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This paper reports on the background, context, design, and findings of a collaborative research project designed to develop a future roadmap for strengthening an Australian research-rich and self-improving education system. Building on the BERA-RSA Inquiry into the role of research in the teaching profession in the UK (Furlong, 2013), the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA), Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) and Australian Council of Deans of Education (ACDE) initiated a national study across education systems and jurisdictions to identify ideas, issues, challenges and opportunities to strengthen teacher education and education policy development through research. The mixed-method study, inclusive of focus groups and an on-line survey collected data from pre-service teachers, teachers, academics and leaders across schools, universities and education departments. A set of recommendations highlight the need for research literacies to be embedded at all stages of a teachers' career and that the profession would benefit from professional learning strategies where teachers are positioned as both critical and discerning consumers and active producers of research. The importance of teachers being able to respond to data within their own set of contextual factors was a key message.

This paper was prompted by our interest in two issues associated with Australia's vocational education and training system: recurring declarations for universal access to vocational education and training (albeit in different forms across different epochs) as the right of all Australians and the continual processes of change associated with the sector over the last two decades. As we approach a time of yet more change in vocational education and training, we call for a rethinking of these two characteristics of a training system, as "problems of the present", situations which in their present form are "intolerable". Reflecting a notion of "thinking" work as personal, political, historical and practical, the paper offers a glimpse of Foucault (1926-1984) as a person. We explain his use of the term discourse as an overarching frame for understanding "problems of the present". We review two major aspects of his analytic toolkit: archaeology and genealogy. We close with refections on the usefulness of these analytic practices as tactics of engagement for researchers interested in historical approaches to vocational education. (Contains 4 footnotes.)

Educational research has long been the subject of lively and agitated debate, not least because of its diversity. Ranging in scope from academic development and broad-scale policy research through to student engagement and discipline-specific research, it includes methods of traditional academic inquiry and investigations and also less traditional modes of research. However, the topography of Australian educational research and the characteristics of the people who undertake this complex body of work are currently unclear. This paper explores some of the complexities of the Australian research community, drawing on the findings of a national online survey of academics who identified as researching in the field of education from within and outside education schools and faculties. The survey attracted 504 responses from 38 of Australia's 39 universities, and just over two-thirds of respondents were located in a school or faculty of education. We draw on the results to answer the questions of who is undertaking educational research and who how they might be supported. We utilise a conceptual model that "segments" the educational research workforce represented by the survey respondents, and we conclude by indicating strategies that might be utilised to address research barriers indicated by educational researchers.

This paper reflects on the geography of Australian educational research in the context of the ERA 2010 and 2012 assessments results. These results reflect significant changes to the nature of educational research over the past decades, where this research is conducted and by whom. We recap the historical changes to the formation of educational institutions and their impact on research outputs to demonstrate that interdisciplinary work is growing in a context where there has been a shift in research outputs away from the traditional area of school education. The ERA results demonstrate a high level of research activity in the intersections between previously distinct discipline areas, particularly in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The future of ERA itself is addressed in order to propose interventions that might make a difference to an ecology that is anchored in traditions and tends towards inertia. Finally, we argue that efforts by universities to build research capacity are likely to continue to be competitive, to focus on the individual rather than on departments and schools, and to be subject to an increasingly pervasive culture of accountability. Against this discourse of accountability, and an accompanying loss in autonomy and creative "think-time", we propose that academics in education actively engage in a community of research. We conclude with interventions designed to build a high-quality, analytical and theoretically intensive research culture to underscore educational research in Australia.

Processes of national research assessment, such as Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) are a type of audit technology that confronts and steers established institutional identities and traditions. This nexus between policy and practice drives boundary work that diffracts prevailing policy logics, organisational practices, and habits of mind. We use this notion of "boundary work" as an analytical lens for understanding the nature and effects of ERA in the Australian educational research space. This paper explains the methodology that informed the AARE-ACDE research reported in Strategic Capacity Building for Australian Educational Research. It documents the policy logic of ERA and the way it cuts across the established ecology of educational research, revealing social and symbolic work that is remaking the boundaries of educational research. We report on the historical trajectory of Australian educational research, the way ERA codes research outputs, and how educational researchers are repositioning in this shifting research space. We argue that there are specific loci of boundary work where capacity building in Australian educational research can make a difference to future educational knowledge building.

Research assessment exercises aim to identify research quantity and quality and provide insights into research capacity building strategies for the future. Yet with limited knowledge of the ecology of Australian educational research, there is little chance of understanding what research audits might contribute towards a capacity building agenda for such a complex field. This paper draws on secondary data analysis of research outputs submitted by 13 Australian higher education institutions to the "Excellence in Research for Australia" (ERA) 2010 and 2012 national research assessment exercises, to show where Australian educational research is conducted. Findings offer a profile of education researchers by location in academic organisational units within universities. By analyzing data not accessible through reported ERA data we were also able to present information about appointment profiles, specifically levels and type of appointment within universities, as well as data on institutional and geographic region, and patterns associated with type of outputs (books, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers and other outputs) and field of research. Analysis of the data reveals definitive shifts in the nature of the published outputs and in employment profiles of researchers and their location across university and regional groupings. Research audits are administrative processes that reshape institutional and disciplinary governance structures, policies, individual outputs, work practices and careers, but they are not the sum total of the field per se.

This paper argues for approaches to research methodologies that interrupt the machinic metaphors and relationships for living circulating in so much VET research. Using the schematic of "cyborg as a figuration" and Wilson's (2009) four epistemological interventions (witnessing, situating, diffracting, acquiring) the authors practice a form of "materialised refiguration" (Haraway, 1994) to re-engage with experiences of doing vocational education and training research over more than two decades. The approach manifests as story telling of/for complexity and opens up a research methodology guided by two questions: How are researchers deeply implicated in knowledge-making practices in and of VET? What vocational lives do we make in and through those practices? The aim of this approach is to call into question machinic VET stories as the only way to narrate vocational education and training research/practice. In so doing, the authors affirm hybrid methodological work that invokes vocational education and training researchers as authors-in-the-making of heterogeneous worlds. (Contains 5 footnotes.)

The argument of this chapter is that whiteness structures pedagogical relations across a number of sites--sociohistorical, occupational, and organizational. In so doing it racializes, without seeming to, the work of educators and so also their goals as they create the possibility of new social and economic futures for learners. In the remainder of this chapter, the author identifies the key issues from a growing body of literature on whiteness that informed a research study of vocational educators' reflections on their experiences of exploring whiteness in an undergraduate teacher education course. Next, she outlines methodological issues associated with the study, including a brief overview of the university course she developed to explore these issues. She offers an analysis of postcourse interviews demonstrating how educators engaged with the racialized dynamics of vocational training. She closes with comments on the challenges this poses for the content of university teacher education programs for vocational educators.

This article offers a contribution to the limited literature on internationalization as academic work. Using narrative inquiry incorporating a mode of research known as "car time", the authors generate narratives of practice to analyse the day-to-day work involved in their international university collaboration. The article foreshadows the dialogic opportunities available to academic staff engaged in collaborative international work. This trust-based approach to internationalization involves building and sustaining inter- and intra-institutional relationships, catalytic events which "make things happen", and learning from each other via common and divergent institutional practices. While cognizant of demands for increased regulation, the article argues for a broader consideration of the learning to be gained from such partnerships. Three things keep this partnership going long after the ink had dried on official agreements between institutions: a personal click, shared professional interests and a framework for institutional agreements and structures.

The vocational education and training (VET) sector has experienced substantial change in the past decade, characterised by ascendant industry-driven needs and mantras of flexibility and responsiveness. A number of public policies underpin these changes and simultaneously point to the need to manage diverse employing bodies, industry standards, learning pathways and flexible pedagogies. Learning is big business, as indeed is the business of managing learning, and women are increasingly visible as workers, educators and managers in Australian VET. This article draws on interview and focus-group data provided by seven women to explore the challenges of managing learning and learning to manage, in systems which are simultaneously spaces of equity and racialised spaces of sustained inequality. While much work has addressed the managerialist ethos underpinning funding arrangements for contemporary VET providers, an unexplored dimension of this context is the complicated and complicitous position women managers find themselves in as they manage the colonial spaces of VET. This article attempts a conversation across contemporary equity discourses, postcolonial and critical interrogations of whiteness, and educational management literature questioning the usefulness of contemporary literature on managing learning and learning to manage, premised as it is on Eurocentric views of management theory.

An Adult Literacy and Numeracy Australian Research Consortium (ALNARC) program comprised four projects designed to integrate new research with analysis of past practices and provision. Preliminary themes were the perception of a "policy void" in regard to literacy and numeracy skills; professional development's tie to workplace practice and understanding of and compliance with reporting mechanisms; and problems when literacy and numeracy are collapsed as one. The project called "Women at Play" explored whether teaching women to write dramatic monologue helps them develop multiliteracies and cope with life transitions. Women developed confidence and skills to develop monologues and literacy skills through collaborative criticism of each other's work. In the project called"Curricular Practices of Adult Community Education, Language, Literacy, and Numeracy Providers in South Australia," community-based literacy practitioners investigated ways they make decisions about their practice to examine the "hidden" curriculum of their programs. Findings indicated that the "hidden" curriculum of community-based programs encourages development of social capital; participants came with widely varied backgrounds and previous learning experiences; programs are nonformal and flexible and English as a second language accounts for the greatest part of programs rather than literacy; and literacy is adaptive to the diversity of multicultural Australia. (YLB)

Adult educators are challenged to maintain their commitment to social change as their work is co-opted by the training reform/lifelong learning agenda. Using ongoing reflection on practice, adult educators can challenge that agenda's dominant conceptions of recognition of prior learning. (SK)

Women make up over 75% of the Australian adult community education sector, a fact largely ignored by the literature. Interlocking effects of gender, race, and class limit people's options, and adult educators are responsible for monitoring their programs to ensure they do not perpetuate these limits. (Author/JOW)