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Oral language is the primary means through which a child controls, describes, organises, and evaluates their life experiences and their ability to use oral language which effectively impacts their future literacy development. Currently, the world is awash with dynamic change and constant disruption. These include natural disasters such as the ongoing Australian floods and bush fires, droughts, the global COVID-19 pandemic, the pervasive use of digital technologies, continuing global unrest, and impacts on economic and social adversity. Many of these disruptions are having a negative impact on the development of children's oral language and ongoing communication capacities. This is interesting given the prioritisation in many western nations, including Australia, of learning to read and write over learning to talk and communicate. This paper serves as an example of what makes good classroom literacy research. It outlines the elements of robust research including a research proposal structure. In this instance, our research investigates educator perceptions of children's developing oral language and communication skills and practices in birth to 8-year-old education contexts within the current backdrop of extreme disruption. The paper includes a literature review, our proposed research methodology which includes interviews from participants in birth to 8-year-old education settings, in both national and global contexts sourced via snowball sampling. The data analysis uses Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the contextualised interview responses from educators within a socio-cultural global malaise of disruption and power. We outline future plans and funding sources, including publications and potential school resources in the spirit of collegial cooperation to support excellence in literacy classroom research.

Early childhood education is foregrounded in change. In Australia, this has encompassed the introduction, review and updates of national quality and curriculum frameworks from 2009, and changes to qualification requirements. Within the state of Victoria, further impacts have occurred due to the simultaneous introduction of a parallel curriculum framework. This paper draws on a qualitative study to examine how diverse teacher education discourses available to Victorian long day care educators have shaped their subject positions, discursive practices and reform engagement. Utilising Foucault's concepts of discourse, knowledge and power, and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis [FDA], findings offer insight into how diverse teacher education discourses and privileged content knowledge influence how educators engage in reform and the changing knowledge base of the field. Recommendations are put forward for consideration to better accommodate the diverse positionalities occupied by educators and ease the enduring hierarchies and tensions within the early childhood field.

In this article I describe the transition of a group of university students in Australia into an online learning environment during COVID-19 pandemic disruptions. I reflect upon my intersubjective experiences as the lecturer in an unexpected situation of urgency and physical distancing. Research has acknowledged synchronous virtual learning contexts as less psychologically distancing than previously thought. I argue that these contexts can foster profound intimacy between participants through linguistic and multimodal means. I use an auto-ethnographic narrative inquiry approach to share observations gained retrospectively through multimodal, critically reflexive, social semiotic discourse analysis of audio-visual recordings of synchronous workshops conducted in 2020. I attempt to fill the gap in research on intimacy in online educational settings by suggesting that intimacy can be created by "linguaplay, personal testimonies," and "contrived chaotic material ecologies." I advocate moving away from an obsession with standardising and generating student knowledge in formal online learning to a stance that values intimacy, connection, and spontaneity.

This article explores how recent curricular reform in Australia has been responsive to a culture of redress. It argues that taken together, the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations and the 2010 national curriculum reform marked a turning point, whereby settler colonial injustices have since been systematically included in the curriculum. This is explored through a case study analysis of the two iterations of the "Victorian Curriculum: History" post-Apology--2012 and 2016--the latter of which remains in current use. Using discourse analysis methods, this article argues that the inclusion of colonial injustice in the post-Apology era signals a consensus that has emerged around the significance of representing injustice in history curriculum, and by extension, for shaping future citizens. Through close textual analysis of the curriculum documents, this article finds that representations of historical injustice have been organized by four frames: memorialization, equivalence, personalization, and human rights. It argues that these frames curtail opportunities for the development of an understanding of the structural character and effects of settler colonialism, and limit consideration of the longer history of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. These failures raise questions about how impending reforms might respond to the contemporary political context where treaty negotiations and formal truth-telling with First Nations' polities are unfolding.

Describing various demographic characteristics of disadvantaged students, the programs they study and their employment outcomes is a significant area of research interest in the vocational education and training (VET) sector. This article offers a preliminary exploration of how groups are problematised and the consequent influence on VET research into disadvantage in Australia. Creating categories provides the historical and political contexts that allow specific practices and descriptors to become dominant. The major methodological approach used is a post-structuralist discourse analysis of policy documents, government VET reviews and published research into equity groups. It is argued that rather than envisaging VET research into disadvantage as a repetitious recounting of these groups' lack of access to vocational education and training, other important agendas are being served by the continued inquiries into people that experience inequity. The influence of long-standing Australian discourses that valorise, mostly male, individual responsibility to be a self-regulating citizen who maintains ongoing employment ensures that policymakers require updated productive expert research into the population to support the specialist discourses of disadvantage.

Background: To support collaborative drawing, it is essential to investigate how students make collaborative drawings and how these contribute to elaborating their ideas. This study examines how 5th and 6th grade students' group drawings contributed to increased levels of explanations of their drawings about sound transmission. Methods: We analyzed two cases of group drawing processes, that showed a large difference in the explanatory levels in their drawings, to find discourse patterns and visualized these patterns through discourse maps in relation to the progressions of drawing. Findings: In the first case, the students successfully co-constructed sound transmission drawings following Demand-Give-Acknowledge patterns. The students continuously questioned how to visualize particles' vibration, used multimodal resources to generate alternative drawings, and determined most scientific drawings. In the second case, the students did not reach consensus on how to visualize particles' vibrations, following repetitive patterns of Give-Refute. While the teacher intervened and mediated student's conflicting ideas, the students did not generate any alternative ideas. Contribution: This study illustrates in close detail how the process of multimodal transactive discussion contributed to conceptual understanding during collaborative drawings. The discourse map may be instrumental to analyze students' collaboration systematically and devise pedagogical approaches.

This paper investigates readers' recognition of unsourced evidentials in texts in association with critical reading. To this end, we involved four Iranian postgraduate students at an Australian university in a collective case study where each student read four Persian texts and participated in in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Data analysis employed critical discourse analysis and discursive power relations to examine participants' positionalities and subjectivities. Our findings in general confirm the students' recognition of unsourced evidential in texts as an indication of critical reading. More specifically, it was revealed that linguistic sources (e.g. Persian indefinite suffix '-i'), as well as socio-cultural factors such as normalization embedded within the Persian oral narrative and discourse, play significantly in identifying unsourced evidentials. Pedagogical implications for critical reflection on texts containing instances of unsourced evidentials are suggested.

Australian early childhood education and care [ECEC] has faced a series of change and reform since 2009, including the introduction and later revisions of key curriculum and qualify frameworks, increased qualifications, shifting theoretical knowledge and pedagogies, and challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, early childhood professionals [ECPs] have been confronted with a succession of substantial changes impacting their professional practice. This paper reports on a qualitative, post-structural study identifying workplace and learning discourses as key influences for the reform engagement of eleven ECPs from kindergarten settings in Victoria, Australia. Foucauldian Discourse Analysis [FDA] revealed specific subjective positions and discursive practices among participants. Recommendations are offered to address issues related to the uptake of reform initiatives. It is anticipated that these findings may generate greater opportunities to support our existing, emerging and future generations of ECPs as they lead the transformation of ECEC and transition through complex times of uncertainty.

VET researchers and policy-makers have historically displayed a keen interest in the future. Two assumptions link VET to the future. The first is that there is a singular object called VET and, secondly, that it can influence a forthcoming state of reality. This relationship is investigated through a rarely utilised post-structuralist discourse analysis of Australia's development of national vocational education and training policies. The performative language of policy-makers treats VET as a singular object and portrays the future as rational and predictable. By demonstrating that VET and potential realities exist in multiple forms, it might be possible to better utilise VET's capacities to produce more desirable national futures. The findings suggest that despite continual reform of the sector, just three strategic positions and their supportive discourses have guided federated policy making. The first generally neglected technical and adult education, followed by the creation of a federally funded novel type of educational institution which eventually led to the establishment of VET quasi-markets. Each underpinning discourse exploited the productive power of language to give effect to governments' desire to improve manifold futures by deploying alternative versions of VET.

Teacher wellbeing is a growing international concern. Despite teachers' experiences being deleteriously impacted by education policies and organisational conditions, dominant discourses of wellbeing focus on strategies that enhance individual self-management of wellbeing. This paper critically examines teacher wellbeing and the counter-discourses of wellbeing mobilised by teachers on an online platform, Reddit. Contributors criticise the wellbeing approaches taken in their schools and education systems. They react to the erasure of how work conditions impact their wellbeing. These forums speak back to the assumption that teachers are deficient and that teachers must be positive in self-managing their wellbeing. We coin the term 'cruel wellbeing' to critique wellbeing programs that neglect teachers' challenging work conditions. We question the practices of training teachers to assume responsibility for their wellbeing using strategies of positivity. We suggest that social media is an important political tool for creating and circulating counter-discourses of teachers' work.

A trend towards evidence-based practice has developed in policy and practice in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia in recent years, evolving to become a powerful hegemonic force. This paper considers this latest impetus to teach according to the mandates of a narrow evidence base as a symptom of the post-truth condition, one that elevates a limited body of evidence to an infallible position. Drawing on interviews with practicing teachers and critical discourse analysis of policy texts, this paper explores the homogenizing effects of a tyrannical evidence-based movement, using Antonio Gramsci's (1971) writing on the relationship between consent, coercion, and the maintenance of cultural hegemony. This paper argues that the contemporary policy landscape obtains consent from teachers to accept its claims through a coercive paradigm built from a powerful set of hegemonic discourses, such as "what works" and "evidence-based." These discourses, this paper suggests, need to be considered within the current post-truth context, where the dismissal of research claims is akin to scientific skepticism; a dynamic that places teachers in an impossible bind where the evidence underpinning policy is protected by a paradigm that makes it difficult to question.

This study aims to investigate the differences in the realization of request speech act between the IEL (Indonesian English Learners) and the AES (Australian English-Native Speakers), as well as explain the factors influencing these distinctions. The descriptive-qualitative method and discourse completion task (DCT) were used to obtain data in various contexts. The results showed that the realization of request speech act of the IEL and AES were different based on the following, (1) Form of Speech, as observed in the use of the main and supporting actions. This indicated that the IEL and AES used indirect and direct speech acts, respectively, and (2) Different Speech Strategies, as observed in the mode of sentences and request strategies. This proved that the IEL often used interrogative sentences, with the AES using declarative sentences when seeking permission from work superiors, and (3) Differences in the use of semantic formulas, where the IEL used attracters and honorifics more than the AES. This revealed that the linguistic and non-linguistic factors influenced the occurrences of these differences.

Learning with technology is increasingly understood to be a social process involving unique and telling discourses. An emerging research agenda has resulted, investigating the links between 'talk' and student technological practices but is yet to include home-education. Preliminary evidence exists of a relationship between particular types of 'talk' and success with particular online activities, namely online search. This may prove especially pertinent to home-educators who report that their most prolific online activities are those reliant upon search engines like Google. This paper presents select findings from a study into online search and the associated discursive practices among early primary students and their parent-educators in Australia. Data from observations, tests and interviews with five home-educating families were analysed recursively using a system guided by Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis. Specifically, this paper seeks to investigate: which discursive practices are privileged in these sites during online search; the extent to which these practices contribute to relations of power and the extent to which these practices are found alongside effective online search. Findings revealed a prevalence of inequitable discursive practices, those that either inhibited the equal conversational power of speakers or which naturalised inequitable power relations more generally. These discursive practices were found alongside ineffective online searches. Notwithstanding, participants continued to speak positively about search engines and their educational power. This rhetoric-reality gap is theorized in the paper as the work of dominant ideologies surrounding technology in education. Findings can assist the growing number of home-educators and their students to use online search more effectively. Insights regarding links between discursive practice and search practice may also help ensure that discourse helps to maximise the educational benefits associated with online search.

In recent years, news media have increased reporting about alleged foreign interference in universities worldwide. A flurry of new policies has followed. This article reviews discourse and policy on foreign interference in higher education in select countries. It identifies the alleged perpetrators and victims, the victims' concerns and responses, and the voices shaping the narrative about foreign interference. We combine the concepts of sharp power and right-wing authoritarianism to inform a discourse analysis and comparative policy analysis of a data set of 161 news articles and related media sources spanning a 30-month period of 2019-2021. Our findings highlight how government actors within the United States and Australia drive the international English-language discourse about Chinese foreign interference in a polarized media environment. We observe well-founded fears of China's exploitation of international students and research collaborations to the detriment of national security. At the same time, a resurgent worldwide authoritarian movement is also exploiting these concerns to augment longstanding assaults on higher education. Our study helps to bridge the gap between the primarily positive framing of the internationalization of higher education in scholarly discourse and the negative focus on foreign interference in higher education in the media, government, and other public discourse. It also serves as an important introduction to this phenomenon and call to action for scholars of the internationalization of higher education to conduct further research and actively engage in the broader discourse around this topic.

This study examines Mood, Modality, and Attitude as a part of Appraisal theory in the Editorial News of the "Sydney Morning Herald" Interpersonal Meta function Analysis. Three methods were used, including (1) Indicative (Declarative and Interrogative) mood, (2) Modalization (Indicative Type), Probability (may be) and Usuality ("sometimes"), and (3) Attitude subsystem as part of Appraisal theory resources with three clauses, including Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation. The study aims to investigate the highest Interpersonal Meta function in terms of Mood, Modality, and Attitude in Editorial Discourse in Business-Related Issues. A sample of ten editorial discourses in business-related issues from The "Sydney Morning Herald" was used to examine Mood, Modality, and Attitude as part of Appraisal theory. The adopted framework in this research is interpersonal Meta function consisting of Mood, Modality, and Attitude as part of Appraisal theory. The results showed that more interrogative clauses were used, specifically 108 of 183 (59.02%) than declarative 75 of 183 (40.98%). Additionally, there were more probability positive clauses 61 of 73 (83.56%) than negative 7 of 73 (9.59%) and usuality 5 of 73 (6.85%). Similarly, appreciation clauses were used more frequently, specifically 19 of 46 (41.30%) than Judgment 14 of 46 (30.43%) and Affect 13 of 46 (28.26%). The limitation for this research is that it examined only 10 business-related editorials, which means it may not be too comprehensive. However, the information in this research can be used for educational development in Interpersonal Meta function Analysis of Editorial Discourse in Business-Related Issues Using English Systemic Linguistics. The author recommends that the future research should add more business-related editorial cases to incorporate Interpersonal Meta function, which consists of Mood, Modality, and Appraisal system as a whole by adding graduation, engagement in order to be more complete, not only Attitude as a part of Appraisal theory.

This paper explores the introduction of the new Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) for graduate teachers in Australia. We investigate how the broader discussion around TPAs has been understood by multiple agents during an eight-month period from January 2019 to August 2019. Data includes legacy media, social media tweets and a survey of school leaders. The analysis draws on Bernsteinian (1975) theory about the way particular social relations produce differing sentiments of social unity. While eschewing a strict binary, legacy media was characterised by a mechanical solidarity which promoted the TPA as akin to a test. Contributions to social media and responses to the survey suggested an orientation to organic solidarity and a recognition of the complex inter-dependence of specialised roles within initial teacher education. These diverse social discourses carry the potential to influence the broader commission of what counts as graduate teacher quality.

Force majeure circumstances, such as those witnessed in the COVID-19 pandemic, have been used to justify new technologies of governance as policy-makers around the world began to realise the magnitude of the problem and its political implications. In Australia, the coronavirus crisis focussed attention on the vital role education plays in society and was used as an opportunity by policy-makers to reinforce an agenda that, over the past two decades, has tied education policy-making to the economy and 'national interest'. Indeed, Australia's growing federal involvement, with respect to schooling policy was continued in the pandemic as the Australian Prime Minister (PM) created a national cabinet to deal with the crisis, consisting of the PM and state and territory leaders. However, despite the ongoing ambition of a national policy agenda pursued by federal policy-makers, fault lines appeared. Informed by Foucauldian notions of discourse, governmentality and biopolitics, this paper explores how Australia's federal Coalition government endeavoured to manage the population at the outset of the pandemic and subjectified teachers as responsible in the service of the economy. While COVID-19 was a crisis in search of a narrative, federal policy-makers experienced pushback as state and territory leaders assumed control and teachers refused subject positions.

The influence of curriculum and policy documents on the decision-making of educators is of particular interest in the field of early childhood. Reports of competing pedagogical approaches with a 'push-down' of curriculum alongside advocacy for play-based pedagogies raise questions as to the potential of curriculum and policy documents to create tension through multiple discourses. This is significant in light of politically driven discourses in education and their potential to influence the decision-making of educators. This research draws on an interpretivist epistemology framed by a post-structural approach to induce and examine discourses that exist across curriculum and policy documents relevant to the first year of compulsory school in Western Australia. A discourse analysis revealed three powerful discourses: inclusivity, achievement and 'PED' -- a discourse encapsulating the interrelationships between play, engagement and development. The power embedded within these discourses provided evidence of how persuasive and prescriptive language is used to engender distinct ethical responsibilities. The findings illuminate the potent influence of powerful discourses on the negotiation of priorities in pedagogical decision-making in the early years.

Racialized descriptions are a constant practice in our societies and a fundamental aspect of racial discourses. This paper uses conversation analytic tools within a Foucauldian perspective on discourse to investigate how discourses of race are (re)produced, and consequently navigated, in talk-in-interaction among speakers of Chinese. Four instances of racialized person description, taken from a larger corpus of 16 hours of casual conversation among Chinese migrants in Melbourne and their acquaintances, are explored in detail. The analysis identifies two interactional sequences, joking and accounting sequences, which allow participants to resist racialized descriptions while still orienting to the interactional preference for sociality in casual conversation. The paper argues that casual and friendly interaction may provide empirical evidence for how discourses of race are destabilized at the level of talk-in-interaction.

As the third-largest export industry, international education occupies an important place in the Australian economy and society. Employing Bacchi's "What is the Problem Represented to be" (WPR) approach, this paper critically analyses four key policies pertaining to international students in Australia since the 1990s. Drawing upon theorising of the globalisation of international education policy, we uncover contestation and problem representation in discourses around the economisation of education and of international students' experiences. The findings reveal multiple discourses of the problematisation of diversity at play, including a "pivot" towards protection of international students' rights as consumers and as potential future citizens, and increased attention to the intrinsic value of international students as people, and not simply as economic agents. The findings have implications for other national contexts, in which international students contribute to the economic viability of education, and in which internationalisation of education in universities has the capacity to foster enhanced cross-cultural understanding.

Alternative teacher education programmes have emerged in many countries as a new approach to recruiting, educating and placing teachers in underperforming schools. The media plays an important role in framing perceptions of these programmes and their teachers, including in Australia, but this has not been the subject of significant research to date. This study examines how one alternative teacher education programme--Teach For Australia (TFAus)--has been positioned and framed within the news media since its inception. It critically analyses the portrayal of TFAus and concomitant educational discourses to explore their connection to larger issues surrounding teacher education and teaching quality. Drawing on an analysis of 122 print/online media articles, we identify narratives related to prestige, benevolence and the 'alternative' nature of the programme, alongside a narrative critical of TFAus. Despite this critical narrative, in investigating and opening up a dialogue on the perceptions and depictions of TFAus, we posit that the programme--although controversial in nature--has generally benefited from print media coverage, advancing its reputation as a major contributor to education reform and champion of educational equity.

Writing native-like has always been a primary purpose for non-native writers of English and, accordingly, many language components have been investigated to develop writers' fluency. One of these language components is syntactic complexity (SC), which is often regarded as a reliable way to grade any texts from easy to difficult. This study aims to compare native and non-native writers' fluency by measuring their SC and to create a reference SC point for non-native writers of English. To achieve this, the study comprised two groups: Group 1 was composed of native speakers from Inner-circle countries, namely USA, England, Canada, and Australia, and Group 2 was composed of non-native speakers from Expanding countries, namely Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China. The data were composed of 200 MA dissertations in ELT equally collected from countries in Group 1 and Group 2. SC realisations were divided into 14 subcategories. The 14 sub-categories constituted a taxonomy for SC and they were analysed through ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis, Independent sample t-test, and Mann-Whitney tests. The results showed that there is a statistically significant difference in 9 categories in favour of Group 1 and that the average SC scores of Group1 are significantly high compared to Group 2. The study suggests that writers of MA dissertations pay particular attention to SC, if native-like fluency is sought because it was concluded that native writers of MA dissertations are prone to write with higher SC level when compared to non-native writers of MA dissertations.

This paper contributes evidence-based scholarship to how teachers understand the value of Aboriginal student-focussed programmes and how discourses of Indigeneity appear to influence those views. Interviews with n = 22 teachers across n = 3 secondary school sites in New South Wales highlighted teachers' understanding of Aboriginal programmes as primarily contributing to students' behavioural and academic improvement. The interviewed teachers spoke positively about Aboriginal students' current academic achievements and prospects for their bright futures as graduates, albeit from within deficit and colour-blind discourses. Utilising Moodie's Decolonising Race Theory framework, teachers' juxtaposing beliefs resonate with existing decolonising education research which indicates a performativity of cultural inclusion through adherence to settler-colonial practices, while at the same time, an intellectual desire to move away from the legacy of Australia's contentious colonial past.

Ideological struggles over the policy and practice of literacy education continue to characterise the field. This paper explores how 'new policy actors', market-orientated and profit-driven players, construct the crisis of literacy and schooling in Australia to reclaim the doxa of literacy education. The concept of doxa is employed to show how recent discursive practices are contributing to orthodox and heterodox positions. A mixed-methods content analysis was performed on reports produced by business groups and their proxies, analysing how these reports construct new narratives. The findings reveal how these stakeholders adopt a stance best characterised as the old doxa revisited and (re)orientated for new economic imperatives. A defence of literacy as 'common-sense' basic skills, in crisis, and predominantly developed through schooling for the purpose of work, is supplemented with a discourse which updates literacy doxa to include technological (media) dimensions where digital literacy skills are the 'new basics' of literacy education.

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) surveys are the most widely used tool for collecting higher education student feedback to inform academic quality improvement, promotion and recruitment processes. Malicious and abusive student comments in SET surveys have the potential to harm the wellbeing and career prospects of academics. Despite much literature highlighting abusive feedback in SET surveys, little research attention has been given to methods for screening student comments to identify and remove those that may cause harm to academics. This project applied innovative machine learning techniques, along with a dictionary of keywords to screen more than 100,000 student comments made via a university SET during 2021. The study concluded that these methods, when used in conjunction with a final stage of human checking, are an effective and practicable means of screening student comments. Higher education institutions have an obligation to balance the rights of students to provide feedback on their learning experience with a duty to protect academics from harm by pre-screening student comments before releasing SET results to academics.

This paper critically examines articulations of relationality present in education policy texts that shape particular discursive representations of relationality between students, teachers and curriculum. The policy texts of Australian state and territory education departments are considered as a set of discursive statements to illustrate how concepts such as relationality are deployed in policy as floating signifiers. Without deep contextualisation, concepts like relationality are instead potentially co-opted and corrupted. We contend that through its uptake, relationality has become a handy catch-all in educational policy discourses, while remaining a sliding signifier, free from a more productive affective potentiality. Instead, we argue that relationality should be centred in education policymaking as part of a commitment to recentre teaching and learning at the heart of schooling through a more authentic, dialogic relational pedagogy.

This essay presents a decade-long reflective account of resisting (in) and appropriating English that I have experienced as a young, female academic from the Middle East who has been engaged in teaching and researching Academic English pedagogy transnationally. Informed by Bakhtin's philosophy of dialogue and his notions of insided-ness, outsided-ness and in-between-ness, I highlight the ideological complexities associated with teaching (in) English in both Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts. I unpack these complexities through diverse scenarios where the tension between 'Internally Persuasive Discourse' and 'Authoritative Discourse' of English was evident. I propose an alternative curriculum, namely English for Dialogic Purposes as a rich way of appropriating in English and for the English-dominated discourse of academia to allow for polyphony of voices and boundary learning, vital for the multicultural and plurilingual world of education.

In Australia and globally, there is a push for accountability systems that focus on impact on student learning as an indicator of teacher quality. Therefore, how the impact is defined in Australian policy documents in teacher education must be made clear before it can be enacted in practice. This study uses Foucauldian archaeology and associated discourse analysis techniques to trace impact through three Australian policy documents. Findings reveal that the evidence base for prioritising impact in the recent lexicon of Australian initial teacher education (ITE) policy is based on specific and shifting ways of thinking around the concept, with only certain voices being heard in the debate. The authors recommend ways for thinking about impact more holistically and using broader sensibilities.

Policy classifies and shapes people/subjects in particular kinds of ways. Focusing on the context of Health and Physical Education (HPE), this paper analyses policy documents from Australia, the United States of America (USA) and Wales. We pay particular attention to how learners are represented within and across the three policy documents, and we apply Bacchi's 'What's the Problem Represented to be?' approach to guide the analysis. For us, problematization is a fruitful and positive process that enables educators to engage with a critical dialogue regarding the policies they are expected to enact. Our analysis highlighted that common across the policies were overlapping discourses of idealism, neoliberalism, healthism, and individualism, which serve to reinforce deficit language and a focus on what learners 'lack'. The problem of 'learner as lacking' is represented within the policies via at least three subject positions: 'the sedentary learner', 'the un-educated learner' and 'the naïve learner'. The findings suggest that the three policies were producing an ideal and perhaps impossible learner (subject) whilst at the same time representing the learner as a problem that the policy could 'fix'. This paper is important because it: (i) demonstrates how certain discourses and voices are amplified and silenced within curriculum policy documents and policy work more broadly; (ii) makes educational and health politics visible; and (iii) creates space for the profession to develop greater critical consciousness related to policy. In terms of future directions, we urge curriculum policy writers and other stakeholders to carefully consider how learners are categorised, represented and governed in and through policy. If curriculum policies, by their very nature, need to produce problems -- in this case, the (im)possible subject - we invite educators to engage in critical conversations regarding the policies they are expected to enact.

Purpose: Recent trends in Western civics education have attempted to secure democratic institutions from perceived threats. This paper investigates how political securitisation historically operated within civics textbooks in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. It further evaluates how Maori, Aboriginal and other Indigenous peoples were variably incorporated or marginalised in these educational discourses. Design/Methodology/Approach: This discourse analysis evaluates a sample of civics textbooks circulated in Australia and New Zealand between 1880 and 1920. These historical sources are interpreted through theories of decoloniality and securitisation. Findings: The sample of textbooks asserted to students that their self-governing colonies required the military protection of the British Empire against undemocratic "threats". They argued that self-governing colonies strengthened the empire by raising subjects who were loyal to British military interests and ideological values. The authors pedagogically encouraged a governmentality within students that was complementary to military, imperial and democratic service. The hypocritical denial of self-government for many Indigenous peoples was rationalised as a measure of "security" against "native rule" and imperial rivals. Originality/Value: Under a lens of securitisation, the discursive links between imperialism, military service and democratic diligence have not yet been examined in civics textbooks from the historical contexts of Australia and New Zealand. This investigation provides conceptual and pedagogical insights for contemporary civics education in both nations.

Academics are seen as primary agents in the enactment of higher education internationalisation. However, the achievements of internationalisation are claimed to be constrained by the lack of academics' involvement and expertise. This research, therefore, compares the policies and practices of capacity building for academics in internationalisation between Australian and Vietnamese universities. More specifically, this research seeks to unpack ideologies and understandings of internationalisation, institutional arrangements of capacity building for academics in internationalisation, and academics' individual agency in engaging and building their capacity for internationalisation. Using the Capability Approach as a theoretical framework (Sen, 1992, 1999), the research argues that academics' participation in internationalisation is determined by social and institutional conditions, combined with their individual aspirations and active roles in creating internationalisation and professional development opportunities. This suggests the significance of an enabling structure and active individual agency in expanding academics' capabilities for successful participation in internationalisation.

Effective professional learning is acknowledged as a key lever to improve teacher practice. However, many studies report significant variation in the effectiveness of the types of programs on offer. Recently, there has been a move from the traditional single event, passive approach to more collaborative and ongoing forms of professional learning. Interestingly, researchers have paid little attention to understanding the experience of professional learning from the teachers' viewpoint. This research sought to develop this understanding by following the attitudes and behaviours of a group of secondary teachers as they participated in an ongoing professional learning program. This professional learning program tracked teachers as they participated in workshops and then applied the learning to their classrooms. Our results suggest five interacting characteristics that contributed to improvements in teaching practice. These findings underpin the development of a process model of professional learning, that we call the Iterative Model of Professional Learning (IMPL).

This brief report presents the preliminary results of the textual data analysis within a qualitative longitudinal study that examines ESL adolescent writers' voice in their academic writing as they transition from a High School Preparation (HSP) intensive English program to mainstream high schools (HS) in Sydney, Australia.

Critical thinking is a core skill within tertiary education, traditionally relying on such principles as logic and truth. Relativistic pedagogical frameworks, such as critical literacy, however, have become increasingly widespread within all levels of education and call into question such principles. In order to ascertain whether critical thinking skills are enhanced or hindered by relativistic approaches, the assessment results of students studying critical literacy within an enabling program at a regional university in Australia were analysed in a small-scale study. The findings potentially suggest that the framework of critical literacy may have had a negative impact on students' results and, possibly, their critical thinking skills, raising the question as to whether the two frameworks might be mutually exclusive.

Purpose: This study aimed to develop and test a measure of real-time continuous speech understanding to be used with natural dialogues. Method: The measure was based on a category monitoring paradigm and employed five existing recordings of natural dialogues from which the different test categories and associated target words were derived. For each dialogue, a listener was first given a semantic category and asked to press a button as quickly as possible whenever they heard an instance of the category. We tested 63 younger adults, using five semantic categories (family, media, season, temperature, and travel) at three noise levels (in quiet, 0 dB, and -5 dB signal-to-noise ratio [SNR]). Performance was measured in terms of accuracy and response time. Results: The results showed clear differences between the three noise conditions regardless of the semantic category. The peak of the response distribution was highest and earliest for the quiet condition and was reduced with decreasing SNR. The responses varied across categories, reflecting differences in the complexity of a given category or the typicality of the association between target words and their category. Broad categories and/or target words that were less directly associated with their category had decreased hit rates and increased response times. Conclusion: The results were discussed in terms of the sensitivity (hit rate) of the performance measure, as well as whether it picked up higher level semantic, context, and discourse properties of the dialogues.

This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing things with language (including non-verbal representations). Genre provides a useful lens to understand how a community's cultural norms and practices shape the use of language in various human activities. Despite this understanding, researchers have seldom considered the role of scientific genres (e.g., experimental account, information report, explanation) to understand how students in science classrooms make meanings as they use and construct multimodal representations. This study is based on an enactment of a drawing-to-learn approach in a primary school classroom in Australia, with data generated from classroom videos and students' artifacts. Using multimodal discourse analysis informed by social semiotics, we analyze how the semantic variations in students' representations correspond to the recurring genres they were enacting. We found a general pattern in the use and creation of representations across different scientific genres that support the theory of a mutual contextualization between genre and representation construction.

In recent times, education policy and reform discourses have become increasingly politicised by neo-liberalism, with critical policy methodologies struggling to catch up. Critical policy sociologists have noted that critical commentaries rarely succeed in changing or impacting dominant education policy pathways. This article presents a framework for critical engagement in education policy drawing on Foucauldian notions of governmentality, with the aim to imagine a path to policy discourse intervention, or truth-telling. The 'affirmative discourse intervention' model comprises three interrelated processes to engage and respond to discourse as a function of governmentality: discourse recognition, discourse disruption and discourse agency. The article outlines the affirmative discourse intervention model and its theoretical underpinnings, then draws on data from the recent and ongoing Australian early childhood quality reform policy to illustrate the affirmative discourse intervention processes in application. The final section offers possibilities that emerge when re-imagining discourse agency in early childhood education and invites further commentary.

Negative portrayals in the Australian media situate teachers as a problem and teaching as a deficit practice. Society is positioning teachers, especially teachers of literacy, as the reason for poor student performance. In addition, negative media discourse around deficit initial teacher education, especially with regard to the teaching of reading and writing, is adding to the overall assumption that teachers of literacy are failing. This article highlights instances of teacher practice by literacy teachers during the global pandemic of COVID-19 which oppose the 'problem teacher' discourse. Snowball sampling was used to garner seven early years and primary school teachers for interviews, focussing on teacher perceptions of multimodal texts. A Foucaultian lens of governmentality and power and Fairclough's approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) were used as lens and method of analysis. The findings of this study indicate that these participant teachers have been sophisticated practitioners in their planning and practice during the pandemic, despite the institutional barriers and extreme disruptions experienced. On reflection, therefore, the constructed societal discourse around 'problem teachers' needs to be reviewed and adjusted.

Language immersion programs, which are a form of bilingual education, are shaped by multiple factors, including the specific characteristics of the region, the language, the community and the learners, as well as national and regional policies on language education. While the underdeveloped production skills of immersion students have been identified as the product of teacher-centred and controlled learning environments, it is not known what role background or heritage language students play in the Australian one-way immersion context, where their presence itself potentially enhances the speaking environment. This paper, based on a project on developing speaking strategies for a Japanese immersion program in Australia, argues that the speaking performance of students in immersion classes is also determined by other factors, such as peer interactions with background students, whose treatment in education systems in Australia remains ambiguous, reflecting the history of separation between foreign language education in schools and the maintenance of mother tongues in the community. By applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper analyses language policy and educational documents and discusses how the language performance of individual learners could be influenced not only by the curriculum but also by policy makers' improved understanding of individual learners with diverse linguistic backgrounds within schools.

This paper employs the new materialist methodology of diffraction to probe the entanglements of matter and discourse that comprise the assemblage of Pilipinx becoming, or the ways by which people are racialized as Pilipinx. By methodologically diffracting Pilipinx becoming through the public pedagogy of punk rock, this research complicates standard stories of Pilipinx identity to provoke more generative encounters with the Pilipinx diaspora in Oceania. As new materialist theory holds that social life is produced by aggregations of related events, it rejects the notion that ontological becoming is dictated by immutable systemic or structural realities. This application of new materialist ontology contributes to understandings of relationality by demonstrating how Pilipinx identity emerges out of processes of relational becoming comprised of co-constitutive discourses, movements, and materialities of human and nonhuman origin. This approach troubles conceptions of Pilipinx becoming which propose that Pilipinx bodies are racialized through the imposition of colonial mentalities and broadens these theorizations by approaching Pilipinx becoming as a relational process in which coloniality plays a part. This relational conceptualization of Pilipinx becoming is informed by how punk rock, when framed as a form of education, complicates dominant understandings of the contexts, conditions, and capacities of Pilipinx bodies. In so doing, it demonstrates how public pedagogies and alternative approaches to education transform affect economies which produce the material conditions of gendered and racialized oppression.

English language teaching is intercultural in nature, and like all human activity, involves emotion and emotional understanding. Empathy is a means through which people can understand and express concern and care for one another. This article focuses on findings from a qualitative study that explored intercultural empathy in a culturally and linguistically diverse educational setting in Australia. A constructivist grounded theory research design was combined with Critical Discourse Analysis to develop theory inductively. An interpretation of the data as Discourse found connections and tensions in participants' conceptions of themselves as empathic, interculturally effective teachers.

Regulatory drivers of teacher quality and teacher professionalism are increasingly being utilised in Australia and internationally to improve children's outcomes. In the context of a recent national review on teacher registration, this article reports on findings from a small-scale study that investigated three early childhood teachers' perceptions of teacher registration in New South Wales, Australia. The participants rejected discursive truths about the need for and benefits of teacher registration, associating this relatively new mechanism of teacher accountability as a threat to teachers' professional practice and job satisfaction, and to centres' provision of quality early childhood education. The findings problematise a discourse of teacher professionalism made enticing by a vow to bring early childhood teachers in from the margins of the educator sector.

This study is located in a lesser-known educational context and investigates aspects of migration, religion and multilingualism. Focusing on the discourse of second-generation adolescent migrants in a Tamil Hindu temple school in urban Australia, I discuss how flexible language practices manifest in this migrant faith setting. I argue that the use of the heritage language is not always at the forefront, despite a monolingual Tamil language policy, because religious transmission is given priority over language transmission. At the same time, there are certain motivations that influence the use of Tamil: to index the close relationship between language and religious culture and to index one's membership of the ethnoreligious community. This paper draws on ethnographic data to provide both a macro and micro view of these motivations -- what drives adolescents to use their heritage language, how it is deployed from their linguistic repertoires, and how it contrasts with the use of the students' dominant language, English. The analysis takes a whole of conversation approach to understanding the relationship between religion and heritage language use for second-generation migrant students.

Under neoliberalism, parents as consumers are expected to provide their children with opportunities to get ahead. Governments defend elite schools on the grounds that 'diversity' and 'choice' are in the public interest but not everybody has an equal opportunity to choose. School websites act to promote specific images of schools with opportunities and advantages they claim to offer. A marketing video of the International Boys' School Coalition reveals the specific masculinities and advantages touted as on offer in boys' education. Globalised discourses of inclusion and merit are interrogated for hidden class and race inequities and advantage, as well as excluding girls and limiting identities of some boys. Schools that overwhelmingly produce the leaders of society are shown to reproduce unfair gender, class and race discourses limiting the possibilities for anyone excluded.

This study explored Master of Teaching pre-service teachers' (PSTs') feelings of comfort and more broadly, their emotional experience as they prepare to work in classrooms with LGBTIQ students. Within the context of a broader mixed methods research project, PSTs were surveyed, and data were combined with a focus group (total participants n = 42). This paper reports on the qualitative data collected. Theoretically, Vygotsky's cultural-historical approach was used to elicit information about the PSTs' emotional experience (perezhivanie). Important findings indicate that PSTs' past experiences influence their understanding of LGBTIQ content and their willingness to transform their developing pedagogy. Systemic tensions around language and context contributed to challenging emotional experiences when PSTs were unable to mitigate the issues. It is argued that comfort is an initial starting point, but "perezhivanie" provides a lens to examine and support a broader understanding of the institutional structures which constrain PSTs when working with LGBTIQ students.

Teacher classroom instructional practice can be a powerful influence on student learning. The Classroom Promotion of Oral Language randomized controlled trial tested whether teacher professional learning focused on promoting oral language in classrooms could improve teacher knowledge and classroom instruction. This study focuses on evaluating the impact of the professional learning on teacher classroom instruction. The nature of classroom talk was used as a means of exploring theories of change and the pathways to practice change. Classroom talk was classified according to its function; organisational, doing, and learning. Teachers from early years classes (first 2 years of school) participated in 4 days of professional learning and received implementation support in their school. Teacher instruction was measured through audio-recordings of classroom talk between teachers and students. The characteristics and proportions of the functions of classroom talk demonstrated by teachers who participated in professional learning (n = 40) and those who did not (n = 38) were compared. Findings indicated no differences in the functions of classroom talk measured with Anstey's type of talk framework following participation in the professional learning; similarities in classroom instruction are discussed and implications for professional learning.

The rigid architectures inherent within formal schooling continue to influence young people's disengagement from education. Globally and locally, policy makers have proposed education reform and innovation, politicians have legislated for education change, yet still the problem of disengagement remains. This paper investigates one community's effort to support the reengagement in learning of young people aged 15-18 years in regional Australia through a flexible, online, community-based education program. Theoretically, this study used critical discourse as a way in to expose so as to explain dimensions of power and ideological positions as to what counts as learning. Critical ethnography as a methodology extended critical discourse's explanatory authority to a naming of spatial and social architectures and their impact on the young people's lives. Discourses of a braided curriculum, structural conviviality and emotional well-being were found to reduce some barriers to reengagement in learning; develop a shared, multi-disciplinary approach to reengagement; and be inclusive of young people's emotional well-being as central to the reengagement process. At this time of pandemic induced online learning as the new normal on a global scale, young people who are already vulnerable due to individual, school, and socio-cultural marginalising conditions deserve research processes with outcomes valorising their voices and those who work with them.

Television, like other media, can work as a platform for promoting learning. This article illustrates the value of multimodal discourse analysis for evaluating the potential of a children's television show as a vehicle for fostering knowledge and skills in a specific subject area. Drawing on social semiotic principles and systemic functional genre theory, we examine the use of language and other modes in "Teacup Travels" -- a show designed to introduce young viewers to historical artefacts. The analysis demonstrates that both story structure and particular semiotic resources contribute to how these objects are represented, and thus shape the TV programme's potential to engage children in learning about the past. Our findings suggest that multimodal storytelling strategies used in "Teacup Travels" encourage some aspects of children's historical consciousness and thinking, while backgrounding others.

It is incumbent upon universities to deliver quality degree programs that produce employable graduates with discipline-specific knowledge and a well-developed set of generic skills known as graduate attributes. To safeguard the achievement of these outcomes, this paper argues for a holistic, longitudinal approach to degree planning known as programmatic assessment. The status of this relatively new phenomenon in the Australian university landscape is examined through an analysis of assessment-related policies from twenty-two of Australia's top-performing universities. Discourse analysis was employed to determine how programmatic assessment is depicted in policy, how key players are positioned in this space, and the discursive practices used to imbue policy with hortatory intent. The results of this analysis are outlined and indicate that policy constructions of a program-level approach to assessment are inconsistent across different universities and very few policies have specific guidelines about how programmatic assessment should be implemented.

Consensus moderation, where collaboration and discussion take place to reach an agreement on mark allocation, is a frequently used approach to quality assurance in higher education. Unit coordinators play a vital role in facilitating consensus moderation, yet limited research has focused on their role in moderation practices. This study explored unit coordinators' perceptions and experiences of consensus moderation in Australian higher education through five focus groups. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, data analysis identified three discursive constructions of consensus moderation situated in the wider discourse of the neoliberal university: a truly collaborative process, an illusion, and a process to manage markers. Unit coordinators in this study were positioned as either supportive, compliant but ineffective, or powerful. In contrast, markers were positioned as helpful and compliant although inexperienced and needing support; uncooperative, resistant, troublesome and demanding; or inexperienced and malleable. This paper has identified varied knowledge and understanding of consensus moderation processes and practice. These findings can inform moderation policy and practices and unit coordinator professional development.