Editorial

The essential work done by teachers in the care and education of our young people has come into sharp focus over recent months with the closure of many schools across Australia in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The introduction of remote learning has provided learning opportunities for students, parents and guardians and teachers alike, as well as highlighting (once again) disparities between schools and communities in terms of their access to the resources required to support learning away from schools.

The articles in this issue of the Australian Journal of Education do not focus on the impact COVID-19 may have on student learning or education practices – that is still to come – but provide some insight into the experiences of students and teachers in a variety of situations.

The experiences of a group of rural students in an authentic science research mentor programme, working alongside university researchers to collect, analyse and interpret data, are the focus of a study by Louise Puslednik and Patrick Brennan. Motivated by Australian students’ decline in STEM skills and the particular difficulties faced by rural schools in accessing qualified STEM staff, the authors examine the short-term impact on rural students’ science skills of a year-long research mentor programme involving face-to-face and remote sessions as well as travel to conduct experiments. Evaluation of the programme involving the Validation of Assessment for Learning and Individual Development (VALID, NSW Department of Education) shows significantly higher overall Year 10 VALID scores of the nine programme participants compared to a control group, as well as significantly higher scores in 21st century skills. The students’ own assessments of their learning support these findings. The authors conclude that participation in authentic science research mentor programmes may be beneficial for students, but that the timing of such programmes (i.e. before selection of senior year subjects) needs to be considered.

While research on mentor programmes frequently focusses on the impact on mentees, the study by Dimity Crisp, Debra Rickwood, Bridgette Martin and Nicola Byrom looks at the effects of a university peer support programme on the mentors or student facilitators. The authors analyse information on the expected and actual benefits and challenges as reported by 16 mentors before, during and after the six-week programme. Results show that mentors’ confidence, self-efficacy and well-being change relatively little over the three time points. In addition, mentors’ reports on anticipated benefits largely match the benefits they actually experience with helping others and skill enhancement and development featuring most prominently. In terms of challenges, while student facilitators anticipate minimal or no concerns, the attendance of mentees is the challenge mentors report the most at the end of the programme.

The study of teachers’ emotional health and well-being by Peta Stapleton, Sarah Garby and Debbie Sabot is motivated by accounts of higher than normal levels of stress among teachers compared to the general population. The authors use an online survey to identify sources of stress among Australian teachers, their life satisfaction and subjective well-being and to assess teachers’ levels of psychological distress as measured through the Depression, Anxiety, Somatic symptoms and Alcohol abuse sub-scales of the Patient Health Questionnaire. Analyses of responses from 166 Australian teachers identify work, workload and finances as the main sources of stress. Compared to lifetime prevalence rates for the Australian population, higher proportions of the responding teachers meet clinical criteria for moderately severe to severe depression, severe anxiety and severe somatoform disorder – a form of mental illness that causes one or more bodily symptoms, including pain. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis exploring relationships between coping styles and psychological distress, life satisfaction and subjective happiness shows that greater use of maladaptive coping strategies may contribute to increased psychological distress, as well as decreased life satisfaction and happiness in this group of teachers. While the sample is relatively small and self-selected, the authors suggest that the findings warrant further investigation of stress and psychological distress in the teaching population and provision of more programmes to support teachers in their development of appropriate coping strategies.

The next article also focuses on teachers and their experiences during and after a professional learning programme. In this study, Tony Loughland and Hoa TM Nguyen examine how participation in a collaborative professional learning model for primary science impacts on teachers’ sense of their collective efficacy or efficacy as a team. The professional learning programme consists of (a) planning sessions, in which teachers collaboratively develop primary science programmes using the question-predict-observe-explain-communicate scientific method, (b) mentoring during classroom lessons and (c) critical, collaborative reflective discussions after viewing a lesson implemented by a peer. Data from teacher planning documents, video recorded lessons, audio recordings of the professional learning sessions and interviews with the 12 primary teachers – undertaken three months after the programme finished – are coded against the four motivational sources of collective efficacy, namely mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion and affective states. Analyses identify more instances of mastery and vicarious experiences than instances of social persuasion and affective states. The authors conclude that teachers’ collective efficacy may be useful as a proxy measure of the success of professional learning, given the time and cost involved with other measures, like student performance or improvement, but that more work is required to apply conceptual frameworks to the design of professional development programmes.

In a study of reading, Nicola Bell, Max Farrell-Whelan and Kevin Wheldall collect data from 137 students at the beginning, middle and end of Year 1. The study investigates whether real-word and/or pseudoword reading fluency skills – as measured by the Wheldall Assessment of Reading Nonwords (WARN) and Wheldall Assessment of Reading Lists (WARL) – predict later phonics performance as measured by the Phonics Screening Check (PSC). Results indicate that while both WARN and WARL are meaningful predictors of performance on the PSC, the WARN shows small but consistently higher specificity than the WARL. This, in turn, means that struggling readers can be identified as early as the end of Term 1 in Year 1 rather than at the end of Year 1, maximising the time available to organise targeted support to struggling readers.

Joanna Sikora and Jennifer Green analyse data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth (LSAY) between 2006 and 2016, supplemented by in-depth interviews to provide a rich picture of volunteers as well as reasons and benefits of volunteering activities. Results of their multilevel analyses reveal that about one-third of people aged 17 to 25 are involved in some form of volunteering with the regularity of volunteering increasing with age. In addition, young people with more highly educated parents, cultural possessions and educational resources are more likely to volunteer, whereas family income or wealth do not emerge as significant predictors of volunteering. Also, while volunteering increases the likelihood of completing university or getting a higher status job somewhat, the effect is much smaller than that of other variables such as gender, family background or academic achievement. Thus, in terms of theory development, the comprehensive evidence analysed in this study provides greater support of Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory as a reason for volunteering than rational choice theory.

The final contribution to the current issue is Michelle Gough’s review of the book Oral History, Education, and Justice: Possibilities and Limitations for Redress and Reconciliation, edited by Llewellyn and Ng-A-Fook (2020) which discusses what oral history can achieve for redress and reconciliation through examples from peoples and communities in Canada and South Africa. She finds that the examples not only illustrate vividly various aspects of the methodology, its potential learnings and how it can be used by educators in classrooms, but also how it can benefit community groups, activists and historians.

With best wishes to our readers and their loved ones for staying healthy.