AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS

Standard 1: Know students and how they learn

The understandings developed in the chapter examine the ways that students learn in high-diversity, high-poverty settings. In addition, this chapter relates to content and teaching strategies for Arts and English learning areas of the curriculum.

Schools can enable kids in high-poverty areas to access digital technologies and media production. Consider the opportunities Dana took up at MediaClub:

AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS

Standard 1: Know students and how they learn

This chapter develops understandings of bi/multilingual children's and families’ experiences of growing up bi/multilingual, identity negotiation and hybrid cultural practices. It highlights the ways in which children's bi/multilingual identities are closely linked to their use of languages in everyday life, within contexts of diversity, difference and marginalisation.

Standard 7: Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

This chapter supports educators to engage with colleagues and families about the importance of bi/multilingualism and the new potentialities of multiple identity negotiation of cultural and linguistic practices across family, community and educational settings.

Introduction

In Australian educational contexts, there exist silences around bi/multilingual children's experiences of learning and using a minority language and identity negotiation. These silences mask our understandings of children's decreasing capacity to retain adequate levels of bilingual/multilingual proficiency due to the early exposure to dominant English-only early childhood and primary education. This is also shaped by global, political, social and economic factors in which English as a global language has a major impact on children's emerging identities, which are a ‘work in progress’, constantly negotiated, renegotiated and constructed within social and linguistic contexts.

The data examined in this chapter are based on a study that attempts to disrupt some of these silences by documenting Latin American Australian children's and families’ views about their bi/multilingual experiences, identity negotiation and hybrid cultural practices, often ignored or dismissed by educators. The findings demonstrate ways in which the children's bi/multilingual identity is closely linked to the use of languages in everyday life, within contexts of difference and marginalisation in growing up bi/multilingual. By drawing on conceptual frameworks of cultural studies, I examine concepts of cultural hybridity, diaspora and Bhabha's (1994) ‘third space’ to show how interracial/interethnic families negotiated their use of languages and constructions of identity in a globalised world in which English dominates social institutions, cultural discourses and linguistic practices.

AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS

Standard 1: Know students and how they learn

This discussion describes how students from different social class backgrounds might have different strengths and needs in the education context. These differences must be considered in order to appropriately support student participation.

Standard 7: Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

This chapter points to how social class might mediate parents’ and carers’ involvements in their children's education and calls for sensitive and strategic responses from teachers.

Introduction

The preceding interview excerpt shows how closely schooling is tied to social class. Here, the interviewee links her middle-class status to the privilege of private schooling and tertiary education, along with her father's income. Interestingly, while Peta was asked to discuss her class history, she was not specifically questioned about her schooling history at this point – this is an inference that the interviewee, as well as many others who participated in a study of mothering practices, made independently. This chapter reiterates and unpacks this connection in a description and appropriation of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of education. While many of us may recognise, as Peta did, a connection between social class and schooling, Bourdieu's abstractions allow both researchers and teachers to better understand, articulate and respond to the complexities of this association. Beginning with an outline of some of the ways in which Bourdieu has been taken up within contemporary education research, this chapter highlights the strengths of Bourdieu's theory of social practice. Making use of his concepts, as well as the approaches of Annette Lareau, Diane Reay, Gill Crozier and David James, this chapter explores the classed dimensions of school choice in an analysis of mothers’ orientations to ‘private’ and ‘public’ schooling. In doing so, it argues against ‘the end of class’ thesis, the now popular notion that class is irrelevant for understanding contemporary experience.

The dynamic nature of school populations, impacted by globalisation and constant socio-cultural change, has implications for educational policy, pedagogy, classroom practices, early childhood settings and school–community relations. Thus, to work as an equitable educator with today's children and youth, one requires a sociological understanding of schooling from early childhood through to secondary completion. It is critical that educators see how education intersects with a range of diverse subjectivities, the power relations inherent in these intersections, and the inequities that are apparent – including the visible and invisible, the voiced and silenced.

Thus, pre-service educators require knowledge about a range of sociological theoretical concepts to critically unpack the complexities of education in relation to the lives of young people, their families and communities. Such knowledge should be fostered during the pre-service stages of an educator's career to provide a foundation from which to appreciate more deeply their potential impact on future generations. Additionally, the changing expectations of educators, as reflected in the Australian context, demand a greater focus on the teacher–researcher nexus. This has been institutionally inscribed through changes to the Australian Qualifications Framework at Level 9, which calls for teacher education courses to produce graduates capable of researching and applying theory to their work. This enhances the imperative for pre-service educators to embrace theoretical understandings during their pre-service teacher education to develop the capacity to use this knowledge to analyse and critique praxis.

This book, based squarely on the research of its contributors, provides an accessible theoretical and research-based reader for upper-level and postgraduate pre-service educators. Each chapter reports upon current, topical research in the sociology of education. Through explanation and analysis, key theoretical concepts are applied to critically interrogate, inform and challenge many taken-for-granted knowledges and practices in education. The chapters are generally grounded in the Australian context; however, some chapters are linked to international research demonstrating widespread relevance of the issue under discussion. Wherever possible, the implications of the theory and research are made relevant to early childhood, primary and secondary contexts; as a result, the book resonates with a variety of audiences.

This second edition, at the beginning of each chapter, articulates how the work reflects the relevant Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST).

AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS

Standard 1: Know students and how they learn

This chapter provides understandings about gender and sexuality diversity in order for teachers to be responsive to the needs of their students from diverse backgrounds. It enables them to recognise that the way that texts are formed constructs particular understandings in relation to difference that may or may not be helpful for learning or wellbeing.

Introduction

Constructed as a medical, social and psychological pathology, gender and sexuality–diverse individuals and communities have experienced overt and covert discrimination to various degrees for centuries. Depending on time and context, this discrimination was not only interpersonally inflicted but institutionally enacted; that is, inequities were ‘built into the system’ through federal and state legislation and policy. In the twenty-first century in Australia, discriminatory attitudes towards gender and sexuality diversity have started to lean towards greater equality. Activism by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) communities and their supporters has increased awareness about the discrimination, inequities and marginalisation gender and sexuality–diverse people experience. Many readers may be unaware that the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, now a public display of celebration and solidarity, began as a protest rally in 1978, one which ended in violence and brutality (Carbery, 1995).

Such events, coupled with political and public education, have resulted in changes to legislation. For example, amendments to federal anti-discrimination legislation were made during the 1980s rendering it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity in the delivery of goods and services, employment, education and accommodation, among other things (Australian Human Rights Commission, n.d.). In the first decade of the twenty-first century, further legislative amendments addressing a raft of inequities related to gender and sexuality diversity mean that gender and sexuality–diverse people can now access many (but not all) of the same rights and privileges afforded those who identify as heterosexual. There is also growing political acknowledgement of the historical discrimination endured by gender and sexuality–diverse people; for example, in 2017 several Australian state governments officially apologised to gay men historically convicted of the ‘crime’ of engaging in consensual, adult, male-to-male sex, previously legislated as a criminal act (ABC News, 2017; Caldwell, 2017).

AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS

Standard 3: Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

Standard 5: Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning

While the APST Standards do not explicitly refer either to processes of reflection or to teachers as reflexive practitioners, we take the position that strong, critical teaching practices, particularly in the areas of planning and implementation (Standard 3) and assessing student learning (Standard 5), require teachers to employ theoretical perspectives in their decision-making processes.

Making the ‘unseen’ seen

In Chapter 1, the ‘unseen half’ was introduced as a metaphor for both the diversity of children and families who are, in many ways, insufficiently catered for in early childhood, primary and secondary education, as well as for the unseen, taken-for-granted inclusion and privilege inherent in an education system that is designed for a socially constructed, normative student. In the chapters that followed, the authors problematised elements of normativity in education and worked to make the unseen ‘seen’ through their analysis of the diverse schooling experiences of preschoolers, children, adolescents and their families. While each of these chapters could have been positioned as a summative description of an issue, the incorporation of sociological theory as an analytical and reflexive tool provided a more nuanced understanding of the issues under investigation. Each chapter highlighted the ways in which theory functions to ‘value-add’, providing depth, a richer perspective and a move away from the superficiality of description and taken-for-granted knowledge to a critical approach.