Amy Chapman

Preparing for parents: how Australian teacher education is addressing the question of parent-school engagement

Parent-school engagement is widely embraced as a policy and educational ideal, yet to date there are few studies of how teacher education prepares students for this important aspect of their professional lives. In this paper, we consider findings from a recent Australian study that explored how the issue of parent-school relations is currently addressed in Australian initial teacher education programmes. The study is situated within the broader policy context of teaching standards. Our findings challenge suggestions that parent-school engagement is largely absent from pre-service programmes, and although the study recognizes gaps and discontinuities, it also identifies four key domains in which initial teacher education currently prepares students for parent engagement. We argue that students are being prepared for parent-school engagement in a variety of ways, but that there is insufficient continuity to ensure that all beginning teachers have a thorough understanding of how to work effectively with parents.

Students in Space: Student Practices in Non-Traditional Classrooms

The discourse of the non-traditional classroom has found itself fundamentally intertwined with the rationalities of creating learning relevant for the future-orientated twenty-first century. In such an imaginary the idea of the conventional classroom – with its four walls, blackboard, ‘closed’ door, teacher-centred pedagogy and student learning conceptualised through the logics of the industrial era – is being renegotiated. This article focuses on an empirical examination of some of the changes to student classroom practice enabled by the material conditions of non-traditional learning spaces. In particular, it highlights the ways in which non-traditional learning spaces have become complex settings through which students negotiate increased learner autonomy, co-operative learning, acceptable classroom behaviour and fluid relations with teachers and peers. The article presents a discussion of the discourse of ‘twenty-first-century learning’ and focuses on non-traditional classrooms as an example of a localised expression of this discourse, supported by ethnographic data generated from field visits to three primary schools in Sydney, Australia to explore student practices enabled by such spaces.

Issues of teacher professional learning within ‘non-traditional’ classroom environments:

In response to the demands of the ‘21st century learner’, classroom environments are increasingly moving away from traditional models of a single-teacher isolated in their classroom. There is an advent of ‘non-traditional’ environments that challenge long-held practices in teaching. To support these changes there is a pressing need to create opportunities for professional learning. This article reports on a study undertaken within three primary schools that had recently adopted ‘non-traditional’ classroom environments. The study aimed to identify how these new spaces were shaping teaching practices and the challenges that they presented for professional learning. This article presents findings from this study with recommendations for how systems and schools can better manage the opportunities presented by these ‘non-traditional’ environments.

Putting “structure within the space”: spatially un/responsive pedagogic practices in open-plan learning environments

Non-traditional open-plan schools and classrooms are currently enjoying a resurgence in Australia, with proponents arguing for the necessity of educational spaces that more readily accommodate the needs of twenty-first century learners. However, these learning environments can pose considerable pedagogic challenges for teachers who must balance the ethos of spaces designed to facilitate autonomous and flexible student learning, while simultaneously managing the complexities of shared space and resources, decreased staff–student ratios, and highly variable student responses to learning in open-plan settings. This paper draws on observational and interview data from an Australian study of three primary schools operating in open-plan spaces. Informed by cultural theories of spatial practice, we argue that the ways in which teachers conceptualize and operationalize notions of “structure” is pivotal to the responsiveness of pedagogic approaches within open-plan spaces.

FYI…Virtual Space Has a Context: Towards an Alternative Frame for Understanding Cyberbullying

Whether we like it or not, computer-generated realities are networked into our everyday lives. From simple financial transactions and communicating via email to participation in social networking sites, writing personal blogs, video posting on YouTube and the formation of avatars to navigate online or as new identities for virtual worlds such as Second Life, digital communication and online participation is ubiquitous. The popularity and currency for young people of having an online presence suggests that there is something motivating them to shift their social space and relationships into the virtual. Whilst often these connections or networks offer opportunities for friendships to flourish, they also provide a platform for negative and distressing relationships, sometimes dominated by persistent and aggressive communication — or cyberbullying.

Wellbeing and Schools: Exploring the Normative Dimensions

This chapter develops a critical analysis of wellbeing as an educational aim. While the goals of schooling have become increasingly concerned with the promotion of wellbeing, the philosophical dimensions of such a move remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines the relationship between wellbeing and schooling, drawing attention to some implicit normative dimensions. It does so through an analysis of educational aims in Australia as well as the normative claims that buttress the contemporary focus on wellbeing. This analysis prompts consideration of whether wellbeing represents an acceptable goal for schooling. Further, it questions how wellbeing might compete or align with a range of other educative and social goals and agendas. These include not only the achievement of academic outcomes, but also a variety of other important educational goals, such as equity, citizenship, economic prosperity and social cohesion. In exploring these issues, the chapter seeks to contribute to both the conceptualization of wellbeing in educational settings and longstanding debates about the purposes of formal schooling.

Institutional statements of commitment and widening participation policy in Australia

This article describes ways in which the equity agenda, as outlined in the Bradley Review of Higher Education (Bradley et al., 2008), is translated into action in one Australian university. Drawing on the conceptual work of Ahmed (2012) to elaborate institutional life, we investigate the effects of the widening participation policy. Ahmed (2012) provokes us to consider institutional commitment as a non-performative in order to examine the association between names and effects as central to institutional cultures. This is achieved through a focus not only on what documents circulating within institutions say but what they do from the perspective of those working with them. The paper draws on three statements of commitment made by various Australian universities in the form of publicly available mission statements and strategic plans to explore how universities value, construct and authenticate their role in widening participation. It then proceeds by supplementing these texts with qualitative data gathered through semi-structured interviews with academic and professional staff in one Australian university to examine how such statements of commitment inform us of the extent to which they are practised or utilised as demonstrations of action in and of themselves. Drawing on Rizvi and Lingard’s (2011) work on social equity in Australian higher education, we argue that statements of commitment to equity and widening participation from universities in the current neoliberal policy assemblage can function to mask the ways in which universities continue to redefine educational values in terms of economics (Rizvi and Lingard, 2011).