Search

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.

Research is at the core of universities' raison d'être and is an integral aspect of academic work, yet the ever-changing parameters around research are problematic. While studies have examined changes brought about through research assessment exercises and issues of academic identity in the twenty-first century, fewer studies have used arts-related research methods to engage with academics' experiences of these changes. This article draws upon visual and textual material generated by academics at an Australian university to investigate how academic researchers engage with research in the current milieu. This research offers an aesthetic mode of interruption and resistance to consider the emotional labour, work and energy involved in doing research that cannot be captured through neoliberal research measurement discourses. It deploys a post-Foucauldian governmentality theoretical framework to illustrate the ways in which academics [re]position multiple selves constantly to build more robust and critical responses to higher education reform.

Graduate teachers in Australia are expected to engage with their peers to expand their professional learning. Learning to use protocols--or structured professional conversations--provides pre-service teachers with opportunities to achieve this expectation. In this paper we explain how pre-service teachers during an extended practicum used protocols to participate in synchronous online discussions using the Blackboard Collaborate learning platform. The pre-service teachers were surveyed about aspects of the protocols and the platform on which the interactions occurred. Protocols appear to be well-suited to assisting synchronous discussions using Web 2 technologies as they ensure everyone has equal time to discuss, present and receive feedback about their work in respectful and efficient ways. This preliminary research provides opportunities for further investigation of pedagogical approaches to use with pre-service teachers when they are required to utilise online platforms when they are away from the university for extended periods of time. (Contains 2 tables.)

Background: Creativity is often cited as one of the capacities that needs to be actively encouraged in all aspects of schooling. However, what creativity is and how it may be promoted through formal teaching and learning approaches remain contested. There are also differences between educators in terms of how they understand, discuss and conceptualise this complex concept. Purpose: This paper focuses on the difficulties associated with talking about creativity in education. It considers the ways in which schoolteachers who are involved in the area of arts education understand, describe and discuss the concept of creativity and how it interacts with their classroom practice. Sample: Twenty-three educators who taught Arts (either as generalist primary classroom teachers or as specialist teachers), and the leadership team from a Kindergarten to Year 9 (pupil ages 5-15) school in the suburbs of a city in the Australian state of Victoria participated in the project. Design and methods: In this phenomenological study, data were gathered from participants through questionnaires, discussion groups, email prompts and reflective journals. The material was analysed qualitatively. Findings: By examining the teachers' dialogic and discursive responses about creativity, it was possible to capture some broad ways in which the participants spoke about creativity. Data were analysed thematically and grouped into categories that represented the connected 'creative orientations': thinking orientations, action orientations, emotion orientations and skill/outcome orientations. Conclusion: There is a need for educators in and across a range of discipline areas to share, map and think about creativity. The approach adopted in this exploratory study offers a way that could be used to focus discussions and help facilitate educators' talk about creativity.

This article interrogates the construction of a visual and sound installation that juxtaposes contemporary material with historical artefacts regarding academic work to offer an aesthetic mode of interruption in explorations of academic voice in university histories and in the contemporary university. Drawing upon Foucauldian histories of the present (particularly genealogy), this installation combines text, images and sound to take audiences on an emotive journey of the university. As historical research increasingly takes on an aesthetic and sensual turn, moving beyond content and context to consider other forms of representation, the article draws on theories concerning the functions of art and the semiotics involved when we engage with art to explore the emotional dimensions of academic work. Art in story and story in art methodologies are used to situate attempts at engaging in aural and visual ways of knowing time and place to (re)consider academics' silenced historical and contemporary narratives.

Measurement of academic work has become more significant than the intellectual, pedagogical, cultural, political and social practices in which academics and students engage. This shifting emphasis creates paradoxes for academics. They experience a growing sense of disconnection between their desires to develop students into engaged, disciplined and critical citizens and the activities that appear to count in the enterprise university. As measurement discourses preclude the possibilities of human emotion and hinder intellectual labour, we embarked on an arts-informed research project that established new creative spaces for our colleagues to illustrate the pleasures and paradoxes of their academic work. In the research project, we developed critical pedagogies through art and poetry that enabled academics to speak back to university management--and each other--about how they experience their work. In this paper, we draw upon poststructural "micro-physics" of power, the poststructuralist "politics of reinscription", and art, poetry and drama as critical pedagogies to interrogate the potential of arts-informed research to speak back to the measured university. The key contribution of this article is to recommend arts-informed methodologies as a forum for dissent and resistance at a time when the spaces of collegiality, pleasure and democracy in the measured university are under attack.

Universities are built upon the collaborative work of academic staff and students, yet the nature of this work has been undergoing profound and rapid change. Pressures within Australia's higher education sector have led to a fracturing of traditional academic roles and growing feelings of disconnection. While there have been many narrative, ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations of academic work, few studies have employed visual arts-informed methodologies to interrogate the ways in which academics represent their teaching, research and community engagement work. In this article we outline findings about academics' views of their teaching work. These findings surfaced from an arts-informed participatory research project, that sought to open up a space for (re)presentations of academic work. With a focus on teaching, three through lines emerged during the analysis: "voicing absences and resistances"; "initiating layers of reflexive moments" and "expressing complexity through collage". We argue that the academics' responses allow us to trace the emotional terrain of contemporary academic work. They also open up ways to unpack, express and make visible academics' complex thoughts, feelings and ideas about teaching practices.

While educators in many parts of the world grapple with what creativity means in practice, discussions about creative pedagogy usually include the elements of creative teaching, teaching for creativity and creative learning. This article stems from a research project that occurred at a Preparatory to Year 9 school in Australia where we worked with staff to explore their understandings of creativity and creative learning in the Arts. We found that while students' creative learning is a fundamental element in a creative pedagogy framework, the notion of creative learning of teachers is largely overlooked in discourses of teachers' professional learning. Given the important role teachers play in student learning, we argue that teachers need to be informed not only about how to teach creatively and for creativity, but also how to consider possibilities and understand things in new ways, thereby making a case that a teacher's own creative learning is crucial.

There is an inherent expectation that educators will work towards continuously improving their practice and quality of teaching. Underpinning this expectation is an assumption that educators also engage in the process of reflection. In this article, we begin by outlining the current tensions in the field of education that relate to managerialist concerns of the measurement and monitoring of quality teaching and effectiveness. We then contextualise our particular circumstances and provide an account of a collaborative action research project we initiated to examine our team-teaching practices in a graduate entry pre-service teacher education programme. In the project, we initially focused on how we might provide for pre-service teachers' learning while they were undertaking an internship in the final semester of their programme. Factors that required consideration included the use of face-to-face and synchronous online forms of interaction. Having experienced the powerful influence of using protocols to structure professional learning conversations with the pre-service teachers with whom we were working, we also decided to extend the conversations we were having with each other to conversations with our colleagues. Taken together, the action research framework and the processes afforded by protocols provided a structured approach for our inquiry. Conversing with the pre-service teachers involved in the programme, with each other and with our peers at a faculty-level seminar and an international conference were the main sources of data gathered during the research project. The collegial conversations that occurred when using protocols also provided a way to move to the level of critical reflection. Rather than discuss the outcomes of our project in the remainder of the article, we elected to scrutinise and theorise the significant elements that were germane to our project--the three Cs: collegiality, conversation and critical reflection. We conclude by realising that to learn about ourselves as teachers and as learners, we need to move beyond routine and technical aspects of reflection, to a level that is critical and transformative, and that this can be achieved through the use of protocols in purposeful and collaborative conversations with others.

Community-based arts projects can act as powerful learning opportunities in a variety of lifelong and life wide contexts. Many of these projects involve artists, who usually undertake a leading role to ensure that some type of transformation takes place for those involved. The impact on the leaders--in this case the artists--is difficult to identify, even if they have been involved in several community-based arts projects. In this paper I provide insights drawn from my doctoral thesis. There I explored the cumulative impact on artists who work on community-based arts projects, what transformations and learning occurred for them as a result of working on these projects, and how those experiences contributed to their identities. My study involved hermeneutic phenomenological/narrative research approaches based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 visual artists. Data were analysed using a recursive and spiralling process and were subsequently presented thematically as a neonarrative. The findings discussed in this article relate to the artists' attempts at reconciling aspects of their individual, social and cultural identities by challenging their own as well as the community's perceptions of artists. The cumulative effect of being involved in community-based arts practice also provided the artists with ongoing identity capital in that they came to realize that they learnt about themselves by connecting with others. The findings contribute to the emerging debate that challenges the narrow view of measuring the value of community-based art projects based on instrumental and public worth, and invites exploration of the private and intrinsic impact on individuals. (Contains 1 figure.)