Mary Ryan

Across education systems, considerable policy and scholarly attention has been directed towards strengthening the relationship between educational research and professional practice. Persistent con...

Writing is a means of negotiating and expressing human identity and authorial voice. With the increased availability of GenAI technologies to automate writing processes, a critical examination of the transformed relations between identity and authorial voice is urgently needed. In this paper, we apply a critical walkthrough methodology with the paid, advanced application—ChatGPT 4.5—to explore how authorial voice can be shaped through human-AI interaction. By applying a reflexive model of GenAI-integrated writing, we examine AI-generated texts and the potential alignments or gaps in the resulting written text with respect to authorial intentions. The analysis discusses prompts used to compose writing aligned with authorial voice, to demonstrate how human authors assert their presence, express their values, and align or distance themselves from particular positions available in generated texts. The paper outlines implications for the pedagogical adaptation of GenAI for writing, emphasing the use of GenAI applications for writing that strengthen authorial voice by generating texts that prioritise human agency and consider polyvocal perspectives.

The emergence of large language model (LLM)-based generative AI brings renewed urgency to longstanding socio-theoretical debates concerning agency and structure in human–machine interaction (Rose e...

Performance indicators and other accountability measures are increasingly common in higher education internationally. Consistent with this trend, the Australian Federal Government’s Teacher Education Expert Panel (TEEP) recently recommended new reforms to strengthen the link between performance and funding of initial teacher education (ITE). Recommended reforms included (i) the measurement and publication of ITE performance on four categories of indicators, including student selection, student retention, graduate readiness, and the employment outcomes of recent graduates and early career teachers, and (ii) the use of transition, excellence, or compact-based funding as levers for driving quality. While the proposal for the adoption of performance indicators to measure the quality of ITE has since been accepted by Australian Education ministers, our inductive content analysis of 56 public submissions in response to the proposed reforms revealed a divergence of views on the validity of the proposed performance measures and the potential impacts of these indicators on student diversity and graduation numbers. Higher education providers, Deans of Education, employers, teachers’ associations, and teacher regulatory authorities were consistent in arguing that the proposed indicators were not direct measures of quality and may have perverse or unintended consequences, with providers incentivised to ‘game the system’. Some stakeholders also queried assumptions that current accreditation processes are not sufficient to drive quality. We discuss implications of this reform for implementation and policy, noting important anomalies between stakeholder feedback and recommendations made in the final TEEP report.

Teacher quality and teacher education improvement have been central discourses for at least two decades in global education. In Australia, despite the pervasive nature of these discussions, there is a lack of substantial evidence indicating the existence of a problem in this regard. Policies aimed at enhancing the ‘preparedness’ of teacher graduates and elevating the ‘quality’ of ITE programs have nonetheless emerged as prevalent solutions over the past decade. The latest enactment of reforms in the policy chain is the Strong Beginnings report from the Teacher Education Expert Panel. In this paper, we align with Ball’s perspective that policy should be viewed as a dynamic process rather than a presumed, ready-made solution to a problem. We utilise systematic conceptual coding using Leximancer to enable a nuanced exploration of the understandings, practices, and conditions of influence for the policy actors inscribed in the TEEP report. We also analyse concept frequency and collocation in the final Strong Beginnings report, noting two main propositions: first, that there is a problem with quality in ITE; and second, that practice is foregrounded in professionalisation. We highlight the consistencies and contradictions within the discourses of the final report and the submissions from policy actors that contributed to this policy enactment process. We suggest that evidence is used when it suits a policy position, but ignored if it disrupts the platform position. We conclude by arguing that the policy actors in this policy enactment process should be afforded the professional authority to continue a well-established process of continual improvement.

Australian literacy classrooms are shaped by an unprecedented time of national curriculum reform. Australian teachers follow a national English curriculum with the pressures of national standardised assessment, state interpretation (state-based syllabus and support documents) and localised system requirements influencing their pedagogical practices. It is timely to consider how teachers recontextualise these external pressures in their teaching of writing. This paper uses reflexivity theory to investigate the interplay between social, cultural and individual influences on the materiality of writing classrooms. Through our conceptual framing of reflexive materiality, we analyse video tours created by elementary teachers (Grades 3–6) to highlight classroom components pertinent to their writing pedagogy and practices. Our analysis focused on theoretically-based instruction practices, teacher professional knowledge, opportunities for students to write, and the impact of the external context on the materiality of the classroom environment. Findings demonstrate a reflexive relationship between teachers’ system-based contexts and the substance of classroom objects, spaces, and teachers’ ideas and philosophies regarding writing.