Day Five (counting the pre conference day), December 5, 2024.

We will update here during the day so please bookmark this page. Want to contribute? Contact jenna@aare.edu.au

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What should anti-racist education and critical research and action look like today?

The final plenary of AARE 2024 was an international forum on What should anti-racist
education and critical research and action look like today. The panellists responded to
questions about what priorities are for education systems that seek to genuinely support and
uplift all students in a changing world?

Professor Mere Berryman ONZM from the University of Waikato challenges us to
understand where racism comes from. Learn to have conversations that respectfully but
unrelentingly push back and promote deep change. To, as Moana Jackson says vehemently
reject deficit theorising without using the “r” word. Our history is built on ‘mythtakes’
deliberately concocted falsehoods to justify a process that is actually unjustifiable.
Professor Angelina Castagno from Northern Arizona University asks if there is a shared
understanding of what is meant by ‘anti-racist’ and ‘critical’. Who defines it and what is the
process? Further, is there a shared commitment to this definition. How is the commitment
enacted and by who? What is offered/leverage/given up? Castagno challenges us to ensure
that anti-racist education does not look like business as usual because is cannot be
acontextual, ahistorical or apolitical. Anti-racist education should be place based, driven by
community, equity-forward, and culturally responsive and nourishing.
Professor Emerita Christine Sleeter from California State University discussed the strategic
use of traditional research methodologies to do anti-racist work. She explained that non-
Western methodologies are not accepted by school systems but the strategic use of
Western tools can include students in projects that help children to question.
Professor Dwayne Donald from the University of Alberta reflects on how it is so difficult to
know what to do when there is so much trouble in the world but that we can work on a slice
of it. He does not see himself as a Indigenous educator but someone who works in
Indigenous-Canadian relations, a role where people work to understand each other. The
problem we face in our institutions that Western education systems treat Western knowledge
as common sense but in fact knowledge is culturally framed. If we are to do anti-racist
education, we need to understand that there are other knowledges systems and people can
have a different relationship with knowledge.

“One of the lowest paying jobs out there”: Early Childhood Educators value their work even if they feel no-one else does

This post is by Budur Alamrani, UniSA

Stef Rozitis, a Master of Teaching (Early Childhood) student at UniSA, focused on how the identities of women Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) are shaped by gender and maternalist discourses, influencing both how their roles are perceived and how they view themselves within their profession. Stef’s research is grounded in the philosophical principles of the dynamic and open-ended nature of postqualitative inquiry.

Stef drew attention to the way Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) are often boxed into the role of
mere caretakers, tending to children’s basic needs, while their profound expertise and
transformative impact on shaping young minds frequently go unnoticed and underappreciated by
certain societal assumptions and stereotypes. Stef then went deeper into the various ways the value
of Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) can be understood from multiple angles, highlighting their
contributions to family life, the child’s development, society at large, and the educators themselves.
One significant example that highlighted the valuable role of Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) was
their partnership and support for families during the COVID-19 lockdown, guiding them on how to
effectively support their children’s learning and development at home.

Toward the end of the presentation, it became evident that certain societal assumptions and
stereotypes about Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) may not hold true. Instead, Early Childhood
Educators (ECEs) find value and joy within their professional communities, viewing their role as vital
in shaping present and future communities for children, families, and society. However, as Stef
emphasised, for the contributions of Early Childhood Educator communities to be sustained, greater
societal and economic recognition of their work is imperative. The future depends on our youngest
generation, and supporting Early Childhood Educators means building the foundation for a better
and more inclusive world.

Enriching the Broad Base of Evidence to Inform Teaching Practice

This post is by Cameron Paterson, Wesley College.

Reimagining Evidence in Education

Two weeks ago, I spent a day immersed in Enriching the Broad Base of Evidence to Inform Teaching Practice, chaired by Nicole Brunker. We were at the University of Sydney School of Education & Social Work and together educators, academics and policymakers sought  to rethink how we use evidence in education. 

One key message resonated throughout: we must trust and empower teachers. Today Nicole Brunker expanded on that workshop.

Teaching Beyond One-Size-Fits-All

Classrooms are dynamic environments shaped by students’ needs, relationships, and unique contexts. Teaching cannot be reduced to a set of universal rules or rigid mandates. Teachers are not mere implementers of prescribed methods; they are skilled professionals who navigate complexity daily. While evidence-based practice offers insights, its dominance in education often oversimplifies the profession. Relying heavily on randomised controlled trials (RCTs) may work in clinical fields but doesn’t fully capture the relational and contextual nuances of teaching. 

Education is both an art and a science. It requires approaches that respect the unpredictable, messy, and human-centred nature of classrooms. This is where evidence-informed practice offers an alternative. It moves beyond rigid frameworks, inviting teachers to combine research, real-time observations, and professional judgment to meet their students’ needs.

Disrupting the Dominance of EBP

In Australian education, EBP often dictates what “works” in teaching, with a narrow focus on literacy and numeracy as the ultimate measures of success. Policymakers simplify research into bite-sized, pre-digested recommendations, presenting them as indisputable truths. This diminishes teacher autonomy, reducing the profession to a robotic exercise and undermining the intellectual engagement of educators. Worse, the dominance of EBP sidelines critical discussions about the purpose of education itself. Critics of EBP have highlighted its failure to address systemic inequalities, labelling it “evidence-based oppression” in other fields like social work. Similarly, in education, EBP promotes a neoliberal, individualistic view of learning that ignores the structural and contextual factors influencing student outcomes.

Enriching Evidence: A Call for Change

Brunker’s research underscores the need to broaden what we consider as “evidence.” Evidence can – and should – include student voices, teacher action research, professional learning insights, and lived experiences. These diverse sources can guide practice in ways that are responsive to real-world complexities. To embrace this complexity, we must move from rigid standardisation to a richer, more nuanced understanding of teaching and learning. The forthcoming green paper from this project offers hope for actionable change, with teachers and stakeholders at its heart.

Mapping K-12 teacher agency & empowerment through netnographies 

This post is by Steven Kolber, University of Melbourne

Margaret Jakovac, Deakin University; Linda Hobbs, Deakin University; Emma Rowe, Deakin University

Margaret Jakovic presented her approach to mapping teacher agency online. The methodology of netographies is akin to an autobiographical approach or a biographical approach but completed online. 

Taking a scoping review to see what others have said on the topics of netography, agency and empowerment. Agency meaning how teachers can make choices, and empowerment comes from outside sources such as authority which both sit underneath the idea of teacher identity. 

This is important in a space where teachers are disciplined and hauled over coals for posts on social media. Margaret suggests that teachers require more confidentiality and or anonymity when online. Providing an example of a teacher who posted about a forthcoming paintball fundraiser, which warranted a complaint, and the teacher being asked to take down the post. 

Social media provides a really good site for studying teachers, as it’s both a high stakes and an open place to study teachers’ behaviours and activities. 

Edu-netnography is the collective name applied to those studying education through the approach of netography. These studies focussed on Facebook and Twitter (now X, and on fire) mostly, with a lesser focus on YouTube and Instagram for example. As this is such a fast-moving space, it’s interesting that due to the long tail of publication that less used platforms, nowadays, are still the dominant focus of the literature. 

It does make you wonder how a more rapid approach to publications on social media might be possible to allow for publications to talk about the places where people are?

Datafied by default: Examining the intersect between Children’s Digital Rights and Education

This post is by Tiffani Apps, University of Wollongong

‘Datafied by default’ is an extension of the phrase ‘digital by default,’ which has previously described the nature of technologies in education spaces. In the case of this symposium, each paper engaged with making visible the impacts of the default datafication of children through data-generating technologies. 

Marie Utterberg Modén began by zooming in with a story of Swedish children’s everyday engagement with digital technologies to access their rights to education. She then zoomed out to explore the default datafication of children through these technologies across the globe. Marie shared the Infrareveal platform, a tool designed to make visible the generation and movement of data via ed tech. Marie and her colleagues, Svea Sabine Kiesewetter and Thomas Hillman, have been using this tool with children to engage in collective learning and experimentation about datafication, differences in data flows, and the environmental impacts.

Chis Zomer began by sharing the EdTech database. This work focused on the process or ‘database as method’ for mapping trends in Ed Tech as a foundation for generating further research and knowledge. The design of the database included stakeholders engaging through experimentation with edtech and data privacy information, as well as visualisations associated with apps.

Michelle Cook shared a PhD work in progress. Michelle mapped the evolution of children’s rights into the digital while noting the absence of young children’s voices. This positioned Michelle’s proposed PhD project well as she outlined approaches to engaging with children under eight years with meaningful connections to the Australian policy landscape.

This was followed by a project examining social media in schools. The team, including Karley Beckman and myself, have extended their published work on ‘schoolfeeds’ through a phase of collective policy making. We employ hybrid forums to engage stakeholders in collective learning and experimentation around this widespread practice. The presentation highlights the potential of the method for democratic participation as an alternative to datafication by default in schools.

Anna Bunn followed by sharing her critically important work with Madeline Dobson, examining the contexts in which digital childhoods researchers conduct this work. Anna’s empirical work reveals the startling gap in digital childhoods research conducted in Australian public schools since the COVID pandemic, the new and increasingly restrictive policy environment for research in public education, and the significant impacts on children’s rights to have their voices heard on matters concerning them.

A key benefit of attending AARE and engaging in a symposium like “Datafied by Default” is the rich discussions that result from combining research with a shared vision for a more democratic and fair education context. We were reminded, too, through discussions that this is particularly important given the increasingly constrained research environment in which our school-based research is situated.

Symposium on school marketisation policies and student segregation

This post is by Michael Sciffer, Murdoch University.

Ee-Seul Yoon presented a comparative model of school policy differences between Australian and Canadian schooling systems. In many countries, marketisation reforms and parental choice have been promoted as mechanisms to raise academic performance and improve equity. This paper found that higher rates of school choice and competition in Australia compared to Canada are associated with higher rates of school segregation and the stratification of material and human resources, which in turn are associated with more unequal learning outcomes. Lower SES students in Canada do better than their Australian counterparts as they attend more socially integrated schools. The paper called for a radical rethinking of school marketisation policies to reverse the negative effects of school segregation.

Joel Windle presented a paper on the relationship between school socioeconomic enrolment mix and school improvement in a highly marketised schooling system. It reviewed whether media celebration of schools identified as the most improved was based on valid evidence. Media reporting has ranked schools by a narrow measure of most improved academic performance without accounting for shifts in the demographic profile of schools. Thus media accounts have likely misidentified the schools who have demonstrated most academic improvement when increases in academic performance can be explained by increased enrolments of socioeconomically advantaged student profiles.

The reality of school choice for Black communities in South Africa was explored by Bekisizwe Ndimande. Thirty years after the end of Apartheid schools remain highly segregated by race. A number of partial improvements to the learning opportunities of Black South Africans have been introduced but a broader neoliberal economic framework has limited real improvements in racial equity. Additionally, no mechanism to enforce the desegregation of South African schools has been enacted by government. A range of school practices such as fees and self-defined enrolment catchments continue to drive racial segregation.

Michael Sciffer outlined the degree of socioeconomic school segregation among Australia’s secondary schools and potential policy reforms to raise awareness of its effects. Australia’s secondary schools are highly segregated by sector resulting in school compositional effects where the socioeconomic status of a student’s peers is just as significant as their own family background in predicting academic performance. The paper called for improved measurement and reporting of systemic drivers of social inequality such as the annual reporting of school compositional effects, school segregation, and the contribution of individual schools to segregation within local communities.

Teachers’ Adaptive Expertise in Assessment for Learning

This post is by Rebecca Burtenshaw, University of the Sunshine Coast

As part of their ARC Linkage Project, Julie Arnold and Jill Willis explore how teachers can overcome these challenges by developing adaptive expertise in Assessment for Learning (AfL). Their research highlights the importance of flexible, student-centred approaches that anticipate, respond, and adapt to the complexities of real classrooms.

In every classroom, teachers face a diverse mix of students with varying needs, challenges, and strengths. For many, this includes students with developmental language disorders or attentional difficulties—who may struggle with vocabulary, comprehension, organisation, and following instructions. Up to one in four students may experience developmental language disorders or attentional difficulties, often struggling with vocabulary, comprehension, organisation, and following instructions. These challenges are exacerbated by the increased focus on high-stakes assessments, such as Queensland’s external exams, influencing practices in lower year levels.

This presentation was built on the foundation that teachers and students collect, interpret and respond to evidence every day. However, some approaches to AfL often follow a linear model: identifying what students know, diagnosing gaps, and filling them. While effective in some contexts, this method risks oversimplifying the complexities of the classroom.

Julie and Jill propose a more circular and dynamic approach that centres on the student experience. This approach sees teachers anticipate what may occur, adapt in class before post-reflecting, and consider adopting new actions. This cyclical process not only supports students but also fosters teachers’ adaptive expertise—a skillset critical for navigating the intricate realities of learning environments.

Their research methodology included two iterations of student interviews, focus groups, professional development (Co-Constructing the lesson’s learning objectives), and, finally, teacher interviews. This includes 19 teacher interviews and 36 lesson observations coded via reflexive thematic analysis.

Julie shared that they identified two distinct orientations in their findings:

1. “Moving Away” or “a defused response orientation”: Teachers who typically deflect, assume, or dismiss students’ voices or feedback. These responses can create barriers to reflection and growth.
2. “Moving Towards”: Teachers who typically reflect, deliberate, and ask, “What can I do differently?” This mindset promotes greater accessibility and inclusivity in teaching practices.

The reflective cycle becomes central here. Teachers who “move towards” are more likely to re-enter the feedback loop, continually refining their AfL practices to meet the diverse needs of their students.

Julie highlighted teachers’ emotional challenges in this process, acknowledging that it’s okay to feel surprised or disappointed by what students reveal. Growth requires giving teachers time and space to process these moments and adapt their AfL strategies. They emphasised the importance of recognising different entry points for reflection. While some teachers may gravitate toward systematised foresight and planning, others might wrestle with the pedagogical pull of summative assessments, which can shift focus away from formative goals.

Julie and Jill’s work underscores a critical takeaway: adaptive expertise isn’t about perfection—it’s about responsiveness, reflection, and refinement. By embracing a circular approach to AfL, teachers can better navigate the complexities of modern classrooms, ensuring every student feels seen and supported.

Roundtables!

This was the inaugural year of roundtable sessions at the AARE conference. A roundtable session is a collaborative discussion that are designed for discussion and feedback on aspects of an incomplete research project. The format is designed to encourage participation from all attendees and all participants are on equal footing, whether they are a research student of full professor. 

While the plan was for the roundtables to go for 60 minutes, they were timetabled for 90. All tables engaged in lively discussion that went beyond the designated time. 

Thank you for all the participants for engaging in this new format for AARE.

Macquarie University’s Michelle Bishop talked to AARE’s roving interviewer Margaret Jakovac, PhD student from Deakin University. Margaret is around the conference talking to people. *Vox pops are on-the-spot interviews.

Vox pops!*

Find out more about ethical research practices by reading the AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research.