This is a collaborative guest post I contributed to Tom Mahoney’s site, The Interruption. The encounter with the face of the other is a command that tells us all, uncomfortably, that we are our brother and sister’s keepers – Emmanuel Levinas This year, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that despite cost-of-living pressures and the declining percentage […]
Image: Group 1 National Teacher Mentorship participants with teaching artists Emily Edward (left) and Huw Mckinnon (right). Photo credit: Clare Hawley (2024 NTM Bell Shakespeare) Last year, I was scrolling through an English Teachers Association of Queensland newsletter and the words ‘Bell Shakespeare Teacher Mentorship’ caught my eye. For anyone who isn’t familiar with Bell […]
By Melanie Ralph Last year, an OECD report described the “disciplinary climate” in Australian schools as being among the “least favourable” in the 38 participating countries. This has sparked many calls in the media and from ‘experts’ to “beef up discipline” and return to stricter approaches. Missing in much of the discussion has been the voices […]
With the arrival of the new Premier in NSW, Chris Minns, has come a hasty announcement of “sweeping” mobile phone bans to be introduced “from day 1, term 4” across all NSW public schools this year. The move follows similar policies in all other states, except Queensland and the ACT. The goal of the ban? […]
By Melanie Ralph Last week, New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet fronted the media to apologise for wearing a Nazi costume to his 21st birthday party 20 years ago in 2003. Calling it a “terrible, terrible mistake,” the premier’s “genuine hope” is that “good will come of this.” Whether you are forgiving enough to view […]
By Melanie Ralph Suites of ready-made resources may be a crutch for some teachers, but we stand to lose the best and brightest if we pursue more top-down reforms that would deskill teachers and kick a struggling profession while it’s already down. Recently, think tank The Grattan Institute published a report titled Ending the lesson […]
Article published on ABC, Thu 19 May 2022 https://www.abc.net.au/religion/labors-pitch-to-improve-teaching-is-tragically-misguided/13890036 Amid the cacophony of noise that the 2022 federal election campaign has generated, Labor has tried to respond to alarming teacher shortages and the so-called “disaster” of student test scores by pledging to “pay students who get an ATAR of 80 or over up to $12,000 a year if they […]
By Melanie Ralph Published on ABC 22 Mar 2022. Link here: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/modest-proposal-for-addressing-the-teacher-shortage/13807648 This term in Queensland, teachers have navigated a further wave of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, followed by devastating floods that have left many families without a home. Beyond Queensland, teachers across the country have summoned a kind of Sisyphean strength over the […]
By Melanie Ralph Amid many pressing issues of 2021, you would be forgiven for missing some big news published in a full page spread of The Australian newspaper back in August. Noel Pearson, academic and community leader, boldly declared that the “teaching debate” has ended “once and for always.” The ‘debate’ Pearson refers to is […]
By Melanie Ralph. Newsflash: gay teachers can be fired. No, this is not some shocking story from homophobic Southern American states, or an ‘L.G.B.T free’ town in Poland. This is here in Australia. In 2021. Alexandra Greyson, a lawyer from Maurice Blackburn, puts it simply: “Religious educational institutions can discriminate on the basis of […]
Melanie Ralph 