By Aaron Teo and Nisha Thapliyal
Despite political discourse and policymaking to the contrary, teachers have always been not just knowledge transmitters but knowledge producers who have played an active role in shaping educational theory and practice. Using this understanding, we embarked on a recent project that foregrounds teacher expertise and agency in the creation of context-specific, practical, and transformative knowledge, particularly for social justice education.
Our literature review revealed that advances in digital networking technologies have allowed activist teachers to connect and share transformative educational practices in new ways. As part of this, we noted the rapidly emerging method of transformative knowledge production in the form of podcasts by teachers about social justice education. Practically speaking, we noted that teachers use podcast technology to innovate their teaching, enhance student engagement, and provide flexible, accessible content that supports diverse learning needs. Podcasts serve as reusable educational resources, tools for professional development, and a means of contributing to public conversation.
A space for dialogue
From a social justice angle, this medium not only amplifies issues that have previously been silenced but also provides a space for dialogue, encouraging listeners to engage with, and reflect on, their specific education contexts. Using storytelling and interviews, podcasts can challenge dominant social narratives to inspire transformation and change. They stimulate critical engagement and foster a sense of community and solidarity, ultimately functioning as spaces of disruption, public pedagogy, and praxis.
While there have been significant developments in this space internationally, we have identified few analogous initiatives in the Australian context. Because of this, we commenced our project with an audit of how Australian teachers were producing knowledge about social justice education. As antiracist researcher-educators, we focused specifically on how race and multiculturalism was discussed in this fora. We drew on extant scholarship on teacher diversity, race and multiculturalism in Australian schools as well as recent evidence from the Australian Human Rights Commission, both of which paint a dire picture of the persistent and problematic nature of racism in schools.
Our audit
We conducted this audit on selected podcast sites, guided by the following research question: how do Australian teachers talk about Indigenous and racialised diversity/difference, if at all?
The audit was framed through a race critical lens, using the following keywords: Indigenous, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI), race/racialisation/racism, culture/cultural, ethnic/ethnicity, linguistic/language, religion, refugee, and nationality.
We use the term ‘Indigenous’ to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, reflecting the importance of attending to racialisation as part of the process of Australian settler colonialism. Our rationale for employing this range of keywords – beyond those directly related to racism and race critical theory – was also based on an awareness that people use different language while doing this work on diversity and racism. In the Australian context, explicit discussions of racialisation are less common and not reflected in official data or reporting (e.g. the Census). Issues of racism are often discussed in more palatable terms like culture and ethnicity. In short, our goal was to search as broadly as possible, so the inclusion of multiple keywords was important.
The first stage of the audit involved identification of podcasts by Australian teachers which matched our keywords. Our initial criteria were 1) podcasts which were produced and presented by teachers and 2) podcasts that had at least two years of sustained programming during the last 5 years. However we found only a couple of podcasts matched this criterion; an unsurprising result given the enormous workloads placed on educators. So, we expanded our search to include podcasts created for Australian teachers and included one-off podcast series during the last 5 years. These expanded criteria led us to seven podcast series located in Australia and targeted towards the Australian school education community.
What we found
Our analysis of this sample began with taking notes about podcast creators, aims and invited speakers. The podcasts were created by various actors including researchers, university academics, government agencies, and education consultants, some of whom also worked previously as principals as school principals. All the podcast series aimed at providing practical ideas or ‘takeaways’ about effective teaching, learning and leadership. A couple of these podcasts were more focused on challenges related to school leadership and another two aimed to translate recently published research and debates about the future of schooling for the teaching community. As shown in the Table, Invited Speakers tended to be academics or education consultants; teachers were rarely speakers in any of these podcast series.
We also searched all the podcast sites using the keywords mentioned previously to identify a total of 17 episodes across these series which contained one or more of the nine keywords.
Out of these 17 episodes, 10 focused on conversations about Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous education where the invited speakers were Indigenous academics and educators (see Table).
On diversity, racism and multicultural education
We conducted a fine-grained analysis of the seven episodes that explored issues related to diversity, racism and multicultural education situated in Australian schools. Out of these seven, two episodes focused entirely on the topic of race and racism in Australian school settings. The remaining episodes discussed issues related to superdiverse schools; the unmet needs of refugee and migrant education, failure to recruit and retain ‘diverse’ teachers, and tokenistic celebrations of multiculturalism in schools Two of these episodes featured speakers from racialised minority backgrounds.
| Podcast | Speaker Designations | Number of episodes that responded to one or more keywords | Number of episodes about Indigenous education | Number of episodes about non-Indigenous forms of difference |
| P1 | Education consultants; Early childhood educators | 1 | 1 speaker: Indigenous education consultant | 0 |
| P2 | Principals, education consultants | 6 | 5 speakers: Indigenous Principals and education consultants | 1 Speaker: racialised settler academic |
| P3 | academics | 2 | 2 speakers: Indigenous academics | 3Racialised Academics conducting research in USA, UK, and Qatar |
| P4 | academics | 4 | 1 speakers: Indigenous cultural resident | 2Speakers: White Australian Academics |
| P5 | academics, journalists, teachers | 3 | 2 speakers: Indigenous academic and journalist | 1Speakers:White Australian academics |
Table: Overview of Invited Speakers and Episode Topics
The language people used
We were also interested in the language that people were using to talk about difference and diversity in these 7 episodes. Accordingly, whenever some kind of sociocultural difference was mentioned (i.e. ethnicity, language or linguistic diversity, religion, nationality, refugee status, race, SES etc.), we extracted words and phrases from these parts of the transcript and used them to create the diagram below. The size of the word indicates the frequency of use.
As can be seen from the Wordle, the words culture, diversity and inclusion were most frequently used to talk about difference. In addition to our keywords, diversity was also understood in relation to gender, rural or remote communities, disability and SES. Indigenous approaches to culturally safe, respectful and responsive education were a reference point for these engagements with educating for and about diversity.
Why this (absence) matters and what we can do
Our podcast audit revealed that Indigenous Australian educators and scholars are leading discussions about how to create culturally safe, respectful and responsive pedagogies in schools and universities . While Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing are rightfully central to such antiracist conversations, Australian Education continues to remain woefully silent on the R word, thereby relegating the critical, counterhegemonic knowledge that other minority teachers bring to the margins. This is not to suggest that racialised minority status is a default signal for criticality and anti-racist action.
We need to leverage these knowledges by carving out space for these voices to be brought to the fore. Our ongoing research and podcasting project seeks to create a platform for racial minority teachers to speak and reflect on their experiences of racialisation, racism as well as their approaches to anti-racist education in schools. The stories they have shared dismantle stereotypes and challenge dominant narratives about racialised students, parents and teachers and celebratory multicultural education. They offer counter-stories that affirm the dignity and complexity of racialised migrant settler communities which hold the potential to build collective awareness and inspire action and solidarity toward racial justice in education and beyond.
Aaron Teo is a lecturer in curriculum and pedagogy at the University of Southern Queensland’s School of Education. He is convenor for the Australian Association for Research in Education Social Justice Special Interest Group. His research focusses on the raced and gendered subjectivities of migrant teachers from “Asian” backgrounds in the Australian context, as well as critical pedagogies in white Australian (university and school) classroom spaces.
Nisha Thapliyal is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, in the field of comparative and international education from a background in social work and psychology. Her interest in critical and feminist pedagogies and education for social justice grew from work with institutionalised children in India including street children, orphans, and so-called juvenile delinquents.
Alexandra Lee is an early career researcher in the field of racism and youth studies, based in Naarm. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Deakin University in 2024. She is a research assistant at Deakin University and Western Sydney University, co-chairs the Asian Australian Research Studies Network (AASRN). Alexandra’s work focuses on how racialisation is experienced as part of people’s everyday movement through place.
This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article.
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