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This paper contributes to southern theorization of multilingualisms. Noting the predominance of northern-generated academic debates, we discuss perspectives from close engagement with southern socio-historical and political contexts, and through prioritizing community and teacher outlooks on multilingualism. Our account is illustrated with examples of linguistic citizenship that highlight local agency and dialogue in border-crossing across multiple linguistic and institutional regimes. Drawing on examples from our research in Brazil, South Africa and Australia, we focus on four agentic multilingual moves that illustrate linguistic citizenship and challenge coloniality. Each of these moves (contestation, transgression, negotiation, and conversation) implies that teachers must situate their work within relationships of reciprocity, and 'from below.'

International education options have expanded in most school systems around the world with promises of curricular innovation. However, there has been limited attention given to the consequences of this shift for social inequalities embedded in pre-existing institutional hierarchies. The International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma, a two-year high school curriculum, has been prominent among recent private curricula, centred on notions of international mindedness and global preparedness. This article seeks to examine the consequences of the presence of the IB Diploma in a school system that is socioeconomically and academically stratified and shaped by strategies of academic distinction focused on local hierarchies. Using quantitative data on IB Diploma students and schools in Australia, it analyses the interaction of the IB Diploma with social inequalities in a system that combines a high level of between-school stratification and a comprehensive (unified) curriculum. We show how the IB Diploma has been successfully used by socially dominant and academically powerful families to consolidate their academic capital and secure educational advantage, thus contributing to the reproduction of social inequality in domestic circuits of schooling. Against its perceived innovative status, the IB Diploma has paradoxically contributed to fostering traditional forms of schooling -- including within-school tracking -- and a narrowing of the curriculum -- including through its strong focus on examinations. It is argued that the social impact of emerging international curriculum options can only be adequately understood if they are simultaneously contextualised within historically constituted local school and curriculum hierarchies.

This article examines shifts in the meaning and relevance of institutionalised knowledge about social inequalities as it circulates globally. In so doing, it contributes to research critiquing an unequal geopolitics of knowledge that grants greatest authority to theories produced in the global north (Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2003). I discuss the resignification of globally circulating texts in terms of their entextualisation and reflect on my own role in this process through an auto-ethnographic narrative. I focus on two widely circulating texts that explicitly deal with questions of social power and globalisation: 'On the cunning of imperialist reason' (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999) and 'A pedagogy of multiliteracies' (The New London Group, 1996). Examination of their re-entextualisation in Brazil points to the need to bring to bear additional epistemological resources attuned to social and political struggles in order to address the racial inequalities that have come to be at the forefront of my own scholarly concerns. The article concludes by suggesting ways of engaging with globally circulating knowledge through the incorporation of knowledge produced by local struggles and emerging from everyday categories, giving the example of possible uses of the Brazilian concept of gambiarra.

This article explores the kinds of teacher knowledge promoted in TESOL-related curriculum standards in five jurisdictions (Australia and England at the national level, New York City and New York State in the United States, and Ontario, Canada, at the subnational level). Such documents are increasingly important in defining, and potentially undermining, the professional status of specialist TESOL knowledge and roles in schools. Part of the influence of teacher standards is through policy transfer, and the examples analysed here were selected for their status as models for the drafters of an emerging policy framework in Victoria, Australia. Building on an emerging theoretical tradition focused on pedagogical content knowledge, the analysis identifies contrasting paradigms of teacher expertise that vary in depth and relative importance attributed to knowledge of language. The authors argue that the differing constructions of pedagogical content knowledge across jurisdictions imply different kinds of teacher roles that are potentially in tension. The three kinds of positioning that the authors identify are generalist teacher of language and literacy, teacher as TESOL specialist, and teacher of emerging bi/multilinguals. The analysis suggests that greater attention should be given to how teacher knowledge is framed in educational policy, with regard for coherence, practicability, and broader professional expectations.

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'.

This article analyses some ways in which racialising discourses around refugees interact with the spatial and social dynamics of marketised schooling. It identifies conflicting discourses that contribute to the polarisation of school social composition and resourcing in the Australian state of Victoria. Media narratives around "ethnic" gangs contribute to wider discourses surrounding working-class neighbourhoods and schools as dangerous and violent "hotspots." At the same time, some elite private schools discursively produce themselves as providing a ladder of opportunity for talented and deserving refugee youth, offering volunteer tutoring and scholarships. These discourses work together to legitimate the funding of socially exclusive sites at twice the rate of the schools that cater to virtually all refugee-background students. The article draws on critical discourse analysis, based on media reporting on refugees, and interviews with parents selecting a secondary school for their children. The findings have implications for the management of school choice as a policy framework, suggesting that its exclusionary effects are heightened in the context of intense media and political attention to refugees as racialised subjects.

This paper analyses the kinds of capital, practices and investments that are implicated in the participation of migrant mothers in the educational careers of their children, drawing on a Bourdieusian framework. We present findings of a study of Muslim Iraqi mothers with school-aged children in Australia, based on 47 interviews with 25 participants. The study identifies different modes of involvement in children's education and connects these to mothers' cultural and social capital. Involvement, and its effectiveness, is analysed through the analytical categories of (i) high capital-high involvement; (ii) low capital-high involvement; and (iii) low capital-minimal direct involvement. The paper contributes to the theorisation of family-school relations in the context of migration, and develops a more nuanced perspective for studying social class positioning and repositioning.

This article contributes to the analysis of the global spread of support for school choice and to the understanding of how a particular form of policy development reflects and cements this support. It maps the growing dominance of school choice within a reconfiguration of politics, policy making, and research. To establish the nature of this reconfiguration, a comparison is made between the Karmel Review, which established systematic federal government intervention in Australian schooling, and the Gonski Review. The analysis traces a move away from a social-democratic model built around an autonomous and representative government authority in which educational research was broadly writ, to a neoliberal model under direct government control, drawing selectively on a cast of corporate consultants and technocrats. I conclude with a consideration of the wider implications of the dominance of school choice as a paradigm for funding reform.

This article examines the ways teachers plan lessons for English as an Additional Language (EAL) students from refugee backgrounds in secondary school transition programs. Based on a study of teachers working with students in three Victorian schools, we identify the key challenges teachers face in planning and the strategies they adopt to confront these. The study identified a large gap between teacher planning practices and the approaches to planning promoted in academic research. We connect this to teachers' reliance on intuitive knowledge that has been built up over time through interactions with students in a range of learning contexts, and through their own experiences as learners. Given the importance of planning for effective pedagogy, we conclude by identifying areas for future development in teacher education and practice.

Research on the university experience of disabled students has focused on barriers in learning and teaching, while the social world of university has as yet gained little attention as a distinctive object of study. Here we examine social experience and socially imposed restrictions through the lenses of social capital and self-concept. A qualitative study investigated the formation of social capital and changes in self-concept amongst physically disabled Australian university students. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed using a grounded theory approach. The study found weak social attachments at university, but stronger attachments outside. Self-concept did not appear to be structured in any direct way by university-generated social capital, partly as a consequence of its weakness. (Contains 1 table.)

With the launch of the "My School" website in 2010, Australia became a relative latecomer to the publication of national school performance comparisons. This paper primarily seeks to explore the school choice experience as framed by "My School" website, for participating middle-class families. We will draw on Bourdieusian theory of cultural capital and relationship networks and Australian-based school choice research in order to contribute to understandings regarding the application of "My School" data within participating families. Data collection consisted of qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with five families, each based within inner-city suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria. The findings of this small-scale study indicate that participating middle-class families possessed highly developed strategies for locating and achieving enrolment in school-of-choice and therefore did not seek to apply available data on "My School" to decision-making, despite each participant reviewing the available data.

This article provides a critical review of popular models for literacy pedagogy with regard for the needs of low-literacy refugee-background students. We argue that in a context of high linguistic diversity there is a need to re-evaluate teaching practices and curriculum in a way that is more responsive to difference and which pays closer attention to insights from second language acquisition research. The first part of the paper presents the distinctive needs of a cohort of high needs ESL learners in Australia, and the second examines the potential and limits of a number of literacy teaching frameworks. Our conclusion is that if the needs of high needs ESL learners are to be adequately met by all teachers of literacy then a greater emphasis needs to be placed in these frameworks on second language processes and teaching practices. (Contains 1 table.)

This article investigates how reality television talent-quest formats model the normative neoliberal worker and learner--roles which are increasingly drawn together. In the age of "life-long learning" and shifting employment demands, new models of the supple, adaptable and willing learner are increasingly important both to meeting neoliberal economic demands and to legitimating them. As they appear in reality television, these models stand as ideological exemplars for the management of disappointment, the cultivation of hope and the maintenance of belief in meritocracy. Compliance, effort, just desserts and luck are emphasised in programs that offer viewers self-narratives that allow them to account for both their own circumstances and wider inequalities. As a vehicle of public pedagogy, reality television plays a central role in defining the place of learning in neoliberal self-actualisation. This is tied to well-established narratives of nationalism, which offer a depoliticised and demobilised sense of community.

The application of market principles to educational provision continues to attract governments across the globe, despite an international body of literature suggesting that marketisation can exacerbate inequalities. In light of a renewed policy push in Australia towards accountability via a market model, this paper analyses the impact of existing school choice policies in the state of Victoria, with particular reference to educational provision in an area of social disadvantage in Melbourne's north. This analysis challenges the claims of the now normalised market model, but also points to the need to expand research into this theme, which has attracted relatively little critical attention in Australia. I argue that both the operation of existing policies and the direction of new proposals imply an uneven system of accountability which applies different standards to increasingly polarised "closed" and "open" schooling sectors. (Contains 2 tables, 3 figures, and 2 notes.)

The challenges for education systems of student disaffection in working-class schools are well known, but the implications of high levels of student optimism in the absence of the resources needed to support academic success have been less often considered. Through examination of the school experiences post-compulsory learners in Australia, this paper seeks to identify some of the ways in which disadvantaged schools are able to command confidence and optimism from students. Analysis of the perspectives of students in schools catering to large numbers of second-generation Turkish-background students suggests that gender and ethnicity organise, make legible and obscure the production of educational disadvantage in these sites. I discuss the implications of strong confidence and faith in schools amongst students in light of contribution of this investment to a wider system of management and legitimisation of inequalities in schooling. (Contains 5 tables, 1 figure, and 7 notes.)