A Coalition party room meeting this week debated the A$1.7 billion childcare package announced in the budget, which would increase subsidies for families with more than one child in care and remove a cap on subsidies for higher-income families. Some MPs reportedly argued childcare shouldn’t be the only type of care being subsidised and parents should also […] … learn more→

Some of the things we reasonably thought turned out to be the other way around. Perhaps tolerance is the passion of the inquisitors and ignorance is strength. The point is that every time the media asks about Wikipedia they tend to ask the wrong questions. Is Wikipedia reliable? How good are Wikipedia articles? And here we could, in a […] … learn more→

If humans and mosquitoes had a battle at the end of the world, who would win? That’s the question I pose to 30 young kids each summer during a two-week camp called “Mosquitoes & Me” in Des Moines, Iowa. I am an educational anthropologist who studies the cultural dynamics of science education. Along with my colleagues Lyric Bartholomay and Sara […] … learn more→

When it comes to education, we cannot think about race, sex and class in isolation. When I was commissioned by the UK government to investigate how these issues affect academic achievement, I discovered how they all matter – and in combination. I believe that an analysis that focuses on any one of these in isolation […] … learn more→

Mentoring is known to be a critical component of job satisfaction and career development. It is also widely recognised that career advancement in medicine, research and health more broadly remains in favour of men. Traditional academic mentoring programs rely on a unidirectional mentor-mentee relationship: a senior academic mentors a junior (female) academic. This model has been shown […] … learn more→

Professors fiercely champion free speech. Many believe that unfiltered, even offensive, expression is fundamental to post-secondary academic life. But what about their students? Should student social media posts be punishable, even if they are made off-campus? This emerging issue in the perpetual battle over free expression speaks to the perils of ever-present devices, ubiquitous wifi and instantaneous […] … learn more→

Neuroscience has established a clear link between music and language acquisition. To put it simply, learning music in the early years of school can help children lay the foundations of reading. In the brain, neural networks involved in processing musical information and developing language overlap. From an evolutionary point of view, the processing of music developed in […] … learn more→

The Australian Senate yesterday voted in support of a motion calling on the federal government to reject critical race theory from the national curriculum. The motion was moved by Senator Pauline Hanson. Critical race theory, or CRT, is an academic theory developed primarily by Black scholars and activists to highlight the systemic and institutional nature of racism. […] … learn more→

Plan S is clear: science must be public and publicly funded research must be accessible by anyone. Like many colleagues, I am keen to see this happening. How to make it happen is, however, a different story. In an effort to liberalise the market, Plan S asked the publishers to disclose the price for open access […] … learn more→

Australian children are among the least active in the world. In a recent study, Aussie kids ranked 140th out of 146 countries for physical activity. And in 2018, a physical activity “report card” gave Australian children a D-minus for overall physical activity levels. The grade was based on only 18% of young people meeting the physical […] … learn more→