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The purpose of this paper is to suggest how well-being messages are recontextualized into school-based contexts from an analysis of national policy and state curricular approaches to health education as reported in the findings of two selected case studies as well as community concerns about young people’s well-being.

A cross-sectional review of Australian federal and state-level student well-being policy documents was undertaken. Using two case examples of school-based in-curricular well-being programs, the paper explores how discourses from these well-being policy documents are recontextualized through progressive fields of translation and pedagogic decision making into local forms of curriculum.

Pedagogic messages about well-being in Australia are often extra-curricular, in that they are rarely integrated into one or across existing subject areas. Such messages are increasingly focused on mental health, around phenomena such as bullying. Both case examples clearly demonstrate how understandings of well-being respond to various power relations and pressures emanating from stakeholders within and across official pedagogic fields and other contexts such as local communities.

The paper focusses on presenting an adaptation of Bernstein’s (1990) model of social reproduction of pedagogic discourse. The adapted model demonstrates how “top-down” knowledge production from the international disciplines shaping curriculum development and pedagogic approaches can be replaced by community context-driven political pressure and perceived community crises. It offers contemporary insight into youth-at-risk discourses, well-being approaches and student mental health.

This chapter focusses on the research methodology of the completed project, drawing on what Martin (2008) described as ‘Indigenist’ research traditions or practices. The project drew upon tenets of critical race theory which developed over the life of a university teaching and learning project to support the praxis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, or Indigenous,1 pre-service teachers on their final internships prior to graduating.

The broader project was conceptualised and framed within our prioritisation of Indigenist standpoint and critical race theory. Our project was designed to amplify the perspectives and voices of Indigenous students in situations where White, hegemonic relations appeared to constrain their potential achievement on practicum in socially unjust and often racist ways. Research into the achievement and success of Indigenous education graduates in Australia is dominated by non-Indigenous reporting, framed in deficit language of Indigenous ‘underachievement’, ‘barriers’, ‘lack’, and ‘disengagement’, rather than from their experience of injustice in their professional preparation as teachers.

The research design troubled how researchers like us ‘come to know’ Indigenous achievement in the higher education sector through the pre-service teachers’ words, impelling us to listen to stories of discrimination, rather than to official accounts of how they ‘failed’ to measure up to teacher standards. The attention to detail in the multi-site, micro-level practices in teacher education and the ways these unfold in situ for Indigenous students would not be possible without the Indigenist research methodology developed in partnership with Indigenous research colleagues and student co-researchers.

This chapter then serves to remind educational researchers that research is a practice and has practice architectures with particular hegemonic arrangements which have not transpired to serve the interests of Indigenous peoples. Honouring Indigenist standpoint and employing critical race theory in research design thus means paying particular and careful attention to the work that research practices do, on, to, and with communities, not normative (colonial) crafting of the praxis research problem.

In these uncertain and risky times, the work that educators and educational researchers carry out may feel inconsequential. In preparing young people to live well in a world worth living in, educators must consider, firstly, what roles they can play in a global environment riven by volatile economic, social, and environmental contexts, and secondly, the responsibilities they bear as researchers to produce forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and this world.

In this chapter, we introduce the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network and how it is that we, as researchers from around the world, came together to discuss our researching practices in coming to know and explore educational research problems concerning equity, diversity and social justice within and across different cultural settings. We share short stories of ourselves to reveal how it is that we have come to know, be, and act as researchers in our projects and how working alongside each other – our mutual relatings – have generated further understanding about our own and each other’s researching practices.

This chapter establishes the purpose of the book, where we share empirical work through the lens of practice architectures. For instance, what is considered to be an educational equity problem across international or cross-cultural sites? What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand educational inequity in its diverse forms in different sites? How are taken-for-granted research practices enabling and/or constraining different forms of understandings about educational inequity, including the issues to be researched and/or the direction of the research project? We then provide an overview of the remaining chapters.

This is the concluding chapter of Researching Practices Across and Within Diverse Educational Sites: Onto-epistemological Considerations. In this chapter, we recall the primary purpose of the book as to examine what it is that we believe we do as a diverse group of researchers from Australia, Finland, Norway, and Canada in educational research, reflexively considering our researching practices and how projects ‘turn out’ as a consequence of these practices. Having met and worked together as a part of the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) international network, our collaborations offer us an important intercultural and cross-cultural opportunity to consider our positionality and responsibilities as researchers to our participants and co-inquirers, and their communities. Sharing our projects reveals the affordances and challenges offered by various methodologies unique from and common across our projects but also reinforces the imperatives of relationality, respect, and reciprocity between researchers and the communities they serve. We leave the readers with a concept that builds upon the title of this book, that of axio-onto-epistemology, already in use in postcolonial and decolonial/Indigenous scholarship, but raised here as an open invitation for all educational researchers to consider in their researching praxis.

This chapter locates our book in social science debates and critiques challenging ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning researching approaches emanating from the global north. This is an important contextualising move, given that these debates have surfaced crucial understandings about the dangers of unquestioned assumptions underpinning researching approaches in intercultural and cross-cultural contexts. The chapter outlines how practice architectures, the key theoretical lens employed in this book, have attempted to counter these exclusions. It focusses on the theory’s emergence from the relational (political and material) work of the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network. This historicising move is part of our shared authorial commitment to rendering visible the taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning researching approaches, including those, such as practice architectures theory, that have a shared commitment to critical educational praxis. The final section of the chapter considers the possibilities and limitations of practice architectures theory as a means of challenging taken-for-granted ontological and epistemological assumptions of research and researching practices.

In this book chapter, I focus on the epistemological, ontological and axiological practice traditions that help to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions about the management of trust funds in First Nation communities. Informing this chapter is a qualitative research study involving 11 First Nation community members in Canada who were interviewed. Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing and the theory of practice architectures are used to identify the cultural discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that enable and/or constrain practice. The findings reveal that Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing collide adversely with trust account decision making due to the duties and obligations guiding trust settlement agreements. The ways in which trust account practices can be transformed to ensure greater alignment with Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing are outlined.

In this chapter, we present a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: first, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; second, we engage in a dialogic conversation to discover our own research practices. Focussing on projects in two different countries (Norway and Canada), our initial centring question for this chapter is: how do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: what onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The chapter reveals that dialogic research practices allowed collective wisdom to be discovered and ensured that we were able to break through the taken-for-grantedness both of the concept being studied and of our own research practices.

In this chapter, we present two examples of research projects aimed at amplifying voices that are often silenced in research: those of children and/or youth from refugee backgrounds. Refugees are often excluded from research for both ethical and practical reasons: because of their assumed vulnerability as well as the challenges related to language or access. In the research projects presented, we aimed to employ methods that suited these groups of children and youth to understand their experiences in ways that they wanted to express them, and in situ. We argue that starting from, and finishing with, the point of view of the knowledge holders illustrates one means (although not exclusively so) by which to amplify their voices and knowledge to counter epistemic injustice in educational research.