Meghan Stacey
Biographic Data
| ID | 3701390 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Meghan Stacey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Meghan |
| FAMILY NAME | Stacey |
| SIGNATURE | STACEY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2192-9030 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Gendered time poverty
Teaching is often framed as a ‘family-friendly’ profession, aligned with women's caring roles. This paper challenges that assumption by examining how contemporary teaching produces gendered forms of time poverty. Drawing on 43 interviews, we develop a theoretically informed analysis that brings together Rosa's concept of social acceleration and Wajcman's account of time pressure. We argue that shifts in workload and work intensity which produce t…
Tackling teacher workload
The ‘problem’ of teacher professional development in Australia
A scoping review of student involvement in curriculum development and reform
This scoping review, covering literature published from 2003 to 2023, maps existing research on student involvement in curriculum development and reform and calls for deeper inquiry into their agency in decision-making. Curriculum development and reform are an important focus of education systems around the world. Yet curriculum making is a complex process, occurring across diverse contexts and involving multiple actors. Within schools, teachers …
Teachers with religious commitments in religiously affiliated schools
Teaching has long been associated with moral purpose and ‘mission’, yet how religious commitments may inform teachers’ understanding and experience of their work within modern schooling systems remains unclear. In this article, we present interview data generated with teachers (n = 11) who identified as having a form of Christian religious commitment and as working in a school affiliated with a Christian tradition. Interviewees were drawn from th…
Middle leaders as policy actors
Schools today often operate in a context of performative accountability in which forms of student assessment become representative of success in a competitive global knowledge economy. While research has explored the nature of top-down assessment directives and the implications of these for local stakeholders, the way in which assessment policy is enacted in schools has been largely neglected. Through analysis of interviews with six middle leader…
Framing teachers’ curriculum work in the Australian print media
Questions about teacher knowledge and expertise are longstanding internationally. This tension has intensified in Australia in recent years, with discussions of a ‘lesson lottery’ experienced by Australian students by virtue of teachers’ varied approaches to curriculum planning. In this article, we present an analysis of how teachers’ curriculum work has been framed in the Australian print media over the past five years, and who has framed the pr…
Teaching social justice education
Teaching social justice within initial teacher education is a fraught endeavour, often interwoven with discomforting forms of learning for both teacher educators and the students they work with. In this article, we introduce the special issue, ‘Teaching social justice education: the nature, role and future of discomfort’. We discuss the impetus for the issue–borne out of both personal professional circumstances as well as the current socio-politi…
Experiences of discomfort in social justice education with pre-service teachers
Engaging in discomfort is often considered essential for meaningful social justice education with pre-service teachers. Yet the way in which discomfort is experienced by such students is an underdeveloped area of the literature. In this article, we explore student feedback survey (n = 2303) and interview (n = 3) data from pre-service teacher education courses that engage with discomforting content, gathered from an Australian university over a fi…
Workload, work intensification and time poverty for teachers and school leaders
This paper presents a synthesis of research literature concerned with teachers’ and school leaders’ experiences of workload and work intensification. Forty papers met the inclusion criteria for the research synthesis. From the analysis, we drew out both definitional and experiential accounts. Firstly, while we mostly found a conflation of the concepts of workload and work intensification, there is a distinction between the two that was apparent i…
Fairness perceptions of educational inequality
The Australian education system features considerable socioeconomic inequality and is a frequent source of controversy in Australian public life. Yet meaningful reform to this system has proven elusive. In this article, we examine the public’s fairness perceptions of educational inequality based on parental financial capacity, using an online survey of adults ( N = 1,999) from New South Wales, Australia. We asked about the fairness of inequality …
Researching teachers’ time use
In the context of global concerns about teacher workload and the relationship between workload and attrition, understanding the nature, quantity and intensity of teachers’ work is an essential first step in formulating robust solutions to this significant problem. Understanding teachers’ work, however, is a complex undertaking, and prior attempts have largely been focused on the quantity rather than the intensity or quality of work required and u…
Pre-service teachers’ views of schools as workplaces in a system of social, cultural and religious division
Teachers seeking work in market-oriented schooling systems confront a range of settings within which they might teach. This article presents the views of ten teachers on the cusp of beginning teaching in the market-oriented schooling system of Australia, regarding the school or schools they would like to work in as teachers. Data were gathered via in-depth, semi-structured interviews and analysed with reference to Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, …
Fairness perceptions of income‐based educational inequality
Income‐based educational inequality is a global issue. In Australia, schools in the relatively large private sector charge a range of fees, with public schools also exhibiting considerable income differences. Using a nationally representative sample in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, we examined the public's fairness perceptions of income‐based educational inequality and how their fairness perceptions are related to self‐interest (part…
Reducing teachers’ workload or deskilling ‘core’ work? Analysis of a policy response to teacher workload demands
Teacher workload is a growing problem internationally. In this article, we analyse an attempt by the state education bureaucracy of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, to address this through the ‘Quality Time Program’. Drawing on labour process theory and Carol Bacchi’s framework of ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’, we analyse how the Quality Time policy documents conceptualise and aim to address a particular kind of teacher ‘workload probl…
Recruiting the 'quality teacher
The figure of the teacher is becoming increasingly significant in schooling systems around the globe. In this article, we consider how the market-oriented system of schooling in the Australian state of New South Wales may be reflecting and (re)shaping understandings of who teachers are and should be. To do this, we present a corpus-assisted analysis of advertisements for teaching positions gathered across the public, Catholic and independent scho…
What needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of education
The series of responses in this article were gathered as part of an online mini conference held in September 2021 that sought to explore different ideas and articulations of school autonomy reform across the world (Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, the USA, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand). It centred upon an important question: what needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of educa…
Attributions for underachievement among students experiencing disadvantage and support for public assistance to them
In this study, we investigated people's perceptions about the causes (i.e. attributions) of underachievement among students experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage and their support for public assistance to those students. Results of an online survey conducted with Australian adults ( N = 1999) revealed that people preferred societal attributions to individual attributions for underachievement among those students. The respondents' attributions, …
Teachers and educational policy
This double special issue, “Teachers and educational policy: markets, populism, and im/possibilities for resistance” explores the figurative politics of the teacher in current education systems around the world. In this introduction to the issue, we discuss how and why teachers have emerged as a key focus of contemporary policy reform. We argue that teachers are seen as a logical site of public commentary in the global knowledge economy, yet teac…
Triage in teaching
The work of teachers is often understood primarily in relation to student learning rather than as a form of labour for the worker in question. While such a focus is understandable, it can fail to recognize the relationship between conditions of work and the character or nature of that work. In this article, we engage with the issue of teachers’ work and workload, presenting interview data from 31 teachers across the state of NSW, Australia. Locat…
Collaborating for policy impact
Knowledge co-production between academics and practitioners is increasingly a focus for university workplace contexts. While there is emerging interest in how social science academics can engage with industry to generate impact, little attention has been paid to how one form of practitioner organisation, trade unions, engages with academics to influence policy and member outcomes. In this article, we examine a case of research collaboration with …
Labour Commodification in the Employment Heartland
This article analyses the commodification of professional labour and union responses to these processes within the employment heartland. It explores the category of fixed-contract or ‘temporary’ employment using Australian public school teaching as the empirical lens. Established to address intensifying conditions of labour market insecurity, the union-led creation of the temporary category was intended to partly decommodify labour by providing i…
Evidence of teaching practice in an age of accountability
Cultures of performative accountability in education have been on the rise globally since the 1980s. Accordingly, teachers have increasingly been encouraged to understand their work in relation to particular forms of ‘evidence’. All evidence, however, is not regarded as equal, and sources of evidence privileged within cultures of performative accountability are typically narrowly rendered, apparently ‘objective’, externally generated and largely …
Exploring students’ metaphors for learning in Western Sydney schools
In both academic and policy spaces, learning is often cast as lifelong, dynamic, constructive and in particular, agentic. Despite this focus students’ voices are rarely privileged in these spaces – especially in policy. We respond to this oversight by deploying Foucault’s theories of knowledge to explore how students understand themselves as learners, considering this alongside dominant political and academic discursive constructions of learning.…
Teachers, fixed-term contracts and school leadership
Fixed-term contracts are a relatively recent, yet growing category of employment for teachers in the public school system in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. In this article, we draw on quantitative and qualitative data from a large state-wide survey (N = 18,234) of members of the public-school teacher union, the NSW Teachers’ Federation, in order to explore the workload reports of teachers in temporary employment. We find that overall, these te…
Workload, work intensification and time poverty for teachers and school leaders
This paper presents a synthesis of research literature concerned with teachers’ and school leaders’ experiences of workload and work intensification. Forty papers met the inclusion criteria for the research synthesis. From the analysis, we drew out both definitional and experiential accounts. Firstly, while we mostly found a conflation of the concepts of workload and work intensification, there is a distinction between the two that was apparent i…
Devolution, market dynamics and the Independent Public School initiative in Western Australia
The devolution of public sector schooling systems has been a feature of education reform since the 1980s. In Western Australia, the Independent Public School (IPS) initiative has recently been installed, announced by the state government in 2009. Now over 80% of the state’s public school students attend IP schools. Drawing on interview data from a broader study of devolution and the conditions of teachers’ work, this article explores the cases of…
Middle-class parents’ educational work in an academically selective public high school
This article reports the findings of a study on the nature of parent–school engagement at an academically selective public high school in New South Wales, Australia. Such research is pertinent given recent policies of ‘choice’ and decentralization, making a study of local stakeholders timely. The research comprised a set of interviews with parents and teachers (n = 15), through which parents – all members of the school’s Parents’ and Citizens’ gr…
Teachers, fixed-term contracts and school leadership
Fixed-term contracts are a relatively recent, yet growing category of employment for teachers in the public school system in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. In this article, we draw on quantitative and qualitative data from a large state-wide survey (N = 18,234) of members of the public-school teacher union, the NSW Teachers’ Federation, in order to explore the workload reports of teachers in temporary employment. We find that overall, these te…
Reducing teachers’ workload or deskilling ‘core’ work? Analysis of a policy response to teacher workload demands
Teacher workload is a growing problem internationally. In this article, we analyse an attempt by the state education bureaucracy of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, to address this through the ‘Quality Time Program’. Drawing on labour process theory and Carol Bacchi’s framework of ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’, we analyse how the Quality Time policy documents conceptualise and aim to address a particular kind of teacher ‘workload probl…
The teacher 'problem
This paper seeks to understand the construction of teachers within one New South Wales education policy, querying this construction in relation to both local and international processes and factors. As such, it also looks to contribute to a growing body of international literature which grapples with the role and nature of neoliberal policy development in education more broadly. To accomplish this, the paper analyses Great Teaching, Inspired Lear…
Recruiting the 'quality teacher
The figure of the teacher is becoming increasingly significant in schooling systems around the globe. In this article, we consider how the market-oriented system of schooling in the Australian state of New South Wales may be reflecting and (re)shaping understandings of who teachers are and should be. To do this, we present a corpus-assisted analysis of advertisements for teaching positions gathered across the public, Catholic and independent scho…
Labour Commodification in the Employment Heartland
This article analyses the commodification of professional labour and union responses to these processes within the employment heartland. It explores the category of fixed-contract or ‘temporary’ employment using Australian public school teaching as the empirical lens. Established to address intensifying conditions of labour market insecurity, the union-led creation of the temporary category was intended to partly decommodify labour by providing i…
Deficit discourses and teachers’ work
Research within communities that have historically been failed by formalised schooling often describes teachers who have found it difficult to engage with the social and cultural differences of their students. In this article, I present the case of Richard, a teacher whose work entailed a particular set of demands generated by a complex range of intersecting factors – amount and nature of experience in teaching, and the context in which he worked…
Attributions for underachievement among students experiencing disadvantage and support for public assistance to them
In this study, we investigated people's perceptions about the causes (i.e. attributions) of underachievement among students experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage and their support for public assistance to those students. Results of an online survey conducted with Australian adults ( N = 1999) revealed that people preferred societal attributions to individual attributions for underachievement among those students. The respondents' attributions, …
Governance reform in context
This article addresses the relationship between profession, organisation and spatial (geographical) setting, more specifically the relationship between welfare sector professionals' conditions for work amidst governance change. In previous research, the conditions for welfare sector professionals' work have largely been studied without taking the employing organisations or the local and regional situation into consideration. In this article, the …
Middle-class parents’ educational work in an academically selective public high school
This article reports the findings of a study on the nature of parent–school engagement at an academically selective public high school in New South Wales, Australia. Such research is pertinent given recent policies of ‘choice’ and decentralization, making a study of local stakeholders timely. The research comprised a set of interviews with parents and teachers (n = 15), through which parents – all members of the school’s Parents’ and Citizens’ gr…
The teacher 'problem
This paper seeks to understand the construction of teachers within one New South Wales education policy, querying this construction in relation to both local and international processes and factors. As such, it also looks to contribute to a growing body of international literature which grapples with the role and nature of neoliberal policy development in education more broadly. To accomplish this, the paper analyses Great Teaching, Inspired Lear…
Devolution, market dynamics and the Independent Public School initiative in Western Australia
The devolution of public sector schooling systems has been a feature of education reform since the 1980s. In Western Australia, the Independent Public School (IPS) initiative has recently been installed, announced by the state government in 2009. Now over 80% of the state’s public school students attend IP schools. Drawing on interview data from a broader study of devolution and the conditions of teachers’ work, this article explores the cases of…
Deficit discourses and teachers’ work
Research within communities that have historically been failed by formalised schooling often describes teachers who have found it difficult to engage with the social and cultural differences of their students. In this article, I present the case of Richard, a teacher whose work entailed a particular set of demands generated by a complex range of intersecting factors – amount and nature of experience in teaching, and the context in which he worked…
Evidence of teaching practice in an age of accountability
Cultures of performative accountability in education have been on the rise globally since the 1980s. Accordingly, teachers have increasingly been encouraged to understand their work in relation to particular forms of ‘evidence’. All evidence, however, is not regarded as equal, and sources of evidence privileged within cultures of performative accountability are typically narrowly rendered, apparently ‘objective’, externally generated and largely …
Exploring students’ metaphors for learning in Western Sydney schools
In both academic and policy spaces, learning is often cast as lifelong, dynamic, constructive and in particular, agentic. Despite this focus students’ voices are rarely privileged in these spaces – especially in policy. We respond to this oversight by deploying Foucault’s theories of knowledge to explore how students understand themselves as learners, considering this alongside dominant political and academic discursive constructions of learning.…
Teachers, fixed-term contracts and school leadership
Fixed-term contracts are a relatively recent, yet growing category of employment for teachers in the public school system in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. In this article, we draw on quantitative and qualitative data from a large state-wide survey (N = 18,234) of members of the public-school teacher union, the NSW Teachers’ Federation, in order to explore the workload reports of teachers in temporary employment. We find that overall, these te…
Governance reform in context
This article addresses the relationship between profession, organisation and spatial (geographical) setting, more specifically the relationship between welfare sector professionals' conditions for work amidst governance change. In previous research, the conditions for welfare sector professionals' work have largely been studied without taking the employing organisations or the local and regional situation into consideration. In this article, the …
Teachers and educational policy
This double special issue, “Teachers and educational policy: markets, populism, and im/possibilities for resistance” explores the figurative politics of the teacher in current education systems around the world. In this introduction to the issue, we discuss how and why teachers have emerged as a key focus of contemporary policy reform. We argue that teachers are seen as a logical site of public commentary in the global knowledge economy, yet teac…
Triage in teaching
The work of teachers is often understood primarily in relation to student learning rather than as a form of labour for the worker in question. While such a focus is understandable, it can fail to recognize the relationship between conditions of work and the character or nature of that work. In this article, we engage with the issue of teachers’ work and workload, presenting interview data from 31 teachers across the state of NSW, Australia. Locat…
Collaborating for policy impact
Knowledge co-production between academics and practitioners is increasingly a focus for university workplace contexts. While there is emerging interest in how social science academics can engage with industry to generate impact, little attention has been paid to how one form of practitioner organisation, trade unions, engages with academics to influence policy and member outcomes. In this article, we examine a case of research collaboration with …
Labour Commodification in the Employment Heartland
This article analyses the commodification of professional labour and union responses to these processes within the employment heartland. It explores the category of fixed-contract or ‘temporary’ employment using Australian public school teaching as the empirical lens. Established to address intensifying conditions of labour market insecurity, the union-led creation of the temporary category was intended to partly decommodify labour by providing i…
What needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of education
The series of responses in this article were gathered as part of an online mini conference held in September 2021 that sought to explore different ideas and articulations of school autonomy reform across the world (Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, the USA, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand). It centred upon an important question: what needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of educa…
Attributions for underachievement among students experiencing disadvantage and support for public assistance to them
In this study, we investigated people's perceptions about the causes (i.e. attributions) of underachievement among students experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage and their support for public assistance to those students. Results of an online survey conducted with Australian adults ( N = 1999) revealed that people preferred societal attributions to individual attributions for underachievement among those students. The respondents' attributions, …
Fairness perceptions of educational inequality
The Australian education system features considerable socioeconomic inequality and is a frequent source of controversy in Australian public life. Yet meaningful reform to this system has proven elusive. In this article, we examine the public’s fairness perceptions of educational inequality based on parental financial capacity, using an online survey of adults ( N = 1,999) from New South Wales, Australia. We asked about the fairness of inequality …
Researching teachers’ time use
In the context of global concerns about teacher workload and the relationship between workload and attrition, understanding the nature, quantity and intensity of teachers’ work is an essential first step in formulating robust solutions to this significant problem. Understanding teachers’ work, however, is a complex undertaking, and prior attempts have largely been focused on the quantity rather than the intensity or quality of work required and u…
Pre-service teachers’ views of schools as workplaces in a system of social, cultural and religious division
Teachers seeking work in market-oriented schooling systems confront a range of settings within which they might teach. This article presents the views of ten teachers on the cusp of beginning teaching in the market-oriented schooling system of Australia, regarding the school or schools they would like to work in as teachers. Data were gathered via in-depth, semi-structured interviews and analysed with reference to Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, …
Fairness perceptions of income‐based educational inequality
Income‐based educational inequality is a global issue. In Australia, schools in the relatively large private sector charge a range of fees, with public schools also exhibiting considerable income differences. Using a nationally representative sample in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes, we examined the public's fairness perceptions of income‐based educational inequality and how their fairness perceptions are related to self‐interest (part…
Reducing teachers’ workload or deskilling ‘core’ work? Analysis of a policy response to teacher workload demands
Teacher workload is a growing problem internationally. In this article, we analyse an attempt by the state education bureaucracy of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, to address this through the ‘Quality Time Program’. Drawing on labour process theory and Carol Bacchi’s framework of ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’, we analyse how the Quality Time policy documents conceptualise and aim to address a particular kind of teacher ‘workload probl…
Recruiting the 'quality teacher
The figure of the teacher is becoming increasingly significant in schooling systems around the globe. In this article, we consider how the market-oriented system of schooling in the Australian state of New South Wales may be reflecting and (re)shaping understandings of who teachers are and should be. To do this, we present a corpus-assisted analysis of advertisements for teaching positions gathered across the public, Catholic and independent scho…
Middle leaders as policy actors
Schools today often operate in a context of performative accountability in which forms of student assessment become representative of success in a competitive global knowledge economy. While research has explored the nature of top-down assessment directives and the implications of these for local stakeholders, the way in which assessment policy is enacted in schools has been largely neglected. Through analysis of interviews with six middle leader…
Framing teachers’ curriculum work in the Australian print media
Questions about teacher knowledge and expertise are longstanding internationally. This tension has intensified in Australia in recent years, with discussions of a ‘lesson lottery’ experienced by Australian students by virtue of teachers’ varied approaches to curriculum planning. In this article, we present an analysis of how teachers’ curriculum work has been framed in the Australian print media over the past five years, and who has framed the pr…
Teaching social justice education
Teaching social justice within initial teacher education is a fraught endeavour, often interwoven with discomforting forms of learning for both teacher educators and the students they work with. In this article, we introduce the special issue, ‘Teaching social justice education: the nature, role and future of discomfort’. We discuss the impetus for the issue–borne out of both personal professional circumstances as well as the current socio-politi…
Experiences of discomfort in social justice education with pre-service teachers
Engaging in discomfort is often considered essential for meaningful social justice education with pre-service teachers. Yet the way in which discomfort is experienced by such students is an underdeveloped area of the literature. In this article, we explore student feedback survey (n = 2303) and interview (n = 3) data from pre-service teacher education courses that engage with discomforting content, gathered from an Australian university over a fi…
Workload, work intensification and time poverty for teachers and school leaders
This paper presents a synthesis of research literature concerned with teachers’ and school leaders’ experiences of workload and work intensification. Forty papers met the inclusion criteria for the research synthesis. From the analysis, we drew out both definitional and experiential accounts. Firstly, while we mostly found a conflation of the concepts of workload and work intensification, there is a distinction between the two that was apparent i…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (17 works) · Pedagogy (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (13 works) · Economics (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Public relations (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Global Education and Multiculturalism (7 works)