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In this theoretical article, we respond to a common education policy discourse that represents community participation in educational policy-making as an essentially rational solution to policy problems and as inherently progressive and democratic. We propose that conceptualising participatory politics as 'publics' challenges this discourse and provides new openings for understanding community participation in education policy reform as modes of worldmaking. Historicising the participative turn within the key decades of the 1970s and 1980s, we argue that mobilisations of participatory politics in education reform are complicated by the existence of participatory reactionary or conservative politics and by participatory politics that are either fleeting and unsuccessful, or exceed or refuse the sovereignty of the liberal democratic state. We propose that working with the theories of the publics can enable a richer understanding of the history of neoliberal education policy reform and of present and future aspirations for participatory education policy practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces an international Special Issue that addresses the significant question of how and why people organise to engage with policy making in the public sphere of education, from a historical perspective. Focusing on the phenomenon of 'grassroots' community organising during the key formation period of the 1970s and 1980s, the issue collects articles from Australia, Canada, Chile, South Korea, Spain (Catalonia) and the United States for the purpose of examining what 'grassroots' organising might look like or encompass under different kinds of states and state bureaucratic arrangements. This introductory article outlines the editors' own research into the Australian context before highlighting how the various articles individually and collectively contribute to questions of 1) expanding understanding of what it means to organise at the grassroots level; 2) the complex relationships between state and school; 3) connections and disconnections between the local, national and international educational domains; and 4) how, methodologically, to capture people, experiences and organisations that may be fully or partly absent from official top down historical records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the policy problematic of state–citizen relationships, reflecting on renewed calls for citizen collaboration and codesign in the provision of public services in 'new public governance'. Analysing this through recent policy reform in Australian public school governance, we examine how existing policy architectures – in this case school boards/councils – are being rearticulated in relation to such calls. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a range of policy stakeholders, we examine the diverse policy translations of citizen involvement in school governance. Our analysis highlights the contradictions and limitations of a school board/council structure for policy aspirations of citizen collaboration. While stakeholders welcomed school board member (i.e., parent) involvement in governance, this was strongly mediated by distinctions between strategic and operational decision-making, questions about the possibilities for meaningful participation, and tensions surrounding the need for skilled expert board members and community representation – particularly in disadvantaged contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the complex interweaving of the 'personal' and 'professional' in the affective labour of teachers. In line with theorisations of affective labour, contemporary school-teaching involves practices of self-work and self-making, as much as practices of curriculum and pedagogy. One emergent form of self-work, reflective of post-secular socio-cultural movements in education, is the use of contemplative practices (mindfulness, meditation, etc.) by teachers. Although mainly positioned within educational scholarship as techniques of stress-reduction, here we analyse contemplative practices as forms of affective labour. Drawing from a qualitative, empirical study, we explore how contemplative practices are embraced by teachers as ways to improve and transform the self – both in relation to the professional responsibilities of teaching, and in relation to broader projects of living. The case studies presented demonstrate the deep political ambivalences of contemplative practices, as they are expressed in teachers' work. Contemplative practices do become incorporated into obligations towards self-improvement and increased productivity (what McGee labels 'the belaboured self'). However, they may also instantiate relational forms of ethical responsibility that move against the grain of instrumentalising, competitive, and individualistic education policy discourses and institutional life-worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory ethical forms present in contemporary neoliberal policy frames. In particular, we analyse the demands of responsibility – as a form of ethical commitment – requested of parents by education policies in the contexts of Chile and Australia. Assuming neoliberalism as a contextualised and multivocal form of governing, we applied a policy sociology approach to study the ethical implications for parents of two recent educational reforms developed in the national contexts of this research. Our analyses show that the emerging demands on parents for responsibility in the educational field exceed univocal forms of individual responsibilisation, encompassing expressions of responsibility that respond to collective and public goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Whilst pervasive in policy documents, however, discourses surrounding 'parent engagement' are often elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that shape policy enactments in schools. In this paper, we argue that contemporary schooling reforms are constructing a new 'governing parent-citizen' through which the parental labour of social reproduction is being extended, valorised and rearticulated. We examine how one major reform movement in Australia is articulating new roles for parents and community members in schools: the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative in Western Australia. Our analysis demonstrates the intensive policy intervention required to produce this new form of parental labour and the subsequent divisions of labour it is producing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives / Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas is the property of Educational Policy Analysis Archives & Education Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Práxis Educativa is the property of Revista Praxis Educativa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article reflects on what doing critical policy sociology means in shifting theoretical, empirical and methodological contexts of education. We focus our analytical lens on two primary considerations. First, we reflect on the politics of criticality, examining differing claims and debates about what it means to do critical research and be a critical researcher of education policy, paying particular attention to how critical policy sociologists position their work in relation to elite power and policy networks. Second, we build on these foundations to consider the trend towards researching mobilities within critical policy sociology, arguing that contemporary 'follow the policy' research risks orienting researchers to the problems and agendas already established by elite policy agents and organisations, while obscuring the not-so-mobile forces that continue to define education policy and practice. We also raise questions about the elite networks and privileged levels of resourcing typically required to conduct this kind of research. In conclusion, we invite further discussion on the politics of knowledge production and challenges for policy sociologists seeking to be critical in shifting contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on an area of privatisation that has not to date received significant attention in educational research: the privatisation of infrastructure, facilities and maintenance, and in particular the labour of cleaning. Analysing the case of Victoria, Australia, we demonstrate how successive governments have defended the privatisation of cleaning labour on the basis that it allows schools to concentrate on the 'core' business of teaching and learning. Tracing the evolution of private contracts and public–private partnerships, we argue that the bracketing of cleaning work divides the types of labour carried out in the school, and thus the meaning and practice of public education. Thus, we suggest that controversies regarding the underpayment of cleaning staff, for instance, signal a deep problematic for public education as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary campaigns for public education rest upon an assumption that public schools are fundamental to an equitable and inclusive society. In this paper, I reflect on this presumption by exploring the inherent tensions of the meaning and practice of ‘public’ education, especially when the ‘public’ in public schooling is linked to political contestation and change in relation to the nation state. In particular, this discussion considers the ways in which the contemporary heightened racial politics of fear of ‘Muslim radicalisation’ structures the ways in which the state creates boundaries surrounding ‘public’ schooling. Here, analysis of recent governmental attempts to addresses the concern of ‘radicalisation’ in schools reveals the difficulties the nation state faces in defining what exactly is the ‘public’, and demonstrates how the politics of race and fear become overarching logics in the constitution of the Australian ‘public’. These logics risk creating exclusions and boundaries in public schooling, which, I argue here, have repercussions for the defence and claim to public education more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is ‘public’ about schooling. In this paper, we examine the ways in which different articulations of ‘the public’ are brought to bear in contemporary debates surrounding school funding. Taking the AustralianReview of Funding for Schooling(the Gonski Report) as our case, we analyse the policy report and its subsequent media coverage to consider what meanings are made concerning the ‘publicness’ of schooling. Our analysis reveals three broad themes of debate in the report and related media coverage: (1) the primacy of ‘procedural politics’ (i.e. the political imperatives and processes associated with public policy negotiations in the Australian federation); (2) changing relations between what is considered public and private; and (3) a connection of government schooling to concerns surrounding equity and a ‘public in need’. We suggest these three themes contour the debates and understandings that surround the ‘publicness’ of education generally, and school funding more specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the desire to defend and claim public education amidst the educational policy effects of contemporary neoliberal politics. The defence of public education, from schools to higher education, undoubtedly provides a powerful counter-veiling weight to the neoliberal policy logic of education-as-individual-value-accrual. At a time of intense global policy reform centred on marketisation in education, the public education institutions of the post-war welfare state are often characterised as being lost, attacked, encroached upon and dismantled. In this paper, I contend it is important to avoid mobilising a memory of public educational pasts that do not account for their failings and inequalities. Turning to a historical engagement with the emergence of neoliberal politics, the paper explores how challenges and contestations surrounding ‘the public’ from multiple standpoints converged in the rise of neoliberalism. Recognition of these convergences and contestations, I suggest, assists to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between neoliberal reform and the welfare state, and thus of the complex task of imagining, claiming and working towards a just and equitable public education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Globally, national curriculum policies are up for renegotiation. These negotiations are shaped by international and national top-down accountability regimes, and an increasing turn towards curriculum centralization and standardization. The new Australian Curriculum (AC) is no exception. The AC is an important educational policy event, one in which understandings about teacher professional authority is being redefined. In this paper, we examine how judgements about teachers’ professional authority are used to defend, promote and explain the AC. Drawing on an analysis of policy documents and interviews with high-level policy-makers, we argue that the AC is opening space in the policy field to reposition teachers’ work by promoting a view of teachers’ professional authority as constrained and defined through the written curriculum documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]