Young people’s learning is at the heart of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education. Teachers and educators can create successful learning experiences for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students by responding to our diverse cultural, linguistic and knowledge backgrounds. All students benefit from learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, and good teaching practices work for all students.

In this chapter you will learn about Country and Peoples and the impact of the past on the present, as well as practical strategies to identify appropriate inclusions for your teaching practice to demonstrate your capability against the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers 1.4 and 2.4.

Teachers need to create innovative learning experiences specific to the teaching location, the story and history of the place, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their knowledges, cultures and languages, the intended learning and the teachers and students in the room.

Our focus is how to bring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, being and doing into education practices in respectful ways to enhance everyone’s learning.

Throughout your teaching career you will hear, and use, the terms ‘curriculum’, ‘pedagogy’, ‘assessment’ and ‘reporting’ often. Each of these terms has been interpreted in different ways and, throughout the history of formal education, one or the other has been often at the forefront of educational thinking and practice. We consider that these four areas are inextricably interwoven and changes in policy or practice in one area influence each of the others.

In this chapter you will be introduced to some of the literature, research and practice that will help you understand curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and reporting. We will discuss the interrelationship and alignment of these four areas, and you will be able to reflect on how changes in each of these areas at a national, system or school level will impact on your day-to-day work as a teacher.

The ways in which students experience their education are shaped by the differences among them. Despite many years of equity-based reform in schools, the children most at risk of educational alienation, failure or withdrawal are, for the most part, the same children who were most at risk 50 and 100 years ago. Children from low socio-economic backgrounds, rural and isolated areas, non-dominant cultural, language or religious groups and students with disabilities have been shown to experience schools as places of alienation, not as places of growth and learning. Issues of sexual and gender identity, mental health, and stability of housing combine to make the situation more complex. And children from First Nations families are consistently named as the most at risk group of students in Australia’s educational landscapes.

This chapter focuses on helping preservice and beginning teachers to recognise and develop the skills they will need to respond appropriately to all learners in their classrooms and to pursue a commitment to social justice.

In this chapter you will learn about how policy is shaped by and, in turn, shapes our educational thinking, work, teaching practices and future research.

You will be introduced to a number of policies that exist at different institutional levels, including initial teacher education policies that govern your practice during professional experience and policies that exist in schools and other education settings.

National frameworks discussed in this chapter are the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST), particularly in relation to understanding policies and practices, and the Australian Curriculum, which emerged originally from a policy text, titled the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (now known as the Melbourne Declaration) and was developed by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. ACARA, like the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), is a federally funded body responsible for setting and enacting government policy reforms. The recent release of the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration heralds the next wave of changes to the Australian education policy landscape.

It is hard to imagine a world without digital technologies. They influence every facet of our lives, including our education, health, leisure activities, finances and jobs. You may have heard different terms for digital technologies such as information technology (IT) and information and communication technology (ICT). In this chapter, we will use the terms digital technology and ICT interchangeably. In the first section of this chapter ‘Digital technologies and you’, we will explore both your personal and educational experiences with ICT as well as investigate your attitudes towards digital technologies in education. ‘Digital technologies in schools’ explores the current situation in early childhood, primary and secondary school contexts. You will be given an insight into theoretical frameworks, curriculum implications and practical considerations for twenty-first-century classrooms. The third section discusses pedagogical theories surrounding the use of digital technologies in classrooms and the fourth section, ‘Using digital technologies in class’, provides numerous suggestions and practical information on how digital technologies can be used for teaching and learning.

In this chapter you will be introduced to some of the literature, research and practices that will help you learn about and reflect on teaching and the teaching profession in the twenty-first century. You will also be introduced to relevant information about Australia’s school communities and school structures so that you can best understand the complex and diverse nature of the work involved in teaching students across the full learning spectrum from early years to senior secondary.

One of our goals in this opening chapter, and throughout the entire book, is to challenge your thinking about the range of issues involved in learning to teach in the twenty-first century. Therefore, we invite you to engage with and question the concepts and ideas presented in the coming pages, rather than accept them at face value. In many cases, we will prompt you to do so, particularly by examining key issues through social and ideological lenses. Adopting a critical inquiry stance is crucial in learning to become a teacher – it will help you to discover what it is that really matters in teaching in the twenty-first century.