Student wellbeing is a key concern for those delivering tertiary education. Tertiary providers such as universities use a range of techniques to support student wellbeing through times of stress. This article reports on one finding from a mixed methods study at two New Zealand universities that explored how students enrolled in agricultural…

This article draws on feminist new materialist theory to examine the relations in-between queer-bodies, clothing and the schooling environment. Working with Karen Barad's agential realist concepts of intra-action and entanglement, queer-bodies and clothing are conceptualized as material-discursive phenomena, co-constitutive and emergent through…

The field of language policy and planning has seen increasing scholarly attention that explores social actors' micro language planning towards a given language policy situation at the grassroots level. In educational contexts, teachers and educators are often considered pivotal locals whose agency, when enacted in micro language planning, can…

In this article, we draw on findings from two critical ethnographic studies across three high schools in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. While the critical ethnographies canvased a range of topics, this article draws on the empirical findings specific to exploring how relationships and sexuality education as a key learning area within Health…

This article discusses the value of affirming methodologies through two studies of African diasporas that reveal how affirmation enhances autonomy, ownership, solidarity, and cultural assertiveness in the research process. Against the background of an indigenous epistemology, the first study presents insights into the cultural practice of liming…

Achievement data from New Zealand secondary schools suggest that students from lower socio-economic communities have fewer opportunities to engage with complex content in subject English. This article examines this phenomenon by drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality and considers how a context of simultaneously increased autonomy and…

Within self-regulated learning, learners exercise agency by setting targets, formatively monitoring progress, and evaluating results in ways which inform their own goal attainment. However, in real-world classroom situations, assessment processes can elicit behaviours that are more ego-protective than growth-oriented. Resistance to teacher…

There is much contention surrounding the term 'gifted' within Aotearoa New Zealand and international literature. Five teachers who were identified as exemplary teachers of gifted infants and toddlers by surveyed gifted and early childhood communities participated in this study. Whilst the majority of the community members used the term 'gifted'…

We offer here a metaphor of the university as an "infinite game" in which we bring to life insight, imagination, and radical inclusion; and resist the "finite games" that can lead us astray. We suggest that keeping the infinite game alive within universities is a much-needed form of academic activism. We offer four vignettes…

This article argues that neoliberal ideology, through policy and governance of children in early childhood settings, has a very strong influence on children in Aotearoa New Zealand. It affects the way they grow up, play, learn, and perform their resistance and agency in the places and space of their education and care. Every hegemonic discourse is…

In contemporary times, organisations across all sectors of society have been encouraged to collaborate and be 'part of the solution' to childhood obesity. This has led to a proliferation of anti-obesity/healthy lifestyles programmes that are funded, devised and implemented by private sector players (e.g. McDonald's, Nestlé) in schools across the…

As neoliberal ideology has come to dominate higher education, the roles and relationships of managers, academics and students have changed radically. This article outlines ways in which neoliberalism and its companion ideology, neoconservatism, have impacted on higher education through a move to individualism, managerialism, measurement and…

Immersed in the bicultural, increasingly globalized, yet uniquely local, Aotearoa New Zealand early childhood landscape, immigrant teacher subjects are shaped in complicated, entangled ways. This paper attempts to open fresh spaces for re-thinking knowable teacher identities by drawing on Julia Kristeva's work on the foreigner and the…

Academic research is subject to audit in many national settings. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the government regulates the flow of publicly funded research income into tertiary institutions through the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF). This article enquires into the effects of the PBRF by exploring data collected from 16 academic women of…

This study applied a cultural lens to the "expert-novice dyad" (Kennell, 2002, p. 243) and explored the learning experiences of indigenous minorities studying in this context. The purpose of this study was to gather narratives that reflected the nature of teaching practices in the one-to-one studio context. The resulting data presented…