This chapter responds to an often-overlooked issue in Australian public schooling’s commitment to equity, that is, ‘religion’, or more precisely, educator’s ‘responsivity’ to the religious identities and knowledges of learners. The shared focus of this book is commitment to equity and pedagogies that transform learning and muster approaches to a more inclusive, responsive and socially just education. We argue for a widening of educational pedagogy. In this chapter, we center Muslim learners as a case study for enabling pedagogies for superdiverse Australian classrooms. We argue for culturally and ‘religiously’ responsive pedagogy (CRRP) as a powerful means of shifting away from established pedagogies that often erase religion from classrooms. This chapter considers the role of enabling pedagogical approaches that are responsive to the lifeworlds of Muslim learners and their religious backgrounds; that view religion as a form of learner diversity and thus assets for learning; that provide equitable opportunities and high expectations for all learners; and that prepare respectful spaces that allow for ‘sensitive’ and controversial dialogue, mediation of difference and criticality so all learners may engage with societal change.

This chapter will show you how traversing the overlapping identities of self (micro), organisation (meso) and system (macro) is an essential skill for educators to be culturally responsive. This includes making decisions informed by broader contexts, organisation/learning environment interpretations of those cultures and, crucially for educators at all stages, what this then looks like in their own educational setting. For pre-service teachers, this calls for a consideration of multiple layers in the development of teacher identity. For all educators, it demands reflection and scrutiny throughout one’s career recognising that some aspects of identity may remain a continuity, while others may change. By examining practitioner examples, research literature, national and global contexts, this chapter will equip you with practical and theoretical examples. We hope this will help you identify and negotiate micro, meso and macro levels of teacher identity as a way to better identify, empathise and implement effective culturally responsive pedagogies for the contexts you work in.

Chapter 2 discusses the subject of perception and how an individual’s selective perception of a situation influences their behavior. This discussion is expanded to include selective perception from a cultural perspective as well as from a group perspective. We also discuss the effects of selective perception on the degree and quality of communication that occurs in groups.

Chapter 6 delves deeply into the subject of communications in groups. We discuss the factors that hamper effective communications. We also explore the effects that gender and more broadly, member diversity can have on the nature of our communications. We include a section on factors and techniques that improve the quality of member communication in a diverse society.

This chapter on continental strike-slip faults and shear zones explores some of the largest faults on Earth, and also faults that represent the greatest seismic hazards. The structural pattern associated with continental strike-slip faults is presented, including strike-slip duplexes, riedel-shears, transpressional and transtensional fold and fault structures, and the chapter discusses how some large faults of this kind appear to transect the entire lithosphere. Shear wave splitting data are briefly presented as a type of data that gives information of the deeper part of continental strike-slip faults, with the Great Glen fault as an example. The well-known San Andreas Fault in the western US, the Dead Sea Fault, The Alpine fault in New Zealand and the Turkish Anatolian Fault are presented as examples of large faults of this kind and how they represent plate boundaries in continental crust. Continental strike-slip structures that do not represent plate boundaries are also discussed, with the active strike-slip faults along the Tibetan plateau and much older and deeply eroded examples from Gondwana (Brazil-Africa) and Canada.

The book concludes with a brief discussion of a number of the themes covered in the book, in particular, multilingualism. The chapter points out that linguistic contact is likely to be more central to the processes of language change than has been assumed by many specialists.

In this chapter, we will inquire into a common definition of constructivism that acknowledges cognition (learning) not as a passive process of receiving information, but as an active process of making meaning, a mental construction that reframes our existing understandings from our different experiences (Olusegun, 2015). In addition, we will explore the historical roots of constructivism to identify common themes in these models through examining insights from key theorists, its strengths and possible limitations. Furthermore we will present a rationale for a ‘flipped PBL’ constructivist pedagogy that provides learners with discourse through authentic problems that enable situational and ongoing cognitive motivation by way of mastery of key concepts and the application of conceptual knowledge to a range of contexts. The uniqueness of this pedagogical approach employs flipped learning experiences to build expertise, depth of learning and problem-solving across a range of contexts to ensure breadth of application. To gain a deeper understanding of this approach, we will also look at some examples of its application in a primary and secondary context and examine the implications for its use.

This chapter will develop your understanding of the role of widening participation in Australia, specifically the pedagogical approaches outlined throughout the chapter which can be enacted to support learners from all backgrounds. These critical teaching approaches have the power to disrupt the reproduction of existing structural inequalities to enhance the educational success of learners from all sectors of Australian society.

In Chapter 9, we discuss the concept of leadership and do so in the context of six theoretical views of leadership. We discuss the various styles of leadership as a segue into a discussion of transactional and transformational leadership. We also discuss the connection and importance of emotional intelligence to successful group leadership.