Julia Morris

Edith Cowan University | ECU · School of Education

Globally, creativity is viewed as a twenty-first-century education competency that is acknowledged by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Ghanaian Ministry of Education (MOE) pre-tertiary curriculum framework. Ghanaian teachers are required to inspire, teach a...

Drawing on the Four C Model of Creativity and Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) as frameworks, the multi-site qualitative case study explored the creative practice of 16 Ghanaian secondary visual arts teachers in the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis, as the 2019 National Pre-Tertiary Curriculum Framework mandates creativity. The researchers used the...

Innovative learning environments (ILEs) have been regarded as one of the contributing factors that facilitate creativity in learners. At the pre-tertiary level of education, Ghana has recently undergone educational reform that sees creativity being added as a key goal for education, but it is unknown if teachers' practices within current educationa...

Secondary visual arts education provides learners with opportunities to develop critical thinking, and their creative potential, as part of their personal growth. This development happens when visual arts teachers actively integrate creative pedagogies to target creative thinking in learners. Ghana's 2019 National Pre-tertiary Curriculum Framework...

The development of creativity through learning is a significant part of Ghana's pre-tertiary education system framework. Achieving the successful implementation of creativity from policy to practice in schools relies on teachers in the local school system, who are shaped by their past teaching experiences and the training they have received during...

As many schools are moving towards more innovative learning environments, there is an ongoing need for evidence about how teachers and students use these innovative spaces to enhance learning. While innovative learning environments have been characterised as spaces that are more flexible, with ubiquitous technology and the ability to reconfigure sp...

Currently, educational bodies are recognising the importance of integrating Australian Indigenous cultures in education to promote intercultural understanding and improve outcomes for Indigenous students. In drama, learning about Indigenous perspectives can be integrated through sharing cultural stories, with this integration mandated by the Austra...

Developing creativity in learners is contingent on how teachers define and understand creativity. This qualitative multi-site case study investigated secondary visual arts teachers’ perceptions and understanding of creativity in Sekondi-Takoradi in Ghana and the influences that impact their perceptions. Data were gathered from 16 secondary visual a...

Despite the known affordances of Arts-Based Research Practice within the international education environment, its use remains relatively uncommon in Western Australia. The reasons for this are likely the contested nature of quality criteria by which Arts-Based Practice is evaluated as well as the challenges as well associated with the dissemination...

This participatory action research case study describes how one secondary school aimed to improve staff culture. Although pre-test data showed the school as performing consistently well in terms of their organisational health, the school chose to implement a line management intervention over 12 months to target three low-rating factors: appraisal a...

In order to supply a future Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce, Australia needs to engage its most capable and gifted secondary students in quality STEM learning, either within school or through extra-curricular opportunities, so that they will continue into STEM-based tertiary degrees. High-achieving students in rur...

The STEBI-B (Enoch & Riggs, 1990) has been widely used as a measure of undergraduate primary pre-service teacher self-efficacy since its creation. However, the publication of its use within postgraduate teaching courses has been limited. The postgraduate pre-service teachers (Graduate Diploma and Master of Education students) are a very different p...

For secondary school teachers, developing a teacher identity is complicated by spoken or implied expectations of the need to be an expert in the skills and knowledge of one’s subject discipline. Since 2009, the Teacher as Practitioner study (N = 764) has explored the effect of continued subject discipline practice on teachers’ identity and retentio...

Arts-based research is a participatory research practice that is well established in the qualitative field. However, while arts-based research has been defined as the creation of art to generate, interpret or communicate research knowledge, there is exiguous literature on the creation of art to establish trustworthiness in qualitative inquiry. This...

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is dominating industry as we become more technology-dependent and the workplace evolves. Consequently, engaging industry professionals in STEM education continues to be a priority in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, as industry look to invest in stud...

The Thesis by Publication is garnering increasing interest across nations and disciplines. However, more needs to be learned about institutional and supervisory support for this thesis mode to ensure that doctoral candidates pursuing this approach enjoy the best possible outcomes. This paper draws on data from 246 recent successful doctoral candida...

A validation of my pedagogy': How subject discipline practice supports early career teachers' identities and perceptions of retention For secondary school teachers, developing a teacher identity is complicated by spoken or implied expectations of the need to be an expert in the skills and knowledge of one's subject discipline. Since 2009, the Teach...

This research compared the process of disciplinary literacy acquisition of students who experienced two different pedagogical approaches to learning science, technology, engineering and mathematics through astronomy (STEM-A). The objective of this study was to explore the impact of a digital storytelling (DST) educational technology intervention in...

The primary research output of a contemporary doctoral journey is no longer limited to a traditional thesis. Amongst other possibilities, current doctoral candidates may choose to produce a Thesis by Publication (TBP). However, very little is known about the factors shaping doctoral candidates’ decisions to adopt a TBP approach during their doctora...

The paper introduces and explores the Plans to Pedagogy research programme, a three-year project focused on teacher capacity-building within schools. Plans to Pedagogy engages practitioner-researchers in the development of their and their colleagues’ spatial learning skills as they move into and attempt to take advantage of innovative learning envi...

In the current field of doctoral education, there is a range of possible approaches presented to doctoral candidates. The Thesis by Publication (TBP) is an option increasingly offered by universities around the world and adopted by candidates in diverse fields. As the approach gains in popularity in response to the demands of modern academia, there...

The Thesis by Publication (TBP) is an approach to doctoral education that offers the advantage of achievement of a doctoral degree while at the same time facilitating development of transferable knowledge and skills necessary to enter and sustain a career in contemporary academia. There is a need to build deeper understanding of the demands of the...

When we set about conducting research with young people, we need to put aside our assumption that they will perceive the experience as we might in their place. As we know that “both respondent and question characteristics affect the reliability of responses in surveys” (Borgers et al. 2004, p. 17), conducting any research with children and students...

We set out to write this book for like-minded people – those who were interested in using statistics in educational research and who needed a helping hand in doing so. In many educational sub-fields there is a tendency to preference qualitative methods (well, speaking as a visual arts education researcher Julia knows most of the studies she reads a...

Correlation indicates how two variables move together, and how strongly one variable moves in relation to other variable. For instance, a store owner observes that sales of soccer balls and sunglasses over a given period tend to increase and decrease together. When a correlation test is run and it is found that the correlation is statistically sign...

It is important to consider the many shades of grey when planning for research in the educational setting. In education there are many factors that impact on research outcomes: the classroom setting, teacher, students, past educational experiences, family experiences and values, and school culture (to name a few). All of these variables need to be...

Now you know how to run and report statistical analyses, you will be keen to share your findings with the world at large. Very few researchers in contemporary research environments conduct research with the sole aim of producing a thesis; most of us want our findings to get out into schools, homes and communities and lead to change. An academic the...

A test of differences between groups is one of the most commonly used statistical procedures. For instance, we observe that student academic performance at one school may be better than at another. We can confirm whether this observation is true by using Mann-Whitney U to test if there is a significant difference in the student performance at these...

Now that you have an overview of quantitative methods and their benefits in education research, you are ready to look at the types of data you are collecting (or want to collect) and the tests that may be appropriate to apply to them. In this chapter we will be discussing four types of data which are normally referred to in statistics: ratio, inter...

Once you have decided which test best suits your data and your analytic needs, it’s time to open up SPSS and prepare the data for testing. We will now give some advice about how to read your data in SPSS.

Regression is used to explain variations in an outcome variable, y, accounted by an explanatory (predictor) variable, x. In other words, how much can one phenomenon be explained by a given variable or a set of variables. Say for example, we hypothesise that access to reading materials (x) can increase reading frequency (y) among young people. Using...

This book provides a clear and straightforward guide for all those seeking to conduct quantitative research in the field of education, using primary research data samples. While positioned as less powerful and somehow inferior, non-parametric tests can be very useful where the research can only be designed to accommodate data structure which is ord...

Whilst the role of disciplinary literacy in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is becoming more prominent, there appears to be little adaptation or allowance made for English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) students learning science in English, as well as no clear understanding of what comprises disciplinar...

This research is based on the Journey through Space and Time (JTST) educational astronomy project for primary and junior high school science curricula in Australia, which seeks to improve students' astronomy content knowledge through science inquiry. The focus of the current project is on the learning needs of students for whom the language of inst...

This Australian case study explored the implementation of strategies to support the development of a positive school culture among whole school staff. A participatory action research approach was used to involve leadership staff in the development of a mixed method assessment of the school organisation. Baseline data from the School Organisational...

The ‘responding’ strand of the Australian visual arts curriculum promotes twenty-first century learning skills through students’ analytical engagement with artworks and artists. Assessing students’ experiences and engagement is one strategy to improve teaching and learning in responding. However, there are no validated, subject-specific student eng...

The thesis by publication (TBP) is an increasingly popular approach to doctoral education that sees candidates publishing their research during their candidature, and including these outputs in their final thesis submission. Responsive to the realities of modern academia, a TBP provides doctoral candidates with opportunities to engage in the schola...

This book has been written to help support higher degree by research students, early career academics and life-long researchers who are looking to increase their capacity to both choose and use quantitative data collection and analysis in educational research. Non-parametric statistics are commonly used in educational research, as the types of res...

While considerable research explores the phenomenon of early-career teacher retention, surprisingly few studies report long-term intervention strategies that attempt to resolve this issue. For context, the paper briefly describes one exception, a seven-year longitudinal project involving over 170 secondary teachers that provides mechanisms to help...

The article “Arts engagement outside of school: Links with Year 10 to 12 students’ intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy in responding to art” written by Julia E. Morris was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 28 March 2018 without open access. With the author(s)’ decision to opt for O...

The Teacher as Practitioner (TAP) project is unique in combining a longitudinal approach (now into its eight year) and a quasi-experimental design (its intervention being participation in a themed annually curated group exhibition/exposition) in providing empirical grounds for claims about the role and place of 'practice' in becoming practitioner i...

The Teacher as Practitioner (TAP) project is unique in combining a longitudinal approach (now into its eighth year) and a quasi-experimental design (its intervention being participation in a themed annually curated group exhibition/exposition) in providing empirical grounds for claims about the role and place of ‘practice’ in becoming practitioner...

According to international benchmarks [Thomson, S., Wernert, N., O'Grady, E., & Rodrigues, S. (2017). TIMSS 2015: Reporting Australia's results. Retrieved from Camberwell, Victoria: www.acer.edu.au/timss], Australia’s science education is still in decline and so the need for further investigation into preservice teachers is warranted. Utilising dat...

Alternative conceptions in astronomy are a road block to new learning. Astronomy content is included in the Australian Curriculum (AC) from Year 3 and then intermittently in Year 5, Year 7 and Year 10. In accepting that science is socio-culturally constructed, it is important for teachers to have a clear understanding of the alternative conceptions...

Upheavals in social media and communications are overturning education, at the same time, a group of art education graduates and their artist lecturers are using creative research to disrupt this turn by visualising the practice of Digital Sabbath. The Digital Sabbath practice aimed to explore the feasibility of switching off from technology and th...

The successful publication of peer reviewed academic journal articles is an essential achievement for early career researchers (ECRs) seeking to establish themselves in their profession. However, this journey can pose several significant challenges for ECRs. We use an autoethnographic approach that draws deeply on our lived experience as ECRs to ca...

This study draws on student engagement factors to examine the relationship between students’ non-school-based arts experiences on their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy to participate in visual arts responding tasks. Visual arts responding in the curriculum includes learning about artists and artworks, decoding art and making critical judgeme...

The Melbourne declaration on educational goals for young Australians (MCEETYA, 2008) cited confident and creative citizens as a key goal for Australian students. This goal aligns with global research on visual arts, specifically visual literacy. Being visually literate means decoding images, understanding the relationship between image and context,...

Music is essential in developing the young brain, particularly skills relating to concentration, filtering, nformation retrieval, verbal competencies, mental visualisation, problem solving, empathy and personal expression. With the introduction of the Australian National Curriculum and its adoption as the basis of the Western Australian P-10 music...

The Science Teacher Efficacy Belief Instrument has been a widely reported measure of teachers' personal efficacy and outcome efficacy beliefs. This pilot study examined if the instrument could be amended for use in The Arts learning area. A small cohort of 110 Graduate Diploma of Education preservice teachers participated in the pilot. Factor struc...

Supporting secondary school leaders to improve staff wellbeing is important because staff (both teaching and administrative) are key stakeholders in students' educational outcomes. This project is promoting a collaborative approach between a university and leadership staff at three Perth secondary schools to co-create, implement and evaluate profes...

This article presents the findings of a qualitative research study on student teachers’ perceptions of sustainability, specifically influenced by ecological citizenship and political solidarity. Research was conducted with 18 Graduate Diploma of Education (Primary) student teachers at one university, as they only have one year in which to train as...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to record Visual Arts education in Western Australia (WA) as it underwent significant change between 1967 and 1987, in administration, policy, curriculum and professional development. Design/methodology/approach – A narrative inquiry approach was utilized to produce a collective recount of primary Visual Arts...

The way in which technologies support students with disability has been widely explored in recent times. Much of this research has focused on computer programs specifically designed to teach social and academic skills to students with disability. In the research reported in this paper we examined how students with disability could use technology de...

Science performance overall in Australia is flat-lining. Science teachers hold the key to addressing this issue. One way to improve the effectiveness of science teachers is to improve their Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) through professional learning experiences, but doing so in the middle-school years in rural and remote settings through trad...

Media arts develop students " digital literacies so they can critically engage in the media-rich Australian lifeworld. However, pre-service teacher education courses often marginalise The Arts subjects, including media arts. In 2014, a pilot study was undertaken to determine first-year Bachelor of Education (Primary) pre-service teachers " experien...

Primary teachers may facilitate children’s first formal experiences of drama, and as such, one Western Australian University was motivated to explore the experiences of its Bachelor of Education primary pre-service teachers. By investigating the experiences of pre-service teachers, the University academic staff could determine the prior experiences...

Sustainability has recently been made a cross-curriculum priority in Australia, through the development and implementation of the Australian Curriculum. Subsequently, primary and secondary teachers across all subject areas are required to integrate Education for Sustainability (EfS) into formal education. A recent research case study was undertaken...

Australian pre-service teachers (PST) frequently report feeling isolated and vulnerable during the high stakes Assistant Teacher Program (ATP) final practicum. Mentoring and online learning communities have been shown to offer effective support during periods in which pre-service and beginning teachers feel challenged. As social media progressively...

With the impending introduction of the Australian Curriculum in the arts, there is cause to reflect on primary pre-service teacher education courses, and how effectively they prepare graduates to facilitate the curriculum. Reflecting on pre-service teachers' experiences in the arts, at both entry and graduation of their degree, may afford insight i...

Visual arts theory is fundamental to facilitating visual literacy, or students' ability to decode and construct imagery. Visual literacy skills support students' participation in contemporary society. This doctoral study uses a mixed methods approach to investigate students' engagement in visual arts theory, as increased engagement may facilitate v...

The arts are crucial in developing our multi-sensory interpretation of culture. With the introduction of the Australian National Curriculum in the arts, there is cause to reflect on teacher education courses, and pre-service teachers' ability to deliver the new curriculum. Reflection on students' experiences in the arts may provide insight into imp...