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Pre-service teacher education is a spatialised enterprise. It operates across a number of spaces that may or may not be linked ideologically and/or physically. These spaces can include daily practices, locations, infrastructure, relationships and representations of power and ideology. The interrelationships between and within these (sometimes competing) spaces for pre-service teachers will influence their identities as teachers and learners across time and space. Pre-service teachers are expected to make the connections between these often-contradictory spaces with little or no guidance on how to negotiate such complex relationships. These are difficult spaces, yet the slippages and gaps between these spaces offer generative possibilities. This paper explores these spaces of possibility for pre-service teacher education, and uses the spatial theories of Lefebvre and Foucault to argue that critical reflective practice can be used to create Soja's "thirdspace" for reconstructing future practice.

Much is made of the potential of lifelong learning for individuals and organisations. In this article we tend to make much less of it, certainly with respect to its use in universities to discipline academics. Nevertheless, we argue that academics now need to re-learn the positions they occupy and the stances they take in response to the marketisation of Australian universities. In particular, we suggest that the position of (pure) critique no longer commands attention in Australian contexts of higher education, although the paper does not suggest a disregard for a critical stance purely for the sake of participation. It is in understanding the interconnections between position and stance , and how they might be strategically performed during the everyday practices of academics, that a more promising way of engaging with the venalities of the market is envisaged; a strategy that could be described as 'sailing into the wind'. In discussing these matters, the paper draws on semi-structured interviews with academics located in university faculties/departments/schools of education along Australia's eastern seaboard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an assessment of some movements in the theorising of inequality over the last two decades, with particular attention to the Australian context and to the issue of gender as compared with class. It is argued that there has been a useful move from 'inequality as disadvantage' to one which focuses on difference, conflict and the characteristics of the groups previously seen as disadvantaged, but that these moves have been limited, partly by an over-attention to inequality in analysing the content of schooling, and partly by an insufficient attention to inequality in relation to policy and practice initiatives. The discussion of specific examples and issues here suggests also that gender and class should not be treated as simply additive dimensions of a problem, and that analyses should be sensitive to the differing circumstances of countries which are often compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]