Educational Investigations

This poster presents an overview of the educational and social barriers to learning that are amplified when students do not physically attend school. As new educators in a world where the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the education landscape, we (Nerida McMaster, Amy Uebergang, Han Worsley, and Kirsten Waddell), wanted to explore the impact of more and more students becoming isolated from physical places of learning. Acknowledging that distance education and remote learning are very different environments, we present that the education profession and educators themselves must be similarly aware of solutions to these barriers and supported to apply them.

Taylor, Caterina and Brydie are a group of fourth year Primary education students preparing for the realities of classroom teaching after university. One of the biggest worries we have as pre-service teachers is around communication with the parents of our future class. We wanted to know how to communicate in the best way to ensure positive outcomes for the student, their parents or carers and ourselves.

Our group for this investigation is made up of Keaton, Edward and Tom. We are all in our final year of Primary Education at the University of Canberra. During early discussions around our investigation, we highlighted the equality versus equity issue that exists in Australian schools as something that we would like to investigate. This led us to examine some of the factors that underpin this debate, including the systems of funding, and how this funding is allocated amongst government and private schools. We have also explored how socioeconomic status (SES) impacts the learning outcomes of disadvantaged students, and how that represents a need for funding systems to be restructured to better reflect the needs of these students.

Our team is comprised of Tash, Sam, Alannah and Kayla and we are a diverse group of beginning educators who are passionate about celebrating and welcoming diversity within our schools. Our research has been centred around how we as educators can challenge heteronormativity within our schools, through curriculum, policy and pedagogy, to improve outcomes for LGBTQI+ students. We hope that through exploring our poster and the complimentary resources provided, we are able to bring awareness to the challenges faced by LGBTQI+ youth and the important role we have as educators when it comes to providing safe and welcoming environments for all students.

In a time of #Metoo, when Grace Tame is our Australian of the year and an Instagram poll of private school students in Sydney experiences of sexual assault receives more than 5000 testimonies in two weeks as educators the issue of how children should learn about consent is a controversial one. At its simplest consent is an agreement between people or permission to do something. We expect students to be active, respectful and responsible participants in their learning and we want them to have the tools they need to actively ask for, give and clarify consent in their lives. Children should receive a comprehensive, explicit, inclusive and integrated consent education from a young age, and as graduate teachers we went looking for strategies to implement in our future classrooms. Our names are AJ, Kate, Amy and Kate and we invite you to share in our learning journey.

Our names are Michaela Kelly and Rachel Thane. We are Primary School educators, currently in the first semester of our career as teachers. As we commenced our teaching careers, an issue that we had in common was our exposure to high levels of trauma within our classrooms, and our feelings of inadequacy when it came to supporting these students and managing the impacts it had on ourselves. As such, our project focuses on the lack of training and support systems provided to those who educate our students with trauma, and the broader effects that this has. It also proposes a potential solution to the challenges facing teachers in this regard. Our poster emphasises the importance of a proactive approach to dealing with the outcomes of trauma in the classroom, synthesised with various measures of support in a school context.

Our names are Clover, Rhianna, Tania, Laura and Lauren. We are all fourth-year primary educators and are passionate and motivated to start our first year of teaching. As we are beginning teachers, we value the importance of work-life balance in order for us to avoid burnout. Therefore, we decided to explore the topic of ICT relating to teacher burnout because we believe we will face many new challenges through ICT as new educators. Our intention with this poster is to provide the relevant resources and strategies necessary to supporting beginning educators in maintaining a positive work-life balance around the use of ICT.

Our group consists of Jess, Josh, Molly, and Lauren. We’re all primary educators who have each found a passion for teaching in a fair, inclusive, and equitable classroom. We each want to create a space for students to express themselves, to achieve, feel comfortable and have a voice.

Throughout our careers and lives we have experienced issues that are deeply related to the issues of gender in the classroom. The differences in expectations for girls, the ways in which boys aren’t held accountable, and the ways in which people keep silent on gender related issues and abuses still permeate culture.

Throughout the process of working together we struggled with the problem that a lot of these problems are cultural and institutional. But working together for simple solutions from research we found great ways to give hope and a positive message to educators that change is possible and achievable!