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This article problematises Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and assessment practices to contribute to the ongoing work of decolonising higher education. It critiques the entanglement of military imaginaries and ITE via a diffractive reading of ITE discourse and policy in the Australian context through military imaginaries in academic and SF literature. In military imaginaries there exists an imperative to enact warfare as 'target processing'; that is, the essence of warfare is understood to be the operationalisation of a continuous cycle of identification of targets, selection and implementation of pre-determined methodologies to match these targets, followed by measurement of the outcomes of the process. This article considers how current ITE expectations prioritise a similar continuous cycle of selection and implementation of standardised methodologies and measurement of effects; effectively an ideology of 'teaching as processing'. It examines how this expectation assists in creating certain concerning expectations and disappearances within teaching and education.

For white settler researchers aiming to contribute to the work of decolonising education, actively seeking ways to disturb and destabilise long-held onto-epistemological assumptions associated with colonial modernity is important. In this article I investigate how these disturbances might occur in a diffractive and decolonising reading methodology. I outline two prior diffractive reading experiences that drew on decolonial theory and Barad's diffraction theory: A situated inquiry of the Great Barrier Reef as a pedagogical agent; and a reading of Australian teacher education policy through military imaginaries. In this article I read these prior diffractive reading experiences through one another, attending to further methodological patterns. I identify two connected methods of defamiliarisation that are generative for destabilising colonising ways of knowing, norms and thinking in education. These are: Bringing ostensibly different phenomena together in diffractive relations with one another; and reading difference in the spirit of companionship, that is, in an orientation to learning from difference rather than to master difference. I suggest that if education continues to rely on and wield the same modern critical tools that support colonial-capitalist systems it will be unable to recognise, address and reimagine the continued violence of these systems.

This article is a reexamination of the author's understanding of pedagogy, aimed at developing an increased awareness of the provinciality, limits and blind spots of the pedagogy and knowledge systems of colonial modernity. It engages with particular Indigenous epistemological theorisations of non-human agency, with Haraway's notion of multispecies entanglement, and with the Australian Great Barrier Reef in an inquiry aimed at noticing absences and hauntings of pedagogies of modernity, including the absence of ways of knowing and being without separability and determinacy and the damage that has come of this. This opens space for contemplating separability and determinacy as ontological difficulties contributing to socio-ecological crises of our time. The article is intended as a move by the author toward developing greater capacity to stay with the trouble of educating and living on a damaged planet that is fast becoming uninhabitable.

This paper presents a reflexive analysis of how university educators experience the shift to increasing online teaching in 2019. We explore what it means to be an online educator in contemporary higher education and aim to raise questions about how we approach online education and understand ourselves as educators, informed by a sociomaterial lens. The research utilised collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to facilitate meaning-making and uncover complex perspectives through collaboration and conversation. This enabled us to question what we as educators were losing and what we were gaining as a consequence of shifting to more online modes of teaching via university mandated platforms and processes. Through this methodology, various themes emerged: the role of corporeality; how we constructed ourselves through texts; how others materialised us in virtual spaces; the experience of online time; and our transforming practices and identities. This paper provides a snapshot of a significant cultural milieu in academia as we were afforded time to engage in reflexive practice about teaching online just as the academic world was abruptly mandated to shift almost wholly online. It also provides unique insights into the significance of understanding ourselves as both embodied and social, and the importance of community within academia.

This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound: the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway (2016) calls response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.

Increasing significance has been ascribed to student engagement, as a measure of success of both teachers and programs. However, since users of the term commonly tend not to explain, rationalise or problematise their understanding of engagement, its value to understand or transform learning may be limited. While clarification has occurred in conceptual work, there is a lack of empirical work that extends beyond understandings of engagement-as-behaviour, as well as insufficient work exploring what students understand engagement to be. Further, much work on engagement is rooted in physical campuses and face-to-face delivery, which represents an incomplete picture of how students actually engage in study. This article investigates student perceptions of engagement in two blended learning Initial Teacher Education programs. It offers a critical discussion of how research can be re-considered in light of changing learning contexts and changing understandings of ways to investigate engagement. The findings of this study support previous work that found multiple levels and meanings of student engagement exist. New complex and multidimensional models of engagement are proposed, which can open new possibilities for designing studies and analysing findings. This article argues that including and questioning physical, virtual and political contexts and power, affect, relationships, linearity and essential measurability are important features of new models of engagement.

The continued erasure of place and politics from modernity’s education systems and disciplinary knowledges perpetuates racialised and ecological injustices and extractive relations. In this paper I affirm the necessity of using evolving methods of critical place inquiry and relocalisation in higher education to redress these erasures. I illustrate an approach which centres the geopolitical (place and politics entangled) in a critical, inventive and relocalising inquiry enacted on sites of the gold rush on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Australia. This brings to notice and questions the relations of mining with the origin stories and narratives of the state and its education institutions. I draw attention to the proposition that higher education is moving towards a transitional space, the bardo, requiring the death of its old forms and preparing the ground for new forms to grow, and point to possibilities for supporting the death of higher education as we know it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]