Dr Kate Ferguson-Patrick

The Australian Curriculum (ACARA 2017) was born out of the Melbourne Declaration of 2008 which urged the need to teach ¿active and informed¿ citizens. However, in the primary school area of the curriculum, examples of active citizenship, and especially active citizenship in a global world, are not easily found. This article exposes some of the complexities of espousing active global citizenship, and then interrogates the primary school Australian Curriculum documents in Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), English, and Science to find instances of guidance for teachers in promoting these ideas. It was found that learning ¿about¿ active citizenship was an opportunity explored in the curriculum documents much more often than learning ¿to be¿ active citizens. If our younger citizens are indeed seen as requiring an active globally oriented citizenship education in our schools, surely our key curriculum documents should lead this focus by providing real opportunities for teachers to engage in it.

The ongoing refugee crisis makes intercultural competence and culturally responsive education crucial issues in schools. At the same time, increased migration poses new challenges for social cohesion in countries around the world. How schools and classrooms can be fair and inclusive in terms of experiences and outcomes for migrant and refugee students is therefore a key question. This paper will explore the increase in migration of newly arrived students in Sweden, and how teachers in this country are catering for diverse students through cooperative learning. I explore cooperative learning as an inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy that can be effectively used in schools to support all students and especially ¿refugee¿ or newly arrived students. Using theory from cooperative learning and Stembridge (2020) as a theoretical framework, I particularly focus on analysis using two of Stembridge¿s themes of Culturally Responsive Education: Engagement and Relationships to analyze Swedish primary school classroom observations and teacher interviews and find commonalities between these two themes and the key ideas in cooperative learning. This research is built on the premise that there is more need in education research for up to date observations into the classroom factors that support or hinder learning and the way that within-class groupings can support diversity and inclusivity. Cooperative learning allows participants to develop a commitment to fairness, social responsibility and a concern for others and this particularly caters for our diverse student populations.

Cooperative learning (CL) has a strong research base, but it is underutilised. This can be explained by teachers¿ reluctance to experiment with pedagogies in an environment increasingly focused on high-stakes testing. Early career teachers (ECTs) need support to be innovative practitioners, particularly with such a complex one as CL. The teacher¿s role is crucial in order to scaffold the students¿ participation in the primary classroom in order to improve their learning and it is teachers¿ pedagogical practices that help to develop these collaborative work habits. This paper explores ECTs responses relating to their role in CL instruction.

In an era of international multimedia exposure and a global economy, there is no question that global education (GE) must be part of the school curriculum. Effective delivery of GE is reliant on adequate teacher preparation. A group of teacher educators at one University sought to raise the profile of GE with pre-service teachers through the integration of global perspectives in various courses. This paper explores pre-service teacher perceptions of the importance of GE and their learning as a result of this emphasis. Additionally, pre-service teacher preferences for further learning about GE are examined. It is apparent that pre-service teachers are interested in GE, especially in terms of how they can incorporate it in their teaching and, with exposure over a number of semesters student understandings develop, creating better prepared teachers of GE. Not surprisingly, these students were primarily focused on their future classroom practices rather than their role in the world more generally. Additionally, it was clearly evident that unique GE approaches were linked to specific teaching disciplines, an indication that GE continues to be a difficult concept to incorporate without explicit guidance for integration, something not always easy in a university setting. © 2014 Taylor and Francis.