PurposeNatural disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, intensifying the communication demands placed on school leaders. This article examines how Australian school leaders communicated during catastrophic wildfire events, with attention to how communication supported trust, ensured safety, and fostered operational continuity. Design/methodology/approachAn interpretivist collective case study was conducted with six school leaders in New South Wales, Australia. Data comprised open ended interviews, supplemented by relevant school/system documents and social media captures. Interviews were professionally transcribed and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with iterative, inductive coding and analytic dialogue between researchers. FindingsLeaders mobilised a set of crisis-communication practices spanning immediate threat response and longer-term recovery. These included emotionally attuned communication; rapid, adaptive multi-channel messaging; values-based care; ethical advocacy and boundary-setting; risk-informed proactive decisions; coordinated engagement of frontline staff; receptive listening to lived experience; trust-building transparency; decisive messaging under uncertainty; and equitable communication oriented to the collective rather than the most vocal. Research limitations/implicationsFindings are based on a small group of participants in one Australian state with retrospective accounts of crises. Transferability to other crisis types and systems warrant further research. Practical implicationsThe typology and reflective questions provide a practical framework for preparedness planning, distributed communication roles, and equity-oriented stakeholder engagement. Social implicationsStrengthening crisis communication capacity can support community trust, safety and resilience as climate-related disasters increasingly disrupt schooling. Originality/valueThe study contributes a typology of crisis communication grounded in leaders' wildfire experiences and offers a reflective self-assessment tool for leadership preparation and team learning. It extends crisis-leadership scholarship by specifying communication as a situated, relational practice that underpins trust, safety and continuity in high-stakes contexts.

Crises in educational settings, such as violence, catastrophic natural disasters or pandemics, require responsive and adaptive leading practices. Responsive crisis leadership is an emerging field in educational settings. This scoping review synthesises empirical studies of primary school leaders' practices in crisis contexts. The thematic analysis highlights agile decision-making, responsive communication, strategic resource management and emotional resilience. Leaders who navigate crises most responsively employ adaptive strategies, mobilise stakeholders, refine existing or new systems, while maintaining visibility and connection within the school community. The review contributes an integrative framework that delineates how crisis leadership in schools is enacted through interrelated domains of practice. A practice-oriented typology of crisis leadership in schools and associated 'signature practices' are offered as heuristic devices that organise how leadership actions are described in the existing literature. Findings could inform leader preparation, professional learning and policy supports for crisis readiness and recovery.

In the National Museum of Wales, visitors are challenged to think about the impact of colonization by engaging with three interconnected exhibits, beginning with Reframing Picton. By pulling down Thomas Picton's portrait from the walls, reframing it in packing materials on the floor, setting it in opposition to a truth-telling historical narrative, and juxtaposing it with The Wound is a Portal photographic display and the installation, Spirited, the visitor is asked to rethink how we should remember historical figures from the colonial past. While walking backwards and forwards, in and around, and across the three rooms, the visitor becomes entangled in a learning experience about colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism. This paper examines our encounter with these three exhibits and concepts as researchers/visitors. Learning in the museum relies increasingly on affective engagement, and in the National Museum of Wales, we find an example through which to explore how this process can work in practice. Using walking methodologies and thinking with theory, we consider how affective engagement can become a means to learn differently, and deeply, in the museum.

While there has been increased interest in trauma-informed practice in schools which support students with diverse and sometimes complex needs, there is a dearth of literature on trauma-informed leadership practices that aid the navigation of crisis events. This article draws from both crisis leadership and trauma-informed education literature to generate a model for trauma-informed leadership. It builds on previous research by mobilising qualitative interview data from 13 principals in Aotearoa New Zealand, to map dimensions of trauma-informed leadership in education settings. Nine interconnected dimensions of trauma-informed leadership practice are profiled which can be used to inform work in schools. The researchers highlight that effective crisis leadership involves understanding and addressing trauma's impact across the schooling ecosystem. Although there are different levels of preparedness, these events are marked by their unpredictability and leaders can foster an environment that supports emotional and psychological well-being within the school community.

This article critically assesses the impact of neoliberal imperatives on academic research, questioning the emphasis on economic benefits over intellectual richness and the ethical implications of such a skewed focus. Drawing on Sara Delamont's metaphor of "the great gates," which conceptualizes distinct research trajectories, a heterotopic lens is used to offer critique. Each gate represents a unique intellectual journey: practical, ideological, risky, or isolative. The research process involved the creation of visual art pieces-collages, multimedia installations, and digital compositions-to think with (and through) the gates. Each art piece interrogates the unique characteristics of a gate, blending material-discursive elements to reflect on intellectual risks and institutional pressures. The creation of these artworks was not only a methodological act but also a deeply reflective and meditative practice, blending theory with artistic expression to explore the ontological and epistemological dimensions of each gate. The study underscores the ongoing need for ethical and responsive academic practices that navigate and challenge prevailing economic and ideological constraints in higher education. The transformative potential of integrating creative and scholarly practices is emphasized. There is value in prioritizing diverse and transformative knowledge production as an outcome of rich intellectual inquiry.

In 1966, a colliery spoil tip fell onto the Pantglas Junior School and several houses in Aberfan, Wales, killing 116 children and 28 adults. On visiting Aberfan, we ask in what ways our experience of the town, the cemetery and the memorial site is informed by, and predicated upon, our earlier engagement with two major creative productions that commemorated this event, Sir Karl Jenkins' Cantata Memoria: For the Children, and an episode of the television series, The Crown. We have used process and walking methodologies that involve 'plugging in' and thinking with affect theory to shed light on the affective intensities and entanglements of commemorative layering.

The museum space is continually evolving and, not surprisingly, we have seen significant and rapid expansion in both digitized records and online exhibitions, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2023. In this article we examine three comparable museum collections of tokens of love and loss in the Foundling Museum in London, the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence, and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. Using a case study approach as visitor-researchers, we explore how post-qualitative theories speak to the affective experience of museums in the physical and the virtual space. We ask if the online visitor experience can be imbued with affective possibilities and, if so, how might they be maximized to best support, replicate, or replace an in-person museum experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many countries adopting containment measures. This transcontinental, transdisciplinary study draws on arts-based research to explore the value of connecting through ‘disease’ at the moment of disease during the COVID-19 epoch. The four researcher-author-educators engaged in collective memory work and drew on collaborative artful practices to create connections and deepen their learning of their home-work transgression experiences. As makers and creators, they participated in and produced a poetic assemblage which involved a netting and knotting process of “becoming”. Leveraging the stories and images, pantoum poetry were then created in a poetic inquiry process that enabled further exploration of the lived experiences of working in home locked down. The picture-like pantoum poems tripped their tongues with phrases, concepts, words and ideas, reflecting and refracting from each gem—glints of gift offerings. Each poetic iteration, strangely unique, but unsurprisingly magical as they held in a web of sameness, concepts connected to their lived experiences. While the poetry enabled lines of flight, the photographs which juxtaposed the pantoums territorialised the imagery, with their iterations of home and a retreat to the ‘iso garden’. Thus, home was placed under erasure.

Exhibition design matters. It determines the way objects are presented, the stories they tell and the way visitors experience them. Using theories of vital materiality and affect as entry points into understanding visitor experience better, this paper explores and compares our affective responses as visitor-researchers to the exhibition designs of foundling tokens at the Foundling Museum in London and the Museum of the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence. The paper asks how sensitive and thoughtful exhibition design impacts our experience. The paper concludes that different design choices create subtly different affective flows and with them, uniquely personalised opportunities for engagement.

Posthumanism locates, progresses, and asserts knowledge in the openings for interconnection. In this article, we undertake a collective biography using an interconnected arts-based practice that affords us complex relations with each other and material ways of thinking and being together. With a shared interest in posthuman theory and memory work, the authors connected online from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa to address the question: What can we learn about the perplexities, paradoxes, surprises, and frustrations associated with our academic work during COVID-19? Using an arts-based methodology and a cartographic analytical approach for our critical posthuman research, our assemblage charted the power relations operating in and immanent to the construction and circulation of academic knowledge during COVID-19.

Teaching performance assessments (TPA) are a trending feature of initial teacher education. Founded in the United States of America, TPAs have emerged in the Australian context as a capstone assessment of preservice teacher competence. However, the inclusion of the TPA in initial teacher education places additional pressure on tertiary institutions to prepare their graduates for the rigour of the test alongside the rigour of the classroom. This paper examines the ways in which preservice teachers may best be prepared for both the test and the teaching profession, exploring notions of the TPA and teacher quality, and the tensions between theory and practice. It does so in the context of part-time and distance initial teacher education, where the gap between university and the classroom, theory and practice is magnified. PrExConnex is introduced as one way in which preservice teachers can be appropriately scaffolded in learning how to negotiate the TPA during professional experience, whilst also being supported in becoming professionals, engaging in professional dialogue and reflective practice. Here, we leverage the metaphor of the classroom as a “black box;” the complex space in which connections occur between teacher and school inputs and student educational output.

Tertiary education in Bhutan has changed with the establishment of the Royal University of Bhutan in 2003, and the two constituent colleges of education have brought many developments in the education system in Bhutan. As the majority of the faculty members in the education colleges are Australian alumni, this case study was focused on how their Australian educational experiences have influenced professional practice in teacher education. This focus was part of a qualitative study which revealed influences in teacher education, research, and leadership as three critical changes that were attributed to the Australian educated faculty members of the education colleges. Inculcating international best practices in teaching pedagogy, curriculum development taking into account the Bhutanese context, and development of Early Childhood Care and Development curriculum are reported in this paper along with discussion of the implications for the Bhutanese education system.

Higher Degree Researchers (HDRs) in Australia tertiary education programs must achieve mastery of complex skills, theories, and concepts. Non-traditional HDRs, especially those enrolled part time and remotely, face barriers to achieving these outcomes. This concise paper uses the case study of a regional university in Australia to investigate the theoretical underpinnings of technology use to promote HDR communities of learning, especially for part time and remote researchers.