This methods and methodologies paper outlines how three Aboriginal scholars developed and applied Indigenous research approaches to analyse the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC), also known as Footprints in Time. Through commitment to Indigenous leadership, the study employed yarning over time and poetic inquiry as analytical methodologies, reflecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing. These approaches honour relationality, continuity, and self-determination by centring Indigenous voices, epistemologies, and research ethics. By weaving together multiple data points into meaningful narratives and poetic representations, we demonstrate how these methodologies operate at the interface of Indigenous and Western knowledge systems (Ryder et al., 2019), providing strength-based approaches to understanding Indigenous childhood development. This paper contributes to Indigenous-led scholarship on longitudinal data analysis, affirming the value of storytelling and yarning for and by Indigenous peoples.
Teacher shortages and declining wellbeing continue to present significant challenges internationally. While burnout has dominated explanations of teacher distress and attrition, emerging scholarship suggests that moral injury, a form of psychological harm arising from violations of deeply held moral values, may offer a critical alternative lens. This systematic narrative review synthesises theoretical and empirical literature examining moral injury in K-12 teaching and its association with teacher wellbeing and workforce retention. Following PRISMA guidelines, a systematic search of ten databases and supplementary citation searching identified 29 eligible studies published between 2015 and 2024, encompassing qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, and theoretical designs. Narrative synthesis, supported by reflexive thematic analysis, was used to integrate findings across this heterogeneous body of literature. Interpreted through the Theory of Practice Architectures, the review examined how cultural discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements shape teachers’ exposure to potentially morally injurious experiences. Across studies, moral injury was commonly linked to systemic conditions, particularly neoliberal policy logics, racialised inequities, and institutional constraints that impeded teachers’ capacity to enact care, justice, and professional integrity. Moral injury was associated with biopsychosocial distress, diminished occupational wellbeing, destabilisation of professional identity, and intentions to leave teaching. The value of this work lies in making visible forms of harm that are often normalised or obscured within mainstream accounts of teacher wellbeing. By foregrounding moral injury as a systemic and relational phenomenon, the review challenges individualised explanations of teacher distress and highlights the need for conceptual refinement, empirical investigation, and system-level responses to support teacher wellbeing and retention.
In this paper, we present a case study of hard-to-staff secondary schools to examine teacher turnover in Australia. The paper draws on interviews with teachers and school leaders to explore issues related to turnover, an aspect of workforce instability that is less recognised in discussions of the Australian teaching workforce. We situate this analysis within the broader context of education marketisation to consider the implications for disadvantaged schools in the context of widespread teacher shortages. We map the dynamics of localised experiences of turnover, highlighting the impacts of marketisation on the teaching workforce through increasing competition between schools for teachers, the ongoing process of continuous recruitment, and the complexities of teacher retention in hard-to-staff schools. We demonstrate how this cycle of constant staff replacement not only disrupts school stability and social relationships but also places additional strain on remaining teachers and leaders, creating unsustainable working environments that further drive turnover contributing to increasingly stratified working conditions for teachers across different school contexts.
Educational researchers and policymakers require robust literature review and analysis methodologies capable of engaging with complexity. This paper presents a novel systematic integrative review methodology in tandem with phenomenographic analysis methods to explore diverse concepts, and wicked problems. Traditional approaches to literature reviews may fail to integrate diverse literature types, especially when addressing complex educational phenomena. In addition, the ‘difficult to define’ aspect of complex concepts that often lie at the heart of wicked problems require appropriate analytic methods. This methodological duo is illustrated in a protocol examining recent literature on the purposes of school-based education (2000–2025). The protocol may support first principles exploration of other wicked problems by mapping diverse bodies of literature and conceptions. The methodology integrates diverse types of literature and uniquely treats research papers as primary data for phenomenographic analysis. It adopts a five-stage framework: problem identification, literature search, data evaluation, analysis, and presentation, and utilises phenomenography as its analytical lens. This research provides effective methods for reviewing diverse literature types while examining phenomenographical dimensions within them. This approach integrates empirical and philosophical insights, recognising that the theoretical frameworks, methodological choices, and contextual factors that shape each study are integral to its contribution to understanding, rather than variables to be controlled or standardised. This methodology significantly informs educational discourse by revealing nuanced complexities through its focus on the qualitatively different ways a phenomenon is experienced, understood and conceptualised, thereby providing researchers and policymakers with a valuable tool for investigating complex educational phenomena.
Neoliberal reforms increasingly frame early childhood education and care (ECEC) as an investment in human capital, with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education prioritised from the earliest years of learning. This policy orientation draws attention to teachers’ content knowledge, as scientific concepts require explicit guidance beyond experiential exploration. Traditionally, however, ECEC has emphasised holistic development and learning, deliberately eschewing narrow, subject-based approaches. Within this context, research has raised questions about teachers’ subject knowledge and confidence in teaching STEM. Such concerns tend to reflect conventional definitions of professional knowledge and are reinforced by gendered assumptions about STEM expertise. Focusing on computational thinking (CT) as pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), this study reports on a pilot STEM professional learning program informed by survey data and focus group discussions. It argues for a dynamic understanding of PCK in ECEC, recognising teachers’ expertise as relational, context-dependent and continually evolving.
