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While the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold around the world, one of its most immediate effects -- beyond significant loss of life and livelihood -- has been the exposure of existing weaknesses in various sectors and systems. This is especially evident in higher education, with its growing overreliance on the (hyper)mobile student body. In this paper we explore critically the challenges and possibilities behind the options of "reframing" and "hospicing" current understandings of student mobility, particularly with respect to the simultaneously romanticized and commodified development of intercultural (communicative) competence. We treat reframing and hospicing as concurrent, co-existing approaches and spaces in which we may dwell as we rethink what it means to engage meaningfully and equitably with difference at both global and local levels. We also explore how "hospicing" may help us to disinvest ourselves from the promises of mobility, letting go of our attachment to it, not simply because of its current impossibility, but rather because of its many ideological and ethical problems. We conclude with a set of critical, reflective questions intended as provocations that may stimulate ongoing dialogue in our shared journeys of knowing, being and relating to ourselves and the Other in the world.

When an endangered or minority language is spoken by children and taught in schools, both oral and literacy skills are crucial for continued language maintenance. In school settings, literacy skills are often prioritised to support the transition to second language literacy, and rich oral language development is overlooked. This paper presents a transdisciplinary collaboration between a language researcher, curriculum support staff and educators in Warlpiri schools, designed to address this. In the project, language documentation research was re-purposed to support professional learning for oral first language development. Educators increased their metalinguistic knowledge and understandings of children's oral language development. They planned programs to meet the learning needs identified from children's data and mapped these to curriculum documents. They enhanced their capacity to develop the Warlpiri language skills of their students and promote children's bilingual, and potentially biliterate, language development. The process and practice described are transferable to other minority, Indigenous and endangered language teaching and learning contexts.

The 2014 Wilson review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory recommended boarding school models as the preferred secondary education option for very remote Aboriginal students. This study considers boarding uptake by Aboriginal students from the Central Land Council region of the Northern Territory. An examination of boarding programs available to Aboriginal students in this region found that scholarship access is largely determined by socioeducational advantage and the perceived social stability of the family and student. To increase access and participation in boarding, more flexible funding assistance programs are needed. An expanded role for brokering could also increase retention and completion rates. Ultimately, more investment is also required in remote community schools, and in the development of 'both ways' capital if the social and educational aspirations of young Aboriginal students and their families in this region are to be realised through a boarding school model.

Bilingual and Indigenous language and culture programmes have run in remote Australian schools with significant and continuing local support. Developments such as the new national Indigenous languages curriculum offer a further opportunity to broaden and sustain Indigenous language teaching and learning activities in these schools. However, over the last two decades, increasing government attention to poor outcomes on national standardised literacy and numeracy assessments has markedly restricted the scope for Indigenous languages. This paper draws on a model of ideological and implementational spaces to discuss competing discourses in top-down and bottom-up policy. Data from an ethnographic study on education stakeholders in remote locations in Australia's Northern Territory revealed incongruities between local discourses that emphasise bi- and multilingualism, local identity and knowledge and community language maintenance and institutional discourses, which foreground a uniform model of education, with English literacy the dominant measure of educational success. The study also revealed that principals, teachers, and community members in some schools work together to develop vibrant, though often fragile, programmes. In addition to this, community members outside school systems are increasingly finding and taking up the spaces that allow innovative Indigenous language and cultural teaching and learning.

The Remote Education Systems (RES) project within the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP) has, over the last four years, gathered and analysed qualitative data directly from over 230 remote education stakeholders and from more than 700 others through surveys. The research was designed to answer four questions: (1) What is education for in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?; (2) What defines "successful" educational outcomes from the remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander standpoint?; (3) How does teaching need to change in order to achieve "success" as defined by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander standpoint?; and (4) What would an effective education system in remote Australia look like? Based on this data, the paper reveals how perceptions differ for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from remote communities compared with people who come from elsewhere. The analysis points to the need for some alternative indicators of "success" to match the aspirations of local people living in remote communities. It also points to the need for school and system responses that resonate with community expectations of education, and to develop narratives of aspiration and success alongside community views.