As a novice teacher, it is important for students to be aware that they are entering a profession with a set of guiding policy frameworks to inform their knowledge, practice and engagement. Chapter 1 introduced a range of data snapshots that provide insight into current Australian and global education systems in the twenty-first century. Data are increasingly used to inform policy, but policy is also shaped by many other complex and multifaceted factors operating across both local and global contexts. This chapter further examines the education landscape and looks at how policy is shaped by, and in turn shapes, our educational thinking, work, teaching practices and future research.

As discussed in earlier chapters, a company has the legal powers and capacity of an individual, in addition to any specific powers conferred by law. The two key decision-making organs that can act as the company in exercising these powers are the board of directors and the members in general meeting. The general law and Corporations Act divide the company’s powers and responsibilities between these two groups. This chapter discusses this division of powers. It also discusses how meetings of members and directors are held, and the requirements on companies to prepare and disclose key information, including financial reports.

This chapter describes how conceptual learning is mediated by interactions, the environment and a range of semiotic modes. Using a case study approach, Illustration of Practice 3.1 presents four-year-old children’s dance-play and drawing-telling as exemplars of powerful forms of meaning-making and communication. The nexus between theory and practice is illustrated through an innovative model that supports children’s creative dance improvisation and experimentation, and links to graphic and narrative modes. Children’s sophisticated levels of thinking, feeling and relating are addressed, and the role of the teacher is foregrounded with regards to supporting transformative learning outcomes for young children.

In this chapter we first look at the DP-hypothesis, the idea that nominals are DPs rather than NPs, and that NP is a complement of D. We then refine this idea, motivating a tripartite structure for the nominal, analogous to what we saw for the clause in the previous chapter. Next, we focus on the argument structure of nominals, comparing and contrasting with argument structure in the clause. Finally, we briefly describe the ways in which grammatical functions are marked in nominals, again contrasting this with the clause.

The goal of this chapter is to develop a theory of Formal Features that will capture and unify many of the generalisations we have arrived at in previous chapters and, more specifically, to develop a theory of Case, agreement and movement, showing how these three notions are intertwined. The core notion is the Agree relation.

In this chapter, we look at empty pronouns: cases of ‘silent deep anaphora’. More specifically, our focus is on null subjects, i.e. silent pronominal subjects, in a range of languages. We identify three main types of null-subject languages and attempt to explain the typology. This leads us to the investigation of the parametric variation across languages.