This article reports on a comparative policy analysis which examined education policy guiding the use of exclusionary discipline practices across four Australian states (Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, and Queensland). Exclusionary practices, such as suspensions and exclusions, are commonly used to respond to problematic student behaviour, yet their effectiveness as a behaviour management strategy remains unsupported by research. Through a comparative analysis of current policy in four Australian states, we find commonalities and differences in both the purpose and practice of exclusions, with their use warranted for disruptive and disobedient behaviours, as well as those considered abusive or violent. With little consideration given to the conditions that contribute towards student behaviour, the policies frame individual students as the problem, largely ignoring the powerful influence on student behaviour of complex home lives, poverty, culture, poor pedagogy, irrelevant curricula and repressive discipline regimes in compromising student–teacher relationships. In prioritising the needs of the school over the individual, exclusionary policies perpetuate the disengagement and isolation of children and young people who struggle to adapt to the rules and regulations within the school environment, exacerbating the disadvantage already experienced by vulnerable groups of students.

Year 12 students in Big Picture Learning schools across Australia now use portfolios and interviews to apply for and gain entry to their first choice of university degree. They receive admission on the strength of portfolio evidence mapped to a new non-ATAR qualification, known as the International Big Picture Learning Credential (IBPLC). Since 2020, 270 graduates have received offers to university using the Credential, growing from 3 in 2017. Like other Big Picture graduates who went before them, they are continuing a trajectory of passion-based learning that began in Year 9 or 10 at one of 45 Australian Big Picture Learning schools. All IBPLC graduates begin tertiary study equipped with experiences in the real world, support systems with a range of community mentors and teachers, specialist knowledge in their chosen field, and a set of independent learning skills intended to give them the opportunity to thrive in the university setting. In this article we share the preliminary findings of a study of graduates of Big Picture Learning Australia secondary schools who have matriculated using the IBPLC. Findings from our surveys and interviews show promise that the learning design of Big Picture, which starts with an internship in a passion area, is the key factor in enabling the success of graduates both from high school and into their university studies.

This article reports on a critical policy analysis of discourses related to school exclusions. The management of problematic student behaviour is one of the intractable problems facing education systems today. Despite being ineffective, school suspensions and exclusions are commonly used in many countries as a discipline strategy to manage student behaviour. We adopted a critical policy analysis approach in a case in Australia to examine what is missing from policy discourses about school discipline. We identified nine silences in the policy discourses. The aim is to better understand the ways in which common-sense policy discourses construct the problem of disaffected students and in the process make invisible the deep-rooted causes of student exclusions and their effects. These key silences open up new foci for policy discourses, which would enhance a deeper understanding of what is involved in addressing complex social problems like school suspensions and exclusions.

This article critically examines the everyday practices of streaming working-class students into vocational education and training pathways in public high schools in Western Australia. It challenges existing beliefs, assumptions and practices underpinning the ways in which students are artificially divided into academic and non-academic forms of school knowledge at a young age. In a country that prides itself on the myth of egalitarianism, we argue that streaming functions to legitimate existing power relations, social hierarchies, and educational inequalities. Drawing on the tradition of critical ethnography, the article examines the post school reflections of five young adults, now studying at Tertiary and Further Education (TAFE) institutions, as they reflect on their experience of high school and the processes around their decision to enrol in a vocational education and training programme at school and with what effects. The article identifies five emergent key themes organised around the narrative of each student.

While tidying up e-mail archives in 2019, the authors stumbled across correspondence from their research participants that captured their attention. They had interviewed thirty-two high school students as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project over a three-year period while these young people were transitioning from school to the world of work. Even though the project had finished in 2013, the authors deliberately maintained contact with them electronically to understand what was happening in their lives. Not all young people responded in 2014; however, the fact that some did was quite remarkable, and their responses unearthed 'thick descriptions' and powerful narratives that the authors reflect on throughout the chapter. Participants' stories advance theoretical and methodological insights capable of informing social action, bringing to the fore 'modalities of time and space' as they continue to 'echo'; demanding our reflexive attention as we enter the 'field' once again to engage, connect and listen to their narratives; 'with them'. Weaving together student narratives, researcher fieldnotes and supporting theoretical frameworks, this chapter culminates in sharing experiences and memories that 'haunt' even when consciously attempting to 'let participants go' (from a field of choice). We learn from and acknowledge the haunting echoes of our participants because they never really 'exit' but 'tag along' as we continue to create democratic spaces, places and directions in future educational research.

Sharing the lived experience of academic casualisation is challenging, based on a power imbalance with many oppositional points, including cost savings versus fair wages, precarity versus security. As researcher/participant, Jennifer initially struggled with sharing experiences emotionally and academically without stripping humanity and affect from her writing. Drawing on the tradition of critical autoethnography, this article uses letter writing as a means of investigating personal-professional experience through critical self-reflection. These letters are written to a fictional colleague (Q) for the purpose of ‘wondering aloud’ about her experience of casualised labour and the difficulties of constructing a personal-professional identity within the context of the Australian neoliberal university.

This paper considers the implications of the current landscape of education policy reform in Australian schooling. We argue that the decontextualisation of education policy enactments and the eschewing of concerns relevant at the local level of the school over the past two decades have prompted various reform agendas to fail. We contend that recognition of the deep contextualisation of schools is paramount in any attempt at renewal. Therefore, it is at the local school-level that reform agendas can and should be directed by the pedagogical and innovative work of educators. We focus on ‘relational pedagogy’ because it offers opportunities to enact school-wide reform and enhance the professional capacities of educators as pedagogical innovators. Contemporary education reform agendas are best situated and registered within school sites and relational pedagogy stands as a deeply contextualised provocation for enacting school renewal.

This article considers Participatory Arts and sociocultural understandings of justice and praxis through the example of Big hART, an Australian multi-award winning provider where both artists and participants – often disenfranchised and marginalised young people – co-create the work (Matarasso, 2018). Enacting social justice principles, Big hART works alongside young people to improve their life outcomes through arts practice strengthening young people’s critical capabilities by inducting them as both makers and responders to their own lives and the world around them. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research across three sites in rural and regional Australia we highlight how multidimensional and multi-modal arts-based projects contribute to young people’s lives through theorising the attributes and dimensions of twenty productive conditions and practices identified as essential for social change. These possibilities are important as when these conditions are purposefully enacted, the power of the arts for sense-making and identity development is revealed in non-formal learning spaces. Theoretically unpacking these conditions and practices and linking them with research outcomes helps build understanding of the generative power of Participatory Arts through the ways Big hART builds bridges between young people and their communities and the developmental trajectories they may take through being ‘at-promise’ rather than ‘at-risk’.

Anamika Lenore Adie Colette Alexander Servet Altan Denise Angelo Catherine Arden Aspa Baroutsis Georgina Barton Kim Beswick Denise Beutel Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews Terri Bourke Devon Brenner David Bright Gillian Busch Kay Carroll Tony Carusi Yangbin Chen May May Hung CHENG Kwok Wah Cheung Tien-Hui Chiang Jennifer Clifton Mitchell Coates Kathryn Coleman Russell Cross Lauren Cummins Elizabeth Curtis Jacqueline D’warte Shelley Davidow Helen Dempsey Eddie Denessen Shelley Dole Karen Dooley ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 2021, VOL. 49, NO. 1, iii–v https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2021.1912275

This book provides a unique insiders account of the work of Big hART, one of Australia's leading participatory arts organisations. Founded on the values of social justice, creativity and transformation Big hART seeks to mobilise a range of community resources including young people, elders, artists, and community activists to produce high quality public performances of merit and social worth. Located in diverse geographic, social and cultural settings across Australia's vast landscape, these creative works generate intergenerational understandings of the cultural processes of individual and collective transformation strengthening capabilities, identity, and connected belonging. This book documents a series of powerful stories that illuminate the ideological, artistic and cultural pathways and learnings gifted by the generosity of participants themselves.

Approaches to learning and teaching cast under the designation of "relational pedagogy" provide the focus of this chapter. We argue that democratic education is most apparent in the moment of encounter between students and teachers. When deliberative negotiation of learning occurs and recognition is given to the mutuality of the pedagogical encounter, moves toward a democratic education are established. For this pedagogic deliberation to occur, the formation of meaningful relationships between students and teachers is fundamental. By meaningfully coming into relation and setting about the task of negotiating how learning should proceed, teachers and students give credence to the immediacy of the moment—to the immediacy of the pedagogical encounter—and the effects exerted by the context within which this relationship is activated. This chapter asserts that it is in these terms that relational pedagogies actively resist the normalising effects of dominant expressions of schooling typical of this present moment—approaches to schooling that preface reductive, decontextualised, "one size fits all" logics—to instead provoke recognition of the idiosyncratic, in-the-moment character of learning. It is in these moments that deliberation and negotiation become crucial to learning and expose formations of a democratic education that positions the relational at its core.