The Educational Alumni Support Project (EdASP) indicated that there is an urgent need for the teaching profession to support casual beginning teachers (CBTs). The EdASP that was carried out at the University of New England provided online support for primary and secondary beginning teachers, yet the majority of postings were submitted by CBTs. In general, these casual teachers experienced feelings of alienation, culture shock, a lack of school and systemic support, and are often not considered part of the school community by staff or students. The analysis of postings by CBTs provides further insight into the difficulties they face, as well as reveals or reinforces strategies that could effectively facilitate their teaching. Many of these findings are not new, yet the call to aid casuals continues to be overlooked. This need for support is both professional and pragmatic. Ethically, education -a nurturing professionshould support its novices. In addition, the transition period from pre-service to professional teacher has significant implications for teacher educators plus the potential retention of teachers.
This article reviews Education for Sustainability (EfS) in the secondary sector across a range of countries. Drawing on journal articles, book chapters and official reports, it identifies some of the more successful approaches to implementing EfS within the secondary sector. The authors first discuss the importance of educating for sustainability at the secondary level and then explore barriers to effective EfS in secondary schools. They go on to share their insights into contextual factors that influence EfS practices which are reported in the case studies. In particular, they discuss the influence of (a) politics and curriculum renewal, (b) alignment of curriculum, resources and teaching, (c) the perceived state of EfS and (d) teachers’ professional development as determinants of EfS implementation and success.
Produced through market relations of neoliberal managerialism, teacher subjectivities are becoming progressively commodified. With the increasing casualisation of the teaching workforce, the wellbeing and status of casual relief teachers (CRT) can be seen as an area of concern, at risk of "flexploitation" (Bourdieu 1998, p. 85). More than just a convenient labour pool, CRTs operate on the margins of school communities, a space fraught with a range of issues. In many instances CRTs experience less job satisfaction, less rapport with students and colleagues and less access to school information, professional development, resources and teaching materials. This article draws on a positioning theory to frame the discursive production of casual relief teacher (CRT) selves within the neoliberal milieu. It offers an analysis of collective biographies that explore narrative formations of casual teaching. Schooling discourse is replete with metaphorical language that frame teacher positioning and a range of existing metaphors in CRT literature highlight their vulnerability in particular. Rather than offering an analysis that addresses casual teacher performance as a problem to be solved, this article proposes that the relationship between 'structural marginalisation and the 'othering' that CRTs can experience is associated with the politics of market-related performativity.
Fiji is developing rapidly, and with an emerging middle class, more of its population are adopting a western lifestyle with its associate patterns of high consumption. This is inevitably having an impact on the country's environment with increased waste production and energy use, and consequently there is a need for effective environmental education to help alleviate these problems. Primary teachers will play a pivotal role in educating children for and about the environment in the coming years. This study reports the findings of a survey of pre-service primary teachers' knowledge and attitudes to the environment locally and globally. The findings indicate that although the majority of teachers interviewed had adopted an 'environmental paradigm' insofar as they wanted to protect the environment, many did not feel that it was necessary to modify their lifestyles in order to do so. The findings suggest that this might be addressed through improved professional development in environmental education and this would be timely given current reforms taking place in the primary sector in Fiji with the introduction of new curricula and assessment regimes.
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