Search

Something changed during the pandemic; we attuned to a call. A call to action, breathing, support, activism, care, well-being, community, minimised mobilities, planetary health and our relations to all these things, and more. We are women working in education spaces across multiple communities, responsive to ongoing matters of concern (Latour, 2008), aware that our rhizomic connections have no middle or end. We use the method and metaphor of the quilt in this collaboration and hold quilting as a Feminist intervention, a return to her-stories and ways of knowing through story as we stitch together cultural and material stories of place. Our COVID-19 chronicles are a creative, collaborative exploration of the initial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning and teaching across our respective countries. This paper is a collaboration of critical auto-ethnographies (Holman Jones, 2016), quilted and stitched together by a group of education scholars who united to research the impact of online emergency teaching that forced education site closures globally. Through this collaborative image quilting, we curated responses to our initial 100-word stories of pandemic life in 2020, that we had posted on a collaborative Padlet. Feminist, storying, and ethnographic theory inform alignment and stitching of each 100-word patch.

The Dreams for Digital Spaces joint symposium paper was co-written to accompany the Dreams for Digital Spaces Representative Symposia presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting held in Chicago, US, 14th April 2023. The paper provides further details of each of the four interrelated contributions and full, combined reference list. Abstract: Dreams for Digital Spaces Symposium explores the array of so-called truths that shape the digital worlds of children, educators, researchers, imaginaries, data, AI, algorithms and more through a series of four interconnected presentations involving research that takes up the digital as a focus and/or mode of inquiry. Together the presentations demonstrate the power of combining data science with philosophy, artistry, co-design, and educational research through interdisciplinary collaborations – collaborations which have folded in and out of each other as ideas, methods and even people have travelled. The symposium offers the audience an opportunity to consider how digital practices become the stuff of dreams and nightmares, making room for a multiplicity of potentially transformative truths to take place across virtual and physical sites.

The Dreams for Digital Spaces Representative Symposium was presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting held in Chicago, US, 14th April 2023. These are the slides that accompanied the presentation. Note that Part 1. (whole contribution) and Part 3 (video walk-through of metaverse) contain pop-up video material from the presentation, pre-recorded by colleagues unable to travel to the event. For full details of each of the four interrelated contributions and a full, combined reference list see the The Dreams for Digital Spaces joint symposium paper, co-written to accompany the symposium. Abstract: Dreams for Digital Spaces Symposium explores the array of so-called truths that shape the digital worlds of children, educators, researchers, imaginaries, data, AI, algorithms and more through a series of four interconnected presentations involving research that takes up the digital as a focus and/or mode of inquiry. Together the presentations demonstrate the power of combining data science with philosophy, artistry, co-design, and educational research through interdisciplinary collaborations – collaborations which have folded in and out of each other as ideas, methods and even people have travelled. The symposium offers the audience an opportunity to consider how digital practices become the stuff of dreams and nightmares, making room for a multiplicity of potentially transformative truths to take place across virtual and physical sites.

This chapter examines the challenges and possibilities of assessment practices in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs. Informed by Bakhtin (1986), speech genres, dialogic approaches and a democratic lens to assessment, the chapter questions the nature and purpose of assessment considering the COVID-19 pandemic. New understanding of the concept of ‘relationality’ through pandemic experience provides opportunities for ‘democratic’ assessment is perceived as a point of departure in the learning process for both students and teachers, and not a destination. This perspective incorporates students’ diverse voices and agency and encourages assessment practices to promote not only instrumental aspects of learning, but also the epistemological and ontological layers of learning and being. Though this conceptual interrogation can be applied to any educational context across programs locally and globally, the focus is on ITE in the Australian context, due to the important role of pre-service teachers in creating and designing assessment practices. The chapter provides case study a example that enabled pre-service teachers to play an active and influential role in the development of assessment artefacts and practices. It concludes by projecting opportunities and challenges to teaching and research practices, locally and globally.

This article details how and why we have developed a flexible and responsive process-based rubric exemplar for teaching, learning, and assessing critical and creative thinking. We hope to contribute to global discussions of and efforts toward instrumentalising the challenge of assessing, but not standardising, creativity in compulsory education. Here, we respond to the key ideas of the four interrelated elements in the critical and creative thinking general capability in the Australian Curriculum learning continuum: inquiring; generating ideas, possibilities, actions; reflecting on thinking processes; and analysing, synthesising and evaluating reasoning and procedures. The rubrics, radical because they privilege process over outcome, have been designed to be used alongside the current NAPLAN tests in Years 5, 7 and 9 to build an Australian-based national creativity measure. We do so to argue the need for local and global measures of creativity in education as the first round of testing and results of the PISA Assessment of Creative Thinking approach and to contribute to the recognition of creative thinking (and doing) as a core twenty-first century literacy alongside literacy and numeracy.

The COVID-19 pandemic jolted teachers to the front line of complex, under resourced negotiation of quality distance learning, whilst also being key communicators with students and families about how to be COVID safe. Media reports debated preschool and school closures and child safety, but scarcely considered teachers. Motivated by the silencing of teachers and extraordinary changes to education, we gathered as a group of nine educational researchers located in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and U.S.A to create a survey platform for teachers’ lived experiences of the impact of COVID-19. Our survey asked 22 questions and attracted 624 responses. This article focuses on question 12: What are the issues you are struggling with and need support with? Drawing from Latour’s provocation we distil key ‘matters of concern’ from the data, illustrated by excerpts from teacher responses and echoed by the authors’ COVID lived experiences as interwoven blackout poetry. Our collated experiences highlight struggles with online learning, connectivity/communication with students and families, quality of teaching, and workload, and the need to value and invest in education and the professionalism of teachers to address these struggles.

This chapter reports on data generated through a process of COVID-19 attuned metho-pedagogical innovation established in the chapter "what are artists and art educators teaching us about how we can conceive and deliver teacher professional learning into the future?" Analysis of data reported in Coleman and MacDonald’s (2020) chapter articulates how movement between temporal and latent space enables teachers to attend to professional learning during times of COVID-19 driven interruption. The act of moving between the temporal and latent creates what can be described as Deleuzean slippage ; a productive act that yields new possibilities for becoming differently. This follow-up chapter reports data generated via a widened lens of slippage enacted by an expanded authorship team. In so doing, this chapter elicits an example of methodological and pedagogic interchange – with methodology and pedagogy mutually constituting each other, becoming metho-pedagogy. With a/r/tographic documentations of change occurring individually, collectively, and collaboratively, we propose slipperiness as a generative catalyst for change in pedagogic ways of knowing.

COVID-19 has continued to effect higher education globally in significant ways. During 2020, many institutions shifted learning online overnight as the sector closed its doors and opened new sites for remote teaching. This article reports on an international study [Phillips et al., 2021] that sought to capture how cross-sectoral teachers experienced these emergency changes during the first months of restrictions. The data, analysed using narrative identity theory, revealed concerns that fall into two broad categories: technologies and relationships. Significantly, it was not a loss of content delivery or changes to assessment that prompted the greatest anxiety for our colleagues, but that they held significant concerns about their students' mental health; inequities of access to a range of services including technological; and challenges connecting emotionally with their students at a distance. The results provide actionable strategies for higher education institutions to apply in future emergencies where remote teaching is necessary.

This project included a collaborative team from education, theatre and performance, and feminist and cultural studies. Building on pilot research in criminology, it looks at how theatre and interdisciplinary research can improve the wellbeing of young people in a climate of widespread violence against women. The project used a research-creation approach to examine how the play ‘Othello on Trial’: • Deploys theatre-based techniques that acknowledge diversity in the classroom • Queries assumptions about Shakespeare’s universality and colour-blindness. The project included performances informed by the research team’s collective practice and a symposium for invited stakeholders in the Victorian education sector. These events helped assess the project’s potential for inclusion in school-based curricula, and show the valuable contribution theatre can make to young people’s creativity, critical thinking and wellbeing. Resulting research data and resources will form a digital study to ensure the project’s longevity. This can be used by schools and policymakers in Australia and internationally. Note: Project outcomes reflect study adjustments to account for COVID-19 restrictions.