Educational research in Australia

Open access: why we must break down the paywalls now

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Publication via open access increases visibility, reach and impact of educational research, so why are we still hitting our heads against paywalls?

Why do we publish? For attention, for funding and for impact. The quality research undertaken by Australian education researchers has the biggest chance of impact if it is readily accessible to educators and policymakers. So why is the important voice of research left out of policy and practice? 

There is no question that one major obstacle is the lack of timely access to published research. Unless you are a researcher with an academic library login, then paywalls, restrictive terms of access, and the time to get hold of legally published research, shut out the very people who need this information.

Traditional publishing model 

Why are our organisations paying excessive amounts to both publish and  access (often) publicly funded-research? In case anyone needs a refresher on the traditional academic journal publishing model:

Academics receive funding via grants to conduct research (taxpayer-funded). Research findings in the form of academic papers and book chapters are reviewed (mainly for free) by their academic peers. Authors rely on their institutions to pay publication costs. Once published, institutions pay again to get access to these works via library subscriptions. 

So, who benefits from this model? Certainly not those outside the academic ecosystem, nor those inside it. The costs are worn primarily by researchers and their institution (x 2) while publishers make a significant profit (for example, a major academic publisher now has a profit margin heading towards 40%, higher than companies like Microsoft and Google).  

OA benefits all

Next week is Open Access Week (24-30 October) which provides an opportunity for the academic and research community to stop and rethink why we do what we do. So, what is open access (OA)? 

Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment (SPARC).

The momentum towards open access publishing is not without challenges and misrepresentation, and fair and equitable access to Australian education research remains challenging. 

The quality question 

There remains persistent misconceptions around OA, often conflated with predatory publishing. Quality discussions in 2022 are more nuanced. In order to be indexed by the Australian Education Index, ERIC, Scopus, et al., all journals (no matter their publishing model), are evaluated for adherence to quality standards including the application of peer review. The most comprehensive index of OA journals, DOAJ, follows rigorous principles for transparency and best practice in scholarly publishing that need to be met to be included. Quality and credibility should be vested in the research itself, not simply by the place of publication. While business models are very much in flux, scepticism is healthy when applied to both not-for-profit and big-name commercial players.

Re-route around the paywall

As members of educational organisations and academia we are not the only consumers of research. OA ensures that those outside of the institutional bubble, including those responsible for policy and information provision, have access to timely research. It also supports collaborative research without restrictions on a global scale. 

Internationally, there is a lot in-play around research access and discoverability. The emphasis on OA is significant in light of the White House (OSTP) memo on equitable access to research, and the release of UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. 

Nationally, the OA policy revision from Australia’s leading health and medical research body removes the current 12-month embargo on the release of NHMRC-funded research from 2023 and all research will be openly licensed (ensuring and clarifying re-usability). If open access is good for science and medicine, it’s just as crucial for education. 

If governments and research organisations are mandating equitable and timely access the writing on the ‘paywall’ seems inevitable. It’s feasible to expect more favourable changes in terms of access to all research.

That’s not to say that for-profit publishers are not embracing OA – many actually are. But while they might be removing paywalls to access the research, they have generally adopted an author-pays model via article processing charges (APCs), again contributing to inequitable publishing opportunities for authors. Some have noted that major publishers are actually now leveraging the OA movement for their own benefit and time will tell as to the success of transformative agreements between institutions and publishers. 

Taking back control of the education research landscape

Improving access to education research requires an informed approach to navigating the OA landscape. Put simply, it comes down to the purpose of education research to affect and improve educational practice and policy. Journals are not the only vehicle for sharing research. Institutional and subject-specific repositories are valuable in terms of discoverability and expanding the use of research to a wider and diverse community. Repositories are central locations for institutional content and “have a critical role in archiving, preserving and sharing the diverse content produced by universities so it can be used by others and have the greatest impact on our society”.

Disciplinary repositories offer a bespoke OA alternative, and contribute to the visibility of discipline-specific research. We have recently been involved with a project that highlights actions that improve access to tertiary education research. The Universities Australia Learning and Teaching Repository (LTR) collates higher education learning and teaching research. Initially LTR archived the learning and teaching project reports and outputs funded by the Australian Government from 1994-2018. Repository content is openly licensed and in 2021 LTR undertook a pilot activity to index selected articles from the education-focused, OA Student Success journal. This pilot activity provides two obvious benefits in terms of educational research: 

  1. LTR, as a resource, is sustained by contemporary scholarly research filling the void left by the removal of consistent education research funding in Australia
  2. As an OA tool, educational research is curated and amplified to an educational community that extends further than our institutions. 

What can researchers do?

As education researchers, there is a lot we can do to make the OA model work for us.

Publish and review in OA journals

When thinking about where to donate your time as a reviewer or author, consider open access options. Read your publishing contract. If you transfer your copyright to a publisher can your own institution re-use your published content in its teaching? Most OA journals apply Creative Commons licenses which articulate rights to reuse, which means immediate and free access to your work.

Deposit in relevant institutional and education repositories

Give your institution’s repository plenty of love. Depositing your research in an institutional repository automatically improves discoverability and impact and that’s a fact. Most recently, the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative examined citation activity in the OA landscape and noted “Open access through disciplinary or institutional repositories showed a stronger effect than open access via publisher platforms”. 

Advocate for Open AccessThere is value in an active (and collective) academic voice when it comes to advocating for OA to educational research. First and foremost, academic libraries and the information professionals working in this space are well-placed to help researchers navigate the changing publishing landscape. Secondly, keep abreast of international and national OA organisations and their activities. Open Access Australasia is a ‘go-to’ central source for current information and resources. Get your institution on board if they are not already members. Finally, if you are an editorial member or a reviewer for a paywalled educational research publication, start a conversation around the value of OA in your own community – what have you got to lose?

Tracy Creagh is Journal Manager, Academic Journals in the Office for Scholarly Communication at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She manages three of QUT’s five open access, peer reviewed scholarly journals and leads the institutions’ Open Access (OA) Journals Community of Practice dedicated to sharing and contributing to best practice in open scholarship. She is also Managing Editor of the Student Success journal. Tracy is on Twitter @creaght 

Pru Mitchell is Manager, Information Services at the Australian Council for Educational Research and adjunct lecturer, School of Information and Communication Studies at Charles Sturt University. She is a long-term advocate for open education resources and her research interests include metadata standards for digital collections that enhance the discoverability of open access content. Pru is on Twitter @pru

Why we must take the pulse of education research in Australia now

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Australian education research is at a key turning point in a pandemic world where the dramatic effects of climate change demand our urgent attention. This blog piece explores the current challenges facing Australian Education research and the contemporary opportunities to create a future radical agenda for inclusive and compassionate education research. This piece has been adapted from the Community of Associate Deans of Education Research (cADRE) address* that I presented on 29 June at the recent AARE/cADRE Education Research Leaders’ Summit hosted by Professor Anna Sullivan on Kaurna Land at the University of South Australia. 

In Australia, we are in a post-election phase. We will have a new Labor government and a new Minister of Education, Jason Clare. We also have a number of other key federal portfolios that will particularly impact upon our sector including Linda Burney, Minister of Indigenous Australians; Ed Husic, Minister of Industry and Science and Anne Aly, Minister of Early Childhood Education and Youth. Australia has voted for change after a long period of Coalition government. 

Education research encompasses a rich transdisciplinary field including all education sectors such as home, early childhood, compulsory school years, senior secondary, higher education, vocational education, professional education, community, transitional and adult learning as well as initial and ongoing teacher education. Our field faces a series of external wicked problems, particularly demoralisation and burnout because of university job losses at a time, as Emeritus Professor Frank Larkins wrote earlier this year, when many universities report large profits. We face a severe lack of grant funding for education research with a significant decline in ARC funding. There is a pressing need to improve the national profile of educational research at a time of extreme change and cutbacks and a significant restriction of opportunities for HDR, early and mid-career academics to build research momentum because of excessive workloads and unrealistic performance goals. We witness the increasing casualization of higher education and more colleagues moving to teaching-focused positions. Science-based metrics are used to inaccurately measure education research outcomes and education researchers experience shrinking time for research and the narrowing of the purposes of universities to vocational skill development (Brennan et al., 2020 AARE Working Party report).

We have seen the previous Australian government increasingly outsourcing education research to organisations and groups outside of universities such as external organisations like AERO and private consultancies, NFPs, philanthropies and corporations. The previous Coalition government’s Australia’s Economic Accelerator (AEA) initiative committed significant funding to the commercialisation of Australian research as part of a package designed to improve commercialisation in Australia’s 6 research priorities which are all in areas of manufacturing. As Professor Tom Lowrie indicated in the recent cADRE/ACDE webinar, this funding initiative will not assist education. However, other funding possibilities include incubator and start-up hubs, philanthropic support, angel investors may be interested in funding our research. The previous government has also introduced funding for industry PhDs and fellowships. These priorities are likely to continue under the new Labor Government. It is, as Emeritus Professor Marie Brennan argued in the cADRE/ACDE webinar, ‘a dangerous time’ for education research in Australia.

There are also a number of key internal challenges also facing Australian education research. Firstly, we need to take a more collegial approach to peer reviewing for ARC grants, ERA, and other competitive research activities. This is an issue facing not only education but HASS as a whole. We also need to improve collaboration between universities and resist the pressure to endlessly compete for very scarce resources. There is a need to think creatively about succession planning in our field given the dramatic changes we are witnessing in the education research workforce with the retirement or retrenchment of many senior researchers; the lack of academic positions available to replace these experienced colleagues; the challenges many Senior Lecturers and Associate Professors face in gaining promotion given the dominance of science metrics to measure academic success in all fields and the difficulties early and mid-career education researchers are experiencing in building and sustaining research momentum. Professor Stephen Billett argued in the cADRE/ACDE webinar that this amounts to ‘a withering of the academic workforce’. Across Australia, Associate Deans of Research in Education report strong cultures of teaching in the field of Education which detract from a focus on research. Deans of Education are often focused on the budget-generating, politicised and rapidly shifting field of Initial Teacher Education to the detriment of other domains of Education research. 

cADRE would like to argue for a radical agenda for inclusive and compassionate education research that informs educational policy and practice. This would challenge the empty rhetoric of ‘excellence’ that we hear so much about in universities. Back in 1996, US scholar Bill Readings was one of the first people to query the ways in which the discourse of ‘excellence’ was replacing the development of culture as the key driving force in universities. While excellence has a convenient ring to it for university managers and governments, we believe we should be seeking transformational or disruptive Education research that has the power to make a real difference to the lives of Australian people of all ages. 

Inclusive and compassionate education research would take a strengths-based approach to the education of all Australians, especially the education of First Nations, migrant, refugee, culturally diverse peoples, people who are differently abled, and all other sections of Australian society. An inclusive and compassionate education research agenda would broaden the scope education research ‘beyond the school/university fence’ to include public, adult, parental, environmental, civil and community education as Professor Stephen Billett argued in our webinar. It would advocate for the commitment of research funding and other resources to foster education research. It would engage in active and genuine partnerships with all of the important education stakeholders, particularly teachers, students, families, communities, Elders, organisations and citizens, to generate grass roots education research agenda setting using the scalable methodologies used in the NSW Deans grass roots education research agenda setting project, including artists who document and sketch the ideas put forward in world café style dialogues, as Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie Knowles outlined in the cADRE/AARE webinar. It would engage in respectful education research with, for and by these communities and citizens. It would provide for a dedicated and respectful focus in Education research on Indigenous knowledge in all domains of education including climate science. Inclusive and compassionate education research would be based on a relational, post-feminist ethics of care approach. 

There is also an important need for the federal Labor government to significantly broaden the national research priorities. There were significant calls at the AIATSIS Summit held on Kabi Kabi Country on the Sunshine Coast from 30 May to 3 June for the national priorities to include Indigenous issues. HASS fields also need to be reinstated as a matter of national research priority given the contribution HASS fields make to research innovation, creativity, transformation and inclusion. We need to lobby the Federal Minister for national targeted research funding for Education that goes beyond the narrow instrumentalist focus of AERO. 

We also need to shift the focus on the exchange value of education research or education research as a commodity on sale to the knowledge economy to Education research’s use value as Emeritus Professor Marie Brennan argued in our cADRE/ACDE webinar. This would involve engaging in research translation, where we educate the public about the value of the research we produce so that our research becomes publicly discussible for the community and for practitioners as well as governments, bureaucrats and funders. These strategies would consolidate our evidence about the Impact and Engagement value of our field in preparation for the ERA Impact and Engagement exercise in 2024.

AARE and ACDE are currently developing a coherent action plan for proactive strategies to enhance the national profile of inclusive and compassionate education research in Australia well into the future. Watch this space!

* While I wrote this address, I would like to acknowledge that it was collaboratively workshopped with members of the cADRE Network Steering Group and built upon the recommendations developed at the cADRE/ ACDE webinar Reimagining education research in a post-election world that was held on 27 May (for video recording see https://www.acde.edu.au/networks-and-partnerships/cadre/ ).

Professor Catherine Manathunga, University of the Sunshine Coast; Chair of Community of Associate Deans of Education Research (cADRE – a network of the Australian Council of Deans of Education (ACDE) 

The astonishing adventures of Angela and Kimberley: this is how it all ends*

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Our two authors have told their stories of leaving university life to return to school over three blogs this year. You can read part one here and part two here.

An introduction from Kimberley

Let me take you for a moment into my Year 6 classroom. It’s the last morning of Term 4 and my students have just finished cleaning out their tote trays. They’ve proudly packed their workbooks from this year into their school bags to take home to share with their parents. ‘All I want for Christmas is you’ has just been requested as we set up for some final UNO games and reminisce about primary school and the year that we’ve shared. Our Deputy Head appears at the classroom door and silently hands me a single sheet of paper then leaves. I read it. There’s been a positive COVID case in our school. ‘Calmly pack the students up immediately and drop them to the playground for supervised collection’. I am to return to the classroom to join a staff Zoom. With a heavy heart, masked up and socially distanced, I do my best to farewell my students on their final day of primary school in a way that none of us had ever really entertained.

Some might say this is an unsurprising end to the 2021 school year, and of course, sudden school closures have become widespread in Term 4. Students, teachers, school leaders and parents have come to accept that adaptability is a requisite disposition for contemporary life and schooling. As widely documented and increasingly researched, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on learning and teaching in all education contexts. Since our previous blog posts for EduResearch Matters, we each have spent time teaching remotely as our primary and secondary school students learnt from home for a large proportion of the second half of the year in New South Wales and Victoria. While this has created challenges as well as opportunities, both similarities and differences in our experiences have been highlighted. In this our third and final blog post, we reflect on two of our key learnings from returning to school contexts in 2021, after our years of previously working as teacher education academics.

Learning 1: We are teachers at heart 

Our grappling with our professional identities has certainly continued over the year. In returning to our reference of the ‘departure card test’ in our original AARE blog post, this year has certainly cemented our self-perceptions as being teachers. Not that this has surprised us, but we did wonder if this identity work would be challenging and prolonged. Positioning ourselves as teachers in our respective school contexts has been easier than first imagined, but two interesting elements of this readjustment arose. Firstly, we have both been struck at different points in this journey that we bring a ‘different’ lens to viewing the world of education. Continually seeking research and data to inform our decisions, engaging in reflective practices and actively  inviting critique and feedback may be second nature to us, but these are practices not necessarily embedded in the approaches of our teaching colleagues. Secondly, we have come to realise that imposter syndrome is present in any professional setting. There certainly have been days where we have both felt that our true identities would be ‘revealed’ and that we would be escorted from the school premises at any moment! While we both identify even more strongly as teachers now, the process of fitting into our teacherly skins is a work-in-progress and one that we embrace wholeheartedly.

Learning 2: One size does not fit all

Our respective experiences in a Sydney urban independent boys’ school (Kimberley) and a rural Victorian co-educational state secondary school (Ange) have emphasised the importance of teachers building relationships and having professional autonomy, in identifying and responding to key and immediate priorities for the students that they teach. Student engagement in learning during remote teaching was a challenge that each of us faced, but how we responded to that challenge differed in our contexts, and even from teacher-to-teacher and class-to-class within our schools. Each of us has worked closely with parents to support students this year, but the needs of, and resources available to, our students and their families have differed. An effective solution in one school community may face barriers, or prove ineffective – or indeed, unavailable – in another. As many have argued and continue to argue, our experiences have emphasised that school funding models need to more equitably equip all schools to respond in a timely and contextualised way to their school community needs.

A conclusion from Ange 

At the start of Term 4, I moved into an Acting Principal role at my school. It was quite a whirlwind of a time to take up the hot seat generally, but COVID certainly added some additional spice! The learning curve has continued to be steep, but I have greatly valued being able to bring some of my ‘big picture’ education skills and knowledge to the table to better support my colleagues and our students to achieve their best as teachers and learners, respectively. This role will continue for me into Term 1, 2022. Kimberley will also move into a leadership role at her school in 2022 as Deputy Head of Junior School. As we reflected together on the year that was, we did ponder this question: was it inevitable that we would end up in school leadership roles? In many ways this shift out of the classroom does reflect our educational backgrounds, where we have professionally come from and our relationship with education. We recognise these differences in us in three key ways:

  • A desire to meaningfully contribute to school-wide improvement using wide-ranging data as the evidence-base from which to make decisions;
  • A level of engagement with the ‘bigger picture’ elements of the educational landscape, locally, nationally and globally; and
  • An opportunity to leverage our extensive mentoring and coaching experience with pre-service teachers to transition into instructional coaching opportunities with peers.

While we are not where we thought we’d be when we individually made decisions over a year ago to leave tenured academic positions, in many ways that has been the beauty of being able to embrace our return-to-school journeys and not be so focused on the destination. Anything has been possible and that openness has certainly played out as we have found our place in our respective schools and they have found their groove with us. Bring on 2022! We are ready to embrace our next challenges and see what working life in schools has in store for us into the future. 

In signing off, we would like to thank our academic and teaching colleagues for their support and encouragement over the year. Your positivity about our return-to-school adventures certainly spurred us on and we hope that our sharing of our experiences has been insightful and inspiring for you too.

*for this year anyway

Dr. Kimberley Pressick-Kilborn (University of Technology Sydney and Newington College) started her career as a primary teacher, and after time working as a casual academic and research assistant, took up a tenured academic position at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in 2004. She completed her PhD in 2010. Highlights in Kimberley’s time at UTS have included opportunities to collaborate in leading externally funded research evaluations of science education initiatives, as well as accompanying preservice teachers on international professional experiences to Samoa and Bhutan. This year, she joined the staff at Wyvern House, Newington College as a Year 6 classroom teacher. Kimberley wears glasses in the photo.

Dr Ange Fitzgerald (University of Southern Queensland and Mirboo North Secondary College) is recognised for her experience and expertise in science education, particularly through her explorations of quality learning and teaching practices in primary science education from a number of angles. While she entered higher education as a teacher educator and PhD student in 2007, she has previously spent time away from higher education as an Australian Government-sponsored volunteer in the Middle East. In 2021, Ange was meant to return to the classroom as a mathematics and digital technologies teacher but that’s not quite how it worked out. Ange is not wearing glasses in the photo.

image by Adobe Stock

Researchers should try to keep researching during the pandemic. Here’s 5 tips to help you do it

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Educational researchers, like many other workers during this COVID-19 pandemic, will be working from home for the foreseeable future. Most have additional teaching responsibilities so currently they will be pedaling fast to convert their teaching to online formats. Many will be juggling new or additional carer duties while working remotely. During this period, and afterwards, it is also likely external and internal research funding will be affected, with many researchers working in a low (or no) funding environment for some time.

We believe it is important, during this period, for researchers to continue with their research programs and to use the time to help develop or refine their research-relevant skillsets.

Experienced researchers, probably already involved in several research projects, will have the expertise to more easily adapt their research to the limitations of being confined to their homes or relatively less funding. And it is not uncommon in any research career to have periods of work away from the workplace or where research funds dry up. But this is a critical time for many researchers, especially research students and early career researchers. The strategies they use and develop now will help them keep their career trajectories intact.

In this article we outline 5 tips for researchers to help them stay research-active while working remotely and while research funding may be thin on the ground. We hope these tips will help researchers maintain their writing momentum and research activity over this period. Importantly, however, the ideas we present here do not substitute for the healthy and ongoing research funding that is ultimately required to tackle important research problems.

1. Research Design

The first thing to consider is research design and whether it needs to be adjusted because of the current social distancing regimes or reduced funding. In fact, this may be the single most important thing to think through in the first instance. Failure to do so may mean research objectives cannot be met and a critical window of data collection is missed. For some it could mean the loss of entire year in the study or research program.

If a shift in research design is needed, a key question is how can research objectives still be met while working remotely and while funding is limited? The research objectives will have been developed through careful reading, contemplation, and consultation so it is important to keep them front and centre as decisions on any changes to research design are made.

For example, some research objectives require longitudinal data from school students and/or teachers in each of (Australia’s) Term 2 (May-July), Term 3, and Term 4 of 2020. If schools are not holding in-person classes in some or all of Term 2, then is it still possible to collect longitudinal data in each of Terms 3 and 4? 

Or, the research context may be adjusted to collect data from students while they are learning remotely from home in Term 2 and then again once they are learning in-class at school. Either of the above considerations will likely also benefit research budgets, as they reduce or eliminate some costs associated with in-person data collection (e.g., travel costs).

Or, the researcher may be able to defer data collection that was planned for 2020 into early 2021 and still stay on track with milestones and timetable.

Shifts in research design of this nature are not unusual at the best of times. Often, approvals from university ethics committees or government departments are delayed, schools drop out from some projects, there is a shift in policy that makes some research issues less topical or timely, funding bodies reduce or remove funding schemes, and so on. Skills developed in adjusting methodology to suit the changing research landscape will be valuable throughout any research career.

Importantly, if research design needs to be adjusted, research students and early career researchers should consult with highly experienced researchers to ensure that the methodological shift will yield reliable and valid data that can directly address the research objectives.

2. Low Hanging Fruit

While working remotely it might be difficult to fire up entirely new research activities and projects. This often requires being on deck in the workplace to harness appropriate infrastructure and personnel to initiate new tasks. It may also be because data collection sites are not accessible during this time. When funding is reduced, it is also difficult to initiate new research projects. Whatever the reason, it is important to audit the “low hanging fruit” that may be available.

There could be essential deskwork tasks that can be done. For example, entering/refining references in an electronic bibliographic database that will eventually need to be imported into the thesis or paper. The format template for a thesis or forthcoming book can be developed ready for material as it is written. An ethics application may be developed and submitted. A survey may be designed. A stockpile of literature can be collected and read. A first draft of an article or thesis chapter can be polished into a second and subsequent draft. A partially completed article can be revisited, completed, and submitted for publication. A vital statistical or qualitative analytic technique may be learned.

For early career researchers, there may be a research article or chapter from the PhD that can be polished and submitted. There may be data from the PhD that have not been analysed and/or written up for publication. For research students whose data collection has been delayed, they may consider publishing a systematic review of the literature gathered for their project.

There are also many secondary datasets, archive materials, policy documents, and so on, that have already been collected/collated and ready for analysis. In our line of research, there is access to PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey), TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), and LSAY (Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth), etc. which all have variables that are relevant to our program of educational psychology research. Indeed, this period of remote working and low funding might be an opportunity to become familiar with one of these for-future research opportunities.

It is also not uncommon for a paper in Revise and Resubmit status to languish on the backburner. Now might be the time to summon the emotional and mental energy to engage with those Reviewers! If the deadline for resubmission has passed, contact the Editor to ask about an extension.

3. New Opportunities in (Educational) Research

The shift from in-class learning to remote online learning happened at scale and with great speed. What would have taken years to implement was carried out in a few days and weeks. From a research perspective, it is one of the largest educational experiments ever conducted.

Online learning is a reality of the future of education (in both school and higher education) and there is now a chance to know more about it on a very large scale. What are the modes and formats that optimise online learning? What online learning platforms are best? What is the optimal mix of teacher-directed, peer-to-peer, and self-directed learning in an online lesson? What student and home factors enable or impede online learning? What are the barriers to accessing and maximising online learning that we need to address in educational policies?

There are educational questions unique to this period that represent opportunities to better understand how students learn best.

There are many types of data that can be collected during this time. Surveys can be administered online. Students, teachers, or parents/carers can be asked to keep a diary during this time. There may be data that schools collect during this period that can be analysed.

Some researchers will have in-class (pre-COVID-19) data that can be matched with data collected during the COVID-19 remote learning period. This can answer some questions around in-class vs. remote learning and instruction.

There are also new opportunities to contribute to professional and practitioner outlets. It has been encouraging to see the extent to which researchers have been part of conversations and decisions around how to manage all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teacher, counsellor, and psychologist magazines, blogs, and newsletters are receptive to evidence-based advice that researchers can provide to support children and young people’s academic and personal wellbeing outcomes.

4. Collaboration

At a time of isolation, remote work, and limited resources, collaboration has never been more important. The emotional support this provides is essential as a basic human need. But there are also some very good research reasons for collaboration.

During this period of remote learning, different researchers will have different capacities. Some researchers will have school-aged children who are learning at home. Some researchers may have other carer roles, such as attending to an elderly parent. These researchers will have a different research capacity during COVID-19 than researchers who do not have such immediate carer roles.

One response to this is to develop collaboration among researchers who have complementary but non-overlapping capacities during this time. For example, a researcher with carer duties may be able to shoulder the load of deskwork that can occur at flexible times during the day and week, in collaboration with a researcher who is in a position to work during business hours or do work that requires real-time responses though the day. Or, a researcher whose participating schools can no longer participate in their research may connect with a researcher who does have viable school contacts. The same concepts apply where a researcher who has limited research resources can connect with a researcher who may have relatively more resources. Thus, a researcher with an established research design, instrumentation, or specific analytical skills can connect with a researcher who has accessible schools (or research resources/funding)—yielding a win-win outcome.

Remember also that on the other side of this period, the researcher with carer duties will be able to recalibrate to contribute in different ways again. Thus, through the life-course of writing and revising an article or chapter, it is often “swings and roundabouts” with each researcher contributing according to capacity and in different ways at different times.

5. Self-regulation (“The Main Thing is To Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing”)

When working remotely there can be vast capacity to lose important routines and structures that typically support research progress. When researchers have limited research resources, they may become disheartened or not be aware of what possibilities exist while they wait for more research funding to become available. During remote working, getting side-tracked, distracted, and procrastinating are also real risks. Moreover, with so many colleagues online in real-time during this period of remote work, there has been an escalation in e-activity (emails, online meetings, etc.) which may impede research progress.

Self-regulation will be a vital personal attribute to help researchers stay on-track and on-time—and to get past periods of low (or no) funding.

Quarantining (no pun intended) significant blocks of writing time is critical to maintain writing momentum. This will probably necessitate turning off email, messaging, mobile phones, etc. Having firm start times, break times, and clock-off times will also be important (including to maintain clear boundaries between personal and working life). This will also involve arranging (as best possible) a specific work area where concentration is easier.

The following mission statement may also be helpful to keep researchers research focused during this time: “The Main Thing is To Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing”.

Having said all of this, another important aspect of self-regulation is to adjust as appropriate to maintain personal wellbeing. If it is not realistic to set the bar at 6 metres, then don’t. Set it at 5 metres and see how you go. Cut yourself some slack where you need to. This remote work period may be something of a marathon and we should self-regulate accordingly as we seek that all-important balance between research productivity and personal wellbeing.

In Sum

For the foreseeable future our research lives have changed. But there will come a time when we are on the other side of this and when research resources are more readily and widely available. When that time comes, it will be important for our research programs and our research-relevant skills to have been maintained. There are lots of ways that researchers can do this—hopefully the ideas suggested here are some useful kick-starters.

Professor Andrew Martin, PhD, is Scientia Professor, Professor of Educational Psychology, and Co-Chair of the Educational Psychology Research Group in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He specialises in student motivation, engagement, achievement, and quantitative research methods.

Keiko Bostwick, PhD, is a Research Officer in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She specialises in student motivation, teacher and classroom effects, and quantitative research methods.

What does the post-truth world hold for teachers and educational researchers?

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As 2016 draws to an end, I am left with a deep sense that things are going very, very wrong. I waver between fury and frustration, unease and dread. But these feelings are useless without some action.

I presented in a symposium at the AARE conference recently on social justice, and our theme was reframing and resisting educational inequality.

It struck me that there have been some really powerful examples of reframing and resisting this year.

For example, we have seen Nigel Farage and the Brexiteers do a stunning job of reframing the UK; we’ve seen Donald Trump resist every moment of rationality and opposition, instead successfully employing what has been described as a choreography of shame to take the presidency of the US. And here in Australia, we’ve seen the zombie-like rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation from the political dead.

We have seen the TIMSS and PISA results released. Almost unanimously, the Australian media took the line that Australian students are slipping down the rankings and, heaven forbid, we’re even being beaten by Kazakhstan.

Leaving aside the incredible display of casual racism, xenophobia and complete lack of cultural awareness being displayed in the commentary, the fact is that TIMSS and PISA say very little about Australian schooling at all.

Yet, our federal education minister argues this is an urgent wake-up call proving that equity-based funding is unimportant and that instead we need to fix teachers and increase slipping standards in our schools.

Actually, minister, all we really need to do to improve our rankings is make the Northern Territory and Tasmania go away (to New Zealand, perhaps?) and hide all of the students who dare to come from circumstances of social and material deprivation or those who have special learning needs. Watch us rocket up the rankings!

Perhaps the most striking thing for me has been the way that discourses of equity and social justice have been mobilised in a very public and powerful way to argue for more testing, for more restrictions and control over teachers and teacher education, and to push for market models of education that undermine the public for private profit.

In the US, Trump has chosen a billionaire for his education secretary and has already announced a huge investment in turning public schools into charter schools. Similarly, Theresa May has a plan for more Grammar schools in the UK. Both are presented as addressing educational inequality.

Here in Australia, we have a phonics test suggested for our youngest students, modelled on the one the UK introduced a couple of years ago. Again, the argument is that this is needed most for children who are disadvantaged.

Education research is trash-talked on social media and given little oxygen in mainstream media and public discourse and is almost invisible in the policy arena.

The message is really powerful and simple and consistently prosecuted: education is broken because of bad teachers and teachers are bad because of teacher educators who are a bunch of out-of-touch educationalists who don’t know anything about the way the world works.

Of course all of this is complete rubbish.

I wonder about the correlation between increasing systems of surveillance and control over curriculum and pedagogy and the growing number of high stakes testing regimes, audit and accountability technologies, and the narrative of slipping standards, declining outcomes and an education system in crisis.

I wonder about how another set of tests is going to address sliding test results.

I wonder about what it means that we have had conservative coalition governments in control of the national policy agenda in this country for fifteen of the past twenty years.

I wonder about what it means when we have climate denying, market ideologues in control who reframe equity as a problem of teacher quality, who advocate for school vouchers instead of a vibrant public education system, who engage highly politicised and influential free-market think tanks in doing their policy work for them, while education researchers are ignored and teachers, parents, students and entire communities are reduced to those who simply have policy done to them.

I wonder what it means when I see multiple reports of children in the US being told by their classmates and in some cases, their teachers, that they will be locked up or their parents deported and themselves put into orphanages because they are Mexican or Muslim.

I wonder what it means when I read about a 10-year-old girl who says a boy who “grabbed her vagina” said it was okay because “if a president could do it, I can too”.

I wonder what it means when a 13-year-old Queensland boy takes his life because of bullying and the Courier Mail runs a piece calling the Safe Schools program “repulsive” and decrying “the ludicrous notion that most of our subjects nowadays include Indigenous, Asian and environmental components.”

I wonder what it means when Pauline Hanson calls for a ban on Muslim immigration and her fellow One Nation senator, Malcolm Roberts, declares that climate change is a “scam” cooked up by the CSIRO and NASA.

I wonder what it means that we lock up children indefinitely on Nauru, subjecting them to cruel and inhumane degradations, yet when Australian teachers protest, our Prime Minister gets annoyed at their “absolutely inappropriate” behaviour.

I think it’s telling that the Oxford dictionary declared “post-truth” as the 2016 word of the year. Similarly, Dictionary.com chose “xenophobia” as their word of the year.

So what does a post-truth world mean for educational research, social justice, equity and addressing educational inequality?

What are the ways we can mobilise and fight back against the xenophobe, the misogynist, the racist, the anti-intellectual, the billionaire posing as a saviour for the common person, the rampant destruction of our natural systems on a global scale, and the complete disregard for the future of our planet and all who live on it?

We need to organise, to collectivise and not just to resist and reframe, but to entirely reconfigure how we approach social inequality through our individual and collective endeavours.

We need to grow community-based, regional, national and transnational networks that can stand together and reject the framing of education as simply a problem of bad teaching that completely ignores structural and systemic inequalities and decades-long policy failures.

We need to produce local, situated and deeply contextualised knowledges that are generated with the communities we work with.

We need a radical reimagining of the politics and practices of educational research.

We need to fight.

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Dr Stewart Riddle lectures in literacies education at the University of Southern Queensland. His research includes looking at the links between music and literacy in the lives of young people, as well as alternative schooling and research methodologies. Stewart also plays bass guitar in a rock band called Drawn from Bees.

Stewart is a member of the English Teachers’ Association of Queensland management committee and edits their journal, Words’Worth.