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This paper explores the introduction of the new Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) for graduate teachers in Australia. We investigate how the broader discussion around TPAs has been understood by multiple agents during an eight-month period from January 2019 to August 2019. Data includes legacy media, social media tweets and a survey of school leaders. The analysis draws on Bernsteinian (1975) theory about the way particular social relations produce differing sentiments of social unity. While eschewing a strict binary, legacy media was characterised by a mechanical solidarity which promoted the TPA as akin to a test. Contributions to social media and responses to the survey suggested an orientation to organic solidarity and a recognition of the complex inter-dependence of specialised roles within initial teacher education. These diverse social discourses carry the potential to influence the broader commission of what counts as graduate teacher quality.

This article examines how the 'teacher quality' agenda, evident in the globalised discourse on education policy, constructs changes to teachers' work and teacher education. We undertake a critical policy analysis of two reports from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), addressing three issues. First, we discuss the global and national context in which 'teacher quality' policies have emerged. We examine implications of policy enactment in Australia and analyse how the OECD documents construct understandings of teacher quality. We link our analysis to a recent government inquiry into the teaching profession in Australia, looking specifically at the impact of the teacher quality discourse on teacher education. The OECD documents constrain what is perceived as acceptable curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation in teacher education. We argue, with others, that changes in response to the teacher quality discourse are narrowing what it means to undertake quality teaching work, especially in contexts of disadvantage.

This paper contributes to the critical studies literature on English as an International Language (EIL) teacher professional identity. It examines the competing values associated with competencies in language teaching, national curriculum, and school contexts to determine how teachers' beliefs on what it means to be a professional teacher are shaped. Literature related to language teachers' professional identities is presented in order to analyse how EIL teachers determine which particular responsibilities constitute professional teachers. This study investigates reports from five teachers working in four privately-funded Islamic schools regarding their professional responsibilities as they recontextualise Indonesia's competency-based curriculum and values education policies in their EIL classes. The findings suggest that the teachers consider their professional identity to be more focused on that of caregiver and moral guardian rather than as an English teacher. It also demonstrates that teachers' professional identity informs teachers' hopes/ambition for their students' futures or teachers' "imagined student identity."

With the increase in distance and online teaching for mainstream schooling contexts, the advocacy of using a virtual world as a teaching and learning place has accelerated. Currently, there is no empirical evidence revealing the pedagogical elements defining teacher practices in virtual settings. This article reports on an exploratory study which contributes to defining virtual pedagogy. Six pre-service teachers and two researchers spent 20 hours exploring a three-dimensional virtual platform for its pedagogical appropriation. The pre-service teachers were asked to conduct a learning challenge for the other teacher-participants. An observation protocol was developed from an analysis of literature on the use of digital technologies and virtual worlds to identify specific teaching practices. Using video recordings of the learning challenges, a process of deductive and inductive categorisation occurred. Findings indicate that virtual teaching practices can be categorised by technology function; pedagogical approach, classroom organisation, teacher role and learner action; feedback and modality; and quality dimensions. The appropriation of the virtual place plays a role in defining teacher practices in the virtual classroom. These findings begin to represent and guide virtual teaching that has the potential to impact the quality of distance learning and learning in a classroom.

Unprecedented changes to family life in the new millennium have left many parents feeling unable to effectively participate in their child's school-based learning. This article presents research which explored enablers and impediments when using social media as part of an inquiry curriculum to promote parent engagement in student learning in one Australian school. Using collaborative inquiry research, various data were collected from two early-years teachers, their students, and the students' parents using surveys, a full-day meeting, online weekly meetings, interviews, and the social media digital platform of Seesaw. Rogoff's three interrelated planes of sociocultural analysis--personal, interpersonal, and community--were used to examine participant interactions and their effects. The agency/structure dialectic provided a conceptual lens to further explain how the social media apparatus of Seesaw enabled learning and teaching. The findings showed that access to forms of language needed to contribute to online social media spaces drew attention to the importance of teachers having at the ready a substantive knowledge of inquiry. Implications for future research are discussed.

Curriculum reform is often described as being dependent on teachers' advancement of reform principles. Many studies report the reasons for whether teachers engage with a new curriculum, and these reasons have focused on internal, personal influences including disconnections between curriculum and teachers' beliefs and practices. This study investigates nine Australian primary teachers' accounts of their use of a new English curriculum from data obtained through semi-structured interviews. A thematic content analysis approach was used to analyse the interview transcripts, illustrating significant differences among the teachers in their use of the intended curriculum. The analysis provided four distinct influences on their curriculum use: the provision of professional development; curriculum and leadership roles; use of alternative or additional materials; and schools' prioritisation of particular learning areas. The findings demonstrate that the consistent use of these curriculum materials, as intended by designers, was appreciably influenced by factors external to the teachers. Implications for curriculum designers include the need for greater consideration of external contextual influences, such as: opportunities for teachers to access professional development, consideration of curriculum roles within schools, the thoughtful provision of additional or alternate curriculum materials, and recognition of the prioritisation of particular learning areas by schools.

In this article, we overview the research literature exploring the teaching of evaluative language in written and/or visual texts in the elementary years of schooling. We then review the recently redrafted Australian Curriculum: English to identify the emphasis given to the teaching of evaluative language and the grammar of visual design across the elementary years of schooling in Australia. Also featured is the importance of the persuasive genre, and multimodal texts. The focus of our research work is on one Year 4 elementary years school teacher who scaffolds her students to bring all of this knowledge together to read/view and write/create in ways that take seriously the powerful written and visual language use of persuasive multimodal texts. The students are undertaking an inquiry topic "Sharks: Dangerous or Misunderstood?". As part of the unit, students are exploring the written and visual grammar of danger signs. The students explore these texts by making a danger sign they would expect to see at the beach, as well as a danger sign for something that is not typically dangerous such as a ladybug. We examine the students' use of the grammar of appraisal and the grammar of visual design, and their capacity to discuss the knowledge/power relationship of their own persuasive multimodal texts during an interview with their teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors present the literacy pedagogical approach LAUNCH and reveal its influence on young learners as engineers of literacy learning through text production. Findings are reported from design-based research in a case study of an Australian early years classroom. Using a qualitative orientation, data were generated from video and audio recordings, cogenerative dialogues, and artifacts. Data pertain to a 5-year-old boy, his teacher, and the first author in the capacity of coteacher and researcher. The authors draw attention to 11 literacy practices that afforded opportunities to give form to and express customary, everyday text production, such as drawing and writing, while introducing new, untried forms of producing text. Central to these literacy practices are pedagogic actions that conceptualize ideas about how teaching and learning text production modalities might occur in the early years of schooling.

This paper examines how a new policy was enacted by teachers with different working conditions in Indonesia. The concept of curriculum enactment and an elaborated theoretical perspective for understanding teachers' professional judgement are presented to reveal whether teachers from different school sectors encounter dilemmas in curriculum reform and whether they display consistency in their patterns of resolving those dilemmas. The data reported in this study were obtained from transcripts of interviews and fieldnotes of classroom observations with nine teachers from state and private secondary schools in Indonesia. The results suggest that the two groups of teachers experienced different dilemmas and developed different resolutions. The paper concludes that the resolutions adopted by teachers reflected their attempts to 'act for the best'.

In various parts of the world, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are actively working towards Reconciliation. In Australia, the context in which we each undertake our work as educationalists and researchers, the Reconciliation agenda has been pushed into schools and English teachers have been called on to share responsibility for facilitating the move towards a new national order. The recently introduced Australian Curriculum mandates that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures be embedded with "a strong" but "varying presence" into each learning area (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2013). In this paper we consider the tensions between policy and practice, when discourses external to education are recontextualised into the discipline of English. We do so by applying an analytical framework based on Bernstein's (1990, 1996, 2000) sociological theories about the structure of instructional and regulative discourses. Our findings suggest that the space to exert Reconciliatory agendas in the Australian Curriculum English is ambiguous and thus holds the potential to not only marginalise Indigenous knowledges but also to create tensions between policy and practice for non-Indigenous teachers of English.

This paper demonstrates how teacher accreditation requirements can be responsibly aligned with a scholarly impetus to incorporate digital literacies to prepare pre-service teachers to meet changing educational needs and practices. The assessment initiatives introduced in the newly constructed four year undergraduate Bachelor of Education program at one Australian university are described and analysed in light of the debates surrounding pre-service primary teachers' literacy capabilities. The findings and subsequent discussion have implications for all literacy teacher educators concerned about the impact of standardised assessment practices on the professional future of teachers. (Contains 1 footnote.)

As the demands placed on the literacy coach have evolved, so too have the roles of these educational providers who are often responsible for working with school teams to turn around student performance on standardized literacy tests. One literacy coach based in a Queensland primary school recounts her experiences via open-ended interview over a two year period. We offer a theorisation of the new ways of working as a literacy coach in a context of teaching and learning marked by diversity. (Contains 2 figures.)

The article focuses on the implementation of story book reads as a means to engage students and parents in literacy learning in an early years classroom. Topics include the research methodology of the Engaging Parents in Inquiry Curriculum (EPIC) project, the strategies used to invite parent participation through e-newsletters and flexible scheduling, and the transformative impact of the initiative on student engagement and literacy development.

The authors describe how one teacher scaffolded his 16- and 17-year-old English communications students to identify the subtle techniques of persuasion in a news report. Situated in an Australian public secondary school, these students were not following a tertiary entrance pathway, but the teacher still wanted them to develop critical literacy skills. The teaching focus was on increasing students' understandings of the power of language used in a news report through the development of a technical metalanguage. The authors outline seven activities in which the teacher helped his students analyze exchanges in text and the social constructions of identity. Attention is drawn to the role of facilitated discussion, where the teacher has depth of knowledge of a functional model of language. This focus on critical literacy allowed the students to engage with substantive issues and complex texts and to also unite over a common issue.

Since 2008, secondary school English teachers have been at the receiving end of contradictory advice on how to best prepare their students for the literacy component of the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). On the one hand, Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) asserts that the 'best preparation for NAPLAN is to continue focusing on teaching the curriculum' (ACARA, 2018a). Yet in Queensland, systems and schools are in the midst of responding to an externally mandated assessment culture (Klenowski, 2011; Hardy, 2014). Our pilot study explores open-answer survey responses from 30 Queensland secondary school English teachers who provided varying accounts of their school's responses to these competing agendas. Employing theories from Bernstein's (2000) sociology of education, we examine what the teacher participants say about (i) NAPLAN's relationship with the English learning area, and (ii) who controls the pedagogic practice for NAPLAN preparation in their school. The article concludes by considering the potential effects of these disparate arrangements.

The last two decades have seen the massification of preservice teacher education and critiques of its quality in Australia and elsewhere. Part of the strategy of massification has been the establishment of satellite campuses in growth corridors. This paper enters the debate on the quality of preservice candidates. The purpose of this research is two-fold: to note comparisons and parallels in demographics across main and satellite campuses, and to advance research on the epistemological beliefs of first year preservice teachers according to campus location. In doing so, we offer an alternative metric for characterising these two groups of students. The results show that the students from both campuses are demographically diverse but are similar in terms of the beliefs they hold about knowing and learning. These findings talk-back to the critique of entry standards for preservice teachers in general and satellite campus students in particular.