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Cultural and linguistic diversity in educational settings is the new normal internationally. However, domestic research shows that Indigenous Australian students are still not benefiting from school. Despite global research on Culturally Responsive Pedagogies and Reggio Emilia being proven to work with minoritised groups in settler societies, little research exists in Australia. This paper addresses this noticeable gap in the literature, bringing into dialogue the culturally responsive pedagogy movement with Reggio Emilia principles for theoretical nuanced examination of listening pedagogies. This dialogue seeks to shift epistemological and ontological framings of the child and their schooling experience. The paper argues for a deterritorialising of Indigenous ways of being and knowing that view learning as socially and culturally mediated. A central finding is that culturally responsive Reggio Emilia inspired practice offers educational change through a decolonising frame using instructional dimensions of relational and dialogic teaching. The paper concludes that reductive pedagogy constrains Indigenous listening and learning and that explicitly connecting curriculum to students' cultural strengths is an instructional reform opportunity for reterritorialising pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2007, 'Closing the Gap' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people has been an ambition of Australian state and federal governments in areas including education, employment, and health. This paper examines media responses to government policies aimed at closing the achievement gap in schools. The paper analyses print and online newspaper articles in national and capital city/state-based newspapers that reported on the implementation and success of Closing the Gap policies in Australia's schools. The paper argues that media narratives are often based on NAPLAN results, data sourced from the MySchool website, or newspaper-created metrics that support their own narrative. This paper highlights the narratives being purported to readers via the selective nature of newspaper data, and subsequently how these narratives attempt to influence the public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Intercultural understanding' (ICU) and its core concept 'interculturality', was introduced in the new national curriculum, implemented across Australia from 2013 (Australian Curriculum, ACARA. [2013]. Australian curriculum V.60. Retrieved from ). This paper draws on a study conducted in Victoria, Australia, which asked: how history teachers conceptualise interculturality for history teaching and learning? The study used two methods to gather data: textual analysis and focus group interviews. This paper only reports on specific findings from the focus group interviews, analysed through a methodology of crystallisation and discourse analysis, framed by four modes of historical thinking; traditional, exemplary, critical and transformative. The paper argues that interculturality is a significant challenge to history education often located in discourses constructed over time which disrupt how things have always been taught. By analysing the teachers' talk through a lens whereby the construction of language reveals the educational problematic, the research looks for a way in for interculturality into history teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the social ecology of Félix Guattari, to suggest that young children learn in complex social and natural situations, in this case 'getting muddy'. The notion of social ecology will be revived in this paper, to ensure that the human social world is embedded in and part of the natural world, with all its complexities, relations and repetitions (re: muddiness). Children learn from their mistakes, from social interaction, due to their instincts, and as part of an evolving situation, much of which is beyond their control, e.g. their attraction to mud. This paper will search for these types of learning(s) in the affect that can be discerned from teaching and learning, and specifically related to 'muddy literacy'. One might call the combined notions that will be put to work in this paper as 'affective literacy', it is an affective literacy fully imbricated in muddy nature. To achieve this, the paper will attend to empirical research in the early childhood context in Australia, that has charted how children learn from inquiry based learning outdoors in mud, pictures of Aboriginal children outside (and a hand), and a mud classroom painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, competing discourses shape tensions between the role of the contemporary university and the global markets in which universities must exist. This paper draws on the examination of interviews with nine education academics in Australia to illuminate the construction of ‘global’ in the production of the global graduate (GG). Discourse analysis is used to explore how, against the backdrop of COVID 19, participants construct different identities variously related to current and future orientations for the GG. This paper uses two big ‘D’ discourses – efficiency as centralised imperative and boundless productivity – to explore knowledge production and accountabilities, neoliberalism, internationalisation and the construction of marketised universities operating in global knowledge economies. We conclude, the GG is an elusive notion, which draws mobile and multiple positionings to reveal unsettled and often ambiguous constructions of ‘university’ and ‘teacher’, with related tensions for the role and identity of education academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To alleviate overpopulation in Australia's metropolitan areas and counter population decline in regional areas, regional settlement of newly arrived migrants and refugees has emerged in recent policy debates. With a new federal government plan to introduce mandatory regional settlement for migrants, significant responsibility is placed on regional schools to cater for the unique needs of students from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. Evoking Bourdieu's thinking tools, this paper examines the perspectives of principals and teachers from two regional schools in Victoria, Australia by exploring their beliefs and dispositions towards English as an Additional Language (EAL) students in mainstream classrooms and their capacity to build student capital within a regional education field. This paper argues that for regional settlement to be 'advantageous', regional schools must look from within to initiate a whole school approach to EAL support and professional development and promote community connections to create advantageous spaces for migrant and refugee youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with an innovative approach to school consolidation in regional New South Wales, Australia. Adopting a 'one school, two sites' model, it is argued that this innovative approach to school consolidation requires new theoretical resources to understand 'the school'. Theoretically informed by Eacott's relational approach and drawing on publicly available data (e.g. MySchool) and focus groups with school leaders, this paper argues that: (i) complicity with the idea and materiality of 'the school' makes it difficult to thinking differently about schooling; (ii) the image of the school is at once constitutive of, and emergent from, community identity; and (iii) to articulate an alternative requires a shift away from an entity-based (substantialist) perspective. Working with the three key concepts of the relational approach – organizing activity, auctor, and spatio-temporal conditions – this paper proposes an alternate way of thinking about school consolidation and the intellectual resources to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on transnational education inquiry from Guatemala to Australia. Grounded in field research on Indigenous matters, this paper offers fractal education inquiry as a proposition to interrupt the straight and spatialized notions of time that produce developmental, salvific, and progress-centric aspirations from which educational problems are generated. Set as a manifestación, the paper begins with the case of the Don Dale youth detention center in Australia's Northern Territory and moves on to define the terms of fractal inquiry to defy carceral logics. Fractal education inquiry is exemplified in the study of teacher education reforms in Guatemala. In the last section, the paper interrogates the logics of the gap, teacher competencies in diverse classrooms, and the disadvantaging of populations as reinscriptions of educational regimes attempting to tame multiple and Indigenous fractal ontologies that defy the linear temporalities ruling current schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the rise of philanthropy and the influence corporate partnerships have on the practice of public schooling. We do this by focusing on one public school in Australia and its partnership with one global commercial actor. The paper proceeds by outlining new philanthropy in public schooling and in particular, how commercial organisations are now sponsoring or making donations to local public schools as part of their focus on Corporate Social Responsibility. We then analyse the participation of one commercial actor – McDonald's – in what we are conceptually referring to as the commercial school heterarchy. Our data demonstrates how McDonald's used different kinds of power to market its brand, gain entry into the school and diversify its field of influence from that of 'sponsor' of a sports team to that of a 'business partner'. In our discussion we consider the implications of this partnership for principled positions in public schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is interested in thinking more about sexuality education at school. As such, it is concerned with a mundane and unacknowledged feature of the sexuality classroom - the mapping of movement. While human movement is a familiar focus of educational research, the movement of things is not. With reference to Barad’s concept of intra-activity, the paper maps human-non-human movements and characterises these as a sexual choreography of schooling. Instead of asking what does movement mean or reveal about sexuality education, I attend to the event movement inaugurates. Predominantly theoretical, the paper weaves together ideas from conventionally disparate disciplinary fields. These include Edensor’s concept of rhythm from geography, Eggermont’s notion of the choreography of schooling from education, and Barad’s spacetimemattering from quantum physics. This theorisation enables a recognition of movement as a force in human-non-human classroom intra-actions implicated in the becoming of sexuality education as event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the construction of teachers within one New South Wales education policy, querying this construction in relation to both local and international processes and factors. As such, it also looks to contribute to a growing body of international literature which grapples with the role and nature of neoliberal policy development in education more broadly. To accomplish this, the paper analyses Great Teaching, Inspired Learning (GTIL), a policy with wide-ranging and potentially significant ramifications for teachers. Ultimately it is argued that although aspects of neoliberal thinking are evident in the policy, particularities of context have mediated this push. It is suggested that this has led to a particular neoliberalisation of policy that variously targets and supports individual teachers and the systems and structures surrounding them, while the place of GTIL within both local state politics and the global imaginary is questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to debates that shaped a special issue of Discourse in 2017 by taking the debate about responsibilisation in education into the realm of Foundations Skills in Australia. The difficulties that many Australian adults experience with low levels of language, literacy and numeracy skills (Foundation Skills), have been widely identified. It has been claimed that almost half of Australia's working age population have Foundation Skills at levels that do not allow them to meet the complex demands of work and life. The paper describes the Foundation Skills policy apparatus that has developed in Australia, and discusses how the sector is characterised by aspects of marketisation and commodification. We argue that the Foundation Skills learner is imagined as an individual, choice making, responsible consumer and increasingly made responsible for carrying the burden of the development of their 'human capital' so that they can secure a less parlous participation in precarious labour markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended to provide a source of critical and theoretical reflection on the current mathematics educational objectives for Indigenous students in Australia, which are premised on acceptance of underlying concepts of 'equity'. It is not the intention of this paper to identify 'how' Indigenous knowledge can be positioned within mathematics curricula, as this would entail a philosophical inquiry much deeper than has been afforded thus far. The intent here is a consideration, facilitated through the lens of key concepts of Foucault, of some of the boundaries currently shaping the ways in which this positioning is being influenced in the mathematics, albeit neoliberal education context. Acknowledging the interplay between the social, and unconsciously shaped adoptions of what can be considered truth; knowledge; and therefore power, is a first step toward developing the openness of heart and mind needed to make real and transformative changes to education for future societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the utility of Campbell's narrative construction of 'the hero's journey' as a conceptual apparatus to understand how international students from Confucian heritage cultures navigate their experiences in Western schooling systems like Australia. The hero's journey framework was used to investigate the commonalities and differences in international students' beliefs and behaviours, which led to the development of three different students 'hero' models: the self-determined hero, the hesitant hero, and the wounded hero. These models were used to represent the students' beliefs, behaviours and perceptions of support and to describe the experiences and motivations of students in different contexts during their secondary schooling in Australia. The hero's journey provides a potentially useful framework from which to engage schools, systems, and policymakers in productive dialogue regarding the support and engagement of international students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school communities with a range of responsibilities. This paper seeks to better understand the kind of post-welfare form of government IPS enacts. Using concepts from the governmentality literature, this paper analyses documents related to the program, and interview data collected from key government officials responsible for the initiative. It finds that while IPS renders operable a neoliberal critique of the public sector by implementing the processes of contractualization, it also diverges from the ideal schema of neoliberalism. Analysis reveals that a number of strategic, pragmatic and political concerns have resulted in what some may view as a contradictory rationality of “the system” being instituted as a key element in this autonomizing reform. The paper calls for attention to the actual operationalizing of neoliberal reform projects to gain a nuanced understanding of modern regimes of rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Australia has a long and sometimes turbulent relationship with the migrant Other. This paper examines a component of this relationship via the window of contemporary multicultural policy. The paper begins with an analysis of the political and social conditions that enabled a national and bipartisan policy of multiculturalism to emerge as formalised federal policy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The paper re-problematises the influences that helped shape Australia's articulation of race and ethnicity and argues that multiculturalism, within a post-September 11 environment, can no longer be framed solely within its traditional framework of social justice. The paper positions education for sustainable development (ESD) as an emerging discursive field that provides educators with an alternative road map for critiquing Australia's fluid relationship with the migrant Other. By linking the tenets of multiculturalism with ESD, this paper suggests pre-service teacher educators are presented with a productive, and at the same time politically palatable, means for regaining pedagogical traction for a semi-dormant agenda of social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores two Australian school education policy documents and the inputs they describe to boost student achievement. The paper suggests that current reform efforts in schooling like others previously configure student achievement in input-output terms confining school education policy to predictable inputs that sideline broader influences on educational output including, for instance, school funding. The national policy documents that are the subject of the case study in this paper are the National Plan for School Improvement and the current Students First. Student achievement is explored as an object of study that can be worked on by policy, including for across-theboard national 'non-educational' purposes. The analysis, critical in outlook, suggests that current school education policy trades on a predictable set of evidence-based inputs as correctives to declining levels of student achievement without weaving into the student learning equation the complex mix of relations that frame the educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the field of language teaching has been increasingly recognised as having an important role in developing not only linguistic proficiency, but also a kind of 'interculturality' among students. Despite this 'intercultural turn' being evident in academic and policy documents, language teachers are at varying stages in their adaptation to such an approach. This paper draws on empirical data from a small-scale study conducted with teachers of Indonesian in Australian schools, to elucidate teachers' understandings of their role as 'intercultural' educators. In particular, the notion of 'culture' is examined, and the ways it is deployed around ideas of 'intercultural understanding' and language teaching pedagogy. This paper argues that despite the prevalence of 'interculturality' in educational policy, and a prevailing 'intercultural ethos' amongst teachers, confusion persists around the foundational idea of 'culture', which may affect teaching philosophy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I (re)define outsourcing in a way that reflects the nature of the practice in education. While business and management definitions of outsourcing have been generative to this point, they are relatively broad and place wide boundaries on the practice. Moreover, they do not acknowledge the interpretation and enactment of outsourcing in contexts where economic models were never supposed to dominate. To create a bespoke and 'stipulative' definition that is a better fit-for-purpose, I selected one school subject, Health and Physical Education (HPE), and one country, Australia, as an illustrative case. I then analysed three literature corpora to find examples and attributes of outsourcing. I argue that recruiting this new definition will allow scholars within and beyond the field of HPE to construct new arguments and generate different types of rich data on the practice in ways that they might not necessarily have been able to previously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the stories of two autonomous public schools in Australia, this paper demonstrates how commercialisation can simultaneously position schools as both consumer and for-profit producer. Drawing on Foucault's articulation of discourse as that which constitutes and makes available what is possible to be said, done and imagined, the paper illustrates how the current marketised articulation of education is allowing for new possibilities of commercialisation in schools. Together these stories demonstrate that there are creative ways that these schools have embraced their autonomy, while relying on market solutions to acquire the resources they deem necessary for their students and their communities. However, it also shows how these resources and the attainment for them are inextricably constituted by the market orientation of education more broadly and how this presents potential dangers for what schools may be and become as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global narratives of educational philanthropy tend to emphasise the significant influence donors have in shaping public school policy and practice. In Australia, however, tax laws work to narrow the possibilities for philanthropy to exert influence over public schooling. Indeed, public schools (unlike private schools and Higher Education institutions) are unable to receive 'direct' philanthropic income, yet they can benefit from philanthropically supported programmes and services. Delving into this complex regulatory environment, this paper maps the types of philanthropic actors – including foundations, charities, intermediaries, not-for-profits, churches and Parent and Citizen associations – that are working with/in Australian public schools, and questions their potential to influence school policy and practice. We cautiously argue that edu-philanthropy in the Australian context is not a picture of policy distortion, but one that is responding to the current policy context of economic rationalism and the rollback of the welfare state, to support and enrich public schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's response to the recent special issue ofDiscourse(Vol. 34, No. 2) that examined evolutions of markets and equity in education. We welcome Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's supplementation of the special issue with the genealogical analysis they provide of private school funding in Australia and the attention they draw to elisions of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity and whiteness in contemporary framings of equity in policy and research. We also clarify and expand on some of the aims and arguments that framed the special issue. However, we feel that any response adequate to the ‘event’ that Morsy, Gulson and Clarke hope to stage – that is, a ‘debate redux’ and politics of dissensus in education as an antidote to depoliticisation – must extend beyond the rehearsal of pre-existing positions; it cannot stop at endorsing or critiquing the points raised in their paper, or reiterating the rationales and arguments of the special issue. We therefore respond by gesturing towards possibilities for ‘disagreement’, in the sense that Jacques Ranciere gives this term, about the political vocation of critical policy sociologists, and the modes of doing and being that can be seen as ‘critical’ and ‘political’ in academic education research. We do not disagree with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke in the usual sense; for that reason, we engage seriously with their call for a politics of dissensus in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument developed in this paper is that a focus on practice provides some resolutions to methodological problems facing Bourdieuian scholarship in education. In order to develop Bourdieu's work on practice to account for the interactions between practices, this paper presents a conceptualization of practice as chains of production and consumption. The first part of the paper reviews the account of practice offered by Bourdieu both embedded in practice games and as field effects. The second part of the paper introduces practice chains of production and consumption as a way to conceptualize practice by drawing on a case involving print journalists' involvement with policy makers over the course of an Australian policy review. The final section presents a discussion of this conceptualization and highlights the potential of the concept for further research in understanding the processes of educational policy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data from an Australian high school classroom, investigating how students and their teacher negotiate readings of literature in order to arrive at meanings that are valued by subject English, as well as understood by the students. Subject English acts a vital agent for the transmission of both literacy and literary knowledge in English-speaking countries, and students which do not share the cultural and social orientations valued by the subject and its texts have the potential to be disadvantaged. However, I argue that this clash of socio-cultural perspectives may be positively viewed as an advantage for democratic education, as it allows students' critical understanding of their world to be challenged, for teachers to include student perspectives, and for students to be empowered to participate in institutional discourses. Implications for teacher practice and educational theory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to its influences across economic, geopolitical, and social spheres, globalization has given rise to the notion of a 'global citizen' who is able to understand a shifting and more internationalized world while moving fluidly through it. Education has been trumpeted as the means to achieve this globally-aware citizenry, leading to an entire field of global citizenship education (GCE). Here teachers are the linchpin, yet understandings of globally-focused coursework in teacher education remain underdeveloped. This paper explores the 'global' within core courses in initial teacher education in Australia and interrogates the kinds of 'citizens' to be cultivated. We begin in our pilot study by canvassing university courses across Australian Group of Eight universities, and locating more global aspects of the courses, where available. Based on initial findings, we offer a dual-axis conceptual framework for guiding an 'alternative future' for GCE within teacher education. We then use the framework in a focused coding of one teacher education syllabus as an exemplar of its potential utility for examining the ways in which future teachers are encouraged, or not, to engage with broader geopolitical, sociocultural, and economic forces of globalization in the PreK-12 schools in which they will eventually teach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its subject the circulation of tolerance discourse within two pedagogical encounters in two Australian educational settings, and draws from the work of Wendy Brown on tolerance as a regulatory force. Brown argues that discourses of tolerance are produced within historical and cultural milieu that enable tolerance and aversion to exist simultaneously. This has significant implications for how we might come to understand the project of working towards a socially just educational system and the various struggles encountered within pedagogical sites. I also examine the pedagogical affects that are produced within different educational moments as we work to teach in or around difference and when we embody the Other in the classroom. I engage with how these experiences speak to the way in which tolerance as national ideal acts to both alleviate and circulate discourses of inequality such as sexism and homophobia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global contexts of accountability have placed unprecedented pressure on school leaders to improve the performance of their schools. Despite recognition that leaders’ influence is mediated by school culture, few studies offer systematic examinations of culture-in-action in schools. The concept of culture remains nebulous and is frequently glossed over as being ‘messy’ in studies of school change. This paper uses tools from membership categorisation analysis to demonstrate how culture is produced at a micro-level in and through the actions of leaders in one school. My analysis shows a disjuncture between the purported values and policies of the school and the ways that school leaders through their talk construct and implement school practices, and thus the culture-in-action at their school. I argue that implementing effective change is impossible without understanding and disrupting the micro-level production and reproduction of culture in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature on social class and language study in schools argues that for middle-class parents and their children, languages are chosen for their capacity to offer forms of distinction that provide an edge in the global labour market. In this paper, we draw on data collected from interviews with parents and children in middle-class schools in Australia to demonstrate how a complex amalgam of elite, cultural identity and/or trade language discourses came into play to explain the choice (or not) to study a language and the choice of specific languages. For many of the parents languages provided a limited form of ‘civic multiculturalism’, as a means of better understanding and respecting the ‘other’. We argue that the value attributed to high status languages via this discourse, means their continued presence in schools hoping to attract middle-class parents, but their relative absence in schools with largely working-class populations, where more ‘practical’ concerns dominate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about theorising with seven refugee-background youth, who have successfully completed their secondary studies in Australia. Using conversations-as-method, the focus is on how research partners theorise academic success, and on the reading I developed in response to their reflections. Inspired by the commonalities in Lugones' and Ahmed's work, especially their focus on persistence as an agentic stance in the face of adversity, I propose reading academic success in the context of this study as acts of willful-resistance (Spelling of 'willful' based on [Ahmed, S. (2012). Whiteness and the general will: Diversity work as willful work. philoSOPHIA, 2(1), 1–20]). Here, willful-resistance is very much about students' persistence and a refusal to being reduced to victimised objects. In addition, academic success as willful-resistance works in coalition with other forces within/against layers of entangled contexts and oppressions/privileges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a response to the 2013 special issue ofDiscourseon marketisation and equity in education, this paper suggests it is important to understand how school sectors (independent, Catholic and government) continue to play a significant role in how we constitute education, markets and equity in Australia. The first part of this paper provides a genealogy of school funding in Australia, giving an overview of how Australia has reached the current state of ‘sector-blind’ school funding. We also focus on the shift in Australian schooling from a public good for national collective well-being to a private, positional good for individual advancement. The second part of the paper suggests that the notion of ‘sector-blindness’ is part of a depoliticisation of educational politics. We work from the premise that education is always and everywhere already a political project. We critique some absences in the special issue around ‘colour-blindness’ and in a coda to the paper, we provide the basis for renewing and politicising the debate about education policy by offering a ‘debate-redux’, that provides some possibilities about forms of democratic politics and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses of 'teacher quality' have been on the rise in Australia since at least the standards-focused policy reforms of the 1990s. This paper uses a corpus-assisted analysis to explore recent deployments of 'teacher quality' and 'teaching quality' in the Australian print media, drawing on 432 articles collected from the 12 Australian national and capital city daily newspapers over the four-year period from January 2014 to December 2017. The analysis highlights that 'teacher quality' and 'teaching quality' are deployed differently in respect to school teachers and teachers in higher/vocational education contexts, and examines the nature of these differences. It demonstrates that the print media plays a key role in shaping and/or reflecting the links between discourses of teacher quality and notions of standards and accountability in education; and also in reflecting the highly politicised and political nature of teacher quality discussions and debates in Australia at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a reflection on the Participation and Equity Program (PEP) in Australia in the 1980s, this response describes the distinctive ideological shift from a social democratic to a market conception of equity in education over the past three decades. This shift has been accompanied by changes in the techniques of educational governance, from the collaborative approach of the PEP, which emphasised the importance of trust in teachers as professionals, to new managerialism focused on efficiency and accountability. Market reforms in education have continued to use such traditionally socially democratic notions as equity, but have been enormously successful in re-articulating their meaning. A commentary is provided on the papers in this Special Issue and their collective analysis of governmental strategies that have led to this re-articulation of equity; the extent to which these strategies have been successful; the consequences they have had on students and school communities, and for the work of teachers and schools; and possibilities for creating new approaches in education that undermine the seemingly hegemonic neo-liberal imaginary and work towards a more progressive democratic view of educational equity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a critical discussion of contemporary policy agendas to raise aspirations for university study among students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. It traces the politics of aspiration from the working class ‘poverty of desire’ thesis propounded by British socialists at the turn of the twentieth century to recent concerns about the educational aspirations of low SES groups. These concerns are manifest in the current aspiration-raising agenda in Australian higher education, which aims to realise equity objectives by cultivating market-rational behaviour and dispositions to maximise self-investment in human capital. However, changes in contemporary global education and labour markets present significant obstacles to the ‘good life’ promises made by advocates of human capital theory, and even when these promises are realised, deficit constructions of aspirations persist. The paper identifies a tension in aspiration-raising logics between (1) human capital promises of economic rewards for enterprising behaviour and (2) the policing of aspirations and associated behaviours according to dominant social values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alongside the influence of market-based reforms in education policy has been the growth of policy that has largely been overlooked – those that outline social contracts. This paper draws on policies that connect with equity as a way of illustrating this social contract turn in policy and develops a conceptualisation of social contracts as they apply to education policy. The argument provides three principles that underpin social contracts, including informed consent, negotiation and accountability. This paper applies these principles to three levels of social contract. At the first level are broad social contracts, which are associated with debates about the kinds of things that states should expect from its citizens, and the things that citizens could expect from governments and the state. The second level of social contract is an institutional or field-based social contract, which spells out the obligations and connections between a specific field and other fields. This level names a kind of social contract that is often exemplified in policies or statements by specific institutions. The third level of social contract deals with contract-like mechanisms embedded in fields that make tangible the obligations and expectations of citizens in fulfilling the expectations of fields. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Australia's Education Revolution, launched in 2008, emphasised equity as a key reason for reforms. It identified ‘pockets of disadvantage’ as one of the main problems that needed to be addressed through its reforms. Through a series of translations, the problem of ‘pockets of disadvantage’ was converted to one of a lack of information, a lack of comparable metrics and the absence of an informed public, leading to a number of solutions such as the development of a national assessment scheme and theMy Schoolwebsite. In this paper, using the theoretical and methodological resources of actor-network theory, I argue that these translations were also, simultaneously, the processes by which the Australian education space was further ‘marketised’. These marketisation processes involved homogenisation, whereby schools were rendered comparable through the development of common evaluation and common metrics; the development of informational resources that enabled parents to function as economic agents and exert ‘market forces’; and coordinating the activities of the actors through theMy Schoolwebsite. The paper concludes with a discussion of how such descriptive analyses might serve as critique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses data from a longitudinal study which foregrounds the category of ‘place’ to ask: How do new teachers learn to do their work, and how do they learn about the places and communities in which they begin teaching? Surveys and ethnographic interviews were carried out with 35 new teachers over a three-year period in a region of rural Australia known for its disadvantage. In this paper we focus on the analysis of ethnographic data about ‘community’ which revealed that these new teachers understand the relationship between schools and communities in superficial ways through commonly circulating categories of school-community relationships. Cutting across these categories, however, a storyline analysis revealed that they enacted community through entrenched and taken for granted binary discourses of community as either a cosy place of belonging and comfort, or an abject place of deficit and disadvantage. The failure of new teachers to develop a more nuanced understanding of comfortable communities, and the abjection of communities that are different from their own classed experience, raises important questions in relation to outcomes for rural and regional children. We suggest that the site of teacher education, and the first years of teacher learning at work, are critical for learning ‘community’ as our study suggests that these assumptions become more entrenched as new teachers are further socialised into the institution of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of public debates on teacher quality, both media and education policy texts construct deficit discourses about teachers, discourses that work together to inform public, commonsense understandings of teacher quality. This paper explores the interrelationships between discourses on teachers constructed on television and in policies in the Australian policy context. Critical discourse analysis was employed to trace the links between the discourses on teachers constructed in a television situation comedy and discourses in the policy documents that inform the Australian Government Quality Teacher Programme. The paper demonstrates the interdiscursivity of media and policy discourses on teacher quality by analysing the ways that the television sitcom constructed a particular version of teachers within the quality policy context. The analysis highlights the need for teachers to challenge these deficit discourses. The paper concludes by arguing for a rethinking of teacher professionalism in ways that include active engagement in public debates on education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global middle class (GMC) is a theoretical construct that seeks to globalise a set of attributes identified in studies of school choice in the global north, and to a lesser extent in developing nations in Asia. As theorised by Ball a mobile middle class with cosmopolitan sensibilities drives international education options in global cities. This proposition is challenged through analysis of the histories of curriculum and class relations in two national settings (Australia and Brazil) and examination of contemporary class profiles (i.e. economic and cultural properties) in expanding forms of international education in these countries. The paper argues that the forms of cosmopolitanism associated with the educational practices of the GMC must be examined within broader historical relationships of cultural domination. We conclude by arguing that broadening the historical horizon is an important exercise to challenge the claim of the GMC to be a novel category involving exceptional forms of cultural contact generated by the dynamics of the 'global city'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how prominent private schools in Australia are performing in a market context according to the tenets of performativity. From a discourse analysis of promotional materials that include prospectuses, advertisements, and school publications, it considers the "value-addedness" that these schools purport to offer. In this regard, ideas such as building self-esteem and emotional intelligence are not only being used for market advantage but are also being nicely conflated with religious principles to produce the "whole" child with market edge. This paper draws on a recent research study of 30 elite Australian schools. As new practices of identity formation and self-presentation are investigated, questions are raised about issues of fabrication in performativity-inspired practices of marketisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies a number of strategies employed by policy actors in the production of Australian higher education entry policy during the period 1987 to 1996, with a particular focus on the production of Queensland higher education entry policy text in 1990 (Viviani, 1990, The Review of Tertiary Entrance in Queensland, 1990, Department of Education, Queensland). The paper begins from the premise that while policy is often intended to be read as if spoken with a single voice, suggesting rational debate and (then) consensus among policy producers, it is more cogently understood as the product of struggle and conflict. Informed by 27 semi-structured interviews with politicians, political advisers, bureaucrats, academics, institutional administrators and independent authorities, the paper addresses the temporary settling of these actors' struggles and conflicts in contexts of policy making through strategies of negotiation. Rather than providing a sequential account of higher education policy that weaves its way through these negotiations, as grand narrative, the paper is more sporadic in its representations of strategies, identifying them in 'local' and specific knowledges and practices. Drawing on Foucault, what emerges is both an archaeology and genealogy of policy production (Gale, 2001, Journal of Education Policy, 16(5), pp. 379-393). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School prospectuses and promotional videos appeal to parents by presenting idealised images of the education a school provides. These educational idealisations visually realise the form of discipline a school is expected to provide, depending on the social habitus of the parents. This paper presents a content analysis of the images used in 33 sets of marketing materials from a maximally diverse sample of schools from the state of Victoria. These images are interpreted using the lenses of Bernstein's control and Bourdieu's habitus and cultural capital. The promotional images are found to vary systematically in terms of content and form depending on the perceived social class of the students which the schools attract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent education policy places a heavy emphasis on parents in relation to students' success at school. This paper explores how parents and teachers account for school success. Using membership categorisation analysis, it interrogates data collected in different interview situations across sites over a period of 20 years. The analysis shows how parents and teachers use talk as moral work to conversationally constitute particular agreed versions of the category ‘parent’. This category is interactively assembled through the use of category-bound attributes that construct deficit discourses of parents that explain student achievement. The analysis demonstrates that parents are complicit with teachers in producing versions of being a good parent wherein they are held responsible for their children's school success and that minimises the responsibility of the school. These findings raise questions both about who is responsible for schooling and about current contradictory policy emphases on parent and teacher responsibility for school success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TheAustralian Curriculum: Historyhas emerged out of a neoliberal federal education policy landscape. This is a policy landscape where pragmatic and performative, rather than pedagogic concerns are clearly foregrounded, and this has implications for curriculum development and implementation. A useful way to conceptualise the features, assumptions and potentialities of theAustralian Curriculum: Historythat has been produced from these policy imperatives is through a framework provided by the descriptors, ‘thin’ and ‘thick’. A thin curriculum is one that essentially equates curriculum with a product, and where the prescribed content is central to understanding what a curriculum is. A thick curriculum, on the other hand, is one where the curriculum is understood as a verb, where the details of content are secondary to an exploration of bigger questions and concepts, and where curriculum theory is the starting point for the selection of content. The use of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ as the ends of a continuum of curriculum provides insights into the purposes of a curriculum. Ultimately, such a dichotomy exposes assumptions about what is important knowledge and who is in control of the curriculum. This paper focuses on how theAustralian Curriculum: Historyas an example of a ‘thin’ curriculum, presents a number of challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with current educational literature in Australia and internationally, in exploring the implications of the hidden curriculum for Indigenous students. It argues that in schools, most of the learning rules or guidelines reflect the ‘white’ dominant culture values and practices, and that it is generally those who don't have the cultural match-ups that schooling requires for success, such as Indigenous and minority students, who face the most educational disadvantage. Howard and Perry argue that Indigenous students ‘… need to feel that schools belong to them as much as any child’ and that to ‘… move towards the achievement of potential of Aboriginal students, it is important that Aboriginal culture and language are accepted in the classroom’. This paper will also provide a discussion into school-based strategies that are considered effective for engaging Indigenous students with school. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The term equity is ubiquitous in Australian education policy and evolves amidst ongoing debates about what it means to be fair in education. Over the past three decades, meanings and practices associated with equity have reflected broader shifts in advanced liberal governance, with equity being reframed as a ‘market-enhancing’ mechanism and melted into economic productivity agendas. In this paper, I argue that an emerging, yet, under-examined policy tension is the view that secondary schools are capable of being equitable, whilst simultaneously acting as adaptive service providers, tailoring education to different students and local markets. A dilemma here is whether or not schools should ‘tailor equity’ or whether tailoring equity is indeed antithetical to equity in so far as it implies unequal provision. To explore this tension, I draw upon fieldwork from ethnographic research in two socially and economically disparate government secondary schools in suburban Melbourne, Australia. In doing so, I explore how equity is enacted and governed by educators, how forms of equity at each school relate to versions of equity in policy and the extent to which each school tailors equity to its local community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the effects of audit cultures on school education through a highly personal reading of the My School website, launched in Australia in 2010. It situates two personal narratives, from the points of view of student and teacher, alongside the other stories available about two of the secondary schools listed on the website. Although statistics such as those generated through the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy tests, school comparisons and post-school destinations present certain kinds of stories about these schools, I argue that these are reductionist and insufficient for understanding the complexities of pedagogical spaces and the teachers and learners within them. Whilst arguments for hard data to address educational inequity can be marshalled to support My School, I suggest that it also inadvertently disguises other elements of schooling and risks increasing inequity. Rather, the statistical stories might be recognised as partial and supplemented and disrupted by richer accounts, including narrative accounts, about schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how Foucault's concept of the panopticon, power and knowledge impacts on the identity of young Nunga males in a secondary educational institution. I argue that the regulation of the Nunga body in schools is embedded in the discursive formations of knowledge about Indigenous people and the workings of power that are tied up in discipline, surveillance and management of bodies in schools. Through the Indigenous concepts of 'play', 'playing up'/'stylin' up', I draw attention to Nunga males' resistance to surveillance and management in the schooling environment through understanding themselves as Nungas and their performance of identity through the popular culture of rap to turn the surveillance gaze back upon itself. For young Nunga males turning the gaze back on itself is an act of constructive defiance that allows them a space to explore their own identities through performance rather than through the knowledge production constructed by the hegemonic racialised institution of the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing number of higher degree research students from China in the universities of multicultural Australia as elsewhere has added to the mounting interest in pedagogies of postgraduate supervision. This paper explores the proposition that efforts to articulate Chinese ideas through research in, for and about Australia have to negotiate positions that would allow or disallow their embedding in the Australian education research community. To do so, the literature on higher degree research supervision in multicultural contexts is reviewed. Then the co-operative approach used to document a higher degree research student's experiences of integrating knowledge from her Chinese intellectual heritage into her research is explained. The third section illustrates a research intervention whereby Chinese knowledge was articulated through research in, for and about teacher education in Australia. The fourth section presents evidence of three different responses to this move to embed Chinese ideas in the Australian education research community. Specifically, the responses of Australian academics to her use of chengyŭ to theorise her evidence is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explain why the policy history of school funding in regard to Australian Catholic Education looks and sounds the way it does today through the production of a genealogy of the subject. The questions addressed are, first, why has the funding of Catholic schools in Australia become an occluded historical site since the 1970s, despite the controversy in which popular accounts of the funding of Australian schools is mired, and when its prevalence so completely dominated the discourses of Australian education in the prior century? Second, has funding policy discourse been defined and contained and what basis is there for contesting such discourse in light of events since that period of time? Third, which or whose policy version triumphs and becomes the accepted policy process and which other policy approaches are obliterated in this process? The theoretical perspective adopted in this paper draws from both postmodern critiques and cultural theories of historical construction, as framed within Foucauldian Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia there is growing interest in a national curriculum to replace the variety of matriculation credentials managed by State Education departments, ostensibly to address increasing population mobility. Meanwhile, the International Baccalaureate (IB) is attracting increasing interest and enrolments in State and private schools in Australia, and has been considered as one possible model for a proposed Australian Certificate of Education. This paper will review the construction of this curriculum in Australian public discourse as an alternative frame for producing citizens, and ask why this design appeals now, to whom, and how the phenomenon of its growing appeal might inform national curricular debates. The IB's emergence is understood with reference to the larger context of neo-liberal marketisation policies, neo-conservative claims on the curriculum and middle-class strategy. The paper draws on public domain documents from the International Baccalaureate Organisation and newspaper reportage to demonstrate how the IB is constructed for public consumption in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]