Tormented visibility: Extremism, stigma, and staging resistance in Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif’s Homegrown

This article examines the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif’s play Homegrown in 2015. Commissioned by the National Youth Theatre, it was unexpectedly cancelled days before it was due to open. This move can be attributed to heightened sensitivity towards so-called “extreme” opinions of the kind Homegrown features, as the British government tightened definitions of unacceptable speech and placed the onus on civil society bodies to police it. Yet, as this article argues, Homegrown’s treatment can also be understood in terms of the historical commissioning processes for minority – especially Muslim – theatre, which privilege certain topics and modes of address that result in marginal communities’ continued stigmatization. From the outset, Homegrown was alert to these constraints and sought to counter them through a radical refusal to conduct its debates in the manner approved by the framing conventions of security discourse and the governing etiquette of post-9/11 theatre

School Choice: What Motivates Parents

The educational system in Australia today is radically different from the school systems of the past. As Mark Porter (2010), Chairman of the Independent schools Council of Australia writes: The expanding role of the federal government in school education and the sustained growth of the independent sector are major developments which have influenced the nature of schooling in this country. (p. 2) The rise of the independent sector has given parents choice when it comes to selecting a school for their children. This increase in choice has been accompanied by a change of focus in Australian education. There has been a move in two major policy directions, marketisation and school performance. Both of these policies can be seen through a lens of competition, choice, the increasing emphasis on accountability, value adding to the curriculum through the addition of extra curricular activities, and the move to make the consumers of education bear the costs (English, 2009)

Future Leadership of Schools in Australia: Employee Perceptions of Taking on the Challenge

Educational systems are experiencing a global leadership crisis. The literature around school leadership paints a clear picture: school leaders are an ageing population and there is a lack of willingness from classroom teachers to take on school leadership roles. Anecdotal evidence would suggest this is also the case within Adventist Schools Australia (ASA), however, there is a lack of research that has explored the leadership intentions of current employees within this education system. Through a review of school leadership literature, and ASA employee survey responses on the topic of school leadership, this study explores the views of these respondents to taking on school leadership positions, including the influences on their decision to further explore school leadership roles

School Choice: What Parents Choose

The educational system in Australia allows parents to have a choice when it comes to selecting a school for their children. Parents have become consumers in an educational market, and schools, including Christian schools, now find themselves operating in a competitive space. The research reported in this two-part article sought to explore the factors that influence parents’ choice of school for their children using a mixed methods approach. Parents with students attending Christian schools in an Australian urban environment completed a total of 102 School Choice questionnaires, and 17 families with children in schools were interviewed

School and the Law: Today’s Teachers ‘Spooked’ by the Law

Over the last couple of decades there has been a change in our society where litigation and the threat of it in all aspects of life has significantly increased. The schools and, in particular, the teachers have not escaped this change. Child protection laws and increased cases of litigation are part of the teacher’s working environment. Increasingly, educational professionals have to focus on and engage with the legal dimension of their work

School and the Law: A Column Designed to Review Some Common Legal Issues for Private School Administrators and Teachers

One of the eye-catching headlines in the Newcastle Herald, 8th February, 2008, read: “Dreadlock Holiday”. It was designed, one would suggest, to entice the reader to continue their reading. Judging from the response to this article, in the media, over the following week, the headline fulfi lled its purpose

Faith-Based Volunteer Motivation: Exploring the Applicability of the Volunteer Functions Inventory to the Motivations and Satisfaction Levels of Volunteers in an Australian Faith-Based Organisation

Increasingly studies on volunteer motivation are exploring the process stages of volunteerism with particular attention to recruitment and retention. Volunteer experience and its dynamic association to satisfaction, however, remain underexamined, particularly in faith-based contexts. This study uses a functional approach to explore the applicability of the Volunteer Functions Inventory (Clary et al. in J Personal Soc Psychol, 74(6):1516–1530, 1998) to a sample of volunteers in an Australian faith-based organization. Factor analysis was supportive of a four-factor solution with the elimination of the Protective function and the emergence of a new function, Enrichment. The validity of a new structure, the Faith-Based Volunteer Motivation Scale, is tested against levels of volunteer satisfaction for this sample. Results concur with Clary et al.’s correlation between high-level motive fulfilment and degrees of satisfaction

Flourish: The Impact of an Intergenerational Program on Third-grade Students’ Social and Emotional Wellbeing with Application to the PERMA Framework

Intergenerational programs are increasingly being recognised as a means of promoting wellbeing through connecting communities, promoting caring relationships, and combating loneliness and isolation. While existing research provides evidence of the positive benefits of intergenerational programs for the elderly, there is limited research on the impact that these programs have on children’s wellbeing. The aim of this study was to measure the impact of the intergenerational program, ‘Flourish’, on student social and emotional wellbeing

Educational Administrators: Leaders or Managers?

The image is striking. A business man dressed in his suit is sitting on a wooden chair that has been placed on the pebbles very close to the water’s edge. He has his legs crossed, hands in his lap, shoulders back and with an air of authority he is staring out across the lake. In the background one can see the mountains on the other side of the lake, giving way to the expansive sky overhead. Words have been overprinted in the sky which simply read, ‘Now I invent instead of Predict. I am a Visionary’. Underneath the image the rest of the advertisement begins by proclaiming, ‘The Advanced Management Program—Creating Innovators.