This paper explores how Australian literature mandated for study in the Victorian senior English curriculum creates opportunities for problematizing central myths about Australia. We engage with Homi Bhabha's notion of ambivalence to demonstrate how representations of colonization, rurality and migration reflect discursive formations of Australia.…

"Songspirals are a university for us, they are a map of understandings" (Gay'wu Group of Women, 2019, p. 33). This paper is authored by Bawaka Country, acknowledging Country's ability to teach and share. Country is homeland and place. Country is everything and the relationships that bring everything to life. Country is knowledge. This…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the clubs and club memberships of 491 elite women in three eastern Australian states in the 1930s. It is the second part of a descriptive analysis of these women's biographical sketches in Who's Who-type collections, now out of copyright, published in Australia in the 1930s: Victoria (1934), New…

A recent global reconnaissance of Christian higher education found a number of key themes that shaped current developments, such as the pressing challenges of secularization and nationalization but also the advantages of privatization and massification. This article provides an update to this older analysis by taking a birds-eye view of trends…

This paper reviews sociological literature to explore the challenge transnational populations pose for nation-based curriculum, and vice versa. With increasing access to dual citizenship and temporary migration, more people are living transnational lifestyles. This poses new challenges in raising the transnational child. Transnationalism has…

Schooling has long been identified as a tool for nation-building and cultural reproduction. In early post-Federation Australia, English and literacy education played a significant role in producing colonial subjects. Although Australia today is heralded as a successful multicultural nation with momentum growing for constitutional recognition of…

In this paper, we consider educational populism on social media in England and Australia. In both contexts, academics are positioned as a key constituent of an unjust elite with previously voiceless teachers (UK) and students (Australia) framed as the 'just people'. While populism often speaks to nations and nationalism, as 'the people' against an…

Although multiculturalism replaced the White Australia Policy in the 1970s, the Australian nation continues to be imagined predominantly as a White space from which Aborigines, Torres Strait Islanders and peoples of non-White immigrant heritage are excluded. Whereas White people's positioning as Australian is secure and taken for granted,…

Over the past two decades children's picture books dealing with the Australian experience during the First World War have sought to balance a number of thematic imperatives. The increasingly sentimentalised construct of the Australian soldier as a victim of trauma, the challenge of providing a moral lesson that reflects both modern ideological…

This study investigates how nation is taught, learned, practiced, and performed in early childhood educational settings in Australia and Hungary. Analysis, based on comparative multi-sited ethnography, reveals nationhood as a taken for granted, unreflexively promoted framework for organizing social life. The "pedagogy of nation" operates…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine Anzac Day commemoration in schools during World War 1. Design/methodology/approach: Empirical research from newspapers and education department publications is used to illustrate key themes in these commemorations. Findings: Despite claims made at the time that school commemorations did not promote…

Given the broad public appeal of WWI commemorations and in consideration of their inclusion in school curriculum, the question is raised of how do Turkish and Australian students view the importance and ways of commemorating the Gallipoli campaign? This comparative study, the first of its kind approaches this current gap in understanding how high…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways that history curriculum has worked to legitimise dispossession through narratives that elide questions of Indigenous sovereignty, and which construct and consolidate white settler identity and possession. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses two case studies to compare history…

This study investigates the impact of cultural and politico-religious dominance on the practice of critical reading (CR) of texts by a group of Iranian postgraduate students in Australia. Four postgraduate students were interviewed individually four times (each time for reading one text) for critical understanding of two pairs of Persian texts,…

Debates about the purpose and content of history education in schools have been prevalent in most Westernised democratic nations over the last 30 years. Under discussion are essential questions concerning national identity/ies, competing narratives and the aims of history education. The impact of 'history wars' has been felt within both Australia…