Education Research Publications

Exploring education policy through newspapers and social media: The politics of mediatisation. 

By Aspa Baroutsis and Bob Lingard

Publisher: Routledge

Exploring education policy through newspapers and social media offers an original, theorised, and empirically-based account of contemporary (re)presentations, (re)articulations, and (re)imaginings of education policy through news media and new media. Aspa Baroutsis and Bob Lingard are both Australian scholars, whose respective focus on media sociology and policy sociology is combined, as they explore the mediatisation of education policy. They consider how ‘newspapers and social media influence policy processes’ and ‘how media mediums are used in, and affect, education policy’. They further consider the effects of the datafication and digitalisation of the social world, in all forms of media, and their manifestations in education policy; a deep mediatisation that demonstrates how the social world is ubiquitously linked to digital media. These affordances can be described as the politics of mediatisation.

Posthuman research playspaces: Climate child imaginaries

By David Rousell & Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles
Publisher: Routledge

Posthuman research playspaces: Climate child imaginaries addresses the need for new forms of climate change education that are responsive to the rapidly changing material conditions of children’s socioecological worlds.

The book provides a comprehensive understanding of how posthumanist concepts and methods can be creatively developed and deployed in collaboration with children and young people. It connects climate change education with posthumanist studies of childhood in the social sciences and environmental humanities. It also offers opportunities for readers to encounter new theoretical and methodological approaches for collaborative art, inquiry, and learning with children. Drawing on three years of participatory research undertaken with 135 children in the Climate Change and Me (CC+Me) project, it takes children’s creative and affective responses to climate change as the starting point for the co-production of knowledge, community engagement, and the transformation of pedagogy and curriculum in schools. Thinking through process philosophy, and in particular, the works of Whitehead and Deleuze, the book develops new concepts and methods of creative inquiry which situate children’s learning, aesthetic production, and theory-building within a more-than-human ecology of experience.

Research Through, With and As Storying

By Louise Phillips
Publisher: Routledge

Research Through, With and As Storying explores how Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars can engage with storying as a tool that disassembles conventions of research. The authors explore the concept of storying across different cultures, times and places, and discuss principles of storying and storying research, considering Indigenous, feminist and critical theory standpoints. Through the book, Phillips and Bunda provide an invitation to locate storying as a valuable ontological, epistemological and methodological contribution to the academy across disciplines, arguing that storying research gives voice to the marginalised in the academy.

Australian Early Childhood Teaching Programs: Perspectives and Comparisons to Finland, Norway and Sweden

By Wendy Boyd
Publisher: Springer

This book examines the approaches, content and design, and practices of current early childhood teacher preparation programs in universities across Australia, and compares them with those in Finland, Norway and Sweden. It is well established that investment in good quality early childhood education yields the best outcomes for children, and that there is significant correlation between quality early childhood learning environments and qualified teachers.

As such, this book offers key insights into academic approaches to the design, implementation and assessment of early childhood teacher programs, and how these programs are shaped in response to requirements and constraints, both within the university context and beyond.

This book provides a focus to inform future practice for decision-makers of early childhood teacher policy; researchers interested in improving the quality and status of early childhood education; and assessors of early childhood teacher programs.

The (quaran)timeliness of art educational inquiry

By Kalin, Nadine M.; Kallio-Tavin, Mira; Klein, Sheri; Lasczik, Alexandra
Publisher: International Journal of Education Through Art, Special Issue

The International Journal of Education through Art is an English language journal that promotes relationships between art and education. The term 'art education' should be taken to include art, craft and design education. Each issue, published three times a year within a single volume, consists of peer-reviewed articles mainly in the form of research reports and critical essays, but may also include exhibition reviews and image-text features. An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including the interplay between art and activism through geoartistic and geopoetic educational initiatives; undergraduate students' trans-cognitive research skills; and study of collaborative art projects.

Improving Schools with Blended Learning: How to Make Technology Work in the Modern Classroom

By Tony Yeigh, David Lynch, Paul Fradale, Edward Lawless, David Turner, Royce Willis
Publisher: Routledge

Improving Schools with Blended Learning is specifically designed to address the important issues needed to successfully modernise education within the context of technological change. It does this by first providing a clear roadmap for designing Blended Learning environments able to respond to the technological imperatives challenging schools at present, and then illustrating this roadmap via specific, original research that details the 'how to' aspects of a successful technology-based design process. School leaders, teachers, teacher education students and researchers will all find highly relevant information about how to manage for disruption in the new and informative approach to Blended Learning (BL) they will discover in this book.

This book arose from two different research projects the authors have been pursuing over the last 3–5 years, including school improvement research and Blended Learning research designed to investigate the role of technology in effective teaching and learning. By combining the insights gained from these two different research areas, this book is able to present a novel understanding of BL that is both insightful and clearly evidence-based.

Improving Schools with Blended Learning also provides several original contributions to specific knowledge in the areas of BL and school improvement that most educators will find highly useful, including the use of BL schemas, a clear and extended BL continuum, how to measure and evaluate the success of BL, how to scaffold teacher ICT knowledge and skills, and a specific process for contextualising applied BL in relation to the ‘disruption’ imperatives of the Knowledge Economy.

Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research

Editors: Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Amy, Malone, Karen, Barratt Hacking, Elisabeth (Eds.)
Publisher: Springer

This handbook provides a compilation of research in Childhoodnature and brings together existing research themes and seminal authors in the field alongside new cutting-edge research authored by world-class researchers drawing on cross-cultural and international research data.

The underlying objectives of the handbook are two-fold:

• Opening up spaces for Childhoodnature researchers;
• Consolidating Childhoodnature research into one collection that informs education.

The use of the new concept ‘Childhoodnature’ reflects the editors’ and authors’ underpinning belief, and the latest innovative concepts in the field, that as children are nature this should be redefined in this integrating concept. The handbook will, therefore, critique and reject an anthropocentric view of nature. As such it will disrupt existing ways of considering children and nature and reject the view that humans are superior to nature.

The work will include a Childhoodnature Companion featuring works by children and young people which will effectively enable children and young people to not only undertake their own research, but also author and represent it alongside this Research Handbook on Childhoodnature.

Touchstones for Deterritorializing Socioecological Learning, The Anthropocene, Posthumanism and Common Worlds as Creative Milieux

Editors: Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Lasczik, A., Wilks, J., Logan, M., Turner, A., Boyd, W. (Eds.)
Publisher: Palgrave

This book focuses on socioecological learning through the touchstone concepts of the Anthropocene, the Posthuman and Common Worlds as Creative Milieux. The editors and contributors explore, situate and interrogate social learning through transdisciplinary positionings, exemplars and theories. The eclectic and cohesive chapters unfold as a journey that may inspire innovative and unique understandings of the socioecological learner: insights that will surely be paramount as we careen towards the 22nd century and all of its as-yet-unknown challenges. Offering tangible and nuanced practice for educational leadership in socioecological learning, this pioneering book will be of interest and value to researchers and educators at all levels. This volume is sure to appeal to students and scholars of socioecological learning as well as the Anthropocene and the Posthuman.

Food Education and Food Technology in School Curricula

Editors: Marion Rutland, Angela Turner
Publisher: Springer

This book draws together the perceptions and experiences from a range of international professionals with specific reference to food education. It presents a variety of teaching, learning and curriculum design approaches relating to food across primary, secondary and vocational school education, undergraduate initial teacher education programs, and in-service professional development support contexts. 

Contributions from authors of a variety of background and countries offer insight into some of the diverse issues in food education internationally, lessons to be learned from successes and failures, including action points for the future. The book will be both scholarly and useful to teachers in primary and secondary schools.

Managing with Mindfulness

Author: Tony Yeigh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Teacher and student interaction occur in a complex and dynamic environment. Managing with Mindfulness: Connecting with Students in the 21st Century draws on educational psychology, duty-of-care principles and mindfulness practices to introduce the Control/Connect continuum as a model designed to foster inclusive classroom practices for the contemporary classroom. Addressing topics such as communication, positive relationships, emotional literacy, motivation and classroom behaviours, the work is written to support Initial Teacher Education students in their transition to practice. Framed by the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, Graduate level, this new textbook integrates the theoretical contexts of classroom management with the needs of contemporary teachers, as situated within the historical context of 21st century teaching and learning. The text is supported throughout with engaging and thought-provoking case studies and activities, thinking points and end-of-chapter review questions that encourage reflection on key concepts and practices.

Arts-Research-Education, Connections and Directions

Editors: Knight, Linda, Lasczik, Alexandra (Eds.)
Publisher: Springer

Drawing from an international authorship and having global appeal, this book scrutinizes, suggests and aggravates the relationships, boundaries and connections between arts, research and education in various contexts. Building upon existing publications in the field of arts-based educational research, it deliberately connects and disconnects the terms in order to expose and broaden the scope of this field thereby encouraging fresh perspectives. This book portrays both contemporary theoretical prospects as well as contemporary examples of practice. It also presents work of emerging scholars, thereby ‘growing the field’. The book includes academic text-based chapters, as well as poetry, narrative fiction, visual essays, and combinations of text-image-sound/video that demonstrate performance of music, theatre, exhibition and dance. This book provides and provokes critical dialogue about the forms, representations, dissemination and intersections of the arts, research and education. This is a focused collection and resource for scholars and students with an international authorship, perspective and audience.

The Flâneur and Education Research, A Metaphor for Knowing, Being Ethical and New Data Production

Editors: Lasczik Cutcher, Alexandra, Irwin, Rita L. (Eds.)
Publisher: Palgrave

This book creatively and critically explores the figure of the flâneur and its place within educational scholarship. The flâneur is used as a generative metaphor and a prompt for engaging the unknown through embodied engagement, the politics of space, mindful walking and ritual. The chapters in this collection explore sensorial qualities of place and place-making, urban spaces and places, walking as relational practice, walking as ritual, thinking photographically, the creative and narrative qualities of flâneurial walking, and issues of power, gender, and class in research practices. In doing so, the editors and contributors examine how flâneurial walking can be viewed as a creative, relational, place-making practice. Engaging the flâneur as an influential and recurring historical figure allows and expands upon generative ways of thinking about educational inquiry. Furthermore, attending to the flâneur provides a way of provoking researchers to recognize and consider salient political issues that impact educational access and equity.

Moving-With & Moving-Through Homelands, Languages & Memory (Teaching Race and Ethnicity)

Author: Lasczik Cutcher, Alexandra
Publisher: Brill  

This book is a work of walkography: its central source is the use of walking as a mode of inquiry, which is shared through the ‘ography’ of an account or portrayal that is written, visual, performed. The ‘walk’ of this walkography is an embodied movement through space, as well as a performance ‘drawing’, of experience and encounter. This method of inquiry resonates with the fundamental premise of this work, that of migration and diaspora.

In 2015, an unprecedented number of migrants and refugees reached Europe. The resultant crisis was the biggest in history, with most migrants entering Europe by sea. Although under different circumstances and different times, this event has synergies with post-War migration, described through the lens of Arts-based research in Displacement, Identity and Belonging: An Arts-based, Auto/Biographical Portrayal of Ethnicity & Experience (Sense, 2015). This work is a sequel to that book. It is an extension of the themes of identity, belonging and migration; however, it is also a development and a complete work in and of itself, both embedded in and transcendent of the first book. The books can operate both in tandem and individually as stand-alone works.

The layering of stories, photography, and poetry build upon each other in an engaging and accessible reading that appeals to a multitude of audiences and purposes. This work can be used as a core reading in a range of courses in education, teacher education, ethnicity studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology, history, and communication, or read simply for pleasure. The book makes significant contributions to the literature on qualitative research, arts-based research, and walking research.

Young Children's Play and Environmental Education in Early Childhood Education

Authors: Amy Cutter-Mackenzie, Susan Edwards, Deborah Moore, Wendy Boyd
Publisher: Springer

In an era in which environmental education has been described as one of the most pressing educational concerns of our time, further insights are needed to understand how best to approach the learning and teaching of environmental education in early childhood education. In this book we address this concern by identifying two principles for using play-based learning early childhood environmental education. The principles we identify are the result of research conducted with teachers and children using different types of play-based learning whilst engaged in environmental education. Such play-types connect with the historical use of play-based learning in early childhood education as a basis for pedagogy.