Notions of consent, including assent and dissent, are paramount ethical considerations in human research, but have different connotations in research involving young children (aged 3 to 8). While discussion surrounding consent in the early childhood literature has progressed from paternalistic views surrounding the need to protect the child, to…

In recent scholarship, a widely agreed upon definition of "post-truth" has proved elusive, particularly because the term is used in tandem with so-named alternative facts, fake news, misinformation, and references to an anti-expert, anti-intellectual climate. This paper will consider recent educators' efforts in the Australasian region…

Despite the much-touted 'sexual revolution', during the 1960s-70s, at the time most Western education systems avoided sex education. This article identifies contradictory discourses about sex as manifested in two distinct cultural expressions that co-occurred in those years in the UK. The first represented mainstream social conservatism - in the…

University institutional policy is poorly understood. While policy is required by law for universities to accept funding and is revered for articulating values, mitigating risk, and guiding practice, policy is frequently considered absurd and resisted in practice. This is the policy-practice divide. To gain a better understanding of this divide…

Speech at Australian universities is restricted in various ways. A few of them, such as student protests against visiting speakers, receive lots of attention. Others seldom do, such as defamation threats and cyber harassment. Self-censorship may be more significant than overt censorship. Those who want to raise awareness of hidden limitations on…

In this special issue of "English in Australia" dedicated to Annette Patterson, Bronwyn Mellor reflects on this "gentle dissenter". Annette Patterson published articles, book chapters, and school textbooks in Australia, the USA, and the UK. Her incisive intellect and commitment to education probably meant that she was not ever…

In this content analysis, we explored how students address instructor ideology in the university classroom through the social media platform Twitter. We employed Boolean search operators through Salesforce Marketing Cloud Radian6 software to gather tweets and identified English language tweets by how students referenced their instructor's…

Participatory approaches to engaging in research with young children place a great deal of emphasis on children's rights to choose whether or not they wish to be involved. A number of recent studies have reported a range of strategies both to inform children of their research rights and to establish options for checking children's understanding of…

This article discusses a unit of work, developed by this author, that encouraged students to "express themselves" by using language to make a difference (i.e., to protest an issue of particular concern.) While the culminating task for this unit was a spoken task requiring students to reflect upon what they had done and how successful…

Several theories about student unrest in the late 1960s and early 1970s are noted, and the situation and student population of La Trobe University at the time are described. It is proposed that the unrest was both an outgrowth of the political climate and a developmental experience for the individual students. (MSE)

Research into indicators of learning occurring in e-mail discussion groups investigated how to maximize factors that enhance learning and networking using e-mail and how to minimize factors that inhibit learning using this medium. Data from a range of e-mail discussion groups formed the basis of the research, with focus on e-mail discussion that…