Sally Lamping

This chapter problematises care within the normative conditions of contemporary neoliberal schooling. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, it theorises care as an affective force sustained through shadow infrastructures (spaces and practices) that both enable and exploit carers. We argue that contemporary challenges to care are materialised in teachers' invisible labour as they navigate systems structured by accountability, performativity, and competition. Through analysis of recent policy interventions, the chapter examines how care is defined, regulated, and narrowed for teachers and students, often limiting relational possibilities. These framings are set against the complex social and economic conditions shaping school life. Recentring care as relational and collective, we explore its tensions and potentials, and conclude by outlining how school leaders might reimagine care through community-based and radically relational approaches beyond technocratic reform.

Higher education is often framed as a pathway to opportunity and professional advancement, with employability and so-called ‘workplace readiness’ positioned as key outcomes of course completion. In...

This paper presents reflections on making space for story through sharing, connection and joy. Writing from their positions as K-12 English teachers and teacher educators, the authors celebrate their experiences in expanding the definition of “story” to be more inclusive, recognising reading as a diverse activity encompassing myriad text types and experiences.Through examination of their individual ways as readers and teachers of reading, the authors demonstrate approaches to embracing diverse forms of reading while helping students to articulate and claim their own reading identities. Through recognition and respect, the authors show how they celebrate and sustain all kinds of reading, working towards developing lifelong learners who engage critically, creatively and empathetically with the world and stories of others.

There is significant pressure on translingual communities, who draw upon and blend all the linguistic and semiotic resources with which they have come into contact (i.e., language, material objects, the built environment) to navigate linguistically inaccessible infrastructures in their new setting. We examined the role language plays within one Local Government Area (LGA) in Western Australia via a larger Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) project; re‐visiting the politics of resourcefulness and focusing on examples of linguistic privileging and linguistic invisibility.The overall study included an initial needs analysis survey which enabled critical conversations around identified problems. These were further unpacked through data collected via interviews/focus groups; shadowing community leaders and LGA/not‐for‐profit employees in their contexts. This offered opportunities to document how stakeholders navigated or resolved known problems. The data was analysed iteratively and thematically to inform and expand conversations around potential collaborative efforts.This article focuses on the analysis of interview and focus group data in one LGA which highlighted systematised linguistic privileging of individuals who speak certain forms of English, and the rendering of community languages as invisible by the system. In response communities created resourceful spaces where collaborative semiosis licensed collective meaning making through the community's full spatial and translingual resources, enabling access to resources, utilisation of community‐generated skills, sharing of local knowledge and fostering of recognition for individuals as agents in civic life, countering the linguistic invisibility they experienced.For institutions, such as LGAs, to catch up with communities, they need to recognise and sustain community translingualism as an essential resource. Our article outlines a viable framework for dismantling linguistic privileging and invisibility in favour of sharing language responsibility with translingual communities.

Australia is seen as a promised land by migrants pursuing a better future for themselves and their families. Highly qualified migrants with vast work experience frequently encounter hurdles on their way to professional realisation, including the official language of the country – English. This study investigates the difficulties Ukrainian teachers face with the English language on their professional transition pathway in Australia. The research involves Ukrainian migrant teachers who obtained a specialist or master’s degree in Ukraine or another post-Soviet country, whose professional experience in Ukraine was in the teaching field, and who identify as Ukrainians. Narrative interviews, memos, documents, and artefacts are the data collection methods; thematic analysis is used to unpack the data. The participants were chosen using non-probability purposive snowball sampling, which engages contacts within the community and benefits projects with a small number of respondents. The inquiry elucidates the extent of the English problem for Ukrainian migrant teachers on their way to professional transition in Australia. The research will benefit other migrant teachers facing similar barriers when trying to re-enter their profession in the new environment and inform apposite institutions about the existing hurdles to facilitate positive changes in the field.