This paper considers the importance parents place on engaging with children's schools following the dissolution of parental intimate partner relationships. These periods of family transition typically involve many changes to everyday life, and can be complicated by tensions, disputes and competing agendas between parties. During such times, school staff may be unaware of family circumstances, uncomfortable about being privy to what many consider private matters, or unsure of their responsibilities based on the information available to them. For parents, however, the link between home and school can be a critical aspect of maintaining community connections and supporting children's learning and wellbeing during a time of personal and family upheaval. Here we draw on in-depth interviews with four Australian parents, whose experiences highlight how gendered norms and assumptions that underpin everyday school activities and practices can create exclusions and additional demands for families in need of sensitivity, safety and support.

• Discussions of diversity in relation to children's education are often characterized by binaries of same/different, mainstream/margins, inclusion/exclusion, self/Other.

• Curriculum remains a contested site in educational debate, with differing views about curriculum as reinforcing social norms, beliefs, and values, as addressing the learning and social needs of learners from a variety of backgrounds and worldviews, or as a hybrid of these.

• Policy and curriculum designed or intended to address diversity tend to rest on assumptions of majority or dominant cultures as homogenous and distinct from the cultures of minority Other/s.

• Inequality is often multidimensional, intersecting with, perpetuating, and reinforcing other inequalities and human rights violations affecting children and families.

• Understanding culture in terms of heterogenous practices of everyday life shifts the focus of discussion and debate toward more nuanced understandings of Otherness, difference and diversity as operating within, as well as between, cultures.

This chapter provides an overview of the conceptual and methodological framework of the Global Childhoods research project. Situated in three global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore, this project explores connections between policy contexts, school experiences and everyday activities of children and the shaping of their orientations to educational success. In order to better understand the intersections of education policy, practice and everyday life for children, we draw on the concept of “lifeworlds”, which has a rich history in social research as a framework for examining how people and groups experience the world. Moreover, instead of focusing on whose education system is more efficient, or better at producing better outcomes, this research seeks to gain deeper understandings about children’s lived experiences, academic performance and orientations to success by investigating children’s everyday lifeworlds (in and out-of-school experiences).

This paper presents a case study of one mother's experience of engaging with her children's schools after leaving a long-term relationship characterised by years of family violence perpetrated by the children's father. We interviewed Bernadette as part of an ongoing study of parents' experiences of school engagement during family separation and divorce. Her family circumstances and the role the children's schools played in that story merit consideration by educators, school leaders and education policy makers. Informed by theories of everyday cultural practices and sociological studies of gendered power relations in education, we argue that gender politics and organisational strategies for keeping parents 'in their place' can signifcantly contribute to systemic failures and school cultures that reinscribe the efects of family violence.

Pre-service teachers in Australian Initial Teacher Education programmes gain classroom experience through supervised, formally assessed professional experience placements and internships. This in-situ experience is recognized as important in the development of professional identities, knowledge and skills. However, many pre-service teachers lament the limited amount of classroom time encountered prior to beginning teaching. This paper reports on a university-schools partnership programme that affords pre-service teachers opportunities for non-assessed school-based experience in addition to, but not part of, their formal Initial Teacher Education programme requirements. Preliminary findings from a questionnaire completed by programme participants suggest that participants particularly value in-situ professional experiences unencumbered by time pressures and assessment regimes, and that these experiences are significant to developing notions of self and emerging professional identities in ways that differ from formally assessed classroom placements.

Non-traditional open-plan schools and classrooms are currently enjoying a resurgence in Australia, with proponents arguing for the necessity of educational spaces that more readily accommodate the needs of twenty-first century learners. However, these learning environments can pose considerable pedagogic challenges for teachers who must balance the ethos of spaces designed to facilitate autonomous and flexible student learning, while simultaneously managing the complexities of shared space and resources, decreased staff–student ratios, and highly variable student responses to learning in open-plan settings. This paper draws on observational and interview data from an Australian study of three primary schools operating in open-plan spaces. Informed by cultural theories of spatial practice, we argue that the ways in which teachers conceptualize and operationalize notions of "structure" is pivotal to the responsiveness of pedagogic approaches within open-plan spaces.