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Alternative teacher education programmes have emerged in many countries as a new approach to recruiting, educating and placing teachers in underperforming schools. The media plays an important role in framing perceptions of these programmes and their teachers, including in Australia, but this has not been the subject of significant research to date. This study examines how one alternative teacher education programme--Teach For Australia (TFAus)--has been positioned and framed within the news media since its inception. It critically analyses the portrayal of TFAus and concomitant educational discourses to explore their connection to larger issues surrounding teacher education and teaching quality. Drawing on an analysis of 122 print/online media articles, we identify narratives related to prestige, benevolence and the 'alternative' nature of the programme, alongside a narrative critical of TFAus. Despite this critical narrative, in investigating and opening up a dialogue on the perceptions and depictions of TFAus, we posit that the programme--although controversial in nature--has generally benefited from print media coverage, advancing its reputation as a major contributor to education reform and champion of educational equity.

Marketization is the development of quasi-markets on the systemic level, which promote choice, competition, accountability, and devolution in public schooling. Marketing is a strategy that individual school leaders employ to respond to these logics. This paper argues that education marketization has led to an increase in school-based marketing within the Australian public school system. The eight public school principals we report on here, perceived marketing as a key technique in shaping school choice but paradoxically, felt that they shouldn't have to market to prospective families. In addition, some participants no longer felt like they operated as public schools, but rather, existed somewhere in the "grey zone" between public and private. We use Bateson's concept of the double bind to argue that marketization is creating a system of performative pressures for public school principals that contradict with their ethical values and beliefs. This double bind is not representative of a simple contradiction of individual conflict, but of school leaders caught up in an ongoing system of marketization that produces conflicting definitions of "publicness" and understanding of what public schools are and ought to be.

Political appetite for neoliberal education policy has problematised teacher education in a number of countries, including Australia, the US and England. In Australia, dominant policy discourses of quality normalise the regulation and standardisation of teacher education and position teacher educators within a deficit model of education reform. Such positioning has been shown to have a deleterious impact on professional status, dismantling complex conceptualisations of teacher educators' work. Framed by key tenets of positioning theory and conceptualisations of policy enactment, this study investigated, using online semi-structured interviews, the ways in which 16 teacher educators in one Australian university positioned policy as "other", and the ways in which they felt they could or should respond. It found that teacher educators position policy, and engage in the policy process, in complex and varied ways. While many positioned policy as an intruder, with the potential to do harm to the profession, others had made choices that positioned policy as a tool for innovative imagining for programme renewal. Findings also highlight the potential appetite for collaborative positioning between policy makers and teacher educators as partners. These findings have significant implications for future approaches to re-shaping the teacher education policy space both in Australia and beyond.

Marketisation and competition within public schooling systems impact the work of principals in varying ways. Previous work on the marketisation of schooling and school autonomy has drawn attention to the 'entrepreneurial principal' as an effect of marketisation. In this paper we explore principals' engagements with marketisation based on 21 interviews with public school principals across two Australian states. Using the work of Christiaens (2020), we highlight a difference between entrepreneurialism and utility-maximisation in marketised systems, evident in how principals engage with leadership within these systems. For most principals in our study, engagements with marketisation were entangled with different orientations toward utility maximisation. Evidence of genuine entrepreneurship was far more scarce. We argue that the need to ensure school survival in a saturated market gives rise to a performative veneer of entrepreneurialism that is largely absent of innovation and the 'leap of faith' that lies at the heart of true entrepreneurialism.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the reform of initial teacher education (ITE) policy in Australia over a 25-year period from 1998 to 2023. It examines policy shifts and movements over this timeframe and aims to better understand the ongoing reforms in the changing contexts of their times. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper engages a critical policy historiography approach, focusing on four "policy moments" each linked to a review commissioned by the Commonwealth government of the day. It draws upon the reports and government responses themselves, along with media reports, extracts from Hansard, and ministerial speeches, press releases and interviews related to each of the four policy moments, asking critical questions about the "public issues" and "private troubles" (Gale, 2001) of each moment and aiming to shed light on the complexities of these accounts of policy and the trajectory they represent. Findings: The paper charts the construction of the problem of ITE in Australia over time, highlighting the discursive continuities and shifts since 1998. It traces the constitution of both policy problems and solutions to explain the current policy settlement using a historical lens. Originality/Value: Its value lies in offering a reading of the current policy settlement, based on a close and systematic historical analysis. Where previous research has focused either on particular moments or concepts in ITE reform, this analysis seeks to understand the current policy settlement by taking a longer, contextualised view.

Cognitive load theory's incorporation of evolutionary perspectives has generated several instructional designs based on movement, including the tracing effect, occurring when learners benefit from explicit instructions to trace out specific elements of lesson materials with the index finger. Historical descriptions of children's tracing behaviours while learning with Montessori's "sandpaper letters" suggest some children would sequence their own learning with sandpaper letters by first tracing the lesson materials with eyes open, then with eyes closed. This description resonates with another cognitive load theory effect -- the imagination effect -- whereby students with sufficient prior knowledge benefit from imagining rather than studying lesson materials. Across two experiments, we replicated and extended the tracing effect by comparing a no-tracing control condition and a tracing condition to a condition where students traced elements of worked examples initially with eyes open, then with eyes closed. The majority of hypotheses were confirmed via effects on self-reported intrinsic motivation, cognitive load, and/or problem-solving test performance. We conclude with considerations for instructional designers, educators, and researchers.

This paper explores perceptions of work intensification around the world. Underpinning this analysis is C. Wright Mills' (1959) argument that many personal troubles are public issues, and the notion that a significant dimension of the privatisation of public education, a concern of public education advocates worldwide, is the ways in which school work has become a private issue. One hundred and thirty interviews were conducted with education stakeholders across Australia, England, New Zealand and Canada exploring the issues of work intensification, school autonomy and accountability policies. The paper argues that the work done in public schools is increasingly becoming a private problem as a result of policy interventions. It suggests that we need to widen the scope of defining publicness in education beyond that of governance and funding to include consideration of how work is organised and experienced.

One of the key tenets of the global education reform movement, professional standards for teachers have reshaped different aspects of teachers' work and learning in many contexts internationally over the past two decades. This paper explores the consequences of neoliberalism for teacher professional learning in contemporary times. The policies and processes built up around teacher professional development and learning as a consequence of contemporary regimes of standards and their dominant conceptualisation of teacher professionalism, constitute particular cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that frame the practice of teacher professional learning. These in turn give rise to some possibilities of practice while limiting others, effectively creating the space within which what counts as 'authentic professional learning' can be enacted. A case study of the interplay between professional standards and professional learning in the jurisdiction of New South Wales, Australia, is presented, via an analysis of publicly available texts generated by the NSW Education Standards Authority explicitly related to teacher professional learning and development. The paper argues that the practice architectures of professional learning in an age of standards work to support instrumental forms of professional learning while constraining the possibility of more authentic or generative forms of professional learning and consequently, teacher professionalism.

In Anglophone countries, narratives of public schooling tend to emphasise generic hopes about schooling as central to the idea of a public good, including fostering community, delivering equality and protecting broad notions of democracy. However, as public systems become more open to privatised logics, these hopes sit alongside fears for the future of 'publicness'. Through analysis of participant interviews in four education systems in Canada, England, New Zealand and Australia, this paper shows that these fears emerge from the specific nature of privatisation evident within specific contexts. Our argument is that while hopes remain in common, parochial policies and histories inform particular fears about how public school systems are losing their 'publicness'. There is evidence of a 'cruel optimism' among participants as they try to hold onto their belief in the good of publicness, even as their institutions become hybridised by creeping privatisation.

This paper uses Anderson's notion of 'imagined community' to argue that how people think about the publicness of their school system provides insight into the functioning and flourishing of communities, societies and nations. We focus on the privatisation of public schooling in Alberta, Canada and Northern England to highlight tensions between the provision of public schooling today and a romanticised, historical imagining of the public school providing equality and emancipation for all. We use data collected from 47 semi-structured interviews of education bureaucrats, union officials, school personnel and advocacy group members that asked about what constitutes 'publicness' within their system. Our analysis shows a tension between the realities of public systems opened up through market-oriented policies of 'autonomous' provision and stakeholders who still strongly believed in a public school system that was in the service of society, rather than the more individualist orientation of school choice and autonomy imaginaries.

Research on the development of professional identity for teachers who enter the profession through alternative routes is still in its infancy. In contrast to their peers who complete traditional initial teacher education programs, these teachers are exposed to different conditions and constraints that produce a range of sub-identities previously unidentified in the literature. This paper draws on interviews with 27 teachers who entered teaching through Teach For America and wrestled with these sub-identities as they considered their emerging professional identity. We argue that these sub-identities point to structural challenges embedded within Teach for America, and we highlight the need for additional research on the growing cadre of teachers entering the teaching profession through alternative routes, and subsequently influencing policymaking processes.

Cultures of performative accountability in education have been on the rise globally since the 1980s. Accordingly, teachers have increasingly been encouraged to understand their work in relation to particular forms of 'evidence'. All evidence, however, is not regarded as equal, and sources of evidence privileged within cultures of performative accountability are typically narrowly rendered, apparently 'objective', externally generated and largely quantified in form. Recent research from the United States, Australia and England has suggested that such cultures may be re-shaping teacher practice and identity. Performative accountability, however, is not the only form of accountability, and this paper explores the tensions between performative and 'intelligent' accountability in teachers' work and lives, reporting on research investigating Australian teachers' understanding of and engagement with data and research as well as evidence of their work more broadly. The paper contributes to the literature on the datafication of teaching and debates regarding the nature and role of evidence in teaching work. Ultimately, we argue that spaces for rich understandings of evidence, present but not dominant in contemporary education policy, must be protected and extended in order for the current focus on evidence to generatively -- and intelligently -- reflect and shape teachers' work.

Teachers' engagement with and understanding of educational research and data is an increasing concern for policy-makers around the globe. With unprecedented access to, and new forms of, 'data' in schools, concerns for its 'best practice' use in classroom decision-making have come to the fore. In academic spaces, these developments have also been of concern due to what such pushes for 'evidence-based practice' may elide in terms of teacher knowledge and professionalism. In this article, we present findings from two national contexts, England and Australia, in order to explore how teachers understand themselves and their work in relation to educational data and research. We find that, despite highly engaged samples across contexts who place considerable importance on such research and data, respondents do not report an equal sense of capacity across the various forms which they may take. Particular limitations are identified in relation to action research. We argue that these results have consequences for the development of a 'mature' profession that goes beyond performative forms of professionalism and towards those of a 'research-rich' culture of trust.

The National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has been a key tenet of Australian education policy since its launch over a decade ago. Print media coverage of NAPLAN and myschool.edu.au, which displays and compares NAPLAN results across Australia, has played a role in both reporting and shaping this aspect of education policy. This paper uses a corpus-assisted approach to map print media representations of NAPLAN over the first decade of the Program, from 2008 to 2018. Building on previous work on NAPLAN and the print media (Mockler, 2013, 2016), it draws on a corpus of almost 6,000 articles from the Australian national and capital city daily newspapers published between 2008 and 2018. It charts the discursive shifts that have taken place over this period as NAPLAN has transitioned in the public space from a diagnostic tool seen to be useful to educators, to a comparative tool seen to be useful to parents and the general public, and more recently to a contested tool seen to have narrow or limited utility.

Discourses of 'teacher quality' have been on the rise in Australia since at least the standards-focused policy reforms of the 1990s. This paper uses a corpus-assisted analysis to explore recent deployments of 'teacher quality' and 'teaching quality' in the Australian print media, drawing on 432 articles collected from the 12 Australian national and capital city daily newspapers over the four-year period from January 2014 to December 2017. The analysis highlights that 'teacher quality' and 'teaching quality' are deployed differently in respect to school teachers and teachers in higher/vocational education contexts, and examines the nature of these differences. It demonstrates that the print media plays a key role in shaping and/or reflecting the links between discourses of teacher quality and notions of standards and accountability in education; and also in reflecting the highly politicised and political nature of teacher quality discussions and debates in Australia at this time.

This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of the AITSL Performance and Development Framework (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2012b) as a vehicle for authentic teacher professional learning. It suggests that the Framework offers a range of implementation possibilities, from surveillance of teaching practice at one end of the spectrum to ongoing and generative formation of teachers at the other, and argues that at its best, the Framework will be interpreted and implemented as a catalyst for school-developed, inquiry-based professional learning that builds collegial professional practice and supports teachers to develop and take an inquiring stance toward their practice.

The work of teachers, as representative of a significant area of social policy, occupies many column inches in newspapers internationally every year. This paper takes a close, systematic look at the education coverage of one national Australian newspaper, over a 30-year period from 1993 to 2022. Focusing on representations of school teachers in the Australian Financial Review (AFR), one of two Australian national daily newspapers, it presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of over 1,300 articles, using the conceptual lens of “news values” to take a close look at the ideas about teachers and their work in which the AFR has invested over the past 30 years. The analysis shows that while the focus was once on issues to do with remuneration, industrial action and school funding, that the educational purview of the AFR has broadened over the past 15 years to take in a more expansive view, both reflecting and reinforcing the expansion of the privatisation of education in Australia over this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the current shape of teacher professional learning, or in-service teacher education, in Australia. Increasingly, teacher professional learning is positioned as both a sure-fire solution to some of the intransigent educational problems of our time, as well as a policy problem in and of itself. In this paper I explore some of the dominant discourses surrounding teacher learning, such as those related to professional standards, teacher professionalism and teacher quality, which regard teacher learning predominantly as about skill acquisition and competency development. I argue that the civil society aspirations of the Melbourne Declaration will better be met by conceptualising teacher professional learning as "identity work". The paper concludes with some questions that might be used to guide thinking about teacher learning and development consistent with these aspirations. (Contains 1 table.)