research, particularly how globalised teacher education has been supported through the use of English as the language of instruction.

Globalisation has led to educational contexts that are no longer bounded in space. Rather they are shaped by global, national and local features of teaching and teacher education. The impact of COVID is used as an example of how global elements have reshaped teacher learning and practice across the globe. 

Dr Dang and Associate Prof Cross argue that there are still very limited theoretical tools for systematically analysing the role of context on teacher learning and practice. They draw on Vygotsky’s theory of genetic development across histories and times. This theory is empirical, empirically bound and theoretically rich.

There is a need for the articulation of globalised space in education. Global artefacts, including online social spaces, privilege the virtual and extend global imaginaries, which can transform our understanding of schooling, teaching, and teacher development. 

They demonstrate the utility of their theoretical framework through an examination of English Language instruction in Vietnam and how practices are shaped at these global, national and local levels.

Student perception of learning and wellbeing within and beyond the classroom

Saurabh Malviya: Continuity of Learning in the child’s everyday in outside school hours care

What does the community think of after school care educators? And how do children think about learning in and out of school. In Australia, the number of children attending Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) has doubled since 2005. While there is a national quality framework for OSHC, there is widespread variation in the level of educational practice embedded in programs. 

This study examines children’s perceptions of how OSHC as a place for developing their identity and extending their learning through play-based learning. This phenomenological study looks at one OSHC program with children ranging in ages from 5 – 12. The themes emerging from the research demonstrate that OSHC and the relationships with educators support children’s social and emotional learning and understandings of their agency.

In the question and answer session, there was a discussion about the potential unintended consequences of examining the educational outcomes of OSHC programs. Do we want that part of a child’s day to be seen as an extension of schooling? Or is it beneficial to the professionalisation of OSHC to understand the types of learning that they support.

Matthew Harper: The subject (still) matters: Uncovering student experience in a case study of high school mathematics and drama

Maths and drama are positioned at different ends of the curriculum spectrum, with maths being considered a serious pursuit while drama is seen as a school subject where students go to play and explore. Matthew Harper takes an in-depth look at these two school subjects, particularly how students perceive maths and drama and characterise their learning in these subjects. Drawing data from four classes (two maths and two drama) in one school, the study involves 51 lesson observations, two interviews with each teacher, student focus groups and visual illustrations of the subject areas.

In focus groups, students were asked to draw an illustration and asked to describe their experiences in either maths or drama lessons. These illustrations and interviews were analysed, using a Bernsteinian lens, to demonstrate the different forms of framing between the subjects. 

Students often drew and described their engagement in maths as passive and teacher driven, whereas drama is a place where students can test things out, try, fail and ‘escape’ the traditional classroom. These drawings and interviews showed powerful understandings of their experience with the content and experiences of learning in different classrooms and subject areas.

The discussion after the study was focused on some of the study’s limitations, in examining only one teacher in each school. The students’ drawings and interviews, however, reflected a specific understanding of how they believe a subject should be taught. The teachers’ individual approaches could be partly responsible for these ideas, it could be that the subject matters.

Dr Kitty Janssen: Improving adolescent sleep: The appropriateness of six potential strategies for secondary schools

Media reports suggest that Australian adolescents are sleep deprived, with reports of 7-10 teenagers not getting enough sleep. Despite a lack of evidence, school leaders from two Australian schools reported a need to build more education and support for students to understand their sleep needs. The approach to health and wellbeing in schools is complex, balancing individual student needs and supporting wellbeing. As a result, teachers need to focus on educating students about the importance of lifestyle changes, including improving sleep.

This study used a strengths-based approach to look at the various factors within students’ lives that helped to improve their sleep. Dr Janssen’s findings show that better understandings of sleep hygiene and parents’ involvement can support improvements in adolescents’ sleeping patterns. She developed the concept of adolescent busyness, which included students’ academic work, social media use, out of hours activities, and peer and family relationships to understand some of the factors that could be inhibiting sleep. Her findings challenged media reports, showing that the majority of adolescents in her study are getting the recommended amount of sleep.

Importantly for parents, this study found that parents’ oversight of social media and devices can create stress that actually inhibits adolescents’ sleep. The factors of adolescent busyness are slightly increased for female students and issues of sleep appear to be worse for children as they move into their mid-teen years.

How to succeed at inclusion

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The first of our intermittent blogs during the #AARE2022 conference. If you want to cover a session at the conference, please email jenna@aare.edu.au to check in. Thanks!

This blog was put together by Lara Maia-Pike, the centre coordinator in The Centre for Inclusive Education QUT and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Thom Nevill & Glenn Savage, University of Western Australia The changing rationalities of Australian federal and national inclusive education policies

In this session the presenters discussed their recent paper focusing on developments of inclusive education in federal and national reform. They started by providing a historical and conceptual analysis of inclusive education policies, particularly during the period of 1992 to 2015.

Political rationality refers to logical ways of thinking about policy development. The methodology used in their paper involves intervention approaches to policy analysis, paying close attention to context and how meaning is constructed in policy. They identified three phases of policy development: one, standardisation, two, neo-social and three, personalisation.

Phase 1: Rationality of standardisation (1992-2005): mode of reason, clear consistent and national guidelines (for example DDA & DSE). 

Phase 2: Review on the standards impact: emphasis on economic goods, producing wider education reforms (for example, the National Disability Strategy and NDIS). Banner of “education revolution”. Role in fostering economic productivity, emphasis of economic benefits of inclusion, broader productivity agenda.

Phase 3: The rise of personalisation, refers to how a service can be made more effective by tailoring to the needs of the students. Teachers can make education more inclusive and equitable by tailoring it to student needs (for example, the NCCD)

What are the implications? There is the shift from conceptualising inclusion collectively to personalisation of inclusion AND there is a responsibilisation of teachers and mothers.

Key insights:

  1. Rationalities that underpin inclusive education policies evolved and mutated over time. Economic rationalities have rearticulated the meaning and practices of inclusive education.
  2. Emerging and unexplored tensions between rationalities of standardisation and rationalities of personalisation.
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Ilektra Spandagou, The University of Sydney Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Early Interventions; Tensions for Inclusion

The presenter explored how early intervention is constructed within the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals. The concept of early intervention is deceptively simple, often refers to early actions that could prevent future complication or need. Early intervention goes beyond education and has been critiqued because often is not distinguished from early childhood development. 

Under the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) (UN, 1989) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN, 2006) early intervention is a established right for children with disability. Early intervention in International Conventions often sits within Health-related conventions. Early intervention in the Sustainable Development Goals carries policy narratives and a collective approach across different regions of the world. Findings include universal interventions, general targeted initiatives, targeted-mixed interventions (targeting disadvantages with interventions that reduce poverty) and interventions specifically targeted to disability. 

Universal interventions are varied, many are integrated programs that combine health, social and educational services. In some countries early interventions look into reducing poverty. 
Early interventions matter and can change the experience of disability. It sits across several fields which are often ignored from the field of inclusive education. While many of these initiatives in early intervention are necessary, the critique is that early intervention needs to be done in an inclusive way. 

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Kate de Bruin, Monash University Why Inclusive Education Reforms Fail in Australia: A Path to Dependency Analysis

The presenter focused on the question as to why policy reforms fail. The presenter discussed Path Dependency Theory, which is often applied in economics, and explains the resistance to change. The theory has three essential components: first, refers to initials’ conditions; second subsequent event and finally institutions reproduced it. Institutions become self-reinforced.

The initial conditions of Victorian education focused on creating a workforce to develop and sustain the economy. This led to the early critical juncture rise of Eugenics, which was enthusiastically taken by medical associations. Tools to screen for deviance and intelligence were developed, screening a large number of children. More and more children were identified, more and more assessors needed, growing exponentially, and leading to the creation of special schools. IQ tests became an intrenched mechanism leading institutions defend and reproduce segregation, through a legitimate-based mechanism. The moral argument was reconstructed by the legitimacy argument. During the 1980 categorical models were developed, where children had to meet a minimum threshold and category, and IQ tests were still used to segregate people, despite the development of conventions and legislation on the rights of people with disability regarding their education. With the development of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) (UN, 2006), the right to inclusive education was clearly defined under the General Comment No.4, Despite human rights recognition and legal obligations to implement inclusive education, many institutions still benefit, including profit making, from segregation. 

 

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Hello! This week you will see a number of . . . (And we have a slight glitch in our email so I’ve posted the excerpt from George Siemens keynote below)

Artificial Intelligence in schools,

Hi Subscribers to EduResearch Matters, the blog of the Australian Association for Research in Education.

This week, there will be a number of posts about sessions at the 2022 AARE conference, being held at the University of South Australia. They will be emailed to you irregularly across the days of the conference.

Looking forward to your feedback. Please share with friends who may not subscribe. You can find the subscription button here (the last option on the menu).

And if you are at the conference and want to contribute a blog, just email me jenna@aare.edu.au

Thanks,

Jenna

Siemens: the biggest challenges facing education now and ways to meet them

The AARE 2022 conference opens this year with a keynote from George Siemens. Here are some of his thoughts.

We have been hearing about fundamental change in education, often driven by technology, for several decades. Previous theorists, like Illich and Freire, similarly advocated for systemic education change, but their concerns were driven by economics, inclusion, and impact. When “education must change” is now advanced as a narrative, it’s often driven by a motivation to drive use of technology or the outsourcing of some core service of universities or schools. In response to the steady drum beat of calls for change, educators have become somewhat immune and even sceptical. Where is this new reality? Why has covid produced a longing for in-person learning, rather than a great drive for online learning? In our professional lives, the appeal of space and place interactions, while increasingly augmented with online engagement, remains strong.

In this talk, I present three dynamics to consider regarding our future education systems. First, I address the education landscape and the many additional stakeholders now prominently providing some core function. Secondly, I’ll address the conflicting space between data-centric research and complexity-science orientations. Thirdly, I’ll discuss the system of education itself. I believe we are facing a systemic challenge and when looking a decade into the future, it’s apparent that a fundamental change in role and responsibility will unfold for education. 

Before I begin, I want to set context for perhaps the most substantive challenge facing education. Trends can be seen as primary or secondary in terms of impact. Secondary impacts include state government mandates and even national level testing and assessment. A secondary trend may change parts of how teaching happens, the content taught, or how students are assessed. Often, the trend has a short timeline and is connected to the interests and motivations of the party in power. Primary trends, in contrast, are those that fundamentally and structurally change the systems of learning and education. In order to keep the system as it currently is, external pressure must be exerted to keep a primary trend from taking over. Unlike the rollout of national testing, which requires mandates to make things happen, a primary trend requires policy and intervention for it to NOT take over. 

We’ve seen numerous primary trends over the last decade, including the rise of social media and mobile technology. The primary trend confronting education, however, has a long history, dating back to the 1950’s, and is now beginning a rapid and alarming ascent to prominence in all areas of our lives: artificial intelligence. AI presents humanity with a unique challenge that we have not faced before: an agent with intelligence that rivals our own in a growing range of domains. 

Educationally, this presents a significant problem. In 2022, Generative AI has grown in influence and prominence. AI can now generate and create in domains that we have previously seen as exclusively our own: art, literature, and scientific discovery. DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion have created art that has won state art competitions. Moonbeam can create writing that has surprising coherence. LaMBDA can carry on conversations that are human-like. After being promised for decades that we would give up routine and mundane tasks to AI while retaining creative activities for ourselves, AI is emerging as an active competitor for our most human skills. Research and scientific discovery is now a pairing of human and artificial cognition. The entanglement that happens at the intersection of the two is spilling over into non-technical domains and sociologists, educators, and psychologists are evaluating how this interplay occurs and how it should be managed and supported.

Education, and all of society, moves forward with the looming AI trend in the background as the overarching development of the current era. The education landscape itself is undergoing significant commercialization and reliance on external stakeholders. Schools and universities are no longer primarily self-contained ecosystems. Instead, the fragmentation of function that defines globalisation has arrived. Online program managers support the development, marketing, and recruiting of students. International programs rely on a global recruitment network. Behind the scenes, consulting firms who had previously mainly addressed the needs of big business and large government now provide services to university and school leaders. Policy papers and guidance documents are produced by every major consulting firm in Australia and the prospect of big economic gains through innovation is a salivating prospect. Big technology is increasingly managing core university computing and security and privacy are now off loaded to these firms. Underpinning all of these transitions is the digital revolution and the data it produces as each student movement and interaction and engagement is logged and recorded. 

Digitization produces data and data produces analytics. For researchers, a conflict is unfolding reminiscent of the science wars of the 1990s. Data has won. All research – quantitative, qualitative, mixed – is digital in capture or analysis or publication. To this end, the quantitative side has resolutely and decisively ascended to the throne. The real space of debate now is on how to move data-centric research from focusing on isolated studies to instead begin assessing and evaluating holistic systems. The “science war” emerging is one where the expression of data is the primary concern. Systemic modelling and holistic assessment sits in conflict with NAPLAN and standardised testing. Research conducted is now increasingly focusing on digital spaces or at least spaces that have a digital component: AI predicting how protein folds,  sensors capturing remote environmental data,  psychologists evaluating the mental health of students in digital settings. A complexity science approach to research moves from granular and limited scope research that occurs in sanitised or limited context settings to including multi-faceted and nuanced contextual data.  

When systems change, inefficiencies are created. Organisations and individuals who evaluate and exploit those efficiencies reflect Gould’s punctuated equilibrium (or Kuhn’s paradigm shift): a sudden and significant phase change. This has been experienced in many sectors already, including the move from physical state music and movies to digital, the shift to on demand rather than broadcast media, and the move to networked media rather than centrally controlled. The accrual of inefficiencies – doing the things afforded by previous philosophies and technologies – is confronting education. How should we teach when AI is better at many cognitive tasks than we are? What should we teach when we can find and access the world’s information from our phone?

Looking a decade into the future, international organisations such as OECD see a world where technology is central to learning, where systems of education are dramatically different from what we see today, where AI is a co-learner, where focus on wellness and wellbeing are increasingly important. Educators have long been the end recipients of government initiatives, quasi-scientific pedagogical approaches, and somewhat short-sighted policy changes. The real work of education leadership is the work of systems change. Systems makers – those who create the structures that others work within – needs to be claimed by organisations such as AARE. The future of education is one that will only emerge to serve the broadest range of stakeholders when all participants have the ability to have a voice and to shape the conversation. Finding points of leverage in shaping learning systems through policy, research, funding, and planning landscape is the critical work of today for educational leaders.

Professor George Siemens is the professor and director of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning UniSA Education Futures. He researches networks, analytics, and human and artificial cognition in education. He has delivered keynote addresses in more than 40 countries on the influence of technology and media on education, organisations, and society. He has served as PI or Co-PI on grants with funding from NSF, SSHRC (Canada), Intel, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Boeing, and the Soros Foundation. Professor Siemens is a founding President of the Society for Learning Analytics Research. In 2008, he pioneered massive open online courses (sometimes referred to as MOOCs).

“How are the children?” One powerful question to ask in early childhood education

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A presentation from the Early Childhood SIG at #AARE2021 with Deborah Pino-Pasternak, Claire McLachlan and Dimity Franks.

The Masai tribes of Africa use the traditional greeting “Kasserian Ingera,” which translates to “And how are the children?” This greeting demonstrates the emphasis Masai warriors place on the wellbeing of the children in their tribe. As early childhood educators and educational researchers we too have a responsibility to protect and respect the children of our tribes. The Masai tribes know there are times where they are faced with challenges that preclude them from caring for their young, just as early childhood educators face barriers that prevent them from educating children in ways that best support their growth, development, and learning.

The recent AARE conference on Monday 29 November allowed three early childhood researchers to reimagine ways of thinking and working in complex and uncertain times to support the learning and welfare of children. Claire McLachlan, Deborah Pino-Pasternak, and Dimity Franks reminded us of the importance of keeping children at the forefront of early childhood education research. Although focusing on different aspects of child development and learning, all highlighted the importance of planning to support children in the early years of school.

Early childhood is a time for learning, a time for discovery and wonder. It lays the foundation for who we become in the future. So how do we prepare children for what is ahead, without quashing their curiosity and enthusiasm for learning?

Sustained shared thinking

Professor Claire McLachlan is a collaborator of the ‘Data, Knowledge, Action’ project which explored the use of sustained shared thinking (SST) to deepen young children’s learning in play-based and child-centred ways. Sustained shared thinking is defined as:

An episode in which two or more individuals work together in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept, evaluate activities, extend a narrative etc. Both parties must contribute to the thinking and it must develop and extend (Siraj-Blatchford et al., 2002)

Initial inquires found this type of interaction to make up a very small proportion of the teacher-child interactions that occurred each day at the two kindergarten centres in the study. Once the kindergarten teachers became more confident with using skills to develop SST interactions, they found it powerful in building a comprehensive picture about a child’s learning. Teaching teams observed that the more they knew about children, and the better connected they were with them, the better able they were to adjust and differentiate strategies across a range of diverse learners. When teachers work toward these shared sustained thinking interactions with intentionality and purpose, there is strong potential for all children to benefit.

Transition to school

Starting big school can be a daunting time for children. Associate Professor, Deborah Pino-Pasternak shared her insights into how to support children in their transition to school to set them up for success. The key, she claims, is the association between the home environment, parenting, and self-regulation.  Home environment considered the amount of shared activity in the home and levels of chaos, while parenting behaviours included closeness, conflict, autonomy support and control. Children’s abilities to regulate their cognition, motivation, emotions, and pro-social behaviours were reported by classroom teachers.

Home environments and parenting styles that encouraged autonomy and less negativity and control, were found to be conducive to the development of social and cognitive regulation. Children with high levels of self-regulation were identified as having positive academic outcomes.

Parents who were closer to their children were more likely to provide greater opportunities for autonomy support and less likely to exert control and engage in conflict (Deborah Pino-Pasternak)

Ultimately, home environments make a significant contribution to the development of self-regulation in early childhood. It is important therefore for teachers to work with families to support children’s transition to school as this could be instrumental to their later success.

Developing self-efficacy in the early years

Self-efficacy is a key aspect of social and emotional learning that is central to developing the confidence, resilience and independence required to be a successful learner. Dimity Franks spoke about the importance of teaching skills in self-efficacy in the early years of school to support children’s learning and wellbeing. Rather than measuring ability, self-efficacy explores one’s perception of their ability to achieve something ie whether they think they can complete something successfully or not. It is the difference between children who jump in and commence a task quickly, and those that say, “I can’t do that”.

One teacher in the study commented,

People underestimate its importance. There is a lot of anxiety among children at the moment, so what could be more important than teaching them to believe in themselves? (Tamara, teacher)

Of most significance in this presentation was the finding that the main source of self-efficacy for children in the early years of school is their physiological and emotional states, such as mood, and levels of stress, anxiety, and fatigue. Previous research into self-efficacy that relates to secondary and tertiary students found mastery experience to be the key source of self-efficacy.

These three presentations remind us that early childhood is a special and unique stage of development and should be valued as such. It is important for teachers to use age-appropriate pedagogies and practices to guide the learning of young children. Families too play an important role in setting up future leaders for a successful start in life. Parents, teachers, researchers, and the early childhood community should continue to work together and ask the question “And how are the children?”  

Dimity Franks is a Lecturer in Early Childhood at the School of Education at Edith Cowan University.