Public Education Archives

Educating for Peace: How the Sydney Peace Foundation Builds a Culture of Peace with Justice

Melanie Morrison outlines the importance of education in the pursuit of peace, advocating for a ‘peace with justice’ model for our turbulent times…

In a world plagued with conflict, rising inequality, and eroding human rights, the work of civil society groups and movements dedicated to peace, justice and human rights has never been more important.

Since its founding in 1998, the Sydney Peace Foundation (the Foundation) has been advocating for ‘peace with justice’ recognising that to achieve true and lasting peace, society must go beyond ending war and violent conflict and must also address deep injustices and structural inequality.

The ‘peace with justice’ philosophy distinguishes the Foundation from more conventional peace organisations. Peace is not a passive condition but an active project— one that requires dismantling the systems of poverty, racism, and exclusion that generate violence and inequality in the first instance.

As Emeritus Professor Stuart Rees who co-founded both the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney in 1988 and later the Sydney Peace Foundation, has said, considerations such as access to health care, education and housing are central to building a better world. It is these fundamental human rights and values that are essential foundations for a more peaceful and just society.

Through education, public engagement, and advocacy, the Foundation has worked with a broad coalition of individuals and organisations committed to peace and social progress to reimagine what a truly peaceful and just society might look like.

This excerpt from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights underscores the centrality of peace education in building these foundations.

“Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.” – Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Central to the Foundation’s work has been its commitment to education as a transformative tool. The Foundation has encouraged people in Australia and abroad to think about the meaning of peace, justice, and alternatives to violence. It is about building a culture of peace with justice where these concepts should not only be taught as a theory but as an active practice.

Teaching from theory to practice

The partnership with the NSW Teachers Federation combines both these elements. How do we embed theories of peace and justice in professional teaching practice? The University of Sydney’s Dr Jake Lynch, also a former director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, has run several sessions with Federation peace delegates on the academic approach that connects the theory and practice of nonviolence, human rights, and conflict transformation. By outlining the distinction between ‘positive peace’ and ‘negative peace’, these sessions encourage a deeper understanding of the necessary conditions for true and sustained peace.

These concepts were developed by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung where ‘positive peace’ goes beyond the absence of armed or weaponised conflict, which he refers to as ‘negative peace’, and incorporates the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. Dr Jake Lynch elaborates on his article entitled Peace and Conflict Studies – Teaching Peace (Journal of Professional Learning 23)

This partnership builds on the NSW Teachers Federation’s long-standing commitment to peace and peace education as fundamental to the ethos of public education. At its very core, public education promotes just and equitable societies in its advocacy and support for access to high quality education for all. No matter where you come from, how much money you have or who you are, you are welcome in public schools. It goes without saying that in the public school sector themes of social justice, human rights, reconciliation, and nonviolence are intrinsically embedded into teaching practice across a range of curriculum areas.

Over recent years, the Teachers Federation has strengthened engagement with the Sydney Peace Foundation and other organisations committed to building a safe, more equitable and more peaceful society. During Peace Week, for example, teachers and students become active contributors to building a culture of peace primarily through the schools program at Cabramatta High School and the Sydney Peace Prize Lecture and Award Ceremony.

The Cabramatta High Peace Day is a highlight of Peace Week. For over 20 years, Cabramatta High, located in Sydney’s multicultural heartland, brings together thousands of students for a celebration of diversity and inclusion. Many students wear traditional cultural dress— from Ukraine to Iraq, from Afghanistan to Ghana— with colourful performances from across the globe. Sydney Peace Prize laureates find it one of the most meaningful parts of Peace Week with the regional head of International Federation of the Red Cross, Alexander Matheou, saying in 2024, “I’ve worked in peace for 25 years and it seems I should have come to Cabramatta High to see what peace really looks like.”

The purpose of education, as defined by UNESCO, is to empower individuals, strengthen communities and fosters inclusive societies. “It is one of the most powerful tools to lift marginalised children and adults out of poverty, and it also helps to uphold other basic human rights. It is the cornerstone of peace, justice and resilience in the face of the world’s most pressing challenges. This is the basis of any democratic society, and the right to education is protected by international law.”

Inherent in these concepts is the process through which students become informed citizens with the knowledge and skills, coupled with the practical experience to participate in the civil society and our democratic processes.

Emeritus Professor Stuart Rees stated in a Honi Soit article last year, in reference to student participation in civil society action when the Centre of Peace and Conflict Studies still existed, “Students spent time on the picket line to learn about labour, to learn about the rights of workers, to learn about the consequences of privatisation, to learn about the apparent power of trade unions. More was learned in a couple of nights huddled around fires with workers than from just theory alone.”

The Sydney Peace Prize as Pedagogy

The Foundation is perhaps best known for the annual Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s only international prize for peace. The Prize is not merely an award— it is a pedagogical tool, designed to shift public conversation and inspire debate.

The Sydney Peace Prize laureates represent a remarkable collection of moral and intellectual courage. Their philosophies and values embedded in their lives and their work hold invaluable pedagogical lessons.

The jury assesses nominees’ efforts to promote peace with justice and awards the Prize to individuals or organisations that have made significant contributions to global peace, through challenging systems of structural violence, inequality, gender discrimination and racism in all its forms.

Recipients have ranged from Muhammad Yunus, the Foundation’s inaugural laureate, who reimagined finance as a tool for the poorest, to feminist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva’s championing of Indigenous agricultural knowledge in India as scientifically valid and continues to be a strong proponent of non-violent community action.

Also, laureates including the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Patrick Dodson and the Uluru Statement from the Heart, all proposing that reconciliation is not the erasure of painful history but its honest reckoning. When Tutu was in Australia, he urged the then Prime Minister John Howard to apologise to Aboriginal Australians for the discrimination they suffer.

Both Patrick Dodson and the Uluru Statement from the Heart highlighted strong themes of respect, recognition and reconciliation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. For educators, the message of these powerful Indigenous individuals and movements is that you cannot move forward without an acknowledgement of the past. Genuine peace cannot be built on silence. It must be firmly grounded firmly in the rights of Indigenous people.

And the many women who have received the Sydney Peace Prize who have refused to be silent as they challenge power structures, the patriarchy, climate justice and inequality.

Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, and Irene Khan all connect the dots between capitalism and climate disaster, between the patriarchy, freedom of speech and human suffering, between corporate power and the erosion of democracy. They fearlessly identify who holds power, who benefits from existing power structures, and who pays the price.

I will make special mention here of our 2026 Sydney Peace Prize Laureate, Australian international human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson. Her work also traverses climate and gender justice, human rights, press freedom and the rights of marginalised communities, Importantly, she is also a strong advocate for public education recognising the fundamental role it plays as a foundation for a more equal and fair society. Also, Dr Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian Christian lawmaker, who continues to act as a role model for courage. She has maintained her principled, evidence-based advocacy in the face of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and brutal personal attacks.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, who received the Sydney Peace Prize in 2018 and the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, teaches us that genuine peace cannot be built while economic inequality and economic injustice exist. The political system that creates this inequality— by serving the interests of the powerful while failing to protect the poorest nations and communities— must be challenged.

Former Human Rights Commissioners Mary Robinson and the 2025 Sydney Peace Prize Laureate Navi Pillay both teach us that human rights are not abstract legal instruments but lived realities, that international law is not a privilege extended by the powerful but a universal right in which every human life carries equal worth and equal protection under the law.

The stories of each and every Sydney Peace Prize laureate— whether it be the lawyers, the political leaders, the artists, the community workers, the academics, the weapons inspectors, the activists— remind us that even in the darkest moments, there is power working together for peace, justice and universal human rights. Stories of courage and compassion deliver powerful lessons in ‘educating for peace’, inspiring a new generation to be active participants in building a better, more just world.

We know that change requires solidarity and collective action. Through our partnership with the NSW Teachers Federation and other organisations, communities and individuals committed to peace with justice, we can be that change.

Here I will end with a quote from Judge Navi Pillay, “we live in a world where voices for justice are louder, more connected, and more courageous than ever before. The path ahead is neither easy nor short, but it is a path we must walk together – with integrity, with compassion, and with determination.”

References

Lynch, J. (2026) Peace and Conflict Studies – Teaching Peace Journal of Professional Learning 23

Morrison, M. (n.d.) Sydney Peace Foundation Annual Report 2024 chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://sydneypeacefoundation.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/2024-SPF-Annual-Report-FINAL_website.pdf

Sydney Peace Foundation (n.d.) Peace Prize Recipients https://sydneypeacefoundation.org.au/peace-prize-recipients/

Sydney Peace Foundation (n.d.) 2025 Navi Pillay https://sydneypeacefoundation.org.au/peace-prize-recipients/navi-pillay/

UN General Assembly, Resolution 217A (III), Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A/RES/217(III) (December 10, 1948), https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.

UNESCO (n.d.) What you need to know about education and why it matters https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/what-you-need-know-about-education-and-why-it-matters

Zhang, V. (n.d.) A Collective Voice for Peace With Justice Honi Soit https://honisoit.com/2025/10/peace-foundation-collective-voice-for-peace-with-justice/

About the author

Melanie Morrison is the executive director of the Sydney Peace Foundation. She is a human rights, peace and climate justice advocate with extensive leadership experience in partnerships, strategy, communications and program development. With a Master’s Degree from the University of Sydney, she has led communications and research programs across the corporate, non-profit, government and university sectors. She is an award-winning journalist, researcher and producer for her work in Australia and overseas.

Educating for Peace – Melanie Morrison Download

Peace and Conflict Studies – Teaching Peace

Jake Lynch provides a well – researched outline of the essential knowledge that teachers would need to introduce the concepts of peace and conflict to their students…

We have the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy to thank (or perhaps blame) for fixing Peace in popular imagination as one-half of an antonymic dyad with War. As for establishing war and conflict as widely used synonyms. The gift, or fault, of journalism. To use a different word at ‘second mention’ is a virtue of news writing.

Teaching peace opens these definitions and elisions to critical thinking by identifying and questioning their component parts. In doing so, it resources groups to relate the dynamics of conflict, violence and indeed peace to layers of their own experience, both direct and mediated. So, it honours and – to an extent depending on circumstance – emulates the ideal of its soulmate, critical pedagogy, in enabling all to be both teachers and learners.

From my background as a television reporter and presenter (and sometime Sydney Correspondent for the UK Independent newspaper) I began by interrogating the typically event-driven coverage offered to news audiences. How often does a violent incident make a headline as the latest episode in “the war between X and Y”? A later paragraph will often open thus: “The conflict began when…” and go on to remind readers of an earlier violent event.

Downplayed, or often omitted altogether, are the processes that lead up to the events. This is where the definition of conflict coined by the Norwegian polymath, Johan Galtung – seen as the ‘Father of Peace Studies’ – is key. Conflict, he declared, is nothing more than “a relationship between two or more parties who have, or think they have, incompatible goals” (Galtung, 1976: 290). That relationship can be reproduced in social relations at many levels – up to and including the waging of war. But it doesn’t need to be. The use of military force is a response to conflict, but only one of a range of possible responses.

Galtung envisaged those relations in a triangle, dividing them into Attitudes, Behaviours and Contradictions: the ABC of Conflict. Impetus for change can emanate from any one of them at any time. And they can combine to produce real-world effects. Violent behaviours can harden attitudes and make it more difficult to open dialogue about goals and their potential for areas of compatibility. “We don’t talk to terrorists”, in the familiar phrase.

Indeed, investigations found that outrage occasioned by Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure was one factor in deterring the Ukrainian government from engaging seriously with the Turkish peace plan, which could have halted the war there as long ago as 2022.

Then, is conflict – as distinct from war – necessarily a bad thing? Change is inherently conflictual, since pretty much any change will suit some people more than others. Students can be invited to imagine a society where nothing ever changes. The sclerosis would freeze injustices in place. To intensify conflict can have the effect of ‘calling out’ such problems, exposing them and bolstering demands for reform and progress.

If war and conflict are – as per countless news reports – synonymous, then peace would risk being seen as the antonym of conflict, not just war. And that would make it impossible to attain, since conflict, on this definition, is an inescapable and in many ways essential fact of life.

How about violence? Again, the field generally follows Galtung’s conceptual innovation by dividing violence into component parts: the form it takes from the effect it brings about. The latter is the defining feature: violence is anything that holds people’s “somatic and mental realizations below their potential” (Galtung, 1969: 168).

It’s obvious how this results from, say, a hospital or apartment block being bombed. That is Direct Violence: so-called because of the direct subject-action-object sequence of They did This to Them. But the effect can be wrought in many other ways too: woven into systems and structures, perpetuated by rules, ideas and assumptions. These can be divided into two other forms: Structural Violence and Cultural Violence. The latter makes the other two “feel right – or at least not wrong”. So, could peace be defined as the absence of violence?

The absence or cessation of Direct Violence can be seen as “negative peace” – not to indicate anything wrong with it, indeed many groups of people in today’s world understandably yearn for it. Negative in the sense that it can be ‘got’ by refraining from doing something.

Positive peace, on the other hand, entails tackling the other forms of violence as well. Re-imagining and reforming structures and institutions; exposing prejudices, re-thinking notions and images of self and other that have hardened over time and across generations. It’s implicated in the United Nations mandate of Peacebuilding, added in the 1990s to its traditional jobs of Peacemaking (brokering agreements) and Peacekeeping (deploying neutral forces in blue helmets). Creating new, more equitable ways of doing and being together as a social safeguard against lapsing or relapsing into war.

A peaceful society is one with abundant resources and willingness to seek out instances of structural and cultural violence; promote and conduct inclusive dialogue about how to change and overcome them and commit to the widest and greatest possible fulfilment of human potential.

As such processes can (indeed must) occur at all levels, we all have a part to play. So, interrogating and broadening definitions of these crucial underlying concepts of war, peace, conflict and violence – as I have briefly done here – allows groups of learners to engage by reference to their own experience, impressions and position in society (both local and global).

Peace Journalism

One abundant source of material for class discussion, as already hinted above, is news stories about various conflicts.

What makes news the way it is? Influences on content have been arranged, in relevant research, in a “hierarchy” – with a role for journalists themselves and their ethical and operational precepts, but embedded in (and often outranked by) commercial and organisational considerations.

The classic news story has a beginning, middle and end that all take place, or become apparent, in the interval between deadlines. That’s what makes it news – as opposed to ‘olds’. Reporters must establish not only why we should hear about something, but why we should hear about it today. What’s happened since the last time we heard about it?

These pressures produce a dominant form that Galtung diagnosed as “war journalism” – not, or not only in the obvious sense of reporting about wars, but a way of representing conflicts (of all kinds) that cognitively primes us for violence. It’s what we are led or left to expect and regard as the inevitable – even desirable – corollary of the story as presented.

Hence the remedial form of Peace Journalism, which has breathed life over the past few decades in both scholarly research and various forms of practice, such as training courses for journalists in societies affected by violent conflict by way of media development aid.

Whereas War Journalism is oriented towards war-and-violence; propaganda; elites, and victory, Peace Journalism adopts the opposite orientations, towards conflict-and-peace; truth; people, and solutions. It has been defined as journalism that “prompts and equips readers and audiences to consider and value nonviolent responses to conflicts” (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005: 5).

A typical War Journalism story will open with a traumatic event and go on to juxtapose reactions to it through quotes from elite sources, often confined to those on ‘our’ side. These may concentrate on promising further steps to ensure the ‘enemy’ is neutralised or even ‘destroyed’. Then ‘peace’ can be ‘restored’.

Peace Journalism, on the other hand, will often find sources from sub-elite levels whose own life experiences reveal the underlying processes, replete with structural and cultural violence, that lead up to such events. Their inputs may be used to inspect the claims of leaders in a fresh light and critically assess them. And it will pick up on initiatives and suggestions for positive peace by addressing these more structural and systemic problems, to prevent the recurrence of direct violence.

It can be a powerful teaching and learning technique to source such material as a group and compile an alternative version of a news story. News in its typical rhetoric does not invite discussion about itself. It is still more likely to self-certify as “the way it is” rather than prompting us to wonder how it came to be that way. To realise there is a fund of options for telling it differently can be most eye-opening. Today, of course, there are abundant alternative media operating in liminal spaces that offer such material, so it can be found with relative ease.

So these are some beginnings for any teachers wishing to offer peace as an object and subject of learning. It can be empowering for groups; but also challenging, as assumptions (that ‘we’ are the ‘goodies’, for example) are critically examined and discussed.

References

Galtung, Johan (1969) ‘Violence, peace and peace research’. Journal of Peace Research, 6 (3), pp. 167–191.

Galtung, Johan (1976) ‘Three Approaches to Peace: Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Peacebuilding’. Impact of Science on Society, 1/2 (1976). PRIO publication No. 25-9, pp 282-304.

Lynch, Jake and Annabel McGoldrick (2005) Peace Journalism. Stroud: Hawthorn Press.

About the author

Associate Professor Jake Lynch teaches into the Master of Social Justice degree program at the University of Sydney. He has spent the past 30 years researching, developing, teaching and training in Peace Journalism. For this work, he was recognised with the award of the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize, by the Schengen Peace Foundation.

Scholarly publications include several books and over 60 book chapters and refereed articles. Jake served for nine years on the Executive Committee of the Sydney Peace Foundation, and for two years as Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association.

Before taking up an academic post, Jake enjoyed a 20-year career in journalism. He was a Political Correspondent for Sky News, at Westminster, and the Sydney Correspondent for the Independent newspaper, culminating in a role as an on-air presenter (anchor) for BBC World Television News.

Jake’s novel series, the Janna Rose mysteries (published by Next Chapter) break new ground as the first detective fiction to be set in the world of EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing: a powerful therapeutic technique for treating unprocessed trauma. The second, Diagnosis or Death, published in 2026, follows Mind Over Murder (2025): https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F1YDRX5Q?binding=paperback&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tpbk

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Readers Who Ponder: The Case for Developing Ethical Understanding Through Picture Books in The Primary Classroom

Bianca Bertalli examines how children’s literature can be used to develop ethical understanding and to address complex issues such as asylum seeking, climate change or social inequalities…

Ethical Understanding in the Primary Years

While the internet delivers information and communication more readily than ever before, a disconnect in ethical decision making by young people in online and offline contexts, is becoming increasingly apparent (James, 2016). To enable students to apply positively principled decision-making strategies to a wide variety of issues, students require opportunities to build ethical understanding throughout their early primary school years and beyond (Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority [ACARA], n.d.). Quality fiction texts in primary school libraries can lay the foundation for learning centred around ethical understanding including values, rights and responsibilities around global issues such as sustainability, democracy and conflict (Johnston, 2017; Johansson, 2013; Lyngfelt, Sporre, Lifmark, Lilja, Osbeck & Franck, 2022; Baird Saenger, 1993).

The Increasing Complexity of Contemporary Picture Books

Humans have a long history in visual storytelling. Across the world- and across time- cultural knowledge has informed the composition and interpretation of visual and multi-modal texts (Lyngfelt, Sporre, Lifmark, Lilja, Osbeck & Franck, 2022; Johnston, 2017). Cooper (2026) points to Murujuga Aboriginal rock art as an example of some of the earliest records of the human experience, told through petroglyphs. Created at least 50 000 years ago, these images continue to tell significant stories today. While traditional children’s literature from the 18^th century onwards often served the didactic purpose of instilling a spiritual education, the turn of the 20^th century saw children’s literature begin to centre children as characters, with plots and purposes of their own (Broomhall, McEwan & Tarbin, 2017). Contemporary picture books usually combine written and visual modes of communication and encompass a growing number of styles and formats (Johnston, 2017).

Postmodern picture books of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries marked a notable change in the way stories are told. These texts often present narrative gaps in which readers must infer their own comprehension of the text. They may also feature ambiguous or inconclusive endings that prompt readers to ponder their own understanding of what has occurred and why (Johnston, 2017; Gleeson, 2021). The increasing complexity of picture books easily lends itself to exploring philosophy or ethics while also simultaneously fostering an early love of reading (Johnston, 2017; Johansson, 2013; Lyngfelt, et. al., 2022; Broomhall et. al., 2017; Gleeson, 2021). While moving away from traditional religious instruction, contemporary literature still assists students to understand the shared values, beliefs, and relationships of their world (Broomhall, McEwan & Tarbin, 2017).

Baird Saenger (1993) suggests that exploring ethics through literature has the potential to improve the clarity and strength of students’ reasoning and instil the ability to listen more closely, articulate thoughts and reflect on actions. In 2022, Lyngfelt, et. al. examined how fiction could be used to develop students’ critical reflection around complex moral issues such as immigration, climate change, war, relationships, and the uncertainty of the future. The researchers found that through fiction, students can deeply and emotionally experience different forms of the world, or of the human condition, and create intrinsic motivation for exploring ethical change.

Picture books that Encourage Children to Ponder

To ‘ponder’ is to engage in deep and considered thinking before reaching a decision or conclusion (Oxford English Dictionary, 2023). Quality fiction narratives successfully build complex characters through which students can carefully explore varying perspectives of plot points, while applying an ethical thinking lens (Lyngfelt, Sporre, Lifmark, Lilja, Osbeck & Franck, 2022). Teachers interviewed in the Lyngfelt et. al. (2022) study acknowledged that while many longer texts may be suitable for independent readers, it is vital to consider the linguistic ability of students and their aptitude to unpack literary devices or access comprehension skills. Given that the Australian Curriculum requires the general capability of Ethical Understanding to be taught beginning in the foundation year of school (Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority, n.d), picture books provide the solution to enabling younger readers to ponder ethical thinking, supporting knowledge development through visual literacy, accessible vocabulary, and relatable characters (Johnston, 2017).

Short Texts Add Long-Term Value to the Collection

A cursory glance at the Children’s Book Council Australia shortlisted picture books in the last 5 years shows an abundance of texts that tackle themes through which ethical understanding can be explored. The Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (2021) describes ethical understanding as a continuum of learning that allows students to identify differing perspectives, explore moral and ethical concepts, and apply ethical thinking in response to an issue. Teacher librarians and classroom teachers can purposefully select texts through which students can build ‘deep literacy’. This term, coined by Johnston (2017), aims to describe a profound level of emotional understanding that influences thoughts and behaviours beyond the initial engagement with the book. Lyngfelt, et al. (2023) found that an emotional engagement with children’s literature assisted children to become more aware of their own ethical responsibilities and their place in the world, as well as developing a sense of justice for others.

Collection development in the Australian school library setting should be guided by the 2023 Australian Library and Information Association and Australian School Library Association [ALIA & ASLA] values. The inclusion of picture books that support students to develop ethical understanding enables the exchange of ideas and information, the promoting of democratic values, and the representation of diversity with the aim of advocating for human rights, sustainability, peace, social inclusion and other challenges the future may bring. Further, ALIA’s endorsement of the principles of the ‘2030 Sustainable Development Goals’ and ‘United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights- Article 19’ reflects ACARA’s description of ethical understanding as vital in responding to ‘human rights and responsibilities, environmental issues and global justice’ (2021, para. 2). Picture books often place children as the central characters navigating the complex ethical issues at hand and imbued with the power to make a difference, and this supports students to become accountable for their actions, providing the foundations to participate fully in the Australian democratic society (ACARA, n.d.). The development of collaborative discussion skills, centred on ethical reasoning, are at the heart of enabling respectful discussion and robust philosophical debates (Lyngfelt, et al., 2023), aligning with the ALIA value that libraries should ‘promote the free flow of information and ideas’ (2023, para. 6). Additionally, ALIA promotes broad library collections as essential to benefiting ‘a thriving culture, economy and democracy’ (2023, para. 6) and as such, ethics-focused picture books are vital to the primary school library collection.

The Bridge: The Teacher Librarian, Ethical Understanding and the Future

While exploring quality literature has always been at the heart of the teacher librarian role, the changing information landscape means that this role must also evolve (ASLA, 2004). James (2016) argues that with the burst of information communication technologies, a deficit in online ethical behaviour is often demonstrated by young people by their conduct in online communities, attention to privacy, and the treatment of intellectual property. As dual leaders in educational pedagogy and information literacy, teacher librarians must bridge the connection between offline and online ethics, when addressing information creation and consumption with their students. To do this, teacher librarians are required to ensure that the library’s literary collection is carefully curated to respond to the learning needs of their students and the call to strengthen ethical understanding across online and offline domains (ASLA, 2004; ACARA, n.d.). By selecting picture books that deal with morally complex social issues, teacher librarians utilise the ‘bridging capacity’ of children’s literature, allowing students to understand the impact of their behaviour on those outside their world as well as a deeper understanding of ‘fairness for themselves and others’ before they move online (NSW Department of Education, 2021, p. 29).

In a joint statement, ASLA and ALIA determined that school libraries are ‘necessary to create safe, confident users of online content’, tasking teacher librarians with the responsibility to support students in recognising opportunities to respond ethically when participating online (2004, para. 1). For example, choosing picture books that help children to deeply understand the values of honesty and integrity may influence them to transfer their ethical thinking between offline and online domains, when it comes to content creation, the use of AI or cyberbullying, in the future. As children now access technology that enables them to both decode and encode information through social media applications, computer software, and handheld devices (often before they can even read or write), the ethics of information creation must be considered far earlier than ever before (Johnston, 2017; ACARA, 2021). By the end of primary school, students should be able to ‘monitor consistency between rights and responsibilities when interacting face-to-face or through social media’ (ACARA, n.d., p. 2). James (2016) suggests that to combat the ethical disconnect currently experienced by young people, students require models and mentors to teach ways to connect more consciously online. The teacher librarian must serve as a bridge in developing ethical understanding offline and online, by explicitly teaching the general capability of ethical understanding across a learning continuum beginning with text choice in the first years of school.

Exemplar Picture Books for Ethical Understanding

Detailed illustrations draw on students’ visual literacy skills, communicating on an emotional level as well as supporting an understanding of place and context for younger readers who have limited cultural currency (Johnston, 2017). The Invisible by Tom Percival (2021) tells the story from the perspective of a young girl facing poverty and homelessness. While these issues may normally elude relatability for some younger children, the illustrations laced in cool greys and blues resonate with the reader as the protagonist literally fades away in her sadness. As Isabel becomes invisible in an unfamiliar city, she notices the other ‘invisible people’. Directed at ages 3 and up, this sophisticated picture book allows children of all ages to ponder what it is that might alienate someone to the point of feeling invisible, as well as ways we can each address inequality, exclusion, poverty, and loneliness (Simon & Shuster, 2023).

While Percival’s (2021) story follows a linear storyline- orientation, complication, resolution- Paradise Sands: A Story of Enchantment, written and illustrated by Levi Pinfold (2023) echoes other postmodern picture books and provides gaps in the narrative and an ambiguous ending. This format provides opportunities for students to examine the ethical decisions faced by the female lead character as well as morally complex themes as identified by The Children’s Book Council Australia (2023) including ‘entrapment, courage, wisdom, patience, belief, temptation and, above all, love’ (para. 2). Set in an eerie desert, three children trespass onto a desolate property and face a foretold meeting with a powerful being called ‘The Teller’. The young girl must make a bargain, demonstrating bravery and resilience, to free her siblings. Written for children aged 5 and up (though perhaps thematically better suited to older readers), stunning illustrations hold hidden layers of visual details that provide a firm platform for discussion and scope for broad interpretation, especially for students who may not yet understand the nuances of figurative language (Johansson, 2013; Lyngfelt, et. al., 2022; Baird Saenger,1993; Walker Books, 2023; Hillel, 2023).

Also purposefully crafting equivocality within its storyline and themes, is Margaret Wild’s (2018) The Feather. Illustrated by Freya Blackwood, the picture book presents a setting that Boulanger-Mashberg describes as ‘anonymous’ (2023, para. 2), leaving space for readers to discuss or infer why the trees are barren and the sun and moon are forever covered. Two young children discover a large glowing, white feather. However, once the town’s adults begin to dictate how the feather should be held and protected, it loses its luminescence and begins to blacken. In the end it is the dreams of the children which restore and free the feather and it is left for the reader to interpret why. The text and images work together to tell a powerful story that explores selflessness, kindness, redemption, hope and the power that children hold to change the world when their voices are valued (Boulanger-Mashberg, 2023).

Text complexity is a primary consideration when choosing a book for younger readers (Baird Saenger, 1993) however, Johnston (2017) makes the point that in just a few words, complex ideas can be communicated, and simple statements can indeed be so profound that they require time reserved for the reader to ruminate. A picture book in which short rhyming couplets serve to provoke deep thinking is Matthew McConaughey’s (2023) Just Because, illustrated by Renée Kurilla. Through examining contradictions in the ways we perceive the world around us, McConaughey uses powerful prose to challenge students’ aged 4-8 years views on ethical concepts such as honesty, respect, and fairness (ACARA, n.d.)

Room on our Rock by Kate and Jol Temple (2019), illustrated by Terri Rose Baynton, informs readers from the outset that there are two sides to every story. This statement opens the possibility for defining multiple perspectives and what this might look like for children. Temple & Temple (2019) have written their book to be read in the first instance front to back, presenting the point of view of a group of unsympathetic seals who refuse to shelter two strangers. The book then asks readers to read from back to front, where the story is instead delivered through the eyes of the desperate, anthropomorphic asylum seekers. The powerful narrative flip has the potential for deep learning around ‘human rights and responsibilities, animal rights, environmental issues and global justice’ as described in the ACARA general capability of ethical understanding (ACARA, n.d., para. 2).

The NSW Teachers Federation library holds an extensive collection of picture books designed to engage students in understanding ethical thinking, social justice or diversity. These are available to members to loan for free.

References:

Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority. (n.d). Ethical Understanding (Version 8.4). https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/general-capabilities/ethical-understanding/

Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority. (n.d). Ethical Understanding learning continuum. https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/media/1073/general-capabilities-ethical-understanding-learning-continuum.pdf

Australian Library and Information Association (2023) What we do. https://alia.org.au/Web/Web/About-Us/What-we-do.aspx#:~:text=Our%20agenda,do%20not%20believe%20in%20censorship.

Australian Library and Information Association and Australian School Library Association. (2016). Statement on information literacy. https://asla.org.au/resources/Documents/Website%20Documents/Policies/policy_Information_Literacy.pdf

Australian School Library Association. (2004). ALIA-ASLA standards of professional excellence for teacher librarians. https://read.alia.org.au/alia-asla-standards-professional-excellence-teacher-librarians

Baird Saenger, E. (1993). Exploring ethics through children’s literature (Books 1–2). Pacific Grove, CA: Critical Thinking Press & Software.

Boulanger-Mashberg, A. (2023). The Feather. Freya Blackwood. https://www.freyablackwood.com.au/the-feather-1

Broomhall, S., McEwan, J., & Tarbin, S. (2017, March 30). Once upon a time: A brief history of children’s literature. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/once-upon-a-time-a-brief-history-of-childrens-literature-75205

Childrens Book Council Australia. (2023) Previous winners. https://www.cbca.org.au/previous-winners

The Childrens Book Council Australia. (2023). Paradise sands: a story of enchantment. https://www.cbca.org.au/book/paradise-sands-a-story-of-enchantment

Cochrane, G. (2018, February 5). Picture books are relevant for students of all ages. National Library of New Zealand. https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/picture-books-are-relevant-for-students-of-all-ages

Cooper, R. (Marrch 23, 2026). Sydney media conferences staggering gaslighting pf traditional custodians must be called out. Cheek Media Co. https://cheekmedia.substack.com/p/sydney-media-conferences-staggering

Gleeson, B. (2022). Are they getting the picture? Access, 36(1), 41-48. The National Library of New Zealand. (n.d.). Services to schools. https://natlib.govt.nz/schools

Hillel, M. (2023). Paradise sands. The Children’s Book Council of Australia. https://readingtime.com.au/paradise-sands/

James, C. (2016). Disconnected; youth, new media, and the ethics gap. Random House US.

Johansson, V. (2013). “I am scared too”: Children’s Literature for an Ethics beyond Moral Concepts. The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 47(4), 80–109. https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.47.4.0080

Johnston, R. R. (2017). Australian Literature for Young People. Oxford University Press.

Lyngfelt, A., Sporre, K., Lifmark, D., Lilja, A., Osbeck, C., & Franck, O. (2023). Bridging “as is” and “as if” by reading fiction in ethics education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 53(1), 63–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2022.2075323

McConaughey, M. (2023). Just because. Penguin Random House.

New South Wales Department of Education. (2022). Information Fluency framework. https://education.nsw.gov.au/content/dam/main-education/teaching-and-learning/curriculum/media/documents/Information_fluency_framework.pdf

Oxford English Dictionary. (2023). Oxford University Press; Oxford English Dictionary. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1284911909

Percival, T. (2021). The invisible. Simon and Shuster.

Pinfold, L. (2023) Paradise sands: a story of enchantment. Walker Books Australia.

Simon and Shuster (2023) The invisible by Tom Percival.

https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/The-Invisible/Tom-Percival/9781471191305

Temple, K. & Temple, J. (2019). Room on our rock. Scholastic Australia.

Walker Books (2023). Paradise sands: a story of enchantment. https://www.walkerbooks.com.au/book/9781406383942/

Wild, M. (2018). The feather. Hardie Grant Egmont.

About the Author

Bianca Bertalli is a NSW Department of Education teacher librarian K-6, at Gol Gol Public School in the Rural Far West. She is a recent graduate of the Charles Sturt University Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship) and a NSW Department of Education Specialist Teacher Scholarship recipient. Bianca began teaching in 2010, as a classroom teacher in the inner city of Sydney, where she previously served as an elected government school representative on the Quality Teaching Council. Bianca has presented at courses and conferences to support early career teachers to develop skills in classroom management, planning/ programming and the accreditation process. She has been an active member of the NSW Teachers Federation for the past 17 years.

Readers Who Ponder – Bertalli Download

Respect starts here: fostering safe and inclusive classrooms and schools

Respect and consent are not new concepts in education, yet their meaning and practical application are often unevenly understood across school contexts. As educators navigate increasing reports of gendered disrespect, sexualised behaviour and the influence of digital misogyny on young people, many are seeking clearer guidance on how to respond through curriculum and pedagogy.

Teachers are noticing shifts in student language and behaviour shaped by online cultures that normalise sexism, rigid gender hierarchies and hostility toward gender equity. At the same time, staff frequently report uncertainty about how to address these behaviours in developmentally appropriate ways that align with syllabus requirements and whole-school expectations. Without coherent, research-informed approaches to consent education and gender equity, schools risk responding reactively rather than building sustained, preventative cultures of respect.

This course responds to growing demand for professional learning that strengthens teachers’ capacity to embed consent, gender equity and respectful relationships within everyday teaching practice. By developing a shared understanding of gender, power and digital influence, participants will be supported to build safer, more inclusive school communities through intentional curriculum and classroom strategies.

This course is designed for K–12 teachers who are interested in strengthening their curriculum and pedagogical approaches to consent, gender equity and fostering respectful and inclusive school cultures. Participants will examine how gender, power and digital influences shape behaviour in contemporary school contexts and consider how understandings of consent have evolved within education. Teachers will expand their strategies and skills in embedding consent education, addressing misogynistic and sexualised behaviours, and fostering respectful relationships across a range of classroom settings to support safer learning environments.

9am-3pm on Monday 24 August at NSW Teachers Federation, Surry Hills

$220

Please note payment is taken after the course.

How to be an effective Learning and Support Teacher

This course is designed for teachers who are interested in building practical skills around learning and support process, structures and implementation across K-12 and all settings. Participants will break down the role of a learning and support teacher, build capacity to manage workload and look to create a context specific guide to assist them in their work.

9am-3pm on Thursday 12 November 2026 in Surry Hills

$220

The Jackie Manuel Secondary English Conference: Empowering teachers to find the joy

The CPL English conference team is back with a wealth of inspiring, resource-rich and evidence-based practical approaches to teaching reading and writing from Year 7 to Year 12.

Workshops will include:

EAL/D Principles & Effective Practices
This session demonstrates how EAL/D pedagogy through multimodal scaffolding, explicit language teaching and purposeful talk supports students to engage with and analyse complex texts. Grounded in EAL/D principles and CESE Effective Practices, participants will explore how high challenge, high support learning can be designed through intentional planning and scaffolding. Teachers will leave with practical strategies to create inclusive, language-rich classrooms where all learners can access, participate and succeed.
Presented by: Cindy Valdez

Integrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander texts
This presentation supports NSW Stage 6 English teachers in effectively integrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander texts within the new text prescriptions. It provides practical planning tools, including programming frameworks and text selection strategies, to ensure meaningful and authentic inclusion. Teachers are guided through reflective activities to evaluate their current practice and identify areas for growth. Action-oriented tasks enable participants to apply learning directly to their programs. The session aims to build confidence, cultural responsiveness, and ensure Indigenous texts are taught with respect, depth, and integrity.
Presented by Emma Chapman and Jackson Parkes

The texts and joy of Standard language, culture and identity
This is an excellent focus study for Standard as it gives teachers and students the opportunity to explore the rich nature of culture and identity and specifically how the language of each text can affirm and indeed, challenges these concepts. Presenters will explore the six prescribed texts to help teachers make the best choices for their own students and help regain the joy of sharing powerful literature with your students.
Presented by Jowen Hillyer and Rosemary Henzell

The texts and joy of Advanced Textual Conversations and Critical Study
Choosing texts for Textual Conversations is always challenging as it invariably shapes the direction of other choices. In this text list there are several fabulous choices that will ensure joy and delight in your English classroom. There are also some exciting choices to be made for advanced Critical Study. Presenters will explore the 6 pairs for Textual Conversations and the 6 texts on Critical study to help clarify the choices to be made.
Presented by Jowen Hillyer and Rosemary Henzell

7 – 10 Programming principles in practice: plan hard, teach easy
In this interactive workshop, participants will be empowered to move from ‘surviving’ to thriving, allowing for a renewed focus on the joy of teaching.
They will explore the core principles of conceptual frontloading, skill mapping and evidence-based teaching strategies that sit at the heart of quality programming and resource creation.
As part of this workshop, participants will have access to a complete model program, accompanying resources and detailed support material to inform their own programming.
Presented by Rebecca Stock and Carole Vela

Same Roads; Different Maps. English Stage 6.
In this interactive workshop, participants will delve into the specifics of mapping the journey of teaching Stage 6 English. The emphasis will be on practical ideas and strategies that can be used to rediscover the joy of teaching English to senior students.
Presented by Jowen Hillyer and Rosemary Henzell

$275 for the day

Friday, 5 June 2026 at Federation House, 23-33 Mary St, Surry Hills, NSW 2010

“Inspiring and realistic presenters with excellent text recommendations.”

“I love CPL conferences. They are so unpretentious and get straight to the heart/reality of teaching.”

“Just please keep doing these conferences; they are invaluable.”

“Always a great PL day – always leave with new ideas.”

“Engaging presenters and valuable, relevant content.”

“Sense of sharing, being amongst people with common goals.”

“Thank you so very much for imparting your knowledge, your expertise and love of everything English!”

“Thank you for continuing to bring us together at this conference.”

Emma Chapman

Rosemary Henzell

Jowen Hillyer

Jackson Parkes

Rebecca Stock

Cindy Valdez

Carole Vela

Assessment Matters: Let’s Measure What We Value

Australian education systems have long recognised that the most valuable outcomes of schooling extend well beyond narrow measures of achievement. The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Declaration reinforces this by emphasising the development of confident, creative, and actively engaged learners who can think critically, collaborate effectively, and contribute positively to their communities. Yet attributes such as reasoning, creativity, collaboration, conceptual understanding, engagement, are often the very ones teachers find hardest to assess, monitor, and communicate with confidence.

This professional learning course responds directly to that challenge. It supports teachers and leaders to foreground the attributes that matter most for students’ long‑term success and wellbeing, and to build assessment practices that honour the full breadth of the curriculum.

This course will deepen your understanding of the attributes emphasised in the Alice Springs Declaration; offering practical ways to capture growth in complex attributes without reducing them to simplistic checklists or proxies; strengthening task and rubric design, and considering how assessments can be used to reinforce the learning schools (and school communities) value. During this course you will reflect on curriculum intent, and provide students with clear pathways for improvement.

You will be empowered to take ownership of assessment, shifting the narrative from compliance to professional agency and build your confidence in communicating the importance of broader learning outcomes to colleagues, leaders, parents, students, and policymakers.

This course aims to promote values‑aligned assessment practices that reduce over‑reliance on narrow, high‑stakes measures and support fairer, more holistic judgments for all learners, and reinforces teacher professionalism, enhances school‑level decision‑making, and ensures that assessment serves as a tool for growth rather than a constraint on meaningful learning.

Prof Jim Tognolini

Professor Jim Tognolini is Director of The Centre for Educational Measurement and Assessment (CEMA) which is situated within the University of Sydney School of Education and Social Work. The work of the Centre is focused on the broad areas of teaching, research, consulting and professional learning for teachers.

The Centre is currently providing consultancy support to a number of schools. These projects include developing a methodology for measuring creativity; measuring 21st Century Skills; developing school-wide practice in formative assessment. We have a number of experts in the field: most notably, Professor Jim Tognolini, who in addition to conducting research offers practical and school-focused support.

20 August 2026 at NSW Teachers Federation, Surry Hills

$220

Supporting Teachers to Affirm Classroom Diversity

Professor Jacqueline Ullman discusses how teachers can support students who identify as gender and sexuality diverse and to assist them to improve their sense of belonging…

Many schools recognise that, as our society becomes more open to and supportive of gender and sexuality diversity, numbers of gender and sexuality diverse students (e.g. those who might identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender-diverse, or as another diverse gender or sexuality identity) have appeared to increase. The word ‘appeared’ is intentional, as experts in the field argue that the increase in young people identifying as gender and sexuality diverse (GSD) is attributable to the impact of rising social acceptance rather than an increase in actual numbers; in other words, GSD individuals have always existed in similar proportions, however – historically, and in some contexts still today – they have been compelled to hide their identities. In Australia in 2025, as parents/carers and peers are more accepting, more young people are able to be open about who they are.

It is part of the labour of teachers to ensure that all their students feel comfortable and supported to be their authentic selves and to be proud of their diverse identities. While this expectation of teachers is aligned with both federal[1] and state-based[2] guidance, at a more basic and relational level, this commitment to positive representation and inclusion of students’ diverse identities is typically aligned with teachers’ positive feelings towards the diverse range of students in their care. Put simply, most teachers like kids and want to support their self-acceptance and sense of belonging.

Talking about Gender and Sexuality Diversity

However, for a variety of reasons, including lack of relevant pre-service or in-service training, the curricular inclusion of gender and sexuality diversity can feel a bit more challenging than the inclusion of other diverse identities and backgrounds. Some teachers feel nervous about what they are and are not ‘allowed’ to say in the interests of inclusivity and – despite growing numbers of GSD students at all levels of education – teachers sometimes express concerns about whether or not gender and sexuality diversity-inclusive content is appropriate for the primary or secondary school classroom (van Leent, 2017). Even within the area of relationships and personal development education, which includes many suitable content areas where gender and sexuality diversity could easily be integrated, almost a third of Australian teachers do not include same-sex attraction or sexual orientation and a quarter do not include gender diversity (Ezer et al., 2018).

Recent survey research with Australian teachers shows that the large majority report positive feelings about gender and sexuality diverse people and a general sense of comfort engaging with related topics – answering questions, addressing name-calling, and providing a safe environment for GSD students (Burns et al., 2023). An important finding of this research is that, while participating teachers were almost uniformly supportive of inclusivity of gender and sexuality diversity at both the policy and curriculum levels, many reported that this was not enacted at their schools. Less than half reported having a gender and sexuality diversity-inclusive school enrolment policy and less than a third said that inclusive topics were featured in the curriculum in a positive way at their school (Burns et al., 2023).

NSW-Specific Supports for the Inclusion of Gender and Sexuality Diversity

As wise educator Emily Style penned back in 1988, the curriculum should function as “both window and as mirror” to validate students’ experiences of self within the public world of the school as a strong foundation for their lives as adults in broader society. For GSD young people, the majority of whom are raised by “straight”/heterosexual, cisgender[3] parents/carers, school-based validation is even more critical. The New South Wales (NSW) curriculum encourages inclusion of diverse identity characteristics both in the classroom and at the whole-school level and gender and sexuality diversity-inclusive content options exist within many curriculum areas, including PDHPE, English, History, Society and Culture, Community and Family Studies and Legal Studies. Further, the Department acknowledges that students who identify as LGBTQIA+ (or GSD) are at risk of experiencing lower levels of belonging and benefit from “targeted programs to boost their connectedness at school” via education/curriculum, inclusive language and through educators working to curate an inclusive physical environment[4]. Additional support is provided via the “Transgender students in schools” legal issues bulletin 55 (LIB55)[5] which reminds teachers to be “inclusive of all students’ individual learning identity” and acknowledges that gender identity can be discussed across many curriculum areas.

From: NSW Department of Education “What Works Best”, available here. © State of New South Wales (Department of Education), 2023.

Parents’ Attitudes to the Inclusion of Gender and Sexuality Diversity

One of the most commonly reported reasons for teachers’ and school leaders’ lack of engagement with gender and sexuality diversity is their concern about parental opposition and subsequent complaint. Recent Australian survey research has addressed this point head-on, finding that 86.5% of public-school parents in NSW support the introduction of gender and sexuality diversity-inclusive topics during K-12 schooling, with most wanting these introduced by the end of Stages 3 or 4 (Ferfolja et al., 2021). Conversely, just 13.5% preferred total exclusion of gender and sexuality diversity from relationships and sexuality education. NSW parents were more supportive of the inclusion of these topics than the national average (see Ullman et al., 2021 for full, nationally representative survey results).

From: Gender and Sexuality Diversity in Schools: Parental Experiences and Schooling Responses, New South Wales Snapshot Report, available here.

Topics such as diverse romantic relationships and families; the negative impact of GSD bias-based discrimination; and understanding gender diversity were viewed by parents as necessary for creating a positive, safe and supportive school culture and preparing students for living well as adults in a diverse, socially cohesive society. Additionally, while media headlines might have us believe that gender diversity (or transgender identities) is a particularly divisive topic, 65% of public-school parents rated the “difference between biological sex and gender” as this relates to gender diversity and transgender individuals as of “moderate” or “high” importance, with just 19.5% viewing this as “not important” (Ullman et al., 2021).

Crucially, this research was nationally-representative, meaning that – rather than survey results being dismissible as the niche sentiments of those in particular locations or demographics – these findings are our closest reflection of the attitudes and preferences of the public-school parent population. While some communities might have an overrepresentation of vocal oppositional parents, most will have an abundance of supportive parents who may be far less likely to contact the school with positive feedback.

New Professional Learning Resource for Supporting GSD Students

Many teachers and school leaders want to support GSD students to feel visible and included within the school community and there are a plethora of easily-accessible online resources to support their efforts, including many offered by the NSW Teachers Federation. However, educators regularly ask for professional learning in this area, which is much more limited in availability and access.

To meet this need, Associate Professor Jacqueline Ullman and Professor Tania Ferfolja, both academic researchers in Western Sydney University’s School of Education, designed the “Teaching to Affirm Community Diversity” online short course (or ‘micro-credential’). This 10-hour short course is designed with the busy educator in mind – flexibly-available and self-paced, with asynchronous engagement with the academics, and able to be used to satisfy professional learning requirements in NSW and nationally.

The course draws from current Australian research and uses federal guidance and state-based education policy to support teachers seeking to create gender and sexuality diversity-inclusive environments in K-12 schools. Through five modules, each including interactive activities, teacher-learners explore legal and policy frameworks, best practice ideas, and strategies for fostering student belonging through a supportive, safe, and affirming school climate for GSD students.

The “Teaching to Affirm Community Diversity” micro-credential is available through Western Sydney University and can be accessed here.

Drawing from empirical research with parents and GSD students, this short course bridges the gap between legal obligations, known best practices, and real-world application, and aims to increase educators’ awareness about how a positive school climate is related to GSD students’ wellbeing, academic success and sense of belonging.

By the end of the 10-hour short course, teachers and school leaders will be able to:

Identify and understand the unique challenges and experiences faced by GSD learners in K-12 settings and their families;
Apply relevant state and federal departmental policies to confidently implement inclusive pedagogical strategies and administrative practices that support GSD learners;
Address and counteract gender-based violence and bullying, fostering a school environment that supports both GSD learners and educators;
Critically reflect on and improve their own practices to create more inclusive and supportive classroom environments; and,
Critically reflect on their school’s local-level policies and work with colleagues to reshape and enact these in line with their learnings.

Central to the micro-credential is a short film, shown in three parts, where learners are introduced to the real-life (word-for-word, verbatim) experiences of six public school mums, parenting GSD children attending primary and secondary schools. These parents’ experiences of working with public school teachers and school leaders to support their children, shared through short films using their spoken interview data as ‘performed’ by professional actors, expose what schools and educators are doing well and where practices could be improved. Their stories are at once emotional and inspirational and offer a unique backdrop for the ‘why’ of local school policy and pedagogical reform in this area.

The six parents, as professionally acted, in the “What Parents Want: Talking about Gender and Sexuality Diversity” short film, featured in the micro-credential.

As with other areas of diversity and inclusivity, best-practice models for inclusivity of gender and sexuality diversity in schools advocate for whole-school approaches, bringing together both macro-level policy guidance documents and interpersonal, relational considerations for school community. Targeted professional learning in this area is an important, foundational element of such a shift. Importantly, it is evident that the large majority of parents want to see schools working to include GSD students – not just for the benefit of those young people, but to enhance cohesion and reduce bullying for the whole school community.

Want to Know More?

The “Teaching to Affirm Community Diversity” micro-credential at Western Sydney University is available here (https://westernx.edu.au/courses/tacd/?cl=1) and open for rolling enrolment throughout the year. Participants receive a digital badge of recognition upon completion.
Training can also be arranged in-person at the whole-school/team levels. For more information or to register your interest, please reach out to Associate Professor Jacqueline Ullman via j.ullman@westernsydney.edu.au

References

Burns, S., Saltis, H., Hendriks, J., Abdolmanafi, A., Davis-McCabe, C., Tilley, P.J., & Winter, S. (2023). Australian teacher attitudes, beliefs and comfort towards sexuality and gender diverse students. Sex Education, 23(5), 540-555. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2022.2087177.

Ezer, P., Power, J., Jones, T., & Fisher, C. (2020). 2nd National Survey of Australian Teachers of Sexuality Education. Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society, La Trobe University. https://opal.latrobe.edu.au/articles/report/2nd_National_Survey_of_Australian_Teachers_of_Sexuality_Education_2018_pdf/13207265.

Ferfolja, T., Ullman, J., & Hobby, L. (2021). Gender and Sexuality Diversity in Schools: Parental Experiences and Schooling Responses. New South Wales – Snapshot Report. Western Sydney University. https://doi.org/10.26183/tmjr-zj59.

Style, E. (1988). “Curriculum as Window and Mirror”, in Listening for All Voices, Oak Knoll School monograph. https://www.nationalseedproject.org/images/documents/Curriculum_As_Window_and_Mirror.pdf.

Ullman, J., Ferfolja, T., & Hobby, L. (2021). Parents’ perspectives on the inclusion of gender and sexuality diversity in K-12 schooling: Results from an Australian national study. Sex Education, 22(4), 424–446. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2021.1949975.

van Leent, L. (2017). Supporting School Teachers: Primary Teachers’ Conceptions of Their Responses to Diverse Sexualities. Sex Education, 17(4), 440–453. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2017.1303369.

About the author

Professor Jacqueline Ullman has a Bachelor of Science (English Education, Secondary) from New York University; a Master of Arts (Sociology and Education) from Teachers College, Columbia University; and a Master of Education (Research Methods) and PhD (Educational Psychology) from the University of Sydney. She began her career as a public high school English teacher in NYC before deciding to upskill with the goal of informing educational policy reform in the interests of making schools more equitable and inclusive. Professor Ullman has published more than 80 journal articles, book chapters, research reports and resources for educators’ professional learning since 2012, is in the top 1% of published academics worldwide in the field of sex education (ScholarGPS), and is a featured author on UNESCO’s Health and Education Resource Centre. Her research-based resources for classroom teachers and school leaders are featured by Australia’s federal Student Wellbeing Hub and within guidance documents for educators distributed by several other state/territory Departments of Education. Her extensive track record of consultation and professional development with schools across Sydney further attests to her understanding of the complexities of diverse school communities and the sensitivity required to successfully work with teacher, parent and student cohorts to conduct research in the areas of sexualities, gender and gender diversity, relationships and health.

[1] https://studentwellbeinghub.edu.au/educators/framework/

[2] https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/multicultural-education/culture-and-diversity/cultural-inclusion

[3] Cisgender refers to when an individual’s biological sex aligns with their gender identity.

[4] See “Targeted Approaches” https://education.nsw.gov.au/about-us/education-data-and-research/what-works-best/student-belonging/making-sense-of-belonging#/asset3

[5] https://education.nsw.gov.au/rights-and-accountability/legal-issues-bulletins/transgender-students-in-schools#Curriculum_8

Jackie Ullman Download

Conviction Politics ARC Project: Unshackling Convict History 2022-2025

Professor Tony Moore (Monash University)) gives us an update on what is currently happening with the international digital history project ‘Conviction Politics’…

Conviction Politics is a digital history project funded by the Australian Research Council and industry partners as part of the Linkage scheme. The NSW Teachers Federation, through its Centre for Professional Learning, is a major Partner Organisation in this project joining with the ACTU’s Trade Union Education Foundation, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the UK Trades Union Congress.

Our project re-conceptualises convict transportation as one of the great forced global labour migrations of history, continuous with the slave trade, used to build settler capitalist colonies in Australia. It flips the narrative of a downtrodden criminal class by revealing the agency of the coerced workforce in collectively resisting this system. At the same time its focus on the transported political prisoners reveals Australian colonies vitally connected to the revolutions, ideas, movements and media innovations sweeping the Atlantic world. Harnessing the latest data mapping technologies, Conviction Politics, reveals how from the earliest days of settlement, Australia’s first work force resisted exploitation through inventive solidarity in the face of coercion, while a vanguard of transported rebels, liberal pamphleteers, industrial protesters, trade unionists, Chartists, Irish independence fighters, and radical agitators changed the political direction of the colonies.

What follows is an update Conviction Politics’ achievements and activities since our last article for the Journal of Professional Learning . Click this link to Tony’s Semester 1 2022 article

New Book Unfree Workers reveals extent of convict resistance

Chief Investigators Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (University of New England) and Emeritus Professor Michael Quinlan (University of NSW) researched and published a new book that engages a key focus of Conviction Politics: Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia 1788-1860 (Palgrave Macmillan, London):

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-7558-4

It explores the role that penal transportation played in the development of capitalism in Australia as well as exploring the many ways in which the active resistance of convicts shaped both workplace relations and institutions. Drawing on two unique ‘big datasets’, the book provides both a quantitative and qualitative assessment of convict-worker resistance from the moment of their embarkation on ships bound for the Australian colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land to their arrival and deployment into various categories of state and private employment.

The book reveals the terrain and scale of resistance by convicts. Between 1788 and 1860 there is evidence of over 11,000 collective protests (including strikes, mass absconding, go-slows and riots). Michael and Hamish conservatively estimate that in excess of 43,000 convicts participated in these actions. Using data for the entire nineteenth-century, the book places the scale of dissent by convicts in the context of later non-union and union organised industrial action by free workers.

It demonstrates that convicts dominated workplace dissent prior to 1850. This included the 1804 Castle Hill rebellion in which nearly 10 percent of the transported workforce participated. The book also reveals a marked prolonged crisis of dissent that occurred between 1822 and 1834. This was a direct response to the abolition of convict wages and the introduction of more intense work regimes in road gangs and on rural estates. The book argues that this wave of resistance eroded the cost-savings that accrued to those who sought to hire unfree labour over free, contributing to the demise of convict transportation.

Michael and Hamish show the extent to which convict actions informed subsequent struggles over working hours and other conditions of employment by free workers. Nothing in Australian history comes close to matching this activism until the titanic maritime and pastoral strikes of the early 1890s.

British Irish/Documentary shoot 2022

The ending of Covid lockdowns allowed Roar Film’s Steve Thomas and Lead Chief Investigator Tony Moore, assisted by our man in London Paul Smith, to embark on an extensive interview, location and archive shoot of the UK and Ireland in 2022.

Interviews included Trade Union Congress (TUC) General Secretary Paul Nowak, in London; Secretary South West TUC Nigel Costley (head of the Friends of Thomas Muir) in Glasgow; Dr Tim Causer from the Bentham Centre at University College London; convict author Katharine Quarmby; and leading Irish, Scottish and English historians. With help of freelance documentary crews, we captured locations across the British Isles associated with convict transportation or where democratic and labour movement activism occurred, and digitally photographed the rare collections of the People’s History Museum in Manchester.

This overseas field trip climaxed in a special presentation on Conviction Politics led by Tony Moore at the Menzies Australia Institute, Kings College London chaired by its Director Dr Agnieszka Sobocinska, and smaller presentations on the project at University College Cork and sat the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival summer school.

Melbourne and Sydney Shoots 2021-23

The Conviction Politics team (Roar’s Steve Thomas and Aaron Wilson, Tony Moore, and Kyle Harvey) undertook extensive shoots in Melbourne and Sydney in 2023, making use of stunning locations provided by our collaborators, including Trades Hall in Melbourne, Unions NSW ‘banner’ museum in Sydney, the Hyde Park Barracks, and Cockatoo Island UNESCO convict heritage site on Sydney Harbour Sydney interviewees included Geoff Gallop, Tom Keneally, Noelene Timbery, Margaret Vosand John Dixon from the NSW Teachers Federation, Peter Lewis from Essential, John Jeremy (former CEO of Cockatoo Island dockyard), Libby Bennett (Sydney Harbour Trust), Warren Fahey from Larrikin Records, Neal Towert from Unions NSW and Prof. Nick Carter from Australian Catholic University.

Melbourne interviewees included economist Alison Pennington, Steve and Andrew Vizard, Research Fellow Dr Monika Schwarz, PhD student Daisy Bailey, and Profs. Gordon Pentland, Mark Andrejevic, Judith Brett and Andrew Reeves.

NSW Teachers Federation – Friday Forum and Other Presentations

The discoveries and media by the Conviction Politics project were unveiled on the evening of May 5, 2023 at the Federation’s Friday Forum, opened by the union’s General Secretary Maxine Sharkey, chaired by Margaret Vos with closing remarks by Kate Ambrose. This full house heard from Tony Moore, Steve Thomas, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Monika Schwarz, about the project’s reconceptualising of the convicts as an unfree workforce that collectively resisted exploitation and impacted both the development of Australian democracy and the early labour movement.

The audience was treated to a sample of the project’s short documentaries, its online Hub, and heard how these resources can be deployed in the classroom.

Tony’s opening speech on the project’s significance can be read here:

( See Appendix One – 2023 Friday Forum: Introductory remarks by Tony Moore)

Canadian Research Trip 2023

The Conviction Politics team of Tony, Monika and Daisy presented papers and documentaries at the International Association for Media and History conference (20-22 June 2023), which was held at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada.

The team hosted a panel discussion and screened microdocumentaries in a communal conference space. The panel demonstrated the transnational history of a shared struggle to advance democracy across various parts of the British Empire, and how the ambitious linking of digitised and analogue archives through international institutional partnerships has revealed the political agency of prisoners who had long been obscured as recidivists in individual records.

Tony then embarked on a road tour with Canadian-Australian filmmaker maker, Deke Richards, researching and photographing sites of the Canadian revolutions of 1837-38. Deke has made a major documentary Land of a Thousand Sorrows Revisited about the Québécoise rebels transported as political prisoners to Sydney, in the early 1840s.

They also met with museums in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto and the Australian High Commission to commence discussions about Canada potentially hosting a tour of the Conviction Politics exhibition.

In 2022 Tony had joined Deke and the Canadian Consul-General André François Giroux, and Marie-Anne Alepin, President of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society of Montréal, in the unveiling of a series of plaques to the Canadian prisoners at the burial sights of those who did not return to their homeland, including the Dapto grave of revolutionary Joseph Marceau, who married a local girl and became a farmer and grocer in the Illawarra.

Conviction Politics Hub – Check it out

With over 80 short documentaries, combined with long and short reads, original songs, timeline, podcasts, songs, data visualisations and rich image archive the Conviction Politics Hub is now live to the public and available for use in schools and by our Partner Organisations. Go to:

https://convictionpolitics.net

A trailer about the Conviction Politics documentaries can be viewed here:

The Hub was test driven with the help of the Centre for Professional Learning. Under the guidance of Margaret Vos, in 2024 teachers undertaking the CPL course Teaching Conviction Politics learned from Steve Thomas and Professors Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Tony Moore about the project’s academic discoveries. They also discovered how the Hub could be used in the classroom as a resource for parts of the NSW History syllabuses. During the course, in real time, Roar Film garnered valuable feedback from teachers that helped us tweak the Hub ahead of it doing public.

Please explore the Hub and provide any feedback directly to Margaret Vos at cpl@nswtf.org.au

**Conviction Politics’ Unshackled Exhibition launches in Hobart**

‘Unshackled: The True Convict Story’ is Conviction Politics’ culminating research

output, that launched on the 12th of March 2024 at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG). It had over 40,000 visitors in its four month run. Unshackled is a ground-breaking, multimodal experience melding traditional museum presentation with engaging storytelling, short documentaries, data-visualisation, innovative technology, original music and soundscapes with traditional museum objects. The creative approach and visitor experience has been described as ‘surprising, immersive and moving’. Its video trailer can be viewed here:

It features curated collections of key objects and images including selections from the magnificent Dempsey portraits of British working-class women and men, a collection of radical tokens, reproductions of radical posters and cartoons from Britain, Ireland and Australia.

A highlight of the exhibition is a life size reproduction of the portable solitary ‘box’ used on the female convict transport ships. Interactive screen-based media, large projections and augmented reality lead the visitor through the exhibition themes: Repression, Exploitation, Resistance & Redemption. These media installations are complemented by real objects to provide a truly unique museum experience.

Unions Tasmania hosted a Workers Day at the Unshackled exhibition in June featuring presentations by union activists, and the Conviction Politics Team. Here is a video of event: https://player.vimeo.com/video/953006465?h=5b0138214c

Please see here the professional photographs of the Unshackled exhibition and launch provided by Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery available at this URL:

https://rosie hastie photography.pic-time.com/By8398ltXJ0WN

Here’s link to the exhibition web app visitors use on their smart phones while at the exhibition that provides more information about the solid objects, accesses the short documentaries by theme that appear on screens in the exhibition, and provides images and information on characters and events, including AI generated talking portraits:

https://exhibition.unshackled.net.au/themes

The exhibition shows how one of the nineteenth century’s largest forced migrations of unfree workers was preserved in time by a remarkable set of records and demonstrates that far from being a downtrodden, supplicant workforce, convict men and women fought back against tyranny and exploitation and changed Australia for the better.

Unshackled is designed, curated, and built by the project through its principal exhibiting Partner Organisation, Roar Film, working closely with TMAG. Thanks Steve Thomas, Matt Daniels Tony Moore, Daisy Bailey and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. As well as the generous support to the project from NSW Teachers Federation and the ACTU, the exhibition has been made possible by generous sponsorship from the Mining and Energy Union, its Mineworkers Trust and Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, with the later becoming a new partner of Conviction Politics.

The exhibition generated extensive media

Here’s the link to podcast Late Night live interview with Philip Adams:

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/unshackled-true-convict-stories/103583600

A review on Arts Hub’s must-see museum blockbusters of 2024:

https://www.artshub.com.au/news/features/major-new-museum-show-unshackles-convict-stories-from-myth-2709586

and a feature article on ABC Online:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-30/forgotten-political-history-of-australia-convicts/103621728

A travelling ‘pop up’ version of Unshackled that can be assembled in a day has also been produced, and the plan is for it to be assembled at the NSW Teachers Federation building in tandem with a suitable conference event in 2026.

Unshackled will tour from 2025-2027 to Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Queensland’s Bowen Basin, the Hunter, Illawarra, North Tasmanian and overseas to Dorchester, London and Cork.

A Stitch in Time

A different bespoke exhibition focused on resistance by Tasmanian female convicts called a ‘A Stitch in Time’, was ‘created by Conviction Politics research fellow Monika Schwarz and was launched at the Penitentiary Chapel in Hobart in June 2023. The exhibition features 18 ‘data embroideries’ created by Monika of 21 convict women chosen for their participation in protest and resistance, especially in the Female Factories.

This project uses data embroidery, a new form of data physicalisation, to display historical life courses of Australian female convicts. The source of the data includes the female convict records of Van Diemen’s Land kept by the British Bureaucracy, including their trial and voyage, their colonial offences and sentences, their marriages and births or their official status like receiving a Certificate of Freedom. These data titbits inspire the sketches for the data embroideries, focusing on acts of resilience or resourcefulness. The data is integrated in the form of a lifeline with the inspiring data points highlighted in colour. The embroideries try to capture moments where the women’s personality is shining through the records, showing that these women weren’t so different from us. Here are two examples.

Daisy Baily Awarded Doctorate

In early 2025 Conviction Politics’ Monash PhD student Daisy Bailey submitted her Thesis:
Emotions of Activism and Exile: A study on Chartist and Young Ireland political prisoners transported to the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century

The work was praised for its originality, discoveries and writing by the two examiners, and accordingly passed by Monash. The project congratulates Dr Baily and looks forward to the thesis being published as a book.

Unshackled: The Convict Memorial

In partnership with the National Trust of Tasmania, Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Steve Thomas and Roar Film’s creative technologist Matt Daniels installed the digital convict memorial in Hobart Penitentiary Chapel Historic Site in October last year. Sharing the brand name Unshackled, the memorial links to, and visualises, the UNESCO Heritage Listed Tasmanian convict records held by project partner Libraries Tasmania.

Powered by the Digital History Tasmania convict dataset, the digital memorial tells the stories of 75,000 convicts through a four-metre interactive obelisk that performs a role not unlike the honour wall of a war memorial. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart reports that “feedback from data visualisation, tourism and heritage experts has been overwhelmingly positive and the descendants of convicts report that the experience is respectful and deeply moving.”

New funded ARC Project: Making Crime Pay

Building on, and enhancing, the memorial this new 2023 project includes Monash academics Prof. Jon McCormack (SensiLab), Prof. Tony Moore and Research Fellow Dr Monika Schwarz who worked on Conviction Politics, as well as Dr Jenny Wise, Associate Prof. David Roberts and Prof. Martin Gibbs from the University of New England. The project aims to create digital tools to allow visitors to experience Australian convict sites and historical big data in new and novel ways. The successful grant awarded to Making Crime Pay enables further analysis and public engagement with convict records and colonial history, the longevity of Unshackled and the continued collaboration with Roar Film and National Trust Tasmania.

Appendix 1 – 2023 May 5 Friday Forum: Introductory remarks by Tony Moore

Thanks Margaret Vos, Kate Ambrose and Maxine Sharkey and the NSW Teachers Federation for inviting us.

The NSW Teachers Federation has been a generous and energetic partner in this project, and shares with our other union partners (the ACTU, TUC and the AMWU) a commitment to retrieving the contribution of the convicts to the early development of democracy and the labour movement in this country. Also Principals Conference.

What the project is

Conviction Politics is a digital history project funded by the Australian Research Council and industry partners as part of the Linkage scheme. It investigates how Britain’s Australian colonies – beginning as some of the most unfree and unequal jurisdictions on earth – became some of the first polities to give all working men the vote by the 1850s and in quick time earned a reputation as the social laboratory of the world.

The answer is to be found in newly digitised convict records, which reveal a very different story of the empire-wide struggle for political and human rights and the unlikely victory of Britain’s reformers and radicals in their place of exile. Harnessing the latest data mapping technologies, Conviction Politics, reveals how from the earliest days of settlement, Australia’s first work force resisted exploitation through inventive solidarity in the face of coercion, while a vanguard of transported rebels, liberal pamphleteers, industrial protesters, trade unionists, Chartists, Irish independence fighters, and radical agitators changed the political direction of the colonies.

Our project re-conceptualizes convict transportation as one of the great forced global labour migrations of history, continuous with the slave trade, used to build settler capitalist colonies in Australia. It flips the narrative of a down – trodden criminal class by revealing the agency of the coerced workforce in collectively resisting this system. At the same time its focus on the transported political prisoners reveals Australian colonies vitally connected to the revolutions, ideas, movements and media innovations sweeping the Atlantic world. To put it in Star Wars terms, there’s not just an evil empire, but a rebel alliance too, and its exiled leaders and foot soldiers make quite a mark in Australia and back in Britain and Ireland. The project reveals this new take on convict Australia through an array of media that we will sample tonight.

Indigenous People:

Notwithstanding the role of convicts in the seizure and occupation of the First Nations’ land in Australia, there is also a shared experience here, between Indigenous people and the transported convicts. Unrest in Britain, Ireland, and throughout the empire was triggered by capitalist commodification, land enclosure, colonialism within the British Isles and the destruction and disenchantment of traditional ways of life. The invasion of the Australian continent brought the same dislocating forces to bear on the Indigenous people of Australia, who fought against this dispossession, with many internally exiled into the convict system, from where they continued to resist. There was violence and death, with convicts used to dispossess. Indigenous land was stolen for the land hungry of Britain and Ireland, that helped the rulers avoid a revolution back home. However, our project reveals some remarkable acts of recognition and solidarity between Indigenous people and European convicts.

Developing the project’s application, we took heart from the Sally McManus’ comments in March 2017 that sometimes it is necessary to resist unfair and unjust laws. It is a key proposition of Conviction Politics that political and social democracy was not simply ceded to the Australian colonies by a caring mother country, but had to be fought for by brave, principled and persecuted people, first in their home countries and then again as convicts.

The project looks at 2 groups. At least 3600 protestors, reformers, radicals and revolutionaries sacrificed their own liberty, and sometimes their lives, for the freedoms and rights we take for granted. Meanwhile the 160,000 convicts who composed our first workforce undertook collective action to resist exploitation of its unfree labour through insubordination, absconding, uprisings, refusals to eat, strikes, and forming union -like combinations from at least the 1820s. Conviction Politics examines both these groups.

So often in the period we’re examining we find that it was new laws buttressing a new economic system that created the crimes. While many such as the United Irishmen took up arms in revolution against the Crown, both at home and then in Castle Hill, Sydney, others were transported simply for what they wrote, said or published. So many British workers, known to history by colourful names like Luddites, Swing Rioters, Tolpuddle Martyrs and Daughters of Rebecca, smashed the machines that were taking or automating their jobs, or demolished the tolls and turnpikes that heralded the privatization of the roads and commons they had travelled free for centuries. Still others were transported simply for coming together in a trade union.

Conviction Politics puts into practice the powerful injunction of media scholar Raymond Williams that drawing a new line with the past can inform contemporary social change. To that end, the scholars and partners in this project mobilise history to speak to our present moment. We consider the persistence from the colonial period of problems that drove our convicts to resist: precarious, insecure, and coerced work; decline in wages: our current cycle of automation: privatisation; our use surveillance and facial recognition; threats to freedoms in speech, media, and assembly; and the ease with which we incarcerate the marginalised. Most importantly we look at the unfinished work of decolonisation in Australia, not just for Indigenous people, but of us all.

We will now watch the first of our short documentaries about the Indigenous Convicts

About the author

Dr Tony Moore is Professor of Communications and Media Studies at Monash University and former Director of its National Centre for Australian Studies. Tony is author of the critically acclaimed Fringe to Famous: Cultural Production in Australia After the Creative Industries (Bloomsbury 2024) Dancing with Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians since 1868 (2012), Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788 – 1868 (2010), adapted as an ABC TV documentary (2015) and The Barry McKenzie Movies (2005). Tony is lead investigator on the ARC the ARC Linkage Projects Conviction Politics: the convict routes of Australian democracy (2019-2025): https://www.convictionpolitics.net and Comedy Country: Australian Performance Comedy as an Agent of Change (2022 – 2027)

Tony was specialist consultant on the major exhibition Bohemian Melbourne, held at State Library Victoria 2014-15 https://www.slv.vic.gov.au/search-discover/galleries/bohemian-melbourne

He is a former ABC TV documentary maker and commissioning editor at Pluto Press and Cambridge University Press and worked in youth policy and advocacy for the Education Commission of NSW, International Youth Year and Youth Affairs Council of NSW. His documentaries include Bohemian Rhapsody: Rebels of Australian Culture, TimeFrame history of ASIO, Lost in Space: Australians in their Cities and Nobody’s Children.

Get Death or Liberty book here:

https://www.murdochbooks.com/browse/book/Tony-Moore-Death-or-Liberty-9781741961409

Rent or purchase Death or Liberty documentary here:

Tony Moore Download

Assessing Higher Order Thinking: K – 12

Overview

In this course you will develop a practical understanding of modern assessment theory and look at strategies for promoting and assessing higher order thinking skills in your students. We will focus on two assessment formats: multiple choice, and performance-based items, and consider the purpose and design of rubrics. We will look in depth at the advantages, disadvantages, tricks, and pitfalls of these different styles, emphasising the interrelationship between learning and assessment.

Professor Jim Tognolini and Dr Sofia Kesidou from the University of Sydney’s Centre for Educational Measurement and Assessment lead an interactive and content-driven professional learning day. Completing this course will consolidate your expertise in helping your students develop analytical, evaluative, and creative skills.

Please note this course was formerly called Modern Assessment Theory and Assessment Strategies for Higher Order Thinking: K-12.

Tuesday 11 August 2026 at NSW Teachers Federation, Surry Hills
Wednesday 26 August 2026, online via Zoom
Wednesday 11 November 2026 at Blacktown

All CPL courses run from 9am to 3pm.

Prof Jim Tognolini

Dr Sofia Kesidou

Sofia Kesidou is an executive leader and academic researcher with close to 30-years’ experience in international educational assessment, curriculum and research.

Sofia has taught courses in assessment to undergraduate and graduate students, and has conducted numerous professional-development sessions related to standards-based curriculum and assessment as well as assessment and data literacy internationally.

Completing Modern Assessment Theory and Assessment Strategies for Higher Order Thinking: K-12 will contribute 5 hours of NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) Accredited PD in the priority area of Delivery and Assessment of NSW Curriculum/EYLF addressing standard descriptors 5.1.2 from the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers towards maintaining Proficient Teacher Accreditation in NSW.

K-12 teachers

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Melanie Morrison outlines the importance of education in the pursuit of peace, advocating for a ‘peace with justice’ model for our turbulent times…

Teaching from theory to practice

The Sydney Peace Prize as Pedagogy

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Jake Lynch provides a well – researched outline of the essential knowledge that teachers would need to introduce the concepts of peace and conflict to their students…

Peace Journalism

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Bianca Bertalli examines how children’s literature can be used to develop ethical understanding and to address complex issues such as asylum seeking, climate change or social inequalities…

Ethical Understanding in the Primary Years

The Increasing Complexity of Contemporary Picture Books

Picture books that Encourage Children to Ponder

Short Texts Add Long-Term Value to the Collection

The Bridge: The Teacher Librarian, Ethical Understanding and the Future

Exemplar Picture Books for Ethical Understanding

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Professor Jacqueline Ullman discusses how teachers can support students who identify as gender and sexuality diverse and to assist them to improve their sense of belonging…

Talking about Gender and Sexuality Diversity

NSW-Specific Supports for the Inclusion of Gender and Sexuality Diversity

Parents’ Attitudes to the Inclusion of Gender and Sexuality Diversity

New Professional Learning Resource for Supporting GSD Students

Want to Know More?

References

About the author

New Book Unfree Workers reveals extent of convict resistance

British Irish/Documentary shoot 2022

Melbourne and Sydney Shoots 2021-23

NSW Teachers Federation – Friday Forum and Other Presentations

Other Project presentations include

Canadian Research Trip 2023

Conviction Politics Hub – Check it out

Conviction Politics’ Unshackled Exhibition launches in Hobart

The exhibition generated extensive media

A Stitch in Time

Daisy Baily Awarded Doctorate

Unshackled: The Convict Memorial

New funded ARC Project: Making Crime Pay

Appendix 1 – 2023 May 5 Friday Forum: Introductory remarks by Tony Moore

What the project is

About the author

Overview

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Presenter

Prof Jim Tognolini

Dr Sofia Kesidou

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**Conviction Politics’ Unshackled Exhibition launches in Hobart**