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This article examines teachers' work as part of the everyday life of classrooms, schools and communities--as curriculum design, dynamic pedagogies and as an oeuvre which is assembled over time. One of the hardest aspects of the everyday work of teachers, and perhaps one of the most under-rated and under-studied, is listening, really listening. This article firstly explores the dangers of teachers not listening. Secondly, it highlights the contributions of teacher researchers who take students and their worlds seriously. We argue that teachers listening to students in the context of their communities can underpin responsive pedagogies and creative curriculum design, which in turn can allow students to assemble repertoires of complex communication practices for representation, participation and taking action. Finally, we speculate about how, over time, teachers, as artists, assemble an oeuvre--an assemblage of curriculum design and responsive pedagogies which could inform teacher education and research.

This paper is one of two that bring together a range of education scholars to consider how education might be for democracy in a time of complex challenges facing twenty-first century societies. In this paper, scholars from Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom consider how sites of formal and informal education can respond to multiple unfolding crises, including the COVID-19 global pandemic, catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse, political upheaval, and growing social and economic inequality. What emerges is a wide-ranging set of reflections that engage with these complexities and challenges in a considered and hopeful way.

Inequitable outcomes from schooling are an enduring and global concern. Large scale data sets of achievement in the form of international and national standardised tests provide geographies of the effects of schooling. Our interests as educational researchers have focused on mapping the local contours of schooling through the use of ethnographically informed approaches to research. In this paper, we consider the implications for ethnographers of schooling of setting aside standard measurements of space and time, for example, to examine how these phenomena are made meaningful and made to matter in particular ways through practices of knowing. We investigate what changes when processes intended to reflect what is 'real' are replaced by performative understandings of knowledge-making. We ground this discussion in three ethnographic studies that provide starting points for reconceptualizing the meaning making of ethnographic practices.

This paper is motivated by a shared concern over the apparent lack of inclusion of socially critical research in educational policy intended to address inequitable outcomes from schooling. We recognise that while this is partly (perhaps mainly) a political problem, an effective response by socially critical scholars must also take into account the mechanics of research/policy relationships. We need to understand who else is operating in the contest for ideas, how and why they use research, and how their practices promote and reinforce some types of knowledge and some messages while others are excluded. One example is the work of think tanks. To gain insight into these issues, we construct and consider "activity profiles" of two think tanks operating to influence policy around socio-economic inequalities and education. These suggest some points of interest for researchers working in that same area: points about the differences between different think tanks and about their strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis the policy process, compared with those of academics. In response, we argue that researchers need to develop a pedagogical not just a critical disposition, and propose a number of potential strategies they could adopt. In order to have an impact, academics must find ways of communicating beyond their scholar peers, in forms that are accessible and digestible, while maintaining the hall marks of robust, peer-reviewed and deeply evidence-based knowledge.

The enduring nature of the problem of inequality in education suggests that new ways of understanding and ameliorating it are needed. Non-representational ontology is yielding new insights in other fields but is yet to gain traction in education. The requisite ontological shift would attend to inequality as a specific material effect of practices of knowing, rather than a social, natural, or discursive reality requiring representation. In this paper, we investigate the potential of such a shift to advance our fundamental commitment to social change through equity and justice. Drawing mainly upon the work of Karen Barad, we offer a reconceptualistion of educational inequality as a doing, not a thing, which becomes meaningful as it is defined by the circumstances required to measure it. We re-examine data collected during a recently completed longitudinal study of schools in the northern-rustbelt-suburbs of Adelaide, specifically the phenomenon of teaching literacy in the classrooms of two teachers in one school in our completed study.

Research in education draws upon a wide range of epistemological traditions due in part to the wide range of problems that are investigated. While this diversity might be considered a strength of the field, it also makes researchers who work within it vulnerable to being divided into those worth listening to and those who should be ignored by "end-users". These people and groups who are interested in the outcomes of educational research, such as policy makers and system providers, increasingly expect research findings to be accessible, and to inform questions of the "what works" variety. Under this imperative, research processes that elaborate the complexity of educational problems, and the provisional, partial and contingent nature of solutions, tend to be dismissed as unnecessarily complex and inaccessible. Epistemological diversity in educational research also presents challenges for inducting teacher education students into the profession. We outline some of these challenges in a discussion of epistemological diversity in research in education. We also describe differences in how research traditions construct educational problems. We argue that crossing epistemic boundaries is a necessary condition of the educational practices of teachers and of those preparing to join their ranks. We compare and contrast knowledge-producing processes in education and identify the repertoires of capabilities and habits of mind associated with different epistemologies or "angles". We suggest that the impact of educational research, including its contribution to teacher education programs, policy and public debate about issues in education, might be enhanced through a heuristic suite of four angles that are each understood to be necessary but not sufficient on their own. We provide a brief worked example of how such a heuristic might be applied to make sense of the diverse bodies of research regarding student engagement in school.

This paper focusses on the schooling stories of two young women who moved from mainstream schooling into alternative learning program set up for Indigenous students and back into mainstream schooling to complete their Year 12 education. The manner in which these young women narrated their stories is understood through the prism of Indigenous notions of relatedness and affect theory and is as revealing as the actual reporting of the events and rationales in these young women's schooling trajectories. Young people's insights into the challenges of mainstream pedagogies and promises of relational pedagogies invite us to consider what could be different in structures and processes which aim to deliver educational equity. We argue there is a need for more research which offers rich accounts of the emotional and relational fields which underpin student subjectivities and engagement.

This article considers the ways in which three alternative education sites in Australia support socially just education for their students and how injustice is addressed within these schools. The article begins with recognition of the importance of Nancy Fraser's work to understandings of social justice. It then goes on to argue that her framework is insufficient for understanding the particularly complex set of injustices that are faced by many highly marginalised young people who have rejected or been rejected by mainstream education systems. We argue here for the need to consider the importance of "affective" and "contributive" aspects of justice in schools. Using interview data from the alternative schools, we highlight issues of affective justice raised by students in relation to their educational journeys, as well as foregrounding teachers' affective work in schools. We also consider curricular choices and pedagogical practices in respect of matters of contributive justice. Our contention is that the affective and contributive fields are central to the achievement of social justice for the young people attending these sites. Whilst mainstream schools are not the focus of this article, we suggest that the lessons here have salience for all forms of schooling.

In this paper, we draw upon the experiences of a group of young people who have been excluded from mainstream schools in two Australian states to provide an account of the ways in which they have found their way to education in educational sites that are variously referred to as "flexible learning centres", "second chance schools" and "alternative schools". Whilst often clashing with school authorities in their original schools, these young people described how, when given the opportunity, they were able to engage in more meaningful learning in environments that recognised and accommodated their personal circumstances, and avoided authoritarian rule. A question we address is: What kinds of educational experiences facilitate "meaningful learning" for these students?

Schooling markets prioritize the needs of valued "customers". In Australia, this has resulted in a proliferation of learning interventions aimed at attracting and holding students perceived to fall into this category, and managing those who don't. In this paper, I attempt two main tasks: a description of the large-scale processes generating increasing customization in education markets, and an examination of the localized effects of a customized learning programme for young people who have left school or who have low attendance rates. This examination investigates the possibility that these young people are set to become modernity's outcasts, as described by Bauman (2004). He argues that an inevitable outcome of modernization and economic progress is the creation of "wasted lives", or individuals who are no longer able to make a living because their labour is made redundant in markets that operate on a global scale. Close attention to an example of customized learning provided an opportunity to assess this risk. I claim that new forms of customization in schooling produce new forms of differential provision, leading to success in global labour markets for some, and redundancy or "wasted lives" for others, and that the type of provision afforded by these new forms of customization is largely determined by the relationship between curriculum and pedagogy. The examination of this relationship in one example of customization describes some of the complexities faced by teachers in these settings, and the epistemic opportunities made possible by recognizing and valuing students' backgrounds, in this case the backgrounds of Indigenous students.

In the twenty-first century, a socially just system of schooling prepares all young people to adapt to new technologies, and participate in a global economy that is highly differentiated at the local level. In Australia and other countries where local markets have become heavily dependent on service economies, "working-class" families are less able to exchange their labour for low-paid wages in factories and other industries, and they are more dependent on education and its accrediting authority than they have been in the past. At the same time, the influence of markets on education has allocated schools to these families, which operate under the least favourable conditions and produce weak outcomes. This paper illustrates how enterprising community collaborations can ameliorate some of these effects. It outlines relevant research about young people who do not complete school, and it describes the implementation of a learning programme in inner Sydney as a means of explicating some of the conditions required to re-engage young people in learning. It is argued that a socially just system of schooling assists young people to construct life narratives in which they are able to chart their way through and around problems, and accumulate the skills, knowledge and dispositions they need to access the formal economy. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper examines the ways in which school teachers and university faculty can work together for the purposes of school reform, professional development and educational research. The paper describes the ongoing interactions between teachers and university personnel in two sites in Australia. Each case considers the ways in which the interaction between teachers and academics contributed to the nature of professional learning for all participants, and transcended some of the boundaries between school and university. We argue that the exchange of ideas across institutional boundaries is an important condition of professional learning within partnerships, and that the negotiation and codification of knowledge serves important research and practice purposes. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

Indigenous conversation and voice are increasingly heard in the research literature but there needs to be more dialogue in order for it to be a two-way conversation. This paper contributes to research that attempts to redress this situation by reporting on conversations with Aboriginal parents and caregivers of students enrolled in a public secondary school in a large New South Wales country town. The conversations were conducted over a three-year period (2005-7) by a team non-Indigenous researchers working in collaboration with Indigenous researchers. In this paper, we describe the various approaches we developed to establish conversations with Aboriginal parents and caregivers, and the various themes that emerged over the course of the study. We also assess how this type of research is located within and contributes to, the existing research literature. Finally, we discuss the importance of ongoing conversations with Aboriginal parents and caregivers, and how schools and systems can better respond to well-established policy goals of productive parent-school relationships.

Looking in classrooms is one of the most basic requirements of school improvement, and yet it is one of the least practised skills of teachers and one of the most contentious methods of educational researchers. When it does occur, it is difficult to agree on what to look for and even more difficult to agree on what is seen. This paper outlines an approach to recounting classroom practices adopted in a three-year study of four schools in New South Wales (NSW) that were all characterised by high levels of poverty and difference. The research examined the processes and conditions under which these schools were attempting to bring about improvements in student learning. The creation of jointly produced accounts of classroom practice, what we have called day diaries, provided opportunities to examine teaching and leadership practices in schools. It also revealed that, for the most part, classroom practices in the participating schools followed a standard and widely adopted script. We argue that disrupting this script requires innovation and the production of new knowledge about what works in the local context, and that such innovation is most needed in high poverty contexts. (Contains 1 note and 1 table.)

Research into Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools is well into its third decade but there is still a pressing need to better understand how computer-based technologies are influencing learning opportunities, and how the local conditions of schooling impact on teachers' attempts to integrate these technologies in their classrooms. In this article, we provide some insight into these questions through our research in six diverse public schools in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. We observed classrooms and conducted interviews with teachers and other key stakeholders, such as principals and technology coordinators about the integration of ICT. Our goal was to describe and examine the ways in which teachers, in a range of settings, are utilising ICT in their classroom practices to mediate student's learning experiences. Our findings indicate that ICT is largely being integrated in ways that support and supplement existing classroom practices. From our observations, we believe that successful integration of ICT requires fundamental shifts in the core activities of schools. These shifts include new teaching. The cases described in this article suggest some ways in which these shifts may be initiated and sustained.

Social justice matters in education and it matters most when students struggle to complete and succeed at school. The central role of teachers' pedagogical practice in this process is well established, but what is less clear is how to support the kind of professional learning that contributes to students' success at school--the pedagogy of disrupting the default modes of schooling. This paper describes some existing structures in four schools working under challenging circumstances and how these structures function in ways to support different kinds of learning. Initiating and sustaining change requires fundamental disruptions to these modes of operation. In order for teachers to do new things, they need to be able to learn new things, but the difficulty is ensuring that teachers learn the kinds of practices and develop the kinds of beliefs that support students' success at school. We draw insights from our research into how this may be understood and achieved, and relate our findings to attempts to bridge the gap between the literature on learning organization and that of organizational learning. (Contains 2 tables.)

Drawing on the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS), this paper documents the assessment practices of about 250 Queensland primary and secondary classrooms and the extent to which they align with those pedagogical practices described as "productive pedagogies" in the research. In considering the extent of this alignment, the paper outlines in some detail the concept of "productive assessment", which also developed out of the research. The QSRLS demonstrated the necessity of aligning pedagogies and assessment practices with curriculum purposes to enhance student learning and contribute to socially just outcomes. A lack of visible alignment in the assessment practices of teachers in the study is demonstrated and discussed. When considered in conjunction with the low intellectual demands of the pedagogies observed, there are serious social justice implications to be drawn from the research. The paper also shows the significance of systemic assessment policies in relation to teacher assessment practices. The paper conceptualizes "productive assessment" in relation to broader sociological considerations of assessment practices. Some possible explanations for the findings are proffered and some brief recommendations about a way forward in relation to teacher professional development around assessment literacy are suggested. (Contains 1 table and 3 notes.)

This paper reports on research into how schools, parents and local communities work together to support students' learning during the transition from primary to secondary schools in what is referred to as the middle years of schooling. The research was conducted in four Australian schools within one urban school district. These schools were located in low-income communities and had high numbers of bilingual students. We mapped existing school-community links that support student learning by identifying key participants and describing how they perceive these links--particularly in relation to improving students' engagement in learning. Our approach was qualitative in nature, utilizing interviews and focus groups. We found that students, families and teachers commonly expressed the view that learning is limited to schooling; that contacts between schools and communities about learning are difficult to negotiate and are heavily mediated by school principals; and we describe a lack of consensus about the nature of communities and the potential of school community links to contribute to enhancing student learning outcomes.

We know what good schools look like but experience tells us that it is very difficult to create and maintain them, especially when they are operating under adverse conditions-constant change, limited resources, high staff and student turnover, and a concentration of first time leaders and beginning teachers. The "Changing Schools in Changing Times Project 2005-7" was designed to investigate ways in which schools working under adverse conditions can engage in sustained school improvement. From the outset, the project team acknowledged that the quid pro quo of being given access to these types of heavily researched schools was the expectation that they would get something in return, and this was most often expressed in terms of some feedback on how they were progressing. Consequently, we had to find ways of working in and with the schools we were researching and, like them, we found it difficult to get people together in the same place without interruption for long enough to maintain a focus on what works and why it matters. Unremarkably, we started to write field notes, make classroom observations, take minutes of meetings and transcribe interviews, but we needed a way of supporting and documenting our observations and conversations that could be regularly and readily shared and negotiated with research participants. We started to scratch together short stories that drew on all our data sources, and shared them with each other and the research participants. The stories have come to function as both a product of the research and one of its data sources. They raise a number of questions related to their use and distribution, such as: Whose stories are they? In whose interest are they told? Do those depicted within them recognize themselves? These stories are described and discussed in this article, and the roles they are playing in the research and reform processes are critically analysed. (Contains 1 note.)

Schools located within communities experiencing high levels of social dislocation, educational disadvantage and student disengagement from learning are working under "adverse conditions". These schools face particular challenges when it comes to stabilising and sustaining wholeschool change aimed at improving students' learning outcomes. In this article, schools are understood as known to us through their technologies of power, which produce the practices, relationships and techniques of schooling. One such technology is a site of pedagogical practice, such as a classroom, and one of its effects is learning. In schools working under adverse conditions, a default mode of schooling that emphasises surveillance and control tends to dampen the kind of learning that leads to success at school. The following discussion explores the possibilities for disrupting this default mode that are opened up when learning is amplified through multiplying the sites of pedagogical practice. This approach differs from reform efforts that seek to replicate successful external reform efforts. Rather than grappling with the question of how to transplant or bring particular reforms to scale, the central question of this article is how to amplify learning that leads to success at school and make it a more likely effect in schools working under adverse conditions.

This paper draws on a three-year study of 24 schools involving classroom observations and interviews with teachers and principals. Through an examination of three cases, sets of leadership practices that focus on the learning of both students and teachers are described. This set of practices is called productive leadership and how these practices are dispersed among productive leaders in three schools is described. This form of leadership supports the achievement of both academic and social outcomes through a focus on pedagogy, a culture of care and related organizational processes. The concepts of learning organisations and teacher professional learning communities as ways of framing relationships in schools, in which ongoing teacher learning is complementary to student learning, are espoused. (Contains 2 notes.)

Improving students' outcomes from schooling requires schools to be learning organisations, where both students and teachers are engaged in learning. As such, knowledge and talk about pedagogy need to be at the core of the professional culture of schools. This article argues that this will require the valuing of teachers' work, that is, their pedagogical practices, to be a central focus of educational policy. Dangers are associated with this argument in terms of understating the impacts of poverty, lack of funding to disadvantaged schools and other social factors such as the pressures of globalisation upon students' educational opportunities. Hence, while acknowledging the importance of pedagogy to students' outcomes, the article contextualises the argument through a recognition of the policy and structural conditions that work against the valuing of teachers and their work. It then conceptualises how, within this context, a focus on pedagogies can make a difference to students' academic and social outcomes from schooling. This conceptualisation utilises the productive pedagogies model of classroom practice, developed in a large Australian study of school reform, as an example of the forms of pedagogical practices that support students' achievement of academic and social outcomes. It is argued that such pedagogical practices ought to be a concern of teachers, school administrators, education systems and local communities interested in schools as learning organisations. (Contains 2 tables and 4 notes.)