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At a time of uncertainty Arts Education continues to offer powerful learning possibilities for being in, and with, the world. While it is crucial to research these possibilities in our own communities, clearly, engaging and collaborating with colleagues from various global contexts and cultures offers great potential. These interactions can develop our understandings of common and disparate issues related to arts education from a range of perspectives and allow us greater impact in the work we do. The Arts Education Research for Cultural Diversity and Sustainable Development network is an international think tank and part of the UNESCO UNITWIN program supporting arts education academics to collaborate and engage in interdisciplinary discussions and research initiatives. In this article we outline the distillation of previous and current research from this group and affiliates to identify four key areas of arts education research that have global relevance and significance. We argue that these four "imperatives"--decolonisation; cultural resilience; inclusion, agency, and wellbeing; and the post-digital age--not only represent a snapshot of current research in arts education but provide a focus for future research and collaborations critical in a pandemic and post-pandemic world. We invite arts education scholars to join us in the discussion.

Opportunities to interrogate praxis through professional learning and reflection is common for school teachers but is not straightforward or as frequently practised by tertiary educators, particularly from across different universities. In this article, the authors who are arts educators from various universities explore a framework that focuses on 'quality' visual art education. The aim was to ascertain if an ontology could be enacted to inform our collective knowledges about quality in arts education across our different contexts. Through collaborative self-study and the application of practice architectures common issues in higher education teaching are discussed. Cases are shared from critical examinations of our practices, that also foreground, interrogate and enrich our collective understandings in the practice field. A proposed model is provided illustrating how the intersection of dialogic discourse with art educational ontology, can promote insightful praxis, which is applicable to not only art education, but a range of disciplines.

The mandated introduction of a teaching performance assessment (TPA) into initial teacher education programs in Australia is one of the numerous and continual reforms that have impacted those who work in the field. The Assessment for Graduate Teaching (AfGT) is an approved TPA developed by a national consortium of higher education institutions to determine the 'classroom readiness' of graduating teachers. Surveys and focus group discussions were conducted with stakeholder groups to explore their experiences of trialling and implementing the AfGT. Initial teacher educators identified several aspects related to implementation that had impacted the ways they work, which included experiencing an increased workload. A semi-fictionalised narrative in the form of a readers' theatre script was developed to weave initial teacher educators' accounts together in an anonymised yet believable fashion for presentation at a research conference. The resultant script provides illustrations of the changing and complex nature of teacher educators' work because of the introduction of the AfGT, and when considered through the theory of practice architectures, it becomes evident that practice traditions are also interrupted.

The field of teacher education is subject to intense scrutiny and policy reform and within this context, the voices of those working within the field are often marginalised. Drawing on our larger study of teacher educators, we addressed the key research question: "How do those who work in the field of teacher education articulate and represent the nature of their work?." Using a fusion of arts-based and data science research methods and the theory of practice architectures, we examined the ways that teacher educators' work is mediated within cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political domains. We argue that while ambiguous dimensions exist in teacher educators' practices, they remain hopeful about their work and find spaces to create alternative sayings, doings and relatings as they prepare teachers for the profession. We contend that using both text-based and visual images facilitates the generation of enhanced meanings to highlight the complexity of teacher educators' work to those within and outside the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amongst the rapid and continual changes occurring in higher education is a heightened emphasis on teaching and the emergence of a quality teaching discourse. In tandem, we are living through a time where not only circumstances, but also new, more complex technologies continue to disrupt and challenge the ways teaching occurs. Despite various initiatives and compliance mechanisms, trust in notions of quality, accountability and scholarship related to teaching in higher education has been questioned. Tensions emerge between the consistency required by institutions and the creativity academics may want to employ in their teaching. Similarly, opportunities for academics to interrogate, discuss and reflect on their teaching can be problematic. In this article, we examine the perspectives of those working amidst these challenges to explore how learning and teaching approaches are changing in the current higher education climate. We draw on data from academic staff working in a faculty of education who shared their understandings through both text and visual responses about their prior, current and imagined future approaches to learning and teaching. We show how academics affectively and reflexively respond to uncertainty and disruption in ways that contribute to understanding and adapting to the challenges of our increasingly digital world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]