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Integrated approaches to curriculum planning and delivery are not a recent phenomenon. In the 1930s John Dewey advocated for a more cohesive conceptualisation of students' learning. Yet, despite state and national endorsement of curriculum integration in Australia, it is generally considered an alternative curriculum design that has failed to gain traction in Australian schools. A qualitative case study, situated in two inner city government schools in the state of Victoria, explored the integrative approaches undertaken by primary and secondary teachers when planning and implementing their curriculum to account for their students' needs, interests and the school and community context. The study identified that the establishment of a concept-based curriculum framework which documented the learning goals, assessment tasks and planned learning experiences sustained the teachers' focus on the cross disciplinary connections. A conceptual framework emerged as critical for generating the professional dialogue pivotal to planning and enacting integrated curriculum.

The aim of this paper is to present a schema that maps the terrain of intercultural assessment strategies. This schema is based upon Haraway's semiotic square and has two dimensions. The first considers how distant or near the cultural Other is understood to be -- whether they are perceived a "stranger" or a "neighbour." The second considers whether the student is encouraged to see the cultural Other as an object about whom one learns facts, or if student and the cultural Other are expected to interact as a means to transforming their mutually interrelated lives. We argue that this mapping helps illuminate the benefits and shortcomings of various assessment strategies, highlighting the underlying curricular assumptions and objectives of these assessment strategies. This paper argues that curricular and assessment models that treat cultural Others as neighbours engaged in joint transformative change should increasingly be the focus of intercultural learning and assessment strategies. A review of extant literature found that school systems, international and transnational curriculum bodies, and some for-profit companies provide a wide range of models for assessing student intercultural awareness, understanding and componence. These models differ so significantly that the term "intercultural" may appear a floating signifier. However, the benefit of our schema is in classifying these models by focusing on the forms of intercultural interactions they anticipate.

A problem in teacher education is how to make learning about inclusive education meaningful so that it is more than just another idea for pre-service teachers to study and has deep and lasting effects on their practice as educators. One innovative approach developed at Deakin University is the provision of the Teaching for Diversity Workshop, involving a series of embodied drama-based activities, in which pre-service teachers encounter issues of inclusion and disability through working with not only academics but also people with disabilities, who become their lead teachers and mentors. This article is about the development and enacting of this with actors from Fusion Theatre in Melbourne, Australia. This article, through the voice of its creator, Jo Raphael, details a series of narrative vignettes that were selected following conversations between the co-authors as they reflected on the workshop as a learning encounter. Using the ideas of "fellow-feeling" from Max Scheler and "alterity" from Emmanuel Levinas, the article considers the genesis of the workshop and theorises the high level of student engagement and ethical commitment evident in the workshops, including joyful laughter, embodied participation, positive risk-taking, acclamations of beauty and a palpable shift from apprehension at the beginning to high levels of interaction. Thus, there was considerable disruption of students' beliefs about disability as agency was distributed to those with disabilities. It is clear from the data that participatory and embodied approaches in teacher education, including the use of applied drama approaches, are highly effective for overcoming barriers and promoting inclusivity.

Intercultural Understanding and Personal and Social Capability are two General Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum. However, the level of engagement anticipated by students in addressing these general capabilities across the learning continua provided in the curriculum differs significantly both in terms of the cognitive level expected of this engagement (as measured by Bloom's Taxonomy), and of the level of interaction expected between students in meeting the capabilities' learning objectives. Using the work of Bernstein and Fairclough, this paper argues that the Intercultural Understanding general capability requires less intellectual and inter-social engagement than the Personal and Social capability due to underlying assumptions that operate so as to distance the cultural Other, placing them on the periphery of Australian society, despite cultural diversity being, in fact, the lived experience of virtually all Australians. The learning continua, once scrutinised through a linguistic analysis and the lens of Bernstein, point to the absences of deep engagement in Intercultural Understanding capability, particularly when compared with that expected for the Personal and Social capability and begs the question of how Intercultural Understanding can become imagined, sustained or respectful within pedagogical encounters across the Australian Curriculum.

This paper brings Barad's agential realism into relation with educational ethnographic work, and longstanding concerns with matters of inequality. We extend previous work that foregrounds time and space in particular places, and that resists approaches to inequality that generalise about 'best practices' for schools in communities facing challenging circumstances. An Axminster Jacquard carpet loom--located in a particular place, the City of Geelong--becomes a specific point of entry to a discussion of agential realism, ethnography and inequality. This carpet loom was once a key machine in a thriving Geelong carpet factory employing families intergenerationally; it is now a demonstration machine in the Geelong National Wool Museum, operated by skilled carpet weavers (now employed as demonstrators) formerly employed at the (now closed) factory. We read questions of deindustrialisation and schooling "through" the carpet loom as apparatus, working with the questions that it materialises about educational research, ethnography and inequalities.

This paper presents research on movements involved in the lives of international university students and their accompanying family members. Located in the framing of new empiricisms and new materialisms, a posthumanist approach is offered as a way to move beyond the limitations of a focus on the educational mobilities of individualised self-contained student subjects. The research this paper draws on engages a diffractive visual methodology involving interview encounters with women who each moved from Iran to Australia together with their partner and children. A materialist feminist approach enables the consideration of how a variety of entangled movements and animated affects shape the lives of international student families. The utility of this approach becomes the inspiration for thinking through the concept of 'intra-active becoming in movement'. This brings a refreshed set of practices for designing higher education experiences for international students that resists the divisiveness of binary oppositions in Western thought.

Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective histories and material geologies of the earth that entwine with societal inequalities, and political questions of the relation between particular human bodies and the earth. In this article, we question: "What might it" do "to rethink the concept of educational inequalities beyond human relations, from within a specific geographical territory?" We seek to rethink inequalities including but exceeding these human relations; we argue that inequalities between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human, are materially generated and perpetuated. We offer three theoretical trajectories that consider the affective, spatial and material dimensions of inequality to rethink the relations between inequality, deindustrialisation and schooling. Educational research is implicated in the (re)production of inequalities, as well as having the potential to be part of the production of more equitable relations.

This article focuses on the induction and mentoring of early career teachers. The context is a suburban primary school in Victoria, Australia, as the school develops mentoring networks for graduate and beginning teachers. Instigated from a school-university partnership, the research draws from the traditions of practitioner research. In the research design and likewise in successful mentoring the importance of a genuine commitment to the discipline of reflective practice or what we have come to describe as "noticing" (Mason, 2002; Moss et al., 2004) is illustrated. The approach offers a new method for small scale-close up research in teacher education. (Contains 1 table.)

Australian policy initiatives and state curriculum reform efforts affirm a commitment to address student disengagement through the development of inclusive school environments, curriculum, and pedagogy. This paper, drawing on critical social theory, describes three Australian projects that support the cultivation of teachers' beliefs, knowledge and skills for critical reflection and leading change in schools. The first project reports on the valued ethics that emerged in pre-service teacher reflections about a Service-learning Program at a university in Queensland. The second project reports on a school-based collaborative inquiry approach to professional development with a focus on literacy practices. The final project reports on an initiative in another university in Victoria, to operationalise pedagogical change and curriculum renewal in Victoria, through the Principles of Learning and Teaching (PoLT). These case studies illustrate how critical reflection and development of beliefs, knowledge and skills can be acquired to better meet the needs of schools. (Contains 2 figures and 1 footnote.)

Digital games are currently viewed, by many within the field of education, as a way to engage and motivate students, and to assist them in acquiring content knowledge and skills. Despite the growing interest in using digital games, including serious games, this is the first critical review of the literature on the effectiveness of digital narrative-driven educational games. Of 2550 articles initially screened, 130 were synthesised in the final review. The results suggest that such games can be more much more effective than traditional instruction for promoting attitude change, engagement, motivation, and skill acquisition; slightly more effective in promoting enjoyment and knowledge acquisition; and equal in fostering behaviour change. As such, they may be viewed as effective and versatile tools for teaching and learning.

Since the publication of the Salamanca statement (UNESCO 1994), inclusive schooling has formed a growing part of the deliberations of the special education community. Inclusive schooling research in Australia in the main continues to reproduce traditions of the special education field, emphasising the dominant psychological perspectives that have been superimposed on inclusive education discourses. At the fifth International Congress of Special Education (ISEC 2000) held in Manchester, "the death knell of the concept of special education" (ISEC 2000) was announced. The concept proposed by Mike Oliver, Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Greenwich, asserts an end to understandings of diversity dependent on medical, psychological and charity-based discourses. From a recent study of inclusive schooling policy, and drawing from poststructuralist methodology, I suggest an approach to research, policy development and practice that questions traditionalist theorising in the special education field. Reflecting on the implementation of the Inclusion of Students with Disabilities Policy (DECCD 1995) in the Tasmanian government school system, I outline my alignment with Oliver's view and highlight how questions of epistemology and reconstructions of research methodologies are central to rethinking understandings of difference. I also illustrate a methodological orientation that offers possibilities for a different science to take place, thereby understanding diversity as multiple and contradictory--and beyond the single "detective story" (Gough 1998) of the medical, psychological and charity-based discourses that circulate in schools as the populist conceptions of "inclusion". (Contains 2 figures and 3 notes.)

This paper explores the changing terrain of disability support policy in Australia. Drawing on a critical disability framework of policy sociology, the paper considers the policy problem of access to education for people with disabilities under recent reform by means of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which commenced full roll-out across the country from July 2016. The paper reviews NDIS reports, legislation and associated literature to consider how eligibility to scheme participation and education services are shaped, and how education is positioned in the development and implementation of the NDIS. The analysis highlights tensions that exist for people with disabilities and their families who both access the scheme and who might draw on its provision to support their education, because of the way the policy is oriented towards pathological categorisation, standardised outcomes and service delineation rather than integrated support and informed involvement. The paper concludes by arguing that despite the policy priority across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries of increasing lifelong learning opportunities, fragmented NDIS policy in Australia prevents people with disabilities from achieving this ideal.

This paper explores the experiences of a small group of families in Australia in relation to recent reform to disability policy by way of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Framed in critical disability perspectives of policy implementation research, the paper focuses on the extent to which the scheme articulates inclusive opportunities for children and young people with disabilities, particularly in relation to facilitating access to education. Interview data that illustrate families' expectations of the scheme and latter-day experiences, coercions and negotiations highlight the tensions that exist for scheme participants who draw on its provision to support their education. These first- and second-order policy effects indicate a welcome change to disability support in Australia, though the extent to which the scheme can advance inclusion for people with disabilities is uncertain, given the distance rendered between the policy and its participants and other service systems. The paper concludes with a theoretical discussion based on the analysis of how the NDIS is framed to interrelate with scheme participants and education and how it might be reframed for better outcomes.

Internationally, Intercultural Understanding (ICU) is increasingly prevalent in the field of education. The recent evidence base includes a growing academic literature and examples of specified education policy and curricula. In regards to leveraging ICU, research suggests a multi-level and longitudinal approach is needed to ensure effective and sustainable school change. Significant gaps exist in the literature about the contextual factors across all school levels that facilitate or impede the development of ICU. These gaps include research and action pertaining to school leadership. This paper draws from interviews and visual data generated in a large Australian study and focuses on the centrality of a single architectural feature of the school, the school foyer, and how principals grapple with the (re)design of these spaces to assert themselves as interculturally capable schools. Discourses of educational leadership have historically relied on well-worn leadership models of operational practices rather than explicitly framing an understanding of diversity to support intercultural capabilities. During a period of mandated Australian curriculum reform and assessment, this paper offers another way of "Doing Diversity" of interest to policy makers and school leadership keen to embed ICU in their schools while highlighting the significant role school leaders have in progressing ICU.

The 2014, 41st Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) presidential address is both inspired and guided by the discursive genres of presidential addresses and the role of the president in a member association such as AARE. In the address, typically the president speaks to the members on an issue or issues that are to shape or conclude their term of office, as it is in my case. Like many of the 40 AARE presidents who have gone before me, I will embed some things that are professional, personal and political--not in the interests of advancing my research agenda, but to add "to the weave and pattern of the association's history" (Reid 2010, p. v). Threads of my research since completing my PhD in 2000 will appear to support the broad argument. Also, I will draw on the outcomes of the 2014 Australian Research Council Discovery round (see Australian Research Council: ARC archives 2016) to encapsulate my key argument that "educational research and its (ex)changes are being reshaped: in a post human digital age, the tree of knowledge is mutating." To make my argument, I will review how the thinking and doing of educational research mid-way through the second decade of the twenty-first century is constructed and ask what research endeavours might be created to make the best possible worlds for our member community and the aspirations of the association.

This paper reveals how the art device of trompe l'oeil provided a way of thinking about the induction and mentoring experiences of seven beginning teachers in secondary school settings in the state of Victoria, Australia. The research study--a phenomenological, narrative inquiry--drew on Bourdieu's theorising of "misrecognition" and "symbolic violence" to analyse data collected from interviews and the participants' diary entries (written narratives). Both the trompe l'oeil art device and the theoretical lens illuminated the reframing of the participants' initial understandings of mentor relationships to gain a different perspective on their early professional lives.

In this paper, we challenge the current focus on "best practice", graduate teacher tests, and student test scores as the panacea for ensuring teaching quality and argue for ways of thinking about evidence of quality beginning teaching outside and beyond the current neoliberal accountability discourses circulating in Australia and other countries. We suggest that teacher educators need to reinsert themselves as key players in the debates around quality beginning teaching, rather than being viewed as a source of the problem. To enable teacher educators to assume accountability for quality beginning teachers, we propose the framework of a capstone teacher performance assessment--a structured portfolio called the Authentic Teacher Assessment (ATA)--and examine examples of these assessments through the lens of critical discourse analysis. As a measure of "readiness to teach", the ATA is compared with supervising teachers' assessments of preservice teachers. We argue that structured portfolios that include artefacts derived from preservice teachers' practice in classrooms along with graduate teacher self assessments provide a stronger accountability measure of effective beginning teaching and demonstrably address the current anxiety regarding "evidence". We suggest that such an approach should be reliable enough to be "read" by external assessors (and moderated across other teacher education institutions). Rigorous research on a national basis is called for in order to develop and implement a structured portfolio as rich evidence of graduates' quality and readiness to teach.

This paper, the final paper in the Keeping Connected special issue, presents the key findings of the overall study and focuses on the challenging process of re-imagining a hospital setting as a community of learning for young people in light of these findings. The paper focuses on young people as learners within the overarching themes emanating from the Keeping Connected research such as normalcy, diversity and communication. Taking up Slee's notion of "the irregular school", we describe how one setting in a large urban paediatric hospital in Victoria, Australia, is transforming the way in which children and young people are supported to maintain their connectedness to learning. We reflect on the evidence of the Keeping Connected project to inform the ways in which a hospital can respond to young people's needs as learners and offer a model of inclusion as a form of cultural change in this important out-of-school setting. Directions for future research are also offered.

In this paper, some key findings of the Keeping Connected project are discussed in light of the methodological challenges of developing an analytical approach in a large-scale study, particularly in starting with open-ended, participant-selected, digital still visual images as part of 31 longitudinal case studies. The paper works to clarify the methodological and epistemological discussions of the visual data, an issue of great interest in qualitative research and visuality for researchers intent on developing understandings of participatory research methods in the field of youth studies.