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Many high school students fear and dislike introductory biomechanics, which can add to the challenges physical educators face in teaching and supporting their students' learning. There is evidence that active and participative learning approaches can improve student engagement with and understanding of biomechanical concepts. This can be done by teaching the theoretical and practical components of biomechanics within a specific pedagogical approach, namely Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU). As TGfU has been shown to significantly improve student engagement and learning in a wide variety of other related disciplines, this article provides strategies for introducing biomechanics using the TGfU pedagogy framework—which may also benefit STEM engagement and the application of STEM-related knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides insight into working-class parents' views of the structural and systemic injustices shaping post-school options and opportunities in contemporary Australia, drawing on interview data with a group of mothers living in growth corridor suburbs in the outer west of Melbourne. Illustrating aspects of Berlant's (2011) notion of "cruel optimism", the paper examines the concepts of diminished society and collective community afforded by success through education, an aspiration and achievement unequal among young Australians. As Reay (2017) argues, an ideological narrative that positions individuals as being responsible for their own achievement through education sets many up to fail. This paper gives voice to the lived experiences of this individual responsibilitisation. We draw on elements of Marxist analysis, a subset of critical theory, whereby economic circumstances are the basis upon which political and ideological realities are built, critiquing the ways in which neoliberal social and economic policy and ideology are normalised (Tyson, 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools must be more than merely sites of sociocultural reproduction, skilling students to assume roles as economic functionaries, positions which serve to engrain social class inequality. Freire (1970) posits that the role of education is humanisation and liberation, imbuing in students a capacity to read the world and their own place in it critically and consciously. Schools, however, are too often are complicit in the re-creation of the hierarchical status quo. As Freire (1970, p.49) points out: "The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them … the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe." In this article, we draw on Freire's (1970) concept of critical pedagogy to contextualise and analyse empirical data gained through a study concerned with school principals' roles in engendering social capital in an outersuburban, socio-economically disadvantaged community in one Australian city. We also borrow from Giroux (2013; 2014; 2015, 2017), who positions radical critical pedagogy as of necessity in the contemporary western world, arguing that schools must play a central role in instilling a critical consciousness during times of neoliberal socio-economic inequality, cultural austerity and political authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses an educational project that can be used to examine communication in the work place and aggressive communication. The project requires the showing of scenes from the motion picture "Office Space." After showing the scenes, students can discuss how supervisors and subordinates communicated, how coercive communication and ineffective listening were portrayed, and the communication competence of characters in the film. As a class, a discussion can center around how communication could be improved and what students have observed in work place communication in their own lives.