President-elect of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has signalled his intention to further deforest the Amazon. In a campaign speech last year, he vowed to reclaim indigenous land – much of which lies within the largest rainforest in the world – for the "wealth ...
More »Questioning the paradox of equity in education
I have been worried for some time about the concept of equity and how it is usually understood in relation to schooling. It seems to me to be very strange that family income, as one indicator, can determine how children ...
More »Two in five teachers don’t know how to teach soft skills
As the Mitchell Institute prefaced last month, soft skills, straightforward as they seem, can be difficult to teach. Now, there's further evidence for this. After surveying 500 Australian teachers, Smiling Minds found that two in five of them feel they ...
More »Autism friendship belief challenged by research
This year, the international journal Autism replaced its cover art of overlapping grey and red puzzle pieces with scattered circles, after a team of editors decided that puzzles evoked negative connotations of the disorder. Yet autism is puzzling: we still don't even know what causes it. Autism assumptions ...
More »How to help students suffering from ‘math trauma’
Math trauma, the issue highlighted in the US edition of The Conversation, is real. If a student never masters irrational numbers then when they come to trigonometry (which involves lots of irrational numbers) they will receive a constant bombardment of ...
More »Simplifying professional development: opting for quality not quantity
The most passionate teachers are also enthusiastic learners; not content to let their practice become stale and always looking for ways to improve the outcomes of their students. Professional development is so important for these teachers who actively look forward ...
More »Brazilian democracy dies as students urged to snitch on teachers
Just over ten years ago, Brazil was a global beacon for development. Now, with the resent election of populist, far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, which some have likened to a mix of Donald Trump and Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, it signals the opposite. Bolsonaro, ...
More »Why students are skipping school this month
Beginning Thursday last week, students across Australia walked, and continue to trot off school grounds – for a few hours, to a day, to up to a week. Unlike previous student protests, however, 'School Strike 4 Climate Action' is far from what some ...
More »Instagram now ‘proactively detects bullying’ in photos and comments
A C-Suite shakeup at Instagram has resulted in a windfall for Adam Mosseri – and for bullying victims. Mosseri, formerly the head of product, now heads up the whole company. His first move as chief was harmonious in tone. "There ...
More »Public education campaigner to take on Abbott for Warringah
If Tony Abbott is as "useless" as indigenous leaders believe him to be, he might struggle to hold his seat of Warringah at next year's federal election. The affluent area, with a median weekly household income that's almost double the NSW ...
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