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Prior to its election to office in 2007, the Australian Labor Party announced a commitment to introduce Trade Training Centres (TTCs) into all Australian secondary schools as an initiative of its Education Revolution. TTCs were proposed as a key element of Federal Labor's education and training policy that aimed to manage future risks to Australia's competitiveness in the emerging global economy and to support school-to-employment transitions for young people. This analysis adopts a governmentality framework to conceptualise the Federal Government's introduction of TTCs alternatively as a key strategy for nationalising social investment politics in Australia. The paper draws on recent Australian policy documents to argue that TTCs are social technologies that work to open up social spaces in and around schools for governing relationships between schools and other community stakeholders, particularly businesses and families. The paper concludes by examining policy implications, including those of social justice, for promoting school community partnerships through TTCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a case for the reconfiguration of the public sphere as discursive space, arguing that such a reconfiguration better enables investigations into public debates on education. The paper focuses on one such investigation, which studied one newspaper's reporting of a review of the school curriculum in Queensland, Australia. It employs Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the interrelationships between policy discourses and the discourses about the review that were constructed in the print media. The paper shows how the dynamic structure of the public sphere enabled discursive connections to be made across sites in order to privilege a shared public discourse on education policy, schools and teachers. In so doing, it demonstrates the capacity of the public sphere to define educational issues and identities in particular ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship education in established democracies is challenged by declining youth participation in democracy. Youth disenchantment and disengagement in democracy is primarily evident in formal political behaviour, especially through voting, declining membership of political parties, assisting at elections, contacting politicians, and the like. If citizenship education is to play a major role in addressing these concerns it will need to review the impact it is making on young people in schools. This paper reviews a major national project on youth participation in democracy in Australia set in the context of a national citizenship education programme. The Youth Electoral Study found that citizenship education in Australian schools has at best been marginally successful and substantially more is required to raise levels of democratic engagement. The paper explores many opportunities available to education systems and schools to address these issues through reconceptualising aspects of the formal and the informal curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines shifts in emphasis in Australian education from expectations and belief that teachers not only make a difference to student achievement, but they are the difference. In moving from social class relations accounts to self-managing school accounts, latest shifts (teacher effectiveness accounts) over-emphasize teacher effect(s), distorting issues of student under-achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As performativity within the academy continues to escalate, this paper considers the place for building research capacities through a scholarship in teaching and learning initiative at an Australian university. While the tensions that exist between discipline research and scholarship in teaching and learning remain, evaluation data for a central higher education research group suggests that an alternative research pathway is possible through collegial structures. The drive towards performativity is not unique to Australia and the evidence presented provides insights that may be useful for a broader audience that may be considering research capacity building. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is significant research on the motivations and migration experiences of South Asian international students in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK); however, the employability journeys of this group are not well understood. This article addresses this gap, illuminating the specific employability challenges experienced and perceived by South Asian postgraduate international students enrolled in Australia and the UK. Drawing on qualitative research comprising semi-structured interviews with 30 South Asian postgraduate international students studying at a university in Australia and in the UK, the findings highlight significant barriers to employability along four key axes: time pressures from study and adjustment issues (micro); lack of internship opportunities offered at the universities (meso); lack of culturally tailored university career services (meso) and perceptions of employers' as well as Government policy implications (macro). Acknowledging and understanding these findings are important for universities to support South Asian international student employability experiences and graduate outcomes to remain competitive in the global job market. The findings suggest recommendations to enhance the employability of South Asian students in the UK and Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu's concept of habitus clivé illuminates Indigenous Australians' experiences in tertiary environments for both Aboriginal students and Aboriginal staff. Habitus formed through family, schooling and social class is also shaped by urban, regional or rural upbringing, creating a durable sense of self. Aboriginal people in Australia live in all of these places, often in marginalised circumstances. Bourdieu's more specific concept of habitus clivé, or divided self, is less well known than habitus, but offers value in giving expression to Indigenous people's experiences within a dominant White society. The complexity of participation and educational change is explored here through the experiences of three authors' intersecting positionalities within the Australian academy. Developing more nuanced scholarly language reduces the imposition of perspectives that see Indigenous people as objects within western frameworks. Scholarly understanding and respect for Australia's first peoples' concepts and cultural practices would engage more appropriately and fairly with Aboriginal knowledge and society. Habitus clivé chronicles one version of habitus that can be changed or be reconfirmed but not easily or by fiat. Understanding the concept can be learned, however. Educational opportunity, glorified in today's higher education, means little for Aboriginal people without long-term strategies addressing existentially and culturally split habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines community participation in school governance in Australia. History of the emergence of the concepts of community participation and decentralization in the country's educational system; Factors affecting educational reforms in the country; Landmark legislation that influenced the evolution of the educational system in the country.

Discusses the factors being considered in national curriculum-making in Australia. Trends in the Australian economy; Costs of education in relation to the outcomes of schooling; Integration of education and youth policies.

This article examines the 1988 Dawkins reforms to Australian higher education and the creation of a unified national system. The article is based on two propositions. The first is that as historians we should examine educational reforms in a changing society not only for what they propose, but with a look backwards to understand their place within a longer history of educational reform. The second – with a side-glance to the British higher education reforms of the early 1990s as a counterpoint – is the extent to which the 1988 Australian higher education reforms should be seen as neoliberal or, as Quicke, McCulloch and Openshaw argue, should we as historians look for nuance within the complex philosophical forces at play? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst peer observation of teaching is well established as a practice that can enhance teaching quality, the challenge to fully embed this practice in universities remains unresolved. This article analyses the perspectives of 18 university leaders (nine Australian and nine English) drawn from a range of school-based leaders to senior leaders of learning and teaching. Our study indicates that some of the challenges associated with leading such schemes can be mitigated through approaches to educational leadership that enact a respectful and collegiate ethos. This we suggest can support developmental academic engagement in peer observation for positive and lasting change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon recent theorising of the ‘becoming topological’ of space– specifically, how new social spaces are constituted through relations rather than physical locations – to explore how standardised data, and specifically test data, have influenced teachers’ work and learning. We outline the varied ways in which teacher practices at a primary school in Queensland, Australia, were actively constituted through processes of ‘tracking data’ and ‘keeping data on-track’, and how teachers were simultaneously being disciplined, or ‘tracked’, by these very same data. Our analyses suggest that what appear to be more ‘technical’ activities and tasks of ‘using’ data are, in fact, actively constituted modes of governance, enabled through and deployed by ongoing practices of comparison and topological respatialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a case study of successful research capacity building in the field of early childhood education in a non-research intensive, regional Australian university. In a context characterised by substantial political, economic and structural constraints, it illustrates a creative, strategic, and to some extent, transgressive approach to research capacity building inspired, in part, by concepts proffered by social theorist Gilles Deleuze. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

National curriculum development in Australia has been characterised in a number of ways. In the 1970s words such as 'core', 'common' and 'progressive' were used to describe curriculum and these terms undoubtedly reflected the social idealism and cultural emphasis in curriculum at that time. In recent times a whole new state of descriptors has emerged. These include: 'common,' 'essential', 'assured,' 'guaranteed,' 'entitlement,' 'agreed,' 'compatible,' 'promulgated,' 'streamlined,' 'corporate' and 'instrumental'. All these words reflect the layered warnings and patterns of beliefs broadly defined as ideology within which the idea of curriculum development has been defined currently.

Focuses on the condition of the private schools in Australia. Increase in the enrollments of private schools; Success of state teacher unions and parents' committees with enrollment impact assessments in preventing funding of new schools or classes; Interpretation of the patterns of specialization in the humanities, the physical sciences and mathematics.

Examines the development of a social studies curriculum in a state education system in Australia. Changes in the curriculum development within the state education system; Accountability of the curriculum; Role of teachers in curriculum planning and implementation.