Margaret Mary Baguley

• PhD
• Professor at University of Southern Queensland

Frank Uhr and Debra O’Halloran’s Multuggerah and the Sacred Mountain (2019) is one of the few children’s picture books that explore the Australian Frontier Wars. In terms of message, the author and illustrator subsume First Nations’ resistance into the nation’s broader celebration of its participation in foreign wars. In terms of medium, they use t...

The Battle of Meewah (One Tree Hill) was fought just outside the city of Toowoomba in September 1843. The battle constituted the first major setback to European settlement in Queensland, though it slowed rather than halted the dispossession of First Nations’ people. It offers an invaluable insight into the ‘Aboriginal way of war’ and challenges the...

Prior to the 1970s Indigenous issues were largely absent from Australian history classrooms. Schools largely taught British and European history, an approach grounded in a hagiographic treatment of European settlement and the nation’s experience of foreign wars. The wave of non-British post-Second World War migration and an increased focus on Austr...

This article explores current historical thinking regarding the ‘small wars’ fought on the frontiers of European empires during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing on a variety of examples ranging from South Africa to Bolivia and Australia to the Congo, the authors identify three major themes - the expansionist aims of imperial...

British and Australian children's books about the Great War remain a steadfastly conservative example of popular culture, particularly when exploring war time nursing. The marginalized place of females in children's literature, the failure of the official histories to adequately acknowledge the unique experience of the nurses, and the popular focus...

As they are usually chosen by adults, children’s picture books offer important insights into contemporary attitudes and values. They subsequently drive the social and academic development of young children, thereby playing a key role in their ethical socialisation and education. This article will explore the role of children’s literature in this pr...

This paper analyses the Australian children’s picture books The Gender Fairy, by Jo Hirst and Libby Wirt, and Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story About Gender and Friendship, by Jess Walton and Dougal MacPherson. Both are examples of a rare engagement by Australian children’s authors and illustrators; indeed, Hirst has the distinction of being the fi...

Although the Great War made extraordinarily complex demands on the nations involved, it is the landscape of the battlefield which has continued to dominate contemporary perceptions of the conflict. Australian and English children’s picture book authors and illustrators have adopted a similar focus, particularly regarding the Western Front. It is th...

Australian children's picturebook authors and illustrators who choose armed conflict as their subject matter inevitably grapple with the paradox that, while war is a central component of national identity, the experience of Indigenous peoples remains, at best, underrepresented. This article uses the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meta-funct...

Despite primarily catering to a U.S. audience for whom religion exerts a greater influence than anywhere else in the Western world, children’s picture books dealing with the first landing on the moon in 1969 are reticent to conceptualise it in religious terms. Significantly, this is the same approach that NASA adopted when seeking to communicate th...

This article explores how artist-researchers navigate the “uncertain” space between theory and practice in a new Doctor of Creative Arts (DCA) program in an Australian regional university. The trickster is deployed as a metaphorical device to provide insights into how the first DCA’s candidates, their supervisors, and the university’s leadership ma...

The English journalist and author Philip Gibbs established many of the mythological conventions of the Titanic sinking – the luxury of a ship believed to be unsinkable; insufficient lifeboats; women and children first; the band playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’; the failure of a nearby ship to respond to distress signals; and the heroism of the doo...

This article explores how war memorials engage with the contested nature of public sculpture and commemoration across historical, political, aesthetic and social contexts. It opens with an analysis of the Australian commemorative landscape and the proliferation of Great War Memorials constructed after 1918 and their ‘war imagining’ that positioned...

The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial is situated on the western side of Green Park in Darlinghurst, in Sydney, Australia. Darlinghurst is considered the heart of Sydney's gay and lesbian population, having been the site of demonstrations, public meetings, Gay Fair Days, and the starting point for the AIDS Memorial Candlelight Rally. It is...

Over the course of the last four decades there has been a growing interest in the development and impact of counter memorials and counter monuments. While counter memorial and monument practices have been explored in Europe and the United States, relatively little research has been conducted in the Australian context. This systematic literature rev...

Australian war memorials have changed over time to reflect community sentiments and altered expectations for how a memorial should look and what it should commemorate. The monolith or cenotaph popular after the Great War has given way to other forms of contemporary memorialisation including civic, counter or anti-memorials or monuments. Contemporar...

This paper presents an analysis of contemporary education policy levers that seek to standardise and measure teaching quality through the deployment of professional standards and increased surveillance of teachers' work. These policy frameworks-with a focus in this paper on the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers-are contrasted against t...

This paper explores the role of the Senior Project Officer: The Arts for the Australian Curriculum Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA) in facilitating the writing of the foundation Shape of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (2011) paper for the national curriculum, with a particular focus on the discipline area of music. The collaboration betw...

This paper examines the personal and professional experiences of the five arts leaders who co-wrote the foundation document for Australia’s first national curriculum in the Arts. Their personal and professional backgrounds, which were explored during in depth interviews, drove the complex collaborative process that informed the first iteration of t...

This paper will explore the key findings identified in the five arts discipline-specific papers which comprise this special theme issue. Each of the participant researchers have situated Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts within the context of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts and what they characterise as its social justice imperati...

St Joseph’s Nudgee College is an Irish Christian Brothers boys’ boarding school in Brisbane. It was established in 1891 to provide the children of Irish Catholics living in regional and remote Queensland and northern New South Wales with access to an education that would act as a vehicle for socio-economic advancement. The first decades of the coll...

Young children often look to their teachers for affection and acceptance, particularly if they are injured or upset. Yet, many male primary teachers experience substantial fear and uncertainty about making physical contact with their students. This study used 53 open ended survey responses and semi-structured interviews with five experienced male p...

During the catastrophic 2019 and 2020 bushfire season and the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020, Queensland’s Courier Mail regularly celebrated firefighters and health workers as national archetypes. By positioning them as the ‘new Anzacs’, the Courier Mail was able to communicate an understanding of the crises using a rhetoric that was famil...

For over half a century, the ‘imagining’ of the Great War in the UK has been framed by the existence of two Western Fronts, one literary and the other historical. The authors and illustrators of children’s picture books, whose work has traditionally reflected a society’s values and pre-occupations, have remained remarkably faithful to the literary...

Male teachers are a minority in both primary teacher training courses and in primary schools around the world. Education research has identified numerous gender-related challenges faced by male primary teachers during their initial teacher training and later when teaching in schools. Despite noting that many males leave teacher training because of...

In the years either side of Federation in 1901, Australia's Irish Catholics balanced two often contradictory impulses: their determination to retain their cultural and religious links with Ireland in the face of an often unsympathetic Protestant majority, and the desire to become 'good' Australians in order to make 'a go' of their lives in the new...

This article explores the experience of three research teams operating across a variety of educational contexts. As members of these teams, the authors were privy to a range of opportunities and challenges that emphasised how political collaboration can be, even when the team formation is an outgrowth of previous personal and professional relations...

During the period between the outbreak of war in August 1914, and the first major engagement for Australian troops in April 1915 on Gallipoli, the Queensland press in Australia articulated a vision of the conflict framed by binary opposites. The most pervasive of these was the positioning of German militarism and lust for conquest as the antithesis...

Effective assessment design and subsequent assessment practices are essential for student success in the higher education sector. A plethora of research on assessment in higher education exists which tends to focus primarily on the student experience. This paper shares results from a 3 phased study that explored staff perceptions related to assessm...

Adolescence is a developmental phase during which young people experience profound physical, emotional and social changes. The diversity and complexity of these changes has increased exponentially over the last 20 years. The arts provide important opportunities to enhance the resilience of adolescents with the benefits of engagement including impro...

In early August 2018, the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery (TRAG) in Queensland opened a group exhibition titled Landscape and Memory: Frank Hurley and a Nation Imagined. The artworks created by the eight invited artists responded to official war photographer Frank Hurley’s iconic images taken on the Western Front and in the Middle East in 1917 and 1...

Compassion and empathy are attributes that are critical for productive and supportive classrooms. They are also important qualities for the world outside of the classroom. An effective way of encouraging compassionate and empathetic thinking and actions with students in schools is through the use of quality picture books. Many children’s books deal...

This article explores newspaper reports appearing in the Australian state of Queensland during the main Australian participation in the Third Battle of Ypres (31 July–10 November 1917). The manner in which the fighting at Ypres was mediated to Queenslanders through press reports offers an insight into the impact of war correspondence and censorship...

Over the past two decades children’s picture books dealing with the Australian experience during the First World War have sought to balance a number of thematic imperatives. The increasingly sentimentalised construct of the Australian soldier as a victim of trauma, the challenge of providing a moral lesson that reflects both modern ideological assu...

This handbook explores a diverse range of artistic and cultural responses to modern conflict, from Mons in the First World War to Kabul in the twenty-first century. With over thirty chapters from an international range of contributors, ranging from the UK to the US and Australia, and working across history, art, literature, and media, it offers a s...

This paper explores the characteristics of creative leadership inherent in developing a major art prize with a significant education component. The Hadley's Art Prize Hobart (HAPH) is the richest landscape art prize in the world. Since its inception it has included an education kit in order to engage teachers and students and enhance their understa...

Teachers’ engagement in professional learning is vital to the profession’s sustainability. Their professional learning is influenced by the demands of balancing work, family, and the strain of balancing the two. This challenge is addressed through the notion resilience, operationalized as career adaptability. In a sample of teachers (N = 193), the...

Perhaps more than any other type of museum display, dioramas, particularly those in military museums, are expected to be all things to all people. To justify their role as an explanatory tool they must be 'accurate' representations of history, yet to survive in the modern museum environment they must also be artefacts or artworks in their own right...

The artists and authors who produce children's picture books dealing with the First World War, and Gallipoli in particular, find themselves burdened by the expectation that they will balance a respect for this foundation myth with a 'pity of war' approach more in line with modern attitudes to conflict. Whatever their personal ideology, to meet thes...

We examine in this article how the construction of a metaphor for collaborative practice can be used as a navigational tool to assist teachers in making meaningful connections between artists and teaching practices. We illustrate how collaborative practices, when enacted in both teaching and artmaking and conceived as a metaphorical construct can...

This article explores the development and implementation of a new Doctor of Creative Arts program in a regional university. The experiences of key leadership staff and Doctor of Creative Arts candidates enrolled in the foundation year of the program are contextualised within the current landscape of practice-based arts research in the higher educat...

The significance and impact of the arts on and in education has been well documented globally (Bamford, 2006; Caldwell & Vaughan, 2012; Davis, 2008; Eisner, 2002; Fiske, 1999; Greene, 2001; Pascoe et al., 2005; Wright, 2003); however, there continues to be a disjuncture between what is prioritised in education policy and its perceived benefits, par...

This chapter explores how an Australian day and boarding college for male students between the ages of 10 and 17 partnered with a regional university to explore the Centenary commemoration of WWI through an Australian Government Arts and Culture Public Fund grant. The respective institutions eschewed traditional commemorative options such as statue...

Within the specific context of The Australian Curriculum: The Arts, this paper explores how teachers of the Arts and teacher educators encounter and enact curriculum change. Adopting Ewing’s notion that curriculum is a complex web of varying stories and storylines that are impacted on by teachers’ underlying philosophy, we suggest that Arts teacher...

This study explores the influence of professional identity on the teaching practice of four school music educators, two from Spain and two from Australia. Narrative inquiry methodology was utilized in order to investigate the full spectrum of their musical experiences, ranging from their earliest childhood memories to their current positions in the...

The Arts Education Practice and Research (AEPR SIG) is a special interest group in the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). AARE is a national organisation for researchers and educators and plays a critical role in supporting and strengthening major research partnerships and networks for the Australian educational research commu...

This study is an investigation into postgraduate students' decision-making in relation to their continuing studies at a higher education institution. Six participants who were enrolled in postgraduate education degrees were interviewed. The interview questions explored the relationship between their motivations for enrolling in postgraduate study;...

Social institutions such as art galleries play a pivotal role in selecting, exhibiting, and presenting work by artists. The curatorial choices that are made when organising exhibitions provide important insights into how the information has been presented. As Whitehead (2005) contends, “arts museums and galleries play complex roles in constructing...

Literate practice in the arts encompasses both aesthetics and creativity. It is also multimodal in nature and often collaborative. This article presents data collected from a small multi-age school, with children from Prep to Year 7, during their preparation for an end-of-year show. The children had studied the topics of conservation and sustainabi...

Literate practice in the arts encompasses both aesthetics and creativity. It is also multimodal in nature and often collaborative. This article presents data collected from a small multi-age school, with children from Prep to Year 7, during their preparation for an end-of-year show. The children had studied the topics of conservation and sustainabi...

Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts extends current understandings of what capacities and capacity-building are and of the dimensions that maximise their prospects of success in current educational policy-making and provision. It does this by exploring how capacity-building is implemented among nine groups of research participant...

Educational Learning and Development: Building and Enhancing Capacity explores the topic of educational learning and development in order to examine issues that are impacting, either positively or negatively, on current research in this area. This is explored through ten groups of research participants from various countries, including circus famil...

Professional learning and development hold potential for transformational growth and change for educators, and for enhancing their capacities to build the capabilities of learners. Realising this potential requires an appreciation of the philosophies, theories and practices surrounding professional learning and development and how these may progres...

In a knowledge economy, formal processes of education have long been equated with power. However, learners’ lifelong and lifewide learning increasingly occurs within the context of transnational and distributed knowledge-as-power. This chapter engages with three sets of data in its exploration of how learning may be both personal and agentic. It ca...

Contemporary capacity-building assumes varied forms and generates varying degrees of effect and effectiveness. It is therefore useful and important to articulate a scholarly programme for researching capacity-building in its multiple manifestations. This chapter outlines that scholarly programme in three dimensions. Firstly, a concise account is pr...

This chapter explores the relationship between consciousness and capacity-building in current educational settings. In particular, it elaborates the distinctive associations between varying levels and states of consciousness on the one hand and the potential to enhance individual and group learning and teaching capabilities on the other. The author...

Contemporary scholarship should equip practitioners, policy-makers and researchers with ideas and insights to be able to identify new and potentially transformative educational futures that enhance capacity-building and share the fruits of that capacity-building as widely as possible. This chapter takes up that challenge by using a synthesised anal...

Resilience is generally considered to be a capacity to act and adapt in the face of adversity or constraint, and is the result of a complex interplay of risk and protective factors. Initially focused on the individual, the resilience concept and research have extended to groups such as teams and communities. In this chapter, we examine conceptualis...

Residents in regional and rural communities remain distant from many of the affordances and opportunities associated with urban centres of population. Conversely, regional and rural residents have been characterised as being particularly resilient owing to having to adapt to changing circumstances. Against this backdrop, it is crucial for those res...

The multiple forms of capital represent a powerful framework for understanding certain approaches to capacity-building. This chapter explores how particular groups of learners and educators exhibit specific forms of capital and how the participants in the associated research projects gain access to and mobilise those forms of capital to generate ce...

The multiple theoretical understandings related to the concepts of diversity and identity provide useful frameworks for exploring capacity-building in a range of complex and, at times, highly contested contexts. This chapter explores how participants in a number of education research studies make sense of diversity and identity as they seek to buil...

Effective knowledge sharing is crucial to the long-term capacity-building of learners, in order to ensure the sustainability of individuals, teams and communities. This chapter explores three sites of knowledge sharing practices: circuses in the Netherlands; an Australian senior secondary art classroom; and an Australian university education resear...

Fostering capacities by encouraging creativity is a critical role undertaken by educators in a diverse range of learning contexts. Creativity is seen to be an essential skill for twenty-first-century living and enhances the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Documentation of creative learning provides important insights into the potentia...

The concluding chapter of this book challenges the reader to engage with the ‘hot topics’ and ‘wicked problems’ presented throughout the chapters on the topic of educational learning and development and the potential for capacity-building for both educators and learners. The new perspectives generated by interrogation of this topic enable the reade...

Collaboration is often promoted as an important strategy to enhance capacity-building. In the education sector it draws upon long-standing practices of social constructivist learning and teaching, which value working and learning from others. This chapter examines the collaborative process through the shared experiences of individuals and groups in...

Leadership can be multi-faceted and multidirectional. Developing leadership capacity requires consideration of a variety of leadership models and reflection on an individual’s and group’s capacity and the contexts in which they are working. Professional development is required for leaders at all levels to enhance capacity, increase networking oppor...

The multifaceted interplay between changes and continuities has a complex relationship with the opportunities for, and strategies of, capacity-building. This interplay is evident also in efforts to promote long-term and sustainable educational learning and development within and across specific educational sites. This chapter examines this interpla...

In a world of rapid technological advances, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in educational contexts has grown exponentially. Similarly, the form and focus of research into ICTs for lifelong, life-wide learning and development and the resultant contributions to the literature are extremely diverse. This chapter brings a...

An ongoing challenge for instructional and syllabus designers and teachers and facilitators who seek to implement these curricula is finding and maintaining an appropriate balance between differing learning and teaching styles. Differences in cultural and language backgrounds, previous learning and teaching experiences, and the personal characteris...

The study of individual differences is concerned with understanding the variations from person to person, such as through personality and cognition and how these differences are related to human behaviour. Fundamental to the study of individual differences has been the measurement of variation utilising a range of assessment and evaluation techniqu...

Beliefs and practices of formal, non-formal and informal learning have undergone radical changes since the late nineteenth century, when didactic instruction gave way in many societies to learner-centred methods. From the late twentieth century, global competition and a shift to neoliberalism have informed the commodification of education. Data fro...

Educational learning and development is evidenced in a range of sectors and is of interest to a range of stakeholders, particularly in regards to its capacity-building potential. This introductory chapter seeks to conceptualise and contextualise this area in the following three ways. The first section will present various approaches taken in concep...

Symposia Presentation

There is extensive research that shows how the arts provide many benefits for all students yet there is evidence that arts education offerings and experiences are decreasing across both university and school sectors. It is important that we recognize the essential role of teacher educators in preparing pre-service teachers to be aware of the 'bigge...

This paper investigates an established collaborative working relationship between two people working in the arts discipline area. One works in a voluntary arts organisation providing professional development for teachers, whilst the other is an arts academic preparing pre-service teachers for a primary teaching career. Both participants bring a ran...

This chapter explores the formation of a school/university research team (SURT) which originated in personal and inevitably professional relationships. The members of SURT are drawn from various educational instiuttuions. Prior relationships among the members and an interest in forging and stenghtening school/university links have been the catalyst...

Symposia Presentation

If effective ways of constructing capacities are to be understood, several means of identifying and assessing multiple approaches to conceptualising and contextualising such capacities need to be developed. This chapter explores and evaluates some of those approaches, adopting an eclectic and culturally diverse approach that considers each approach...

The Arts Education Practice and Research (AEPR SIG) is a special interest group in the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). AARE is a national organisation for researchers and educators and plays a critical role in supporting and strengthening major research partnerships and networks for the Australian educational research commu...

If effective ways of constructing capacities are to be understood, several means of identifying and assessing multiple approaches to conceptualising and contextualising such capacities need to be developed. This chapter explores and evaluates some of those approaches, adopting an eclectic and culturally diverse approach that considers each approach...

It is vital for research teams to assess their activities and outcomes as they grow in confidence and momentum if their capacities are to be enlarged and sustained. The authors use this chapter to conduct a theoretically framed evaluation of the first three years of operations of the research team that they constitute. Attention is given simultaneo...

The search for teacher quality has been one of the priorities in the field of educational research during the last decade. The studies about teacher quality, however, have often focused on the technical, objective and easily measurable aspects of the profession and have ignored other personal qualities that are essential for an effective practice (...