Asia literacy is an Australian education policy goal intended to educate Australian school students about Asian languages, cultures, and economies and, in turn, deepen Australian engagement with the Asian region. First defined in 1988, the concept has since been adapted by a suite of Asia education policies with more than 60 relevant policy documents having been published since the 1950s.
However, despite being a cornerstone education policy, political vagaries have prevented the widespread and sustained implementation of Asia literacy education in schools. Tied to the broader goal of engaging with Asia, Asia literacy is in conflict with a sense of an Australian national identity and entangled with Australian economic, education, and foreign policies.
A thematic review of the extant policy data and scholarly literature reveals several flaws in Asia literacy policy. Namely, it is underpinned by several assumptions: Asia literacy is learned in formal education; Asia is a knowable entity; proficiency in languages, cultures, and economies equates to Asia literacy; and Asia literacy is assumed to resolve national disengagement from Asia. This approach fails to account for everyday Asia literacy enlivened in the multicultural and multilingual Australian society. Scholars have argued that this “others” Asia from everyday Australian life. The implications of this model of Asia literacy play out in the classroom with few teachers reporting confidence in teaching Asia literacy content, and enrollments in Asia-related subjects being perpetually low.
Newer policy imperatives which stipulate the teaching and learning of intercultural competencies may help to dissolve the construct of the Asian other and enliven Asia literacy in the classroom beyond knowledge of languages and cultures. If pursued, this can foster dynamic knowledge of Asia in Australian schools, bringing Asia closer to the everyday and enhancing engagement with the Asian region.
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Emily S. Rudling
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Emily Gray
The key themes that inform research with LGBTIQ+ teachers in Australia are heteronormativity in the workplace, policy, context, and the negotiation of private and professional worlds. There is a paucity of work that focuses solely on an Australian context; therefore, it is necessary to link the Australian themes to broader international themes from the field. Research carried out into the lives of LGBTIQ+ teachers in Australia is part of a small but growing field of international work that engages with LGBTIQ+ teacher identities, both in their personal and professional lives. LGBTIQ+ is an acronym that refers to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and/or queer. The “+” acknowledges that there may be other categories of gender and sexual identification that are not included here, and also acknowledges that gender and sexual identities are shifting and may be subject to change during the duration of a person’s life. LGBTIQ+ has been chosen as a preferred acronym in the article because of its inclusiveness and acknowledgment of physical sex, sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression. When referring specifically to the experiences of transgender educators, “trans*” is used, a broad term for people who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth and which includes people identifying as transgender, genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender creative. The term “cisgender” or “cis” is used to denote people whose sex assigned at birth reflects their gender identity.
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Diane Mayer, Wayne Cotton, and Alyson Simpson
The past decade has seen increasing federal intervention in teacher education in Australia, and like many other countries, more attention on teacher education as a policy problem. The current policy context calls for graduates from initial teacher education programs to be classroom ready and for teacher education programs to provide evidence of their effectiveness and their impact on student learning. It is suggested that teacher educators currently lack sufficient evidence and response to criticisms of effectiveness and impact. However, examination of the relevant literature and analysis of the discourses informing current policy demonstrate that it is the issue of how effectiveness is understood and framed, and what constitutes evidence of effectiveness, that needs closer examination by both teacher educators and policymakers before evidence of impact can be usefully claimed—or not.
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Stephen Crump, Kylie Twyford, and Theresa Koroivulaono
Remote and rural education is a resonating issue worldwide, given the new and emerging capabilities of digitization to reduce barriers of distance, time, and space, particularly for Oceania. Issues based on achieving equitable educational access and participation that ameliorates the disadvantages for many students in remote and rural locations of Australasia and the Pacific, compared to those in urban classrooms, are pertinent. Nonetheless, students in remote and rural locations also show great resilience and have built up a trove of informal knowledge from the demands of daily life requiring a high degree of independence and maturity. This is evident in the distance education School of the Air in Australia, the University of the South Pacific, and the Marshall Islands College in the North Pacific. These sites provide insights into strength-based reform strategies intended to improve rural and remote education and training and, consequently, work and life choices.
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“Redressing Aboriginal disadvantage” through Indigenous education policy and studies has been on the policy agenda in Australian institutions for several decades. With notable exceptions, Indigenous studies programs have tended to position Indigenous peoples as objects of study. These objectifications still largely pivot around constructions of Indigenous cultures and peoples through deficit or essentializing discourses. The apprehension of these limiting discourses in Indigenous Australian studies for non-Indigenous learners contribute to the reproduction and reinforcement of contemporary justifications for Indigenous peoples’ colonial disenfranchisement. Often, limited attention is given to examining the relationality of knowledge, people, and ideas in (neo)colonial domains and, subsequently, to the deconstruction of the epistemological conditions under which Indigenous peoples were and are “known.” The Indigenist Standpoint Pedagogical (ISP) framework was designed to develop critical tools for all students to understand the epistemic forces that empower their worldviews and behaviors. The key question for an ISP framed learning space shifts is not, “What do students need to know about Indigenous peoples and experiences?” but rather, “Where does my knowledge come from and what is its purpose and impact on the way I relate to, and form, understandings about Australian history and Indigenous Australian peoples and experiences?” In the latter approach, students are exposed to opportunities to theorize and examine structural privilege. They engage in critical self-enquiry to interrogate the conditions that impact on their interpretations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian experiences throughout history and into the 21st century. In this sense, ISP is an inherently reformative, relational, and critically reflexive framework that supports and facilitates the reintegration of Indigenous knowledge perspectives in ways that interrupt the enduring impact of the colonial narrative.
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Georgina Barton and Kay Hartwig
The business of international students in the higher education sector is a crucial part of many countries’ economic development and intercultural richness. In fact, in Australia participation of international students in university study accounts for the third highest export industry behind iron ore and coal with similar trends seen in other countries. Given that such a large proportion of students across the globe are international, it is important that higher educators are able to support them appropriately through their study. Research literature has identified a number of issues international students face including homesickness, being away from family and friends, financial hardship, accommodation concerns, and cultural difference including language. Further concerns may arise when international students undertake a professional experience in an authentic workplace such as in a work integrated learning (WIL) experience or practicum or internship. For international students studying teacher education students are expected to complete a number of professional experiences within the schooling sector. Research about teacher education international students’ experience in schools has often focused on negative aspects related to this component of study rather than the success that many students enjoy. In fact, supervisors or the work colleagues who are responsible for assessing international students often report mutual benefits through hosting. International students in teacher education face several difficult issues as well as success, and this includes international students in Australia and domestic students undertaking professional experience overseas. A model of effective practice for all stakeholders in teacher education professional experience can be useful.
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Elisa Di Gregorio and Glenn C. Savage
In recent decades, important changes have taken place in terms of how governments debate, manage, and allocate funding for schools. These changes have been strongly influenced by a diversification of actors contributing to the school funding. For example, although governments continue to provide the majority of funding resources for schools across member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), many nations have witnessed an increased presence of nongovernment actors, such as philanthropies and corporations, in contributing to the funding of both government and nongovernment schools. Many nations have also seen increases in private parental contributions, which has contributed to the expansion of private schooling relative to traditional public schooling.
Despite significant diversity in funding models across OECD nations, debates about funding are increasingly informed by a transnational field of policy ideas, practices, and evidence. The OECD has been a central force in facilitating this “global conversation” about the complexity of school funding trends and impacts, particularly in relation to the impacts of funding on student achievement and equity. A key question in these evolving debates is whether “more money” alone will improve outcomes or whether the focus needs to shift more toward “what schools do” with money (i.e., a “what works” approach). In response to this question, the OECD has played a leading role in steering global debates away from a historically dominant focus on whether more funding makes a difference or not to student achievement, toward a different narrative that suggests the amount of money only matters up to a certain point, and that what matters most beyond that is what systems and schools do with money. At the same time, the OECD has been central to producing a rearticulated “numbers-driven” understanding of equity, which understands equity primarily in terms of the relationship between a young person’s background and his or her performance on PISA, and which frames equity as primarily important from an economic perspective.
Importantly, however, while schooling funding reforms are increasingly informed by global conversations, policy reforms remain locally negotiated. Recent Australian school funding reforms illustrate this well. Over the past decade, two prominent federal school funding reviews have sought to address funding issues in Australia’s federal system. These reports have been deeply shaped by the distinctive conditions of possibility of Australian federalism, but at the same time have been heavily informed by broader transnational reform narratives and the work of the OECD specifically. Yet while both reviews position the OECD at the center of their respective rationales, each does so in different ways that speak to different policy problems. An exploration of the Australian case and how it relates to broader global conversations about school funding offers important insights into how policies are simultaneously globally and locally negotiated.
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Troy Heffernan
Education in Australia’s history stretches back tens of thousands of years, but only a small number of changes have altered its shape in that time. The first period of education lasted for thousands of years and was an Indigenous education as knowledge of religious beliefs, society, and laws was shared from one generation to the next. Knowledge of Australia’s significant environmental diversity was also taught because possessing the skills to find appropriate shelter for the conditions, while developing methods of hunting, gathering, and fishing, was knowledge that needed to be taught to ensure survival.
Education changed when Europeans invaded Indigenous lands. Settlers who brought children as well as those who gave birth to children wanted their offspring to be part of an education system that mimicked England’s. Ex-convicts and later members of the Church provided this service and began the tradition of non-Indigenous education in Australia. It was during the 19th century as cities and towns increased in size, and the population more generally, that the final two significant periods of Australian education began. The nation’s wealthiest required religious and grammar schools that prepared children for secondary education and for university overseas, as well as in Australia as universities were established and slowly increased in number. When private education began, it was largely the only option for those seeking university degrees for their children, but this began a series of events in Australia that still sees approximately one-third of all school students attending private schools.
Public and compulsory education began in the late 19th century and gradually became more accessible. Public education, in some respects, began as governments saw the benefit in the social advantages of education, and economic incentives in creating educated laborers. However, even through the austerity of world wars and financial depression, successive generations of publicly educated individuals saw the need for increasingly continuing education beyond the compulsory school age. Public education subsequently increased in popularity through the 20th century as a growing number of students stayed beyond compulsory schooling age. Education in Australia is still seeing policies change to make schooling accessible and open to all members of society regardless of background. In the 21st century, secondary schooling is being completed by most demographic groups, and university has become accessible to a diverse group of students, many of whom may not have had access to such options only a few decades ago. This is not to suggest that systemic issues of racism and ostracism have been eradicated, but steps have been made to begin addressing these issues.
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Three normative accounts of formal early childhood education and care are evident within international, national, and local policy frames. Human capital theories, human rights discourses, and social pedagogic understandings shape policy frames in specific ways. The flow of global policy frames has influenced the formal early childhood education and care sector in Australia. Early childhood education and care have evolved as specific repositories of hope for nation states seeking to boost their productivity and secure enhanced life outcomes for citizens. There are structural challenges in translating an evidence base and apparent policy consensus into systemic change. It is therefore necessary to highlight the persistence of equity challenges that exist in the early childhood education and care sector in Australia.
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Kimberley Pressick-Kilborn, Melissa Silk, and Jane Martin
STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education has become a global agenda, with schooling systems around the world in developed and developing countries seeking to incorporate STEM programs into their in-school and out-of-school curricula. While disciplinary integration has been common practice in primary (elementary) schooling for many decades, in the early 21st century the STEM education movement has promoted an increased focus on project- and problem-based learning across disciplines in secondary schools as well. Research suggests, however, that STEM education programs can face barriers in their implementation, often depending on whether they are designed to align with existing curriculum outcomes or whether they are developed as cocurricular programs. Challenges are also presented by the need for professional learning to equip teachers with new skills and knowledge in designing and delivering STEM education. In addition, some researchers and educators have argued for STEAM—integration of the arts in STEM education. For those concerned with school reform, a great strength of STEM and STEAM education approaches lies in the potential for transdisciplinarity. As such, new opportunities and possibilities for framing driving questions and addressing contemporary societal challenges are created. Two particular issues identified as critical are (a) the potential contribution of STEM education to creating a sustainable future, and (b) the importance of STEM education for social justice, in ensuring all children and young people have equitable access to learning opportunities.
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Catherine Robinson
Homelessness, with poverty and housing inaccessibility as its underlying structural drivers, has an enduring presence in all Western nations. While governments traditionally focus on supporting adults, families, and youth out of homelessness, increasingly attention is being turned to the significant number of children under 18 years who experience homelessness alone without an accompanying parent or guardian. Unaccompanied children commonly leave home early against the backdrop of family conflict and breakdown, domestic violence, physical and sexual abuse, and neglect. They may sleep rough without shelter, couch-surf between extended family members, friends, and acquaintances, and access those youth refuges that will accommodate them. Without access to the consistent care of a parent or guardian, unaccompanied homeless children experience unique personal, systemic, and structural vulnerabilities that, without adequate developmentally appropriate intervention, will result in a range of physical, psychological, social, and educational harms.
Schools, as the sole universal statutory service for children, can be central in the immediate safeguarding of children and their referral to services for additional supports. Schools can also offer a pathway into lifelong learning, employment, and community connectedness that is crucial to reducing poverty and enabling wellbeing and social inclusion. As such, schools have a key role to play in responding to unaccompanied homeless children by ensuring equitable access to education and engaging with the international shift toward child and youth homelessness prevention and early intervention.
Research consistently suggests school-based programs are key to identifying children at risk, preventing homelessness, and improving learning outcomes for those who do experience homelessness. At a minimum, schools can intervene in educational harms, such as low attainment and early school leaving, that are associated with high mobility, a lack of support, cumulative trauma, and stigma. Addressing administrative and practical barriers to homeless children’s school access and attendance, implementing trauma-informed practice, and increasing awareness of homelessness are essential starting points. Further, the trend of articulating child wellbeing as a shared, cross-sector goal has increasingly created opportunities for schools, in collaboration with social services, to become innovative homelessness prevention and early intervention hubs that strengthen children’s outcomes.
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Fiona MacDonald
The purpose of education and school reform is a topic of constant debate, which take on a different perspective depending on the motivation of those calling for change. In the Australian context, two of the loudest school reform agendas in the early 21st century center on school autonomy and social justice. The school autonomy agenda focuses on freeing up schools from the centralized and bureaucratic authorities, enabling them to respond to the local needs of their students and school community. Social justice reform focuses on equity, including lack of opportunity, long-term health conditions, low educational attainment, and other intersecting inequalities, and practices of care and nurture that focus on emotional, behavioral, and social difficulties in order to address the disadvantages and inequalities experienced by many students and families.
In the early 21st century, school autonomy and social justice reform have been engulfed by neoliberal ideology and practices. Schools are encouraged to engage in a culture of competitive performativity dictated by market-driven agendas, whereas equity has been transformed by measurements and comparisons. Neoliberalism has been heavily critiqued by scholars who argue that it has mobilized the school autonomy agenda in ways that generate injustice and that it fails to address the social issues facing students, families, schools, and the system.
Schools are committed to care and social justice, and, when given autonomy without systems-level constraints, they are adept at implementing socially just practices. While the neoliberal agenda focuses on the market and competitive performativity, the premise of school autonomy is to empower school leadership to innovate and pursue opportunities to respond more effectively to the needs and demands of their school at the local level. Schools are implementing social justice practices and programs that introduce responsive caregiving and learning environments into their school culture in order to address the holistic wellbeing and learning needs of their students and school community. With an increasing commitment to addressing disadvantage through the provision of breakfast food, schools are creating wraparound environments of nurture and care that have become enablers of students’ learning and of their connectedness to school and their local community. Adopting a whole-school approach, principals have demonstrated how social justice and school autonomy reform has aligned to address the overall educational commitment to excellence and equity in Australian education.
