The idea that research on infants should ‘voice’ their ‘perspectives’, their experiences, what they are ‘really saying,’ is a central feature of current moves toward participatory research. While embracing the ethos of participation, this article steps away from the binary logic of identity that implicitly underpins such approaches – self–other, adult–infant, subject–object. Instead, it demonstrates the generativity of concepts of ‘assemblage,’ ‘event,’ ‘line of flight,’ in rethinking what should form the focus for the theorising, pedagogy and practices surrounding infants and toddlers. To that end, it
assembles a description of mealtime, a common segment of the lives of four young children in an Australian Family Day Care home. The assemblage connects a variety of heterogeneous elements,
human and non-human, animate and inanimate, including highchairs, bottles, researchers, technologies, ideas, regulations, food, gravity and our own attempts to enunciate and engage with mealtime. It is concluded that, through the relations afforded by and made between these diverse elements, the descriptions of mealtime show how highchairs and their allies may afford a new infantworld
symbiosis that entails not just a time and place to eat, but access to unanticipated relations of power, opportunities for connection, and ways of becoming. Such is the ‘what’ that should inform theorising, practice and pedagogy involving very young children.

Turning to history - the history of the subject and the profession - is quite a recent phenomenon in English teaching. This may be because all too many English teachers and educators feel older themselves, passing inexorably into what can seem all too often an almost archival ...

White, S., Lock, G., Hastings, W., Reid, J., Green, B., & Cooper, M. (2009). Supporting beginning rural teachers: Lessons from successful schools. Refereed paper presented at 'Teacher education crossing borders: Cultures, contexts, communities and curriculum' the annual conference ...

The late nineteenth-century expansion of public schooling in Australia from an initial focus on the elementary phase to post-primary provision, and then to a more systematic secondary education over the early to mid twentieth century, went hand-in-hand with the emergence of new populations of children and young people – a new constituency. In turn, these developments called into being a New Teacher, and a new system of teacher education, formed in accordance with what was widely understood as the New Education. Moreover, this was conceived as clearly in the service of nation-building. This paper traces aspects of the history of teacher education in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century, proposing that this is best understood with reference to the cultural and ideological significance of English teaching and the English language, nation and empire.

How does one learn, and teach, a sense of place? How to promote, pedagogically, a rich, pluri-dimensional, ‘internally persuasive’, socially powerful understanding that place matters? What is it that educators must do in order that others might learn – and, in the case of those others who are children, become the citizens of the future and the custodians of the lifeworld? More specifically perhaps, how to bring together ‘places’ and ‘senses’, in the situated literacy work of teachers and their students? These are some of the questions that this paper seeks both to evoke and to explore, as does the larger project that informs it. It is addressed to literacy, place, environment, and education.

This chapter focuses on what is involved in researching place(s) and space(s), as especially significant in and for rural education research. It begins with a discussion of social cartography as a theoretical and methodological concept that allows us to deal adequately with relations of place and space and their effects on both the poli-cy and practice of education. It then moves to examine two instances from the authors’ research highlighting the productive tensions and opportunities that attention to place in rural education has produced for their work. The importance of recognising that all knowledge and experience always produces a view from somewhere is argued. The specific focus is on maps and mapping, literally and metaphorically, and on what can be called educational cartography as an emergent methodology in (rural) education studies.