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Candidate wellbeing is recognised as a continual challenge for doctoral programs, with government mandates requiring an institutional response. This paper explores the experiences of candidates undertaking intensive writing sessions ('Write-Ins') and their influence on their wellbeing. Exploratory findings demonstrate opportunities for Write-In models to contribute positively to 'Spaces of Wellbeing'. Spaces of Wellbeing theory (Fleuret & Atkinson, 2007) highlights four dimensions of space that influence wellbeing: capability, security, integrative and therapeutic spaces. Findings show the Write-Ins contributed positively to wellbeing by offering space for candidates to enhance writing productivity, to work to their own pace, to connect with others, and to work flexibly.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is now a global crisis, resulting in the intermittent closure of many schools, worldwide. The school closures are believed to have affected adolescents’ education, particularly for vulnerable adolescents including those from a refugee-background.  The study explores the home learning experiences of adolescent Bhutanese refugees in Tasmania, Australia and draws on social capital theory to interpret findings. Interviews with adolescent Bhutanese refugees revealed four overarching themes: disengagement from learning, the experience of isolation, the complexity of family relationships and motivation through relationships. This article makes an important practical and theoretical contribution to home learning through challenging Putnam’s binary distinction between bonding and bridging and suggesting alternative conceptualisations based on the role of bonding in the creation of bridging social capital.  These findings have potential implications for the development of mitigation measures to support refugee-background students under extraordinary circumstances.

The AAEE 2014 research symposium in Hobart provided a privileged space for researchers and practitioners within environmental education and sustainability education (EE/SE) to come together and create dialogues about education for sustainability research. This essay is a critical reflection from postgraduate researchers about the symposium and the EE/SE research landscape more broadly. The authors interrogate contemporary research frameworks and practices, and deliberate on how current perceptions enable and inhibit performance within EE/SE research. The authors ask provocative questions and encourage readers to imagine for themselves what a new research landscape, freed of calcified frameworks and entrenched systems, might look like. The essay then draws on an ecological systems perspective as a means of reimagining EE/SE research within a more emergent landscape that values inclusivity, democracy, collaborative inquiry and curiosity.'It's about dialogue and it's about time' was the theme of the 2014 AAEE Research Symposium. As emerging researchers in environmental and sustainability education (EE/SE), we, the authors, found the symposium to be a catalyst for thinking about how it is that we 'consider' and 'perform' EE/SE research. As a group of first-year PhD students, we have reflected on the research landscape in which we are located. In this essay, we aim to open a penetrating dialogue about the practice and meaning of research within contemporary research frameworks. We ask provocative questions and invite EE/SE researchers to critically reflect on how their own research practices and performance are mediated by deep-rooted frameworks and methodologies.A key stimulus for the symposium was to respond to the provocation: 'What are key research questions in EE/SE research?' We challenge the status quo that research questions are best determined through academic networks of knowledge building and sharing. Instead we contend that key research questions in EE/SE can be identified and created collaboratively.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, parents and caregivers were asked to take greater responsibility for their children's education while they were unable to attend school. In this commentary, we report on data sourced from 243 participants in the Tasmania Project in Australia about their experiences of learning from home during COVID-19 lockdown. We engage with ideas about boundaries and bounding processes to understand how participants perceived challenges to their children's learning from home. They identified a lack of physical space for children's work to be performed and a lack of time, skill, and confidence to support them. We explore the bounding processes inherent to understanding and constituting education through identity, space, and place making and consider the ways in which these processes were revealed in the challenges identified by respondents. We argue that home learning disrupted known practices associated with education and schooling and challenged accepted categories and socio-spatial divisions created by institutionalisation. We anticipate that exploring the challenges of home learning during COVID-19 from the perspectives of parents and caregivers will inform future homeschool partnerships.

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Sustainability, conceptualised as the integration of economic, social and environmental values, is the 21 st century imperative that demands that governments, business and civil society actors improve their existing performance, yet improvement has been highly fragmented and unacceptably slow. One explanation for this is the lack of diversity on the boards of organisations that perpetuates a narrow business, economic and legal mindset rather than the broader integrated values approach that sustainability requires. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature investigating how board diversity affects the sustainability performance of organisations. Our review uncovers evidence of relationships between various attributes of the diversity of board members and sustainability performance, though over-reliance on quantitative methodologies of studies reviewed means explanations for the observed associations are largely absent. Limited measures of sustainability performance and narrow definitions of diversity, focused predominantly on gender, were also found. Important implications from the study include the need for policy responses that ensure boards are diversely composed. We identify that more qualitative investigations into the influence of a broader range of types of board diversity on sustainability performance is needed, along with studies that focus on public sector boards, and research that takes an intersectional understanding of diversity.

Carbon sequestration values of wetlands are greatest in their sediments. Northern hemisphere research dominates the earlier saltmarsh carbon sequestration literature, recently augmented by analyses across mainland Australia where species assemblages, catchment histories and environmental settings differ. No previous assessment has been made for Tasmania. Carbon stores and accumulation rates in saltmarsh sediments of the Rubicon estuary, Tasmania, were investigated. Carbon was determined from sediment cores by Elemental Analyser, combined with analysis of organic content and bulk density. Carbon accumulation was determined using short-term and long-term sediment accretion indicators. Results showed carbon densities to be lower than global averages, with variation found between carbon stores of native and introduced species zones. Cores from introduced Spartina anglica indicated a trend of higher sediment carbon percentages relative to cores from native saltmarsh Juncus kraussii and Sarcocornia quinqueflora, and in finer grain sizes. Sediment carbon stock of 30 cm depths was 49.5 Mg C ha−1 for native saltmarsh and 55.5 Mg C ha−1 for Spartina. Carbon percentages were low owing to high catchment inorganic sediment yields, however carbon accumulation rates were similar to global averages, particularly under Spartina. Covering 85% of saltmarsh area in the estuary, Spartina contributes the majority to carbon stores, potentially indicating a previously unrecognized value for this invasive species in Australia.