Artefacts, practices and pedagogies : teaching writing in English in the NAPLAN era

In secondary schools, English teachers are often made responsible for writing results in national testing. Yet there have been few studies that focussed on this key group, or on how pedagogical practices have been impacted in the teaching of writing in their classrooms. This study investigated practices of English teachers in four secondary schools across different states, systems and regions. It developed a novel method of case study at a distance that required no classroom presence or school visits for the researchers and allowed a multi-sited and geographically dispersed design. Teachers were invited to select classroom artefacts pertaining to the teaching of writing in their English classes, compile individualised e-portfolios and reflect on these items in writing and in digitally conducted interviews, as well as elaborating on their broader philosophies and feelings about the teaching of writing. Despite and sometimes because of NAPLAN, these teachers held strong views on explicit teaching of elements of writing, but approached these in different ways. The artefacts that they created animated their teaching practices, connected them to their students and their subject, suggested both the pressure of externally driven homogenising approaches to writing and the creative individualised responses of skilled teachers within their unique contexts. In addition to providing granular detail about pedagogical practices in the teaching of writing in the NAPLAN era, the contribution of this paper lies in its methodological adaptation of case study at a distance through teacher-curated artefact portfolios that enabled a deep dive into individual teachers’ practices

Poetry in Action: Understanding Experiences, Perceptions, and Impacts of PIA in Secondary Schools: Research Report. Part 1, Artists

Poetry in Action is a theatre in education (TIE) company that has worked with schools around Australia for more than fifteen years, and apart from repeat bookings and anecdotal responses, little is known about the impact of PIA on teaching and learning in the schools that it has reached. In the arts industry, PIA provides employment to a range of artists, ranging from new graduates from theatre courses to industry experts. The research investigates experiences, perceptions, and impacts of PIA in Australian schools and in the arts industry. Report 1: Artists focuses on the interviews held with artists, particularly the themes of artists' practices, artists' professional capacity-building and artists' career development

Poetry in Action: Understanding Experiences, Perceptions, and Impacts of PIA in Secondary Schools: Research Report. Part 2, Schools

Poetry in Action is an Australian touring theatre group that has worked for fifteen years delivering intense, high-energy performance-based programs to schools around Australia and beyond. Poetry in Action aims to evoke joy and wonder, bring poetry to life, inspire and complement the work of teachers. In its emphasis on the vocal elements and musicality of poetry, and on embodiment and physicality in poetic expression, Poetry in Action provides more dynamic entry points to poetic language and form than students usually experience in text-based study of poetry. This mixed method research evaluates the impact of PIA on artists, teachers and students in the diverse secondary schools that PIA reaches. Report 2: Schools draws on a national survey with teachers and interviews with PIA artists to explore what schools value most and identify those factors that are barriers to delivery and quality of impact. Clearer insights into PIA's value to schools informs recommendations based on how teachers currently incorporate PIA shows into teaching and learning in their schools and how this might be strengthened to further increase and diversify the impact of PIA in secondary schools

Understanding the Experience and Perceived Impact of the Ready Arrive Work Program

The Ready Arrive Work (RAW) program assists high school students from refugee backgrounds to explore vocational learning pathways in a supportive and positive environment. It aims to equip them with a better understanding of employment, workplaces, career planning and the pathways which can lead to a successful career after completing school. Designed by JobQuest and the NSW Department of Education the RAW program targets government high schools in metropolitan and regional NSW. It has been operating in NSW High schools since 2006. For students from refugee backgrounds, careers advice has been consistently identified in policy and research as a point of vulnerability and as an ideal opportunity for intervention. A recent Victorian inquiry into school-based career advising (Parliament of Victoria, 2018) identified numerous issues faced by refugee students including: unfamiliarity with systems of education and work, inadequate knowledge of career options and prerequisites, isolation, trauma, disruptions, lack of connections and mentors, parents’ limited knowledge and accompanying expectations. More than a decade after the RAW initiative and resources were developed, and after rapid expansion of the program beyond its original site, this research aimed to gather an understanding of the perceived impact, enablers and barriers of the RAW program. This qualitative research interviewed 58 stakeholders including school students, school staff, Job quest staff and Raw steering committee, industry and civic partners. Findings indicated that the Ready Arrive Work program was beneficial for students, schools, industry and civic partner organisations. All the ‘impacts’ reported by these stakeholders were positive. This indicates that participating RAW stakeholders hold the program in high regard and the continuation of the program should be prioritised by the NSW Department of Education. Specific impacts were reported by stakeholders for each of the participating groups

Arctic terns : writing and art-making our way through the pandemic

We call ourselves the Arctic terns after the birds that migrate between the northern and southern hemispheres. Three of us live in south-west Britain and three in south-east Australia. We tried to make sense of our lockdown lives and the ways we were imbricated in world events. We wrote and made art in response. We read our work to each other and showed each other our artworks. The material practices we developed helped make the pandemic endurable, and at times hilarious. Here we share some of our work and some of our thinking about why it matters

Writing in Secondary Academic Partners

Writing in Secondary (WiS) Academic Partners is a partnership between the New South Wales Department of Education and the Centre for Educational Research, School of Education, Western Sydney University (WSU). The WiS project was undertaken across secondary schools (n=20) within NSW in 2021 and 2022. The project focused on the improvement in academic writing for Stages 4 and 5 within History; Personal Development, Health and Physical Education; Science and Visual Arts. The impact of WiS on students' writing within these subjects and teachers' pedagogical changes in the teaching of writing are identified in this report

Teaching Writing in Secondary English in the NAPLAN Era: Final Report

This report presents findings from research investigating the writing pedagogies, beliefs and practices of English teachers in the context of a decade of Australia's NAPLAN testing, where writing has been consistently identified as problematic in secondary schools

Julia the hottie and 'you go, girl' : role models for girls and young women?

Australia acquired its first female Prime Minister on June 24th 2010 when Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard confronted PM Kevin Rudd whose reputation had been in freefall. She quickly called an election for August 21st which resulted in a hung parliament. After 17 excruciating days of vote counting and deal-making, on 7th September, a Gillard Labor government was delivered to power with the support of a posse of independents. These weeks of waiting, first for the election, and then for the election result, provided ample opportunity for reflection for feminist educators like me, who surprised ourselves with our ambivalent responses. Surely, I thought, more than a century after suffrage, decades of International Women's Day school assemblies and thousands of stickers proclaiming that "Girls can do anything", and despite my poststructural theoretical leanings, this would be an event worth celebrating. Women friends and colleagues reported similar responses. Accordingly, and with a particular interest in exploring traces of ambivalence and contradiction, I began to map some of these celebratory responses to Gillard as our first female PM through the media, particularly in the "women's interest" segment of the market

Difference as ethical encounter

This chapter works further into the notion of “difference” in pedagogical encounters by exploring two collective biography stories alongside a third text, an excerpt from the Australian Prime Minister’s historic 2008 speech on the stolen generations. I argue that his speech can also be read as a pedagogical encounter with its own particular spatial, temporal and affective modalities and performances. Each of these texts draws attention to an ethics of encounter and responsibility and to notions of difference within pedagogical space. While one of the collective biography stories focuses on a young white teacher in a class of Aboriginal children, the other story traces the same teacher’s experience some years later with international exchange students. Both of these stories are provocations to investigate ethical relations between pedagogies, bodies and space, but in their sense-making they invoke differences of skin, language, belief, taste and culture, class and privilege, or lack of it, that appear to separate the teacher and her students, and to separate students from each other

Temporalities, pedagogies and gender-based violence education in Australian schools

This chapter examines two resource kits produced 20 years apart for Australian secondary schools: No Fear: A Kit Addressing Gender-Based Violence (1995) and Building Respectful Relationships: Stepping Out Against Gender-Based Violence (2016). It considers whether there is a ‘subject didactics’ for teaching and learning about gender-based violence (Ligozat et al., 2015), and how this might be influenced by feminist pedagogies. The chapter opens with an account of how didactics, pedagogies and curriculum intersect. It then maps curriculum continuities and variations across time, through close analysis of the resource kits and sample classroom activities, identifying key didactic principles for learning about gender-based violence