This article seeks to understand women's underrepresentation in STEM professions by investigating the educational factors contributing to female students' identity development. The current study undertakes a comparative approach between STEM, and the most popular field of study with women, Management and Commerce. Data were collected from a…

Indigenous education futures require the prioritising of Indigenous voices. We need to ensure educators are engaging in deep listening, critical self-reflection and learning to develop necessary understandings. This paper will explore the urgency of prioritising Blak voices in all classrooms, emphasising the role of Indigenous-authored texts…

Overrepresentation in exclusionary school discipline is extensively documented for certain groups of students, particularly students of colour and those with disability, yet while these groups may overlap, policies that aim to address disproportionality tend to consider equity factors in isolation. The majority of research on overrepresentation,…

Enrolment statistics indicate that while the cultural and linguistic landscape of Australian higher education continues to be enriched by widening participation and internationalization, ongoing patterns of underrepresentation of students from traditionally excluded, equity groups persist. There is a need for sector-wide, strengths-based…

Preparation of Primary teachers to deliver the Arts in schools continues to receive attention, particularly as the shortage of educators becomes more prevalent. This paper seeks to examine the preparedness of students undertaking Initial Teacher Education (ITE) across three Australian Institutions (n=120). The authors explore 'How does ITE…

The Australian Universities Accord's (Department of Education, 2024) focus on expanding underrepresented groups' access to higher education underscores an on-campus-online paradigm shift, or post-pandemic digital transformation, to address students' flexibility and accessibility needs. The shift identifies that online student engagement, and…

Higher education initiatives to support students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are widespread. However, there is pervasive concern within public discourse that such widening participation efforts have contributed to a 'dumbing down' of higher education. There are classed dimensions to evaluations of (dis)advantaged students' university…

The gender gap in physics in Australian secondary schools remains a significant issue. This study aims to address this problem by examining how physics teachers perceive girls' participation in physics, and how these perceptions influence their approach to gender issues and their potential impact on girls' physics identity. The study uses a…

The nursing workforce constitutes the largest professional health workforce in Australia. Nursing is traditionally a female dominated profession. This study reviewed Australian universities that provide entry to practice nursing education. The study identified the distribution of females and males in leadership in nursing education, the…

Purpose: Girls are underrepresented in many school science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, leading to ongoing gender disparity in STEM careers. This issue is not new and has seen a range of initiatives implemented in an attempt to increase girls' STEM participation. In Australia, a number of these initiatives have…

In this article, I propose a new conceptual lens for understanding issues of racialised discipline and school exclusion that takes into consideration the foundational carceral logics of the settler colonial state. By bringing together carceral state, settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies literatures I demonstrate how the settler…

It seems uncontentious that policy development should be informed by evidence, and that researchers should be engaged to assess available evidence. In this paper, we tell the story of a Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) about school exclusion, a task intended to inform a 'root and branch' policy review. Drawing on Carol Bacchi's 'What's the…

Introduction: In Australia, 54.3% of medical students are women yet they remain under-represented in stereotypical perspectives of medicine. While potentially transformative, generative artificial intelligence (genAI) has the potential for errors, misrepresentations and bias. GenAI text-to-image production could reinforce gender biases making it…

Recent studies and media articles draw attention to gender imbalances in the music industry, both locally in Australia and globally. In Australia, there have been calls to overhaul tertiary music programmes to support and encourage female students into careers such as sound production, screen composition and contemporary music performance, where…

At a time when "difference" is being actively diluted in the service of standardisation and conservative views of nationhood, stories about difference, and their semiotic and multimodal elements, provide rich grounds for critical engagement. This is especially the case with stories about highly visible cultural symbols, such as the…