This symposium from AARE members is interlinked with one from BERA colleagues (Part A). We as academic research teams came together in successive BERA and AARE conferences in 2019 with projects from four cities in the UK and four in Australia in a multi-cities ethnography, challenging child poverty in school-communities. We made good progress towards coordinating and sharing our research intel, but the first Covid lockdown in early 2020 stalled our collaboration. The Bangor and Brisbane teams of the original eight cities continued to build our local partnerships and maintain the collaboration, as noted in Beckett’s (2023) edited book soon to be launched. Public schools in Australia are not only at the frontline of challenging the educational narrative of childhood poverty (Wrigley et al., 2012), but also of building democracy and protecting children's right to learn (Masschelein & Simons, 2013). This symposium presents findings on how public schools working with children and their school-communities in high poverty contexts have curricularised and pedagogised student wellbeing in ways that build democracy and protect learning as distinct from "performing" achievement. We present findings on (1) the recontextualisation by professional teachers of wellbeing curriculum, (2) the investments made by school leaders in environments, and (3) the nature of school-community partnerships, guided by Health Promoting Schools indicators (WHO, 2021). We also consider how findings such as these should impact teacher education. The task of this paired symposium is to explore the notion of boundaries around research. Why is our AARE work significant to an international collaboration? We offer (1) teachers’ perspectives on how they challenge child-poverty and support wellbeing in their professional work, and, (2) how we as academic partners have responded to their initiatives. The work to be done from collaborating with partners from Wales, acknowledging their ground-breaking Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 legislation (Davidson, 2020), is to make similar policy inroads in Australia to take wellbeing just as seriously. Chairperson: Lori Beckett Discussant: Richard Watkins Paper 1 - School-community partnerships in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student wellbeing Uncle Cheg Egert, Kate Houlihan, & Tanya Saltner, “The Murri School” - Aboriginal and Islander Community School, Brisbane, Australia This paper is from the Wellbeing leadership team in a community school in Queensland for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. We outline a First Nations perspective on supporting the educational aspirations of students, many of whose daily lives are underscored by urban poverty, racism, out-of-home (or looked-after) care, and/or complex medical and developmental issues. Our school has decades of experience in configuring limited budgets and leveraging health services, philanthropic interest and Indigenous community strengths to support student wellbeing. We focus here on environments and community partnerships, espoused not only by the World Health Organisation (2021) as indicators of a health promoting school but also as a beacon for other schools and Government whose own wellbeing journeys are just beginning. Paper 2 - Rethinking child poverty and school-community wellbeing approaches Sue Whatman & Katherine Main, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia In this case study from Queensland, we investigated how educators conceptualise and support student wellbeing. We firstly articulate what teachers understand of child poverty and how they respond, particularly with regard to effects of the Global Educational Reform Movement or GERM (Sahlberg, 2015). The schools were grappling with regentrification of the school-community, a challenge for providers of public education for children of families who are predominantly key workers. The data from interviews between the authors and school leaders lent itself to analyses informed by Bernstein’s (2000) concepts of rules and fields, including recognition, recontextualisation and realisation. We conclude with suggestions on how to draw upon our international research collaboration to drive a wellbeing policy environment that is in its infancy in Australia. Paper 3 - Pedagogies for belonging and wellbeing of primary schoolers at risk of disengagement. Katherine Main & Sue Whatman, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia This study conducted in a regional primary school in Queensland employs the concepts of instructional and regulative discourse (Bernstein, 2000) to analyse what and how students are learning via a custom curriculum and deliberate, social and emotional pedagogies of the teachers, to re-engage year 3 and 4 primary school students in learning. Drawing on 25 classroom observations and five teacher video vignettes, pedagogies for wellbeing seem to emphasise recognition and realisation of regulative discourses more than instructional discourses. We conclude that building students’ sense of belonging and connectedness to learning comes before GERM-infected pedagogies for achievement. Paper 4 - Mobilising the teacher education sector to prioritize professional knowledge of wellbeing Pauline Taylor-Guy, Australian Council for Educational Research, Australia The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) has an extensive research history into school wellbeing. We've investigated how mental health and social wellbeing manifest in schooling environments (c.f. Laurens et al., 2021), and developed protocols for evaluating the effectiveness of school-based wellbeing programs (Dix et al., 2020). How, then, does collaborative international research find its way into teacher education? With increasing uniformity in teacher education in terms of required subjects (TEMAG, 2015), the flexibility for institutions of higher education to prioritize wellbeing research into coursework has also been reduced. It is proposed that empirical collaborations such as this can add to “policy clout” triggering recontextualization of wellbeing into compulsory curriculum in teacher education. References Australian Council of Social Services. (2022). Poverty in Australia 2022: A snapshot. University of New South Wales. https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/a-snapshot-of-poverty-in-australia-2022/ Beckett, L. (2023, in press). Child poverty in Wales: Exploring the challenges for schooling future generations. University of Wales Press. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Revised Edition. Rowman and Littlefield. Davidson, J. (2020). #futuregen: Lessons from a small country. London: Chelsea Green Publishing. Dix, K., Ahmed, S.K., Sniedze-Gregory, S., Carslake, T., & Trevitt, J. (2020). Effectiveness of school-based wellbeing interventions for improving academic outcomes in children and young people: A systematic review protocol. Australian Council for Educational Research. Masschelein, J., & Simons, M. (2013). In defence of the school: A public issue. Translated by Jack McMartin. E-ducation, Culture and Society Publishers. Sahlberg, P. (2012). Sahlberg, P. (2012). How GERM is infecting schools around the world? https://pasisahlberg.com/ Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG). (2015). Action Now, Classroom Ready Teachers Report. Department of Education, Australian Government. World Health Organisation (WHO)(2021). Making every school a health promoting school: Global indicators and standards. Author. Wrigley, T., Lingard, B., & Thomson, P. (2012). Pedagogies of transformation: keeping hope alive in troubled times. Critical studies in Education, 53(1), 98-10.