Joanne O’Mara
Biographic Data
| ID | 5398584 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joanne O’Mara |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joanne |
| FAMILY NAME | O’Mara |
| SIGNATURE | O’MARA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3511-1125 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 17 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
How Did We Get Here? Truth-Listening to Climate Crisis Through Reading Literary Works by Australian First Nations Writers
In this paper we theorise climate fiction in the context of Dirrayawadha: Rise Up , by Anita Heiss (2024). Dirrayawadha: Rise Up is a literary novel that narratises historical truths in a dialogic encounter. Through an exploration of love, resilience and resistance, the novel recounts early moments of invasion while simultaneously revealing the links between colonial violence and environmental crisis. We examine four excerpts from the novel to il…
Overcoming hesitancy in delivering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures in Australian schools
Over the past decade, Australian schools have been directed to positively engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures and put in place strategies to enhance the success of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. These directives have come from both the Australian Curriculum Cross-curriculum priorities and the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers and School Leaders. Since these changes have been intro…
The Importance of Professional Identity in the Sustainability of the Secondary English Teaching Profession
Professional identity is now widely understood to be central to teachers’ lives, practices and wellbeing. And yet, as teaching workforce shortages continue across the world, there has been little research into the influence of identity on attrition rates nor how identity might feature in attempts to address attrition and improve teacher retention. This paper reports statistically significant findings from a mixed-methods study, using surveys, int…
Neither this nor that
This article examines and critiques gap-based education policies that are based on statistical and reductive conceptualisations of success for First Nations students in Australia. The policy desire to achieve social justice underpinned by parity of outcomes across a range of life indicators (including standardised English literacy) between First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians is embedded in programmatic approaches to pedagogy …
Teacher Agency and the Digital Technologies Curriculum in Disadvantaged Australian Schools
Teachers’ everyday work-for-change
Focusing on teachers’ practices amid a national curriculum ‘implementation’ project for schools identified as having high enrolments of students experiencing disadvantage, this paper uses narrative methods to illustrate what we refer to as teachers’ everyday work-for-change. Teacher interview data was generated via a longitudinal multi-site case study. Two teachers at one school are selected for detailed attention because—despite their significan…
Data justice in education
Educational institutions increasingly rely on digital platforms to deliver content and learning, monitor attendance, communicate with stakeholders, and evaluate institutional performance. Despite the efficiency and accessibility gains they offer, digital platforms are powered by personal data which, through a process of datafication, can be used to track, monitor, and profile staff and students. The insights drawn from this data can be used to sh…
Urgency through education
The purpose of this communication is to explore possibilities for children’s literature to enable futures learning. It introduces the ways in which two different frameworks might be used to analyse children’s literature. The first framework draws upon the Earth Charter Principles (ECP) (Auld et al., 2021). The second framework brings together the pillars of sustainability with the principles of Education for Sustainability (EfS) in a framework fo…
Analysing digital educational games with the Games as Action, Games as Text framework
Putting professional learning practice first in innovative learning environments
Considerable investment has been made to redesign built spaces in schools, with an assumption not based on research evidence embedded in both the architectural and educational literature that this will improve teaching and learning practices. In this study of 12 Victorian case studies in Australia schools were selected based on OECD criteria, not including the built environment, of an innovative learning environment (ILE). Yet each school had in …
Digital games in the museum
There is growing interest in the incorporation of digital games as part of the suite of offerings in museum education in heritage environments. Digital games are seen as ways of recreating historic worlds, affording empathetic and affective engagement, and increasing interest in and understanding of historical periods or processes, working in complementarity with material exhibitions and artefacts on display. Stakeholders engaged in the developme…
Reimagining Literacy
Children today must navigate an ever-expanding array of mobile electronic devices and digital technologies that require literacy skills of a different order than in past eras. School systems and educators everywhere have been racing to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change and to respond to these changing learning needs which disrupt existing pedagogical practices. In early 2020, education systems across the globe experienced furthe…
Necessary but not Sufficient
This paper argues the case for expansive and inclusive models of literacy pedagogy that can be applied to curriculua more generally. Literacy pedagogy in Australia has benefitted from using Freebody and Luke's (1990) Four Roles of the Reader Model. We analyse the Paul Kelly song video, Sleep, Australia, Sleep, using this model. Underpinning this model is the concept that each role is necessary but not sufficient. We discuss the benefits fo plural…
School leadership and intercultural understanding
Internationally, Intercultural Understanding (ICU) is increasingly prevalent in the field of education. The recent evidence base includes a growing academic literature and examples of specified education policy and curricula. In regards to leveraging ICU, research suggests a multi-level and longitudinal approach is needed to ensure effective and sustainable school change. Significant gaps exist in the literature about the contextual factors acros…
The National Disability Insurance Scheme and access to education
This paper explores the experiences of a small group of families in Australia in relation to recent reform to disability policy by way of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Framed in critical disability perspectives of policy implementation research, the paper focuses on the extent to which the scheme articulates inclusive opportunities for children and young people with disabilities, particularly in relation to facilitating access …
The policy problem
This paper explores the changing terrain of disability support policy in Australia. Drawing on a critical disability framework of policy sociology, the paper considers the policy problem of access to education for people with disabilities under recent reform by means of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which commenced full roll-out across the country from July 2016. The paper reviews NDIS reports, legislation and associated litera…
Process drama and digital games as text and action in virtual worlds
This article explores the intersections between drama and digital gaming and the educational possibilities for literacy of both. The article draws on a model for the educational uses of digital gaming and three case studies from the Australian Research Council funded three and a half year project, Literacy in the digital world of the twenty first century: Learning from computer games. This model theorises the scope of the possibilities for litera…
The policy problem
This paper explores the changing terrain of disability support policy in Australia. Drawing on a critical disability framework of policy sociology, the paper considers the policy problem of access to education for people with disabilities under recent reform by means of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which commenced full roll-out across the country from July 2016. The paper reviews NDIS reports, legislation and associated litera…
Data justice in education
Educational institutions increasingly rely on digital platforms to deliver content and learning, monitor attendance, communicate with stakeholders, and evaluate institutional performance. Despite the efficiency and accessibility gains they offer, digital platforms are powered by personal data which, through a process of datafication, can be used to track, monitor, and profile staff and students. The insights drawn from this data can be used to sh…
School leadership and intercultural understanding
Internationally, Intercultural Understanding (ICU) is increasingly prevalent in the field of education. The recent evidence base includes a growing academic literature and examples of specified education policy and curricula. In regards to leveraging ICU, research suggests a multi-level and longitudinal approach is needed to ensure effective and sustainable school change. Significant gaps exist in the literature about the contextual factors acros…
The National Disability Insurance Scheme and access to education
This paper explores the experiences of a small group of families in Australia in relation to recent reform to disability policy by way of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Framed in critical disability perspectives of policy implementation research, the paper focuses on the extent to which the scheme articulates inclusive opportunities for children and young people with disabilities, particularly in relation to facilitating access …
Process drama and digital games as text and action in virtual worlds
This article explores the intersections between drama and digital gaming and the educational possibilities for literacy of both. The article draws on a model for the educational uses of digital gaming and three case studies from the Australian Research Council funded three and a half year project, Literacy in the digital world of the twenty first century: Learning from computer games. This model theorises the scope of the possibilities for litera…
School leadership and intercultural understanding
Internationally, Intercultural Understanding (ICU) is increasingly prevalent in the field of education. The recent evidence base includes a growing academic literature and examples of specified education policy and curricula. In regards to leveraging ICU, research suggests a multi-level and longitudinal approach is needed to ensure effective and sustainable school change. Significant gaps exist in the literature about the contextual factors acros…
The National Disability Insurance Scheme and access to education
This paper explores the experiences of a small group of families in Australia in relation to recent reform to disability policy by way of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Framed in critical disability perspectives of policy implementation research, the paper focuses on the extent to which the scheme articulates inclusive opportunities for children and young people with disabilities, particularly in relation to facilitating access …
The policy problem
This paper explores the changing terrain of disability support policy in Australia. Drawing on a critical disability framework of policy sociology, the paper considers the policy problem of access to education for people with disabilities under recent reform by means of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which commenced full roll-out across the country from July 2016. The paper reviews NDIS reports, legislation and associated litera…
Digital games in the museum
There is growing interest in the incorporation of digital games as part of the suite of offerings in museum education in heritage environments. Digital games are seen as ways of recreating historic worlds, affording empathetic and affective engagement, and increasing interest in and understanding of historical periods or processes, working in complementarity with material exhibitions and artefacts on display. Stakeholders engaged in the developme…
Reimagining Literacy
Children today must navigate an ever-expanding array of mobile electronic devices and digital technologies that require literacy skills of a different order than in past eras. School systems and educators everywhere have been racing to keep up with the rapid pace of technological change and to respond to these changing learning needs which disrupt existing pedagogical practices. In early 2020, education systems across the globe experienced furthe…
Necessary but not Sufficient
This paper argues the case for expansive and inclusive models of literacy pedagogy that can be applied to curriculua more generally. Literacy pedagogy in Australia has benefitted from using Freebody and Luke's (1990) Four Roles of the Reader Model. We analyse the Paul Kelly song video, Sleep, Australia, Sleep, using this model. Underpinning this model is the concept that each role is necessary but not sufficient. We discuss the benefits fo plural…
Analysing digital educational games with the Games as Action, Games as Text framework
Putting professional learning practice first in innovative learning environments
Considerable investment has been made to redesign built spaces in schools, with an assumption not based on research evidence embedded in both the architectural and educational literature that this will improve teaching and learning practices. In this study of 12 Victorian case studies in Australia schools were selected based on OECD criteria, not including the built environment, of an innovative learning environment (ILE). Yet each school had in …
Urgency through education
The purpose of this communication is to explore possibilities for children’s literature to enable futures learning. It introduces the ways in which two different frameworks might be used to analyse children’s literature. The first framework draws upon the Earth Charter Principles (ECP) (Auld et al., 2021). The second framework brings together the pillars of sustainability with the principles of Education for Sustainability (EfS) in a framework fo…
Neither this nor that
This article examines and critiques gap-based education policies that are based on statistical and reductive conceptualisations of success for First Nations students in Australia. The policy desire to achieve social justice underpinned by parity of outcomes across a range of life indicators (including standardised English literacy) between First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians is embedded in programmatic approaches to pedagogy …
Teacher Agency and the Digital Technologies Curriculum in Disadvantaged Australian Schools
Teachers’ everyday work-for-change
Focusing on teachers’ practices amid a national curriculum ‘implementation’ project for schools identified as having high enrolments of students experiencing disadvantage, this paper uses narrative methods to illustrate what we refer to as teachers’ everyday work-for-change. Teacher interview data was generated via a longitudinal multi-site case study. Two teachers at one school are selected for detailed attention because—despite their significan…
Data justice in education
Educational institutions increasingly rely on digital platforms to deliver content and learning, monitor attendance, communicate with stakeholders, and evaluate institutional performance. Despite the efficiency and accessibility gains they offer, digital platforms are powered by personal data which, through a process of datafication, can be used to track, monitor, and profile staff and students. The insights drawn from this data can be used to sh…
How Did We Get Here? Truth-Listening to Climate Crisis Through Reading Literary Works by Australian First Nations Writers
In this paper we theorise climate fiction in the context of Dirrayawadha: Rise Up , by Anita Heiss (2024). Dirrayawadha: Rise Up is a literary novel that narratises historical truths in a dialogic encounter. Through an exploration of love, resilience and resistance, the novel recounts early moments of invasion while simultaneously revealing the links between colonial violence and environmental crisis. We examine four excerpts from the novel to il…
Overcoming hesitancy in delivering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures in Australian schools
Over the past decade, Australian schools have been directed to positively engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures and put in place strategies to enhance the success of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. These directives have come from both the Australian Curriculum Cross-curriculum priorities and the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers and School Leaders. Since these changes have been intro…
The Importance of Professional Identity in the Sustainability of the Secondary English Teaching Profession
Professional identity is now widely understood to be central to teachers’ lives, practices and wellbeing. And yet, as teaching workforce shortages continue across the world, there has been little research into the influence of identity on attrition rates nor how identity might feature in attempts to address attrition and improve teacher retention. This paper reports statistically significant findings from a mixed-methods study, using surveys, int…
Sociology (13 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Political science (9 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Curriculum (4 works) · Engineering (4 works) · Literacy (4 works) · Mathematics education (4 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (4 works)