Creative Use of Digital Technologies: Keeping the Best and Brightest in the Bush
Gifted students have been provided the opportunity to study three core subjects through an academically selective virtual high school in western NSW, Australia. At the same time these students continue to attend their local public high school for their other subjects. This article presents the mechanisms that have provided this opportunity, and describes successes and challenges. Students are located across 385,000 km² and meet online through web conferencing to engage in real time. They are also able asynchronously to access study materials in an online repository.
Structural marginalisation, othering and casual relief teacher subjectivities
Produced through market relations of neoliberal managerialism, teacher subjectivities are becoming progressively commodified. With the increasing casualisation of the teaching workforce, the well-being and status of casual relief teachers (CRTs) can be seen as an area of concern, at risk of 'flexploitation'. More than just a convenient labour pool, CRTs operate on the margins of school communities, a space fraught with a range of issues. In many instances, CRTs experience less job satisfaction; less rapport with students and colleagues and less access to school information, professional development, resources and teaching materials. This article draws on a positioning theory to frame the discursive production of CRT selves within the neoliberal milieu. It offers a detailed analysis of collective biographies that explore narrative formations of casual teaching. Schooling discourse is replete with metaphorical language that frames teacher positioning, and a range of existing metaphors in CRT literature highlight their vulnerability in particular. Rather than offering an analysis that addresses casual teacher performance as a problem to be solved, this article proposes that the relationship between 'structural marginalisation and the 'othering' that CRTs can experience is associated with the politics of market-related performativity.