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The purpose of this communication is to explore possibilities for children's literature to enable futures learning. It introduces the ways in which two different frameworks might be used to analyse children's literature. The first framework draws upon the Earth Charter Principles (ECP) (Auld et al., 2021). The second framework brings together the pillars of sustainability with the principles of Education for Sustainability (EfS) in a framework for ecological sustainability of children's literature (White et al., 2020). The communication starts by introducing a text -- a recent example of 'awarded' and therefore high-quality children's literature. We then outline the two frameworks and explore the possibilities of applying these frames for analysing this text. We conclude that the sustainability frameworks are useful tools and resources for analysing children's literature to determine the quality of the text and how the experience of reading the text may impact children, their learning and their environmental consciousness and practices.

This paper considers aspects of a course redesign that focuses on motivating Pre-service Teachers to engage in negotiating relevant literacy teaching pedagogies in their discipline. The purpose of this article is to describe how we approached the teaching of literacy with Pre-service Teachers, in ways that valued the Preservice Teachers' relationships with secondary students using notes of gratitude. These notes provided the Pre-service Teachers with an opportunity to communicate in plain language to the students what they learnt from them about literacy pedagogy. The shift from the focus on the subject matter of literacy to the enactment of literacy teaching and learning through valued pre-service teacher and student relationships shifted the tenor of the course. Our conclusion emphasises how this innovation in assessment enabled us to emphasise the importance of relationality in teaching and to uphold ideals of social inclusion of school students and the professional growth of Pre-service Teachers.

Considerable investment has been made to redesign built spaces in schools, with an assumption not based on research evidence embedded in both the architectural and educational literature that this will improve teaching and learning practices. In this study of 12 Victorian case studies in Australia schools were selected based on OECD criteria, not including the built environment, of an innovative learning environment (ILE). Yet each school had in their ILE redesigned the built space to enable different pedagogical practice. More collaborative teaching practice and pedagogical change emerged to be closely associated with redesigned built environments. Furthermore, for schools to fully benefit from the affordances of redesigned built space and connectivity of mobile technologies, putting the professional learning of teachers first was necessary to both initiate and sustain different pedagogical practices. Drawing on practice architectures theory, we illustrate how the conjuncture of the material-economic context of redesigned built environment and technologies, the cultural-discursive assemblage of discourses regarding the needs of twenty-first century learner-earners and the social-political context of policies enabled action-oriented teacher professional development. These conditions shaped the conduct of practice, the 'sayings', 'doings' and 'relatings' of teacher professional learning both within each school and across the Victorian public system.

Contemporary children are growing up in a post-typographic era, where mobile electronic devices and digital texts are increasingly present. For parents and educators, shifts into new digital practices and new text forms can create a sense of uncertainty. In response to parent and teacher interest, popular media have frequently focused on topics relating to young children and shifting digital practices. This study addresses popular media accounts of children and digital technologies over five years (2013-2018), looking in particular at the emergence of mobile devices and their impact on children's changing literacy practices. The authors collected popular media articles over this time period and analysed them for the ways in which children and digital technologies were represented and these media called on teachers and parents to respond. The authors provide an overview of their findings and address key themes from the articles, sharing influential examples and addressing the implications and influences of media perspectives. Finally, the authors examine the implications of popular media accounts in relation to informing parent beliefs and approaches, and curriculum responses.

Paradoxes are particularly problematic in literacy as they often complicate learning. However, identifying and examining them can also tell us something about the inherent problems within social, political, and educational systems. This paper reports on an analysis of a total of 205 AJLL articles and editorials, published between 2011 and 2021. The purpose of the study was to identify the paradoxes associated with student language and literacy learning. The systematic literature review identified 311 instances of paradoxes across these 205 articles. Thirty instances of paradoxical terminology associated with student literacy learning were selected from the 311 instances. The excluded 271 instances of paradox were associated with policy contexts, teacher performance, and accountabilities, which are outside the scope of this article. The research in the 205 articles found that literacy learning was shaped by the skills of literacy learning, the complexity of student learning through standardised approaches, and textual plurality. The contexts of literacy learning spanned the virtual and real, the implications of national testing on local situations, and the changing nature of text and what it means to be literate. This review identified that students negotiate paradoxes associated with the risks of standardised testing, the narrowing of the writing curriculum, and understanding the variety of textual forms and practices. Identifying and examining these paradoxes will help address some of the persistent problems in literacy learning faced by students and teachers. Keywords Paradox * Literacy learning * Literacy skills * Literacy context * Becoming literate, 1 Introduction Literacy learners often experience paradoxes. This sign, displayed alongside a busy Yarra River walking trail in Victoria, promotes Odyssey House, a rehabilitation centre for people struggling with substance [...]

There is growing interest in the incorporation of digital games as part of the suite of offerings in museum education in heritage environments. Digital games are seen as ways of recreating historic worlds, affording empathetic and affective engagement, and increasing interest in and understanding of historical periods or processes, working in complementarity with material exhibitions and artefacts on display. Stakeholders engaged in the development of digital games, however, may have different views of what constitutes significant knowledge and priorities. This paper reports on findings from a pilot study that investigated key concerns for three groups involved in designing a game -- museum educators, maritime archaeologists and games designers -- that foregrounded the construction of history, history as constructed and processes of historical research. The paper explores the differing values and priorities underlying the perspectives of each group, and the implications of these for museum education, and the design of the game.

Focusing on teachers' practices amid a national curriculum 'implementation' project for schools identified as having high enrolments of students experiencing disadvantage, this paper uses narrative methods to illustrate what we refer to as teachers' everyday work-for-change. Teacher interview data was generated via a longitudinal multi-site case study. Two teachers at one school are selected for detailed attention because—despite their significant engagement, commitment, and work towards enacting the new curriculum—their innovations were not sustained. These cases provide a useful site of analysis of change as a practice, rather than a more common focus on change as an outcome. De Certeau's theory of everyday practice is used to discuss how work-for-change is an everyday feature of teacher practice in schools enrolling students experiencing disadvantage. This aspect of teachers' work in these settings is seldom acknowledged because successes are easily obscured by deficit discourses. Other factors contributing to the invisibility of teachers' work-for-change in these schools include the often-intangible nature of teachers' professional successes amid more formally visibilized failures, the ephemeral nature of everyday practice, and a workforce context characterised by teacher and leadership transience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the tensions between national and international testing, educational policy and professionalism for middle school English teachers. I argue that state and federal government(s) are responding to the impact of Australia's falling results on the international testing in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) through the usage of their own testing program, the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The publication of NAPLAN results on the MySchool website in a searchable and comparable form has been detrimental to many schools and has pushed these schools into "emergency mode", as they struggle to improve their scores. At the same time, the results from recent PISA examinations reveal extensive inequities in educational outcomes across Australia, as well as some consistent general trends in the Australian data. I use the metaphor of the hospital emergency department to explore this situation. Drawing on Sahlberg's (2011) notion of the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM), I explore this metaphor becoming a pandemic. I draw on Gillborn and Youdell's (2000) usage of educational triage and cast different and multiple educational professionals playing the role of the triage nurse--the alternate federal and state government education ministers responding to international and state test results in triage; and principals of poor performing schools operating their school as though it is an emergency department; poor literacy results triaged Code Red receiving immediate focus and attention, but "treated" in terms of immediate survival and a focus on basic skills. I argue that the international testing provides better markers for how we are doing as a nation, and what might be done to improve our international standing with respect to our literacy scores. I argue that true gains in literacy and the development of more complex literacy skills are not made through triaging literacy through an emergency department, but through a long-term focus on school redesign.

Intercultural education (ICE) is a priority for schools and schooling systems worldwide. While extensive policy and academic literature exists that describes how ICE should be done in schools, relatively little has been published about the pragmatics of implementing and enacting ICE, despite evidence that principals, teachers and schools feel ill equipped to teach and engage in ICE. This article investigates how schools implementing ICE are confronted with distinctive challenges. Engaging methodological tools of social constructivism (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005) and an analytical lens supported by social cultural theories of identity and representation (Hall, 1997; Gee, 2004), we argue that the everyday experiences and practices of teachers need be explored, but also interrogated and understood otherwise (Lather, 1991). We draw on qualitative data from a large-scale study conducted in schools in Victoria, Australia. We present three vignettes that elucidate how ICE was enacted at the principal, curriculum and teacher levels. Each vignette is based upon a key challenge confronted by schools and illustrates the processes different schools used to tackle these issues and to embed ICE into the daily schooling practice.

In this paper we take on Green's (2017) orientation of the Australian Curriculum: English and consider what might it hold for the students of Australia. We set about analysing eighteen minutes of storytelling by a group of young 9-12 year old Kunibídji males from Maningrida in the far North of the Northern Territory in Australia, making this storytelling visible to the readership. In doing so, we note the rhetorical attitude held by these young people and their artful use of discourses as they translanguage between Ndjébbana, English, traditional knowledge, popular culture and mainstream Australian culture. The artful use of discourses demonstrated by these young people highlights their preference to engage in oral storytelling using scaffolds of meaning-making found in digital technological literacies. We argue that all Indigenous students should have the right to learn in their preferred language of communication as part of their linguistic human rights.

Access and usage of digital technologies is a marker of advantage in Australian schools. This study aims to identify how context impacts upon the enactment of the teaching and leading of the Digital Technologies Curriculum in schools labelled as disadvantaged. The study used a four-fold heuristic of contexts to analyse the work of educators in schools. The study found that external contexts structurally shape the teachers' agency with the Digital Technologies Curriculum. The study revealed that the enactment of the Digital Technologies Curriculum in disadvantaged contexts was enabled by additional supports and nuanced approaches. Successful enactment can occur when teacher and leader agency outperform the impact of structural disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we document observations of our own young children's usage of technology in their "out-of-school" worlds. How might these technologies and practices be changing the understandings and usage of texts and literacies of the children who enter into classroom spaces? What transformative possibilities might these home technology practices announce for teaching and learning within classroom environments? In both Canadian and Australian curriculum documents, as well as in OECD reports, the need to develop innovative approaches to educational practices and the inclusion of digital technologies is acknowledged as necessary in facing 21st century challenges. We provide examples linking to media news stories in both countries, addressing the use of touch-screen technologies in schooling and examine how these presentations are very different from the practices we have observed in our homes, where the children have relative openness and freedoms with their device usage. Within the article we demonstrate, using media links and images, the ways in which our own children have begun to navigate digital devices and texts and to create new sorts of narratives that open possibilities for literacies in multiple ways, as "creators", "designers", and experts. We argue that, once translated into classroom practice, technological tools tend to be "domesticated" by practices that resist the transformative affordances of these tools, and may even provide barriers to student engagement and practice. Finally, we conclude the article by making some practical suggestions for creating opportunities for transformative technology use in education. (Contains 3 figures and 2 footnotes.)

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.

In this dialogic article of interwoven stories, we employ a critical autoethnographic approach to explore moments of our lives as we worked through the official "research plan" at the heart of the supervision timeline. Lucinda's doctoral thesis in education, supervised by Jo, highlights the way curriculum emerges from the struggles of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) as she and a group of teachers develop curriculum and perform identity, both as co-researchers and as inescapably gendered subjects. Here, instead, we turn to how this might work in relation to the supervisory relationship, linking the personal and political to trouble the research plan developed in the first months of the PhD timeline. We write around a narrative from the original thesis, which troubled both of us, and rework our own stories of the supervised and the supervisor through the competing discourses of our work and lives.

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.

This article investigates 8-and 9-year-old girls' use of the popular game "Minecraft" at home and school, particularly the ways in which they performatively "bring themselves into being" through talk and digital production in the social spaces of the classroom and within the game's multiplayer online world. We explore how the girls undertake practices of curatorship to display their "Minecraft" knowledge through discussion of the game, both "in world" and in face-to-face interactions, and as they assemble resources within and around the game to design, build and display their creations and share stories about their gameplay.

The need for English and literacy curriculum to connect with young people's lifeworlds to build bridges and frames of reference that connect traditional English curriculum with digital texts and literacies, are increasing priorities in curriculum frameworks in Australia and elsewhere. This paper reports on a project in which the authors worked with teachers and students in five secondary schools to research the ways in which digital games might be incorporated into the English curriculum. Central to this endeavour was "turning around" to the affordances of digital games and their paratexts to understand how they can be understood as text and action. Drawing on classroom observations and literature in Games Studies and English curriculum we present a timely model and innovative heuristic that we argue facilitates teachers incorporating digital games into their English classrooms. We illustrate how each assists teachers in "turning around" to digital games to make their English classrooms more relevant to students' lifeworlds.

Teachers' beliefs about what it is (or is not) possible to achieve with digital games in educational contexts will inevitably influence the decisions that they make about how, when, and for what specific purposes they will bring these games into their classrooms. They play a crucial role in both shaping and responding to the complex contextual factors which influence how games are understood and experienced in educational settings. Throughout this article the authors draw upon data collected for a large-scale, mixed-methods research project focusing on literacy, learning and teaching with digital games in Australian classrooms, to focus explicitly on the attitudes, understandings and expectations held about digital games by diverse teachers at the beginning of the project. They seek to identify the beliefs about games that motivated teachers' participation in a digital games research project while focusing, as well, on concerns that teachers express about risks or limitations of such a project. The authors' aim is to develop a detailed picture of the mindsets that teachers bring to games-based learning environments, and the relevance of these mindsets to broader debates about the relationship between games, learning and school.