The policy landscape concerning First Nations students in Australia has been increasingly focused on improving educational outcomes, school retention and completion, and student wellbeing. In NSW, this has seen greater attention toward the importance of quality teaching practices that integrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and pedagogies across the curriculum. For the intended improvements to be realised, effective policy and quality teaching must advance in tandem.

Teachers implementing the Aboriginal Education Policy (AEP) face a tension between complying with policy mandates, confidently employing quality teaching practices for First Nations students, and striving for authenticity in their approach. Teacher disconnection from policy design, lack of confidence in policy decision-making, fear of making errors in policy enactment, and the system's prioritisation of policy compliance all contribute to this tension. Additionally, the perception that policy is separate from quality teaching threatens the smooth integration of quality, equitable teaching practices.

Grounded in the understanding that both principals and teachers are crucial policy actors, this study utilises Ball’s (2003; 2005) toolbox approach to explore how teachers interpret and enact policies promoting equity and cultural understanding, with a particular focus on the AEP. Using qualitative methods including interviews and document analysis, this research investigates teachers’ perspectives on their roles as policy actors and their efforts to authentically integrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and pedagogies into their teaching practices.

While educators acknowledge the import of building genuine relationships with students and communities, and engaging in culturally responsive teaching, they often find it challenging to exercise agency and autonomy in policy enactment within a performance and metrics-driven environment. There is an urgent need to reform and reframe policy and policy enactment as a dynamic, context-dependent process that is synonymous with quality teaching. Only then will equitable educational opportunities for all students be possible.

Aim

This study examined undergraduate elementary education teacher candidates’ interrogation of student engagement as a strategy for addressing educational inequality through the structure of Professional Learning Community (PLC) seminars. PLCs are a context where TCs develop knowledge and skill needed to support student learning through the application of equitable teaching practices.

Framework

PLCs are oriented toward a humanizing pedagogy where “educational practice requires the existence of ‘subjects’, who while teaching, learn. And who in learning also teach” (Friere, 1998, p. 67). This orientation prioritizes theory in practice and is concerned with pointing TCs toward teaching for equity. Grounded in the theoretical lens of communities of practice (CoP), PLC seminars focus on socialization, learning, and individual/collective identity development of teacher candidates (Wenger, 1998).

Methods

Data comes from reading guides and exit tickets collected during PLC seminars. This data was analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019). After identifying patterns and coding the data, themes were generated and defined. These served as analytic lenses framing our sense-making.

Findings

TCs’ latent notions of student engagement were disrupted; TCs operationalized the relationship between theory and practice; TCs envisioned their growth as a process of stitching at the edge of theory and practice. Themes point to teacher candidates’ adoption of an inquiry stance toward student engagement as central to providing students with access to rich learning.

Relevance

PLCs are an effective context in which TCs developed a unifying perspective of student engagement that is agentic for students from diverse backgrounds and circumstances. Key pedagogies of disruption, operationalization of, and the stitching together of theory and practice have the potential to cut across all areas of teacher education and novice teacher learning thereby preparing teacher candidates as they develop quality equitable teaching practices that impact student learning.

The teaching placement, a widely accepted element in teacher education programmes worldwide, presents persistent problems around equity and inclusion for student teachers. Placements, with established hierarchies, mean student teachers are peripherally positioned as novices (Baize 2023; Rosehart et al. 2022) with implications for their professional agency development (Heikonen et al. 2020). This international research project aimed to understand student teachers’ development of professional agency when COVID-19 interrupted their placements and when previous ways of understanding how to teach and how to educate student teachers became insufficient when schools moved online. We used historical socio-cultural theory to conceptualize the pandemic as a societal rupture at the phylogenetic level which also disrupted the ontogenetic (practice) and microgenetic (individual) levels of the social practice of teaching and learning to teach.

For this small qualitative study, semi-structured interviews were piloted, amended, then conducted with student teachers whose schools closed during placement. Using inductive and deductive thematic analysis, with both data-driven and theory-driven codes (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006), we identified how disruption to traditional hierarchies in teacher education created generative spaces to develop student teachers’ professional agency by positioning student teachers on a more equal footing to experienced teachers, especially when their digital expertise assisted the pivot to teaching online.

This study gives a fully developed theorization of teacher education as a social practice and responds to calls for teacher education to foster agile and adaptable future teachers (Kidd and Murray 2022; la Velle 2022). Our findings led us to question the enduring deficit positioning of student teachers. Instead, we suggest a strength-based approach that is cognizant of what student teachers bring into teaching is necessary to foster high quality teacher education and highlight adaptive learning environments and inclusive practices for developing student teachers’ professional agency to intentionally create adaptable future educators.

This paper focuses on Florida’s House Bill 1647: K-12 Education (HB 1467), also known as the Curriculum Transparency Bill. The exploration of different interpretations of educational policy among elementary English Language Arts school teachers of grades 3-5 in Florida, United States, and the impact these interpretations have had on their pedagogical choices was explored. This qualitative case study investigates the varying interpretations of HB 1467 within its real-life context. Data collection methods include in-field observations, semi-structured interviews, and analysis of policy-related documents. This study ascribes to Karl Weick’s (1995) Sensemaking Theory, which connects individuals’ psychological and sociological ideas to make sense of the world around them. Karl Weick emphasized that sensemaking is the ongoing process through which people give meaning to events and experiences to understand them and take necessary action. Teachers collaborate with their peers in education by sharing ideas, insights, and experiences to improve their practices, reduce ambiguity, and adapt to change. How teachers make sense of educational policies determines their pedagogical choices, but what happens when there are many interpretations of the same educational policy? Teachers’ sensemaking of this policy has led to practical and pedagogical variances in classrooms across Florida. This has prompted many teachers to remove classroom libraries, resulting in learning inequities among students across the state. This policy has created a whirlwind of emotions, reactions, and interpretations. Implementing educational policies often leads to diverse interpretations and practices among educators. This study aims to reconcile these tensions by proposing a new educational social contract. This contract, which emphasizes collaboration, equity, and innovation, offers a beacon of hope for the future of education in Florida. It is urgent, as it will help ensure that all students receive a high-quality education, regardless of the specific pedagogical choices made by teachers.