Nicole Mockler

The University of Sydney · Sydney School of Education and Social Work

Amid the growing ‘teacher quality’ discourse, early career teachers have increasingly been positioned as problematic in Australian education policy discourses over the past decade. This paper uses a critical policy historiography approach to compare representations of early career teachers in two key education policy documents, from the late 1990s...

Education is increasingly conceptualised by governments and policymakers in western democracies in terms of productivity and human capital, emphasising elements of individualism and competition over concerns around democracy and equity. More and more, solutions to intransigent educational problems related to equity are seen in terms of quality and...

This paper seeks to interrupt the dominant discourse of action research that emphasises the celebration of achievements, paying less attention to the ‘unwelcome truths’ that can sometimes be revealed. Building on our work in supporting inservice teacher professional learning thorough practitioner research in contexts such as the Coalition of Knowle...

Large-scale school/university partnerships for the enhancement of teacher professionalism and teacher professional learning have been part of the teacher development landscape in Australia for the past two decades. This paper takes a historical perspective on Australian school/university partnerships through detailing three national projects over a...

The act of engaging in sound and ethical practitioner research, regardless of context, encourages and indeed demands an alignment between the ethical framework employed in the research enterprise and the ‘everyday ethics’ of practice. This paper explores the ethical dimensions of what Cochran-Smith and Lytle have termed the dialectic of practitione...

In the context of global concerns about teacher workload and the relationship between workload and attrition, understanding the nature, quantity and intensity of teachers’ work is an essential first step in formulating robust solutions to this significant problem. Understanding teachers’ work, however, is a complex undertaking, and prior attempts h...

This paper presents a synthesis of research literature concerned with teachers’ and school leaders’ experiences of workload and work intensification. Forty papers met the inclusion criteria for the research synthesis. From the analysis, we drew out both definitional and experiential accounts. Firstly, while we mostly found a conflation of the conce...

Marketisation and competition within public schooling systems impact the work of principals in varying ways. Previous work on the marketisation of schooling and school autonomy has drawn attention to the ‘entrepreneurial principal’ as an effect of marketisation. In this paper we explore principals’ engagements with marketisation based on 21 intervi...

Alternative teacher education programmes have emerged in many countries as a new approach to recruiting, educating and placing teachers in underperforming schools. The media plays an important role in framing perceptions of these programmes and their teachers, including in Australia, but this has not been the subject of significant research to date...

This article aims to document the positioning of teachers' work within current educational reform, using the Australian federal policy landscape as a case study and the tenets of the Global Educational Reform Movement, or GERM, as an analytical heuristic. The authors draw on the theory of practice architectures to argue that teachers' work is curre...

Cognitive load theory’s incorporation of evolutionary perspectives has generated several instructional designs based on movement, including the tracing effect, occurring when learners benefit from explicit instructions to trace out specific elements of lesson materials with the index finger. Historical descriptions of children’s tracing behaviours...

This book is grounded in the idea that words matter. It holds that how we discuss teachers and teaching in the public space shapes the way we come to regard teachers as a society; the beliefs we hold about who they are, what they do, and why they do it. Over time it also comes to shape the conditions and contexts in which teachers do their work. Th...

Political appetite for neoliberal education policy has problematised teacher education in a number of countries, including Australia, the US and England. In Australia, dominant policy discourses of quality normalise the regulation and standardisation of teacher education and position teacher educators within a deficit model of education reform. Suc...

This special issue explores past, present and potential future imaginaries of ‘public’ education in Europe and beyond. The special issue is located in a contemporary context of political turmoil, in which one in four European voters allegedly supports populist political parties , with the largest support for far-right forms of populism; it is also...

In Anglophone countries, narratives of public schooling tend to emphasise generic hopes about schooling as central to the idea of a public good, including fostering community, delivering equality and protecting broad notions of democracy. However, as public systems become more open to privatised logics, these hopes sit alongside fears for the futur...

Marketization is the development of quasi-markets on the systemic level, which promote choice, competition, accountability, and devolution in public schooling. Marketing is a strategy that individual school leaders employ to respond to these logics. This paper argues that education marketization has led to an increase in school-based marketing with...

This book represents the first collective work of the Global Teacher Education Consortium (GTEC) with chapters authored by leading teacher education researchers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, Finland, Hong Kong SAR, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Scotland, the USA and Wales. Globally, teacher education is being...

This paper explores perceptions of work intensification around the world. Underpinning this analysis is C. Wright Mills’ (1959) argument that many personal troubles are public issues, and the notion that a significant dimension of the privatisation of public education, a concern of public education advocates worldwide, is the ways in which school w...

Teachers’ engagement with and understanding of educational research and data is an increasing concern for policy-makers around the globe. With unprecedented access to, and new forms of, ‘data’ in schools, concerns for its ‘best practice’ use in classroom decision-making have come to the fore. In academic spaces, these developments have also been of...

Cultures of performative accountability in education have been on the rise globally since the 1980s. Accordingly, teachers have increasingly been encouraged to understand their work in relation to particular forms of ‘evidence’. All evidence, however, is not regarded as equal, and sources of evidence privileged within cultures of performative accou...

This paper uses Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined community’ to argue that how people think about the publicness of their school system provides insight into the functioning and flourishing of communities, societies and nations. We focus on the privatisation of public schooling in Alberta, Canada and Northern England to highlight tensions between the...

The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has been a key tenet of Australian education policy since its launch over a decade ago. Print media coverage of NAPLAN and myschool.edu.au , 1 which displays and compares NAPLAN results across Australia, has played a role in both reporting and shaping this aspect of education policy....

One of the key tenets of the global education reform movement, professional standards for teachers have reshaped different aspects of teachers’ work and learning in many contexts internationally over the past two decades. This paper explores the consequences of neoliberalism for teacher professional learning in contemporary times. The policies and...

Issues around the retention or attrition of early career teachers are shaped by the policy discourses that frame their work, and the way that these discourses are articulated in the public space. This chapter explores public representations of early career teachers through a critical and systematic examination of print media texts, drawn from the A...

Discourses of ‘teacher quality’ have been on the rise in Australia since at least the standards-focused policy reforms of the 1990s. This paper uses a corpus-assisted analysis to explore recent deployments of ‘teacher quality’ and ‘teaching quality’ in the Australian print media, drawing on 432 articles collected from the 12 Australian national and...

In these times of increasing bureaucratic management in education, the need for the profession to organise itself to support and protect its professional work is obvious. Moreover, if the central aim of education is the critical transmission, interpretation and development of the cultural traditions of our society, then the need for a form of resea...

This paper takes up Grumet and Yates’ challenge to understand curriculum as “a projection towards a future as well as a drawing from the past” (2011, p. 245), exploring some of the enabling and constraining factors for curriculum integration in twenty-first century Australia. It takes a historical perspective, using this context to explore contempo...

Research on the development of professional identity for teachers who enter the profession through alternative routes is still in its infancy. In contrast to their peers who complete traditional initial teacher education programs, these teachers are exposed to different conditions and constraints that produce a range of sub-identities previously un...

The role of ‘academic partners’ working alongside teachers is an increasingly complex and sometimes controversial one. This article explores the role of academic partners in educational action research, reporting on data from a larger study conducted in New South Wales, Australia. Schools involved in the study had received targeted government fundi...

Teacher research has a long and proud history, stretching back to at least the 1970s, of supporting and valuing teachers as creators as well as consumers of knowledge about educational practice. In this chapter, we explore the shape and rationale of these historical ideals and the ‘architectures of practice’ that frame them, juxtaposed with the mor...

In this paper, we explore the notion of school improvement through the lens of praxis as it relates to equity, inclusion, and transformation, with a particular focus on inquiry-based school and teacher development. We argue that authentic improvement is a consequence of praxis, and highlight, through examples, key ways that authentic school improve...

This comprehensive publication rightly establishes early childhood as a critical phase in the education of young people and makes the case for developing our insights regarding early childhood education (ECE) practices through the eyes of practitioner inquiry in the context of collaborative partnerships. It achieves its goal through a series of ins...

As the concluding chapter to the book we draw together the arguments for engaging the voice of students as a means of developing a reform agenda leading to more democratic and participative social enterprises. We draw out concepts of respect, responsibility, reciprocity and trust as essential elements in transcending an instrumentalist, neo-liberal...

This final and fourth chapter in part two of the book addresses the matter of listening to student voice in tertiary settings. The chapter is presented in three parts. In the first, a brief introduction is provided to the policy context of student voice work in higher education. In the second part, we explore more specifically the conceptualisation...

In seeking to portray the conditions under which authentic consultation and dialogue with children and young people can take place the chapter turns to a number of cases where the rights of those taking part have been compromised, leading to a distortion of their voices. One of these is historical, a psychological experiment; another is contemporar...

In this chapter, we push beyond this initial suggestion of what the classroom implications of student voice work might be. Using Bernstein’s (Knowledge and control, pp. 47–69, 1971) notion of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment as the three message systems of schooling, we first of all draw on Bob Lingard’s recent work to reflect on the shaping of...

This chapter explores the rationale for democratic student agency. In the first section, we problematise the dual and widely adopted notions of ‘student empowerment’ and ‘evidence-based practice’ as framing devices for student voice initiatives, and consider as a cautious alternative Michael Fielding’s ‘patterns of partnership’ model as introduced...

This chapter explores the tension between the current push for compliance and approaches to education and inclusion that seek to legitimately enfranchise young people. We examine the impact of compliance and audit on educational systems and institutions, and highlight the ways in which these can be counterproductive to the kinds of democratic or tr...

Whereas the majority of chapters in this book discuss practices in contexts that are relatively familiar to us the purpose of this chapter is to take the reader not only beyond the school, but also into other areas of social provision in other parts of the world. Turning to examples of participative action research (PAR) it demonstrates the efficac...

This opening chapter sets out the rationale of the book in terms, not only of the case for consulting, listening to and acting upon the perceptions and insights of children and young people regarding their schooling, but also the reasons why as advocates we should be cautious. Clearly the United Nations declaration on the rights of the child is a s...

This chapter explores some of the specific issues related to the ethics of researching with children and young people, especially in school contexts. We examine the ethical implications for researching with children and young people that emerge not only from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child but also from a number of national research et...

As the first of two chapters drawing upon extended case studies of practice this chapter turns to a four year project involving young people in a given school acting as co-researchers investigating features of the working of classrooms, teachers and the curriculum. It positions the students as research apprentices but is not sanguine about the exte...

This chapter examines practical methods that may be employed to engage and enhance the opportunities for children and young people to make a meaningful contribution to social inquiries and action. It does so by re-introducing the discussions around the nature of evidence, its purposes and processes and argues for ‘evidence that matters’. It also fo...

This second narrative of practice, in terms of engaging children and young people as consultants and evaluators, turns to the role that they may play when advising cultural institutions regarding the design and evaluation of exhibitions. It discusses the roles of cultural institutions in evolving a particular pedagogy that can take learning in new...

Teaching and Digital Technologies: Big Issues and Critical Questions helps both pre-service and in-service teachers to critically question and evaluate the reasons for using digital technology in the classroom. Unlike other resources that show how to use specific technologies – and quickly become outdated, this text empowers the reader to understan...

School retention rates appear to have an iconic status in the global world. This chapter discusses the failure of global educational governance as an economic remedy specifically in relation to the raising of the school leaving age in Australia. It argues that global policy-making for economic competitiveness not only “sidelines the social purposes...

This article provides a review of the concept of student voice as it has been represented in Educational Action Research from the 1990s to the present day. Contextualised within an exploration of the challenges posed by educational action research that incorporates student voice in the current age of accountability as reflected and understood in ac...

Historically, school leaders have occupied a somewhat ambiguous position within networks of power. On the one hand, they appear to be celebrated as what Ball (2003) has termed the ‘new hero of educational reform’; on the other, they are often ‘held to account’ through those same performative processes and technologies. These have become compelling...

This work interrupts the current “consulting students” discourse that positions students as service clients and thus renders more problematic the concept of student voice in ways that it might be sustained as a democratic process. It looks at student voice holistically across realms of classroom practices, higher education, practitioner inquiry and...

This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of the AITSL Performance and Development Framework (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2012b) as a vehicle for authentic teacher professional learning. It suggests that the Framework offers a range of implementation possibilities, from surveillance of teaching practice at o...

This paper examines the current shape of teacher professional learning, or in-service teacher education, in Australia. Increasingly, teacher professional learning is positioned as both a sure-fire solution to some of the intransigent educational problems of our time, as well as a policy problem in and of itself. In this paper I explore some of the...

Facilitating Practitioner Research: Developing transformational partnerships addresses the complex dilemmas and issues that arise in practitioner inquiry. It recognises that facilitating practitioner research is far more than providing advice about method adoption, important as that contribution is; or even modelling research practices and drawing...

Launched in January 2010, the MySchool.edu.au website, which ranks and compares schools on the basis of standardised literacy and numeracy tests, has been the subject of intense media coverage. This article examines 34 editorials focused on MySchool, published from October 2009 to August 2010, and identifies three key narratives in operation, those...

Drawing on previous research that focused upon the formation and mediation of teacher professional identity, this paper develops a model for conceptualising teacher professional identity. Increasingly, technical-rational understandings of teachers’ work and ‘role’ are privileged in policy and public discourse over more nuanced and holistic approach...

This chapter explores the notion of teacher professional identity, reporting on a three-year study that sought to understand the formation and mediation of professional identity for secondary school teachers. It highlights the domains of personal experience, professional context and external political environment in the ever-emerging construction o...

A festschrift recognises the contribution of a scholar’s work at an important point in their life. When Susan Groundwater-Smith’s 70th birthday was approaching and she was momentarily threatening to ‘retire’ (a threat that has since been revoked), we thought it timely to reflect on and celebrate her overall contribution to the field of education. W...

The chapters presented in this book are testament to the contribution Susan Groundwater-Smith has made to the practice, scholarship and understanding of practice in schools and other educational institutions in Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The contributions by scholars and practitioners alike demonstrate how her commitment to...

“Being me” as a qualitative researcher can be harder than it looks or sounds. In this chapter I tell the methodological story of a 3-year life history study that aimed to explore the development of teacher professional identity. Through the telling of the story, I argue that critical to the achievement of authenticity in qualitative research is the...

This paper reports on the uses of interactive whiteboards in 'connected classrooms' in rural New South Wales, Australia. The research specifically focuses on the e2 program, a senior school initiative among five schools that seeks to extend the range of curriculum options available for students by connecting classrooms using video conference and in...

These two quotes from the prolific writings of Seymour Sarason are a kind of dialogue between his original book The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change and his subsequent publication Revisiting The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change, which he wrote 25 years later. Drawing on his own well-known adage ‘the more things change,...

This chapter reports upon the Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools (CKBS) established in Sydney, Australia, a decade ago. Working in conjunction with the Centre for Practitioner Research at the University of Sydney, members of the Coalition go about their work examining current practices and investigating new possibilities. Members share problem...