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This article considers what it means to teach and learn in places of poverty through the narratives of front-line workers-particularly students and teachers. What is the work of teaching and learning in places of poverty in current times? How has this changed? What can be learned from both the haunting and hopeful narratives of front-line workers? Is it possible to continue to educate in these times and in ways that allow for critique, imagination and optimism? These questions are addressed by drawing from studies conducted over three decades in schools located in high-poverty neighbourhoods. Literacy education is considered as a particular case. Educational researchers need to remain on the front line with teachers and students in places of poverty because that is where some of the hardest work gets done. Reinvigorated democratic research communities would include teachers, school leaders, policy workers and young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-stakes literacy testing is now a ubiquitous educational phenomenon. However, it remains a relatively recent phenomenon in Australia. Hence it is possible to study the ways in which such tests are reorganising educators’ work during this period of change. This paper draws upon Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography and critical policy analysis to consider this problem and reports on interview data from teachers and the principal in small rural school in a poor area of South Australia. In this context high-stakes testing and the associated diagnostic school review unleashes a chain of actions within the school which ultimately results in educators doubting their professional judgments, increasing the investment in testing, narrowing their teaching of literacy and purchasing levelled reading schemes. The effects of high-stakes testing in disadvantaged schools are identified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the need for critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability that often promotes reading comprehension as readily assessable through students answering multiple choice questions of unseen texts. Based upon a 1 year study investigating literacy in Years 4-9 the ways strong-performing primary schools develop serious and in-depth reading for learning are explored. School and teacher features which allow for the development of sophisticated pedagogical repertoires and space for critical reading comprehension, without losing the complexity of curriculum offerings, are outlined. How one experienced middle primary teacher operates strategically, ethically and critically in supporting her ESL students to learn to read is illustrated. The teacher's work is situated within the complex accountability demands faced by classroom teachers. This was accomplished by a teacher whose pedagogical repertoire has been assembled across a career teaching in low-SES high ESL communities in a school with a balanced literacy program and high level of collegial support. Risks for schools and teachers whose circumstances work against their capacities for prioritisation and strategic decision-making are identified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on accounts from students to inform a Middle Schooling movement that has been variously described as 'arrested', 'unfinished' and 'exhausted'. We propose that if the Middle Schooling movement is to understand the changing worlds of students and develop new approaches in the middle years of schooling, then it is important to draw on the insights that individual students can provide by conducting research with 'students-as-informants'. The early adolescent informants to this paper report high hopes for their futures (despite their lower socioeconomic surroundings), which reinforces the importance of supporting successful learner identities and highlights the role of schooling in the decline of adolescent student aspirations. However, their insights did not stop at the individual learner, with students also identifying cultural and structural constraints to reform. As such, we argue that students may be both an important resource for inquiry into individual school reform and for the Middle Schooling movement internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we explore the relationship between literacy, place, and teacher identity as they intersect around Special Forever, a professional learning program with a focus on environmental communications and place based education. Teachers participating in Special Forever speak from different positions, histories, and alliances as local landowners, farmers, users of Murray-Darling Basin resources, and environmental activists; they teach in places to which they are connected in multiple ways and in which they have particular investments that shape the design of their environmental communications curriculum. We draw on an analysis of the Special Forever Guidelines for schools to discern how the Murray-Darling Basin is represented within the program, and read this alongside interview data in which teachers speak about the complex relationships they have with ‘their place’ in the Murray-Darling Basin. We suggest that the interrelationships between the politics of places, the politics of literacy pedagogy, and the multiple subject positions that teachers negotiate deserve closer attention if we are to develop more grounded approaches to critical literacy and place-based pedagogies. Furthermore, we argue that an important element for making literacy critical is attending to the politics of the places that are important to children and their teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the performance of boys in standardized forms of literacy in Australia. Interventions to literacy programs; Effects of normative models of literacy development on different children; Dispositions of children toward literate practices.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss educational issues in Australia and New Zealand involving standardisation of education materials, educational policy and quality audits in schools.

For the past four decades, the question of how long it takes to achieve academically in a second language has been the subject of research. It is a key policy question informing the allocation of resources for the support of English language learners in schools, with the existing research from the United States (US), Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) showing it takes varying lengths of time depending on a range of variables. Until this present study, no research had been done on the trajectories of English language learners in the Australian context, where increasing numbers of English learners form the student population. As part of a broader mixedmethods study designed to address this gap in the research, we present quantitative analyses of longitudinal school data on NAPLAN reading results for two large regions in Queensland from the years 2009–2015. Using two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures, we identified the academic trajectories of EAL students as compared with the trajectories of the same age cohort, most of whom are English as a first language speakers. The findings show that EAL students who had been in schools long enough to sit four NAPLAN tests reached parity by Year 7, suggesting that it takes the whole of primary school for them to achieve at the same level as their English-speaking peers. Those who entered between Year 3 and Year 5 reached parity within two to four years of arrival in Australia. For older learners entering school between Year 5 and Year 7, reaching parity took much longer. The implications of these findings are far reaching for policy, teacher preparation, and the provision of high quality language support programs in Australian primary and secondary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]