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This paper argues that languages, increasingly marginalised in schools in English-speaking countries, are gaining ‘elitist’ ground as part of the ‘value-added’ marketisation of schools and parents’ desire for their children to gain ‘positional goods’ through schooling. In arguing our case, the paper draws on survey and other data derived from second-language immersion programmes in two Queensland secondary schools, where key learning areas such as mathematics and science are taught through the medium of another language. As a corollary, we also argue that some schools – in our case, government schools – are using their immersion programmes as markers of distinction in a period of post-comprehensive schooling and emerging school markets, which includes both government and non-government schools. There is also a global policy context to such programmes in respect of countries such as Spain, China and Germany supporting the teaching of their respective languages in nations around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Frequent calls for more male teachers are being made in English-speaking countries. Many of these calls are based upon the fact that the teaching profession has become (even more) 'feminized' and the presumption that this has had negative effects for the education of boys. The employment of more male teachers is sometimes suggested as a way to re-masculinize schools so they become more 'boy-friendly' and thus contribute to improving boys' school performance. The focus of this paper is on an Australian education policy document in the state of Queensland that is concerned with the attraction, recruitment and retention of male teachers in the government education system. It considers the failure of this document, as with many of the calls for more male teachers, to take into account complex matters of gender raised by feminism and the sociology of masculinities. The paper then critiques the primary argument given for the need for more male teachers: that is, that male teachers provide boys with much needed role models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse to examine interview accounts of educational disadvantage provided by Samoan community members engaged as paraprofessionals in secondary schools in the Australian state of Queensland. While the interview participants were asked a range of questions for an Australian Research Council funded project on the construction of Australian identities through language and literacy practices, the data extracted in this paper focuses only on those accounts that referred explicitly to pedagogic discourses and practices. In these accounts, the Samoan paraprofessionals attributed educational disadvantage to: (a) the arbitrary organisation of students, knowledge and spaces in schooling institutions, and (b) differences between school and Samoan institutions. The principles of power and control generating the unequal selection, organisation and distribution of school knowledge are discussed in the light of empirical research utilising Bernstein's theoretical work on the social re/production of disadvantage in and through schooling discourses and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses sociologically the current form of school-based secondary assessment, in Queensland which is criterion-referenced to Year 10 and a hybrid criterion/norm referenced form at the end of Year 12. Habermas' arguments are used to suggest that this. assessment pattern will give the state potentially greater 'steering capacity' over education by 'rationalising' it-the 'scientisation of schooling'. This form of assessment fits within the accountability discourse of the economically parsimonious 1980 while meeting selection demands. However, the approach does meet some educational demands. The paper also reflects upon the role of the state and expert knowledge in policy formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parent engagement in schooling has long been held as a vital component of the successful navigation of the schooling process and, consequently, governments often invite such engagement via policy implementation. However, at times, contestation arises about parent engagement, with some parents seemingly 'crossing the line' when attempting to be involved in their children's schooling. This paper investigates the possibility of parent engagement in schooling in Queensland, Australia, conceptualising it as a game of social and systemic practice. The author examines this notion using an example of contestation between parents at a regional government school and the education authority. Policy directives about parent engagement are explored, with the rhetoric of such policy applied to the example in question. The work of Bourdieu and Foucault is used to argue that the invitation to parents to engage is framed and thus often misrecognised, resulting in unintended conflictual relationships between parents and governing authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the Foucaultian concept of power/knowledge is central to an understanding of the production of individuality through the use of dividing practices in schools. Dividing practices include the examination and psychological testing procedures which, as technologies of modern power, combine hierarchical observation and normalising judgement in the process of individuation. An analysis of the discourse of two dividing practices used extensively in schools in Queensland, Australia provides a genealogy of the exercise of disciplinary power in schooling in the cause of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health has become a symbolic category of considerable importance, expressing a range of notions relating to well-being, consumption and normality A particular view of health as corporeal and individualistic has become pervasive within the new health consciousness, and school physical education represents one site among many where the ideology of healthism is produced This paper draws on a study of an innovative programme in primary schools in Queensland, Australia It explores how on the one hand the instructional discourse of `daily physical education' varied across a number of sites of meaning production and how on the other hand this instructional discourse was embedded in the regulative discourse of healthism which set limits on the extent to which the people operating at these sites could make their own sense of daily physical education We argue that a corporeal and individualistic concept of health, in which body shape and fatness play a central role is being produced through health-based physical education programmes like daily physical education These programmes in turn represent an important site of the production of an individualistic and internalised mode of corporeal control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]