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This study aims to explore the factors that influence Asian student mobility using a life planning model, which focuses on students' lifelong planning and restricting factors in decision-making. As a result of macro data analysis of student mobility from six Asian source countries to eight major destinations from 1999 to 2017, the income gap between source country and destination country shows a negative correlation with student mobility, which supports the hypothesis that a decrease in budgetary constraints promotes study abroad. This finding is contrary to the assumption of the traditional push-and-pull model. This may be explained by the expansion of a middle-class population who are eager to send their children abroad whenever the budgetary constraint is lifted. Bilateral trade shows a positive correlation, which supports the hypothesis that prospect of employment, associated with economic connectedness, promotes study abroad.

While university participation rates among Indigenous Australians have been on the rise in recent years, parity targets remain elusive. In this context, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how aspirations for higher education are formed and nurtured. Studies tend to focus on barriers to access, often in ways that position Indigenous Australians as a homogeneous 'Otherised' group. This paper counter-balances hegemonic narratives of Indigeneity by analysing what Indigenous students from middle-class families say about their aspirations for university. Drawing on interview data collected in 2016 in government schools in New South Wales, Australia, it offers fresh understandings of school-to-university transitions, both empirically and conceptually. Using the lens of four--dimensional social space as conceived by Indigenous scholar Maggie Walter, we illustrate how race and class function in powerful but complex ways to shape the aspirations of two young Indigenous women. We argue that if we are to shift longstanding demographic patterns of university participation, then visible stories of Indigenous success, such as those told here, can help to redefine current discourses on Indigenous aspirations for higher education.

This paper draws on Bourdieu's theorising (particularly habitus and field) to think about position-making of teachers in respect of the early enactment of the Australian Curriculum. Position-making, a concept developed from the analysis proffered, can be contrasted with the more common practice of position-taking endemic in a relatively stable field. Position-making is an ongoing phenomenon in a changing field when the habitus is out of place, here the field of the new Australian Curriculum, creating the effect of what Bourdieu sees as hysteresis. This paper explores the positioning and re-positioning of agents (teachers and school leaders) due to an external change (the Australian curriculum) in the schooling field. Data for this study were collected from a middle-class state high school in Brisbane Australia, which was an early adopter of the new Australian Curriculum. The initial enactment phase of curriculum change was an unsettling one that (re)positioned agents--hence, the concept of position-making, which is a contribution to Bourdieu's theoretical resources and which complements the idea of policy enactment as opposed to policy implementation. Both allow some agency in mediation of mandated changes in the specific contexts of schools and teacher/leader habitus.

Families' mealtime talk has significant implications for children's language development. This study investigated five middle-class Australian Chinese families that differ in their lifestyles and meal routines. It aims to explore: (1) the nature of the Chinese parents' language use in interactions with children at mealtime; and (2) the factors that may impact the quality of mealtime talk. Drawing on systemic functional linguistic theory, the parents' language was analysed in terms of interpersonal functions and cohesive patterns. The findings show distinctive differences among the families. The parents sitting with children for meals generated a higher quality of language that contained informational functions, expanded in various cohesive patterns, than the families where parents were positioned separately from children or where fathers were absent from dinner. This study indicates the diversity of Chinese children's language experiences at home. Lifestyles and meal routines could be a mediator affecting the nature of mealtime talk.

There is little literature which provides any analysis regarding the relationship between cultural order and home education. Research reported here found that home education has grown steadily in recent decades and that parents' motivation for home education was closely associated with cultural order. It was noticeable that Christian and Confucian values seemed to provide philosophical support for Chinese middle-class families who have chosen to educate their children at home. The parents reported that they preferred to cultivate in their children their favourite culture and beliefs, rather than to merely facilitate their achievement of excellent academic outcomes.

As sites of human social activity, schools must engage in challenging conversations between staff, students and their communities about social disharmonies. This paper presents interview data from a case study of Eucalyptus High School (not its real name), a large multicultural school located in a middle-class area in suburban Victoria (Australia). The paper examines the school's engagement in 'challenging conversations' about socially and politically volatile issues as part of a holistic approach to building school culture, highlighting certain limitations in this approach. An 'ecologies of practice' model is used to critically explore these, which could be used to support schools to adopt a broad and critical examination of the possibilities and limits of their cultivation of inclusive and nurturing environments.

Teacher education programmes are often tasked with preparing predominantly White, middle class, pre-service teachers to be effective in diverse contexts. Many teacher educators consider practicum experiences critical to forming values and dispositions necessary for the teaching profession. This article focuses on the work of two White, middle-class, pre-service teachers, Charlotte and Seraphina, who volunteered to do their practicum in a remote indigenous community in Australia on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. At the beginning of the practicum, both pre-service teachers' attitudes about the experience were similar; yet, over time they began to develop divergent dispositions or 'positionality towards diversity' relative to their unique backgrounds and APY Lands experiences, highlighting certain sensitivities and biases regarding racial, cultural and linguistic diversity. We focus on how Charlotte and Seraphina interpret their experiences, what this can tell us about their professional development, and the possible implications for teacher educators teaching in post-colonial contexts.

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'.

Schooling has long been studied for its role in class formation and reproduction, Australian government secondary schools have also traditionally been associated with 'the local' and with 'nation building'. Some schools might now also be engaged with ideas of the 'the global' not only through policy practices and priorities, but also through the social dynamics of migration and movement. In globalizing times neither class formation nor schooling can be thought of simply in national terms. They are connected to globalizing forces yet cannot be divorced from their national specificity. We suggest that within Australia recent and historical emphases on skilled migration are pivotal to considering local connections to global middle class circuits. We argue for new approaches to studying the school experiences of global middle-class families and students, through a focus on transnational connectivities, generational dynamics, family and social life, rather than on more 'culturalist' approaches and national comparisons.

Over the past decade the issue of food and in particular, food consumed within schools has come to encapsulate a broad range of concerns regarding children and young people's health and wellbeing. In Australia, the UK and more recently the USA, attempts to ameliorate a range of public health concerns have provided the impetus for an unprecedented proliferation of school food initiatives and legislative reforms governing the types of foods that may or may not be provided within schools. While academic enquiry in this area has largely focussed upon attempts to govern children, recent initiatives in the UK and Australia have begun to target parents in their attempts to promote healthy food practices. In this paper we interrogate the ways in which parents, or more specifically, mothers are positioned in relation to school food discourses in Australia and in the UK and suggest that school food has become a site through which an array of pedagogical opportunities are opened up to invoke particular subject positions premised on normative views of affective middle class motherhood. In short, we seek to explore the means through which mothers come to be regarded as legitimate targets of school food pedagogy. The paper draws on empirical data from Australia and the UK to compare a range of pedagogic techniques employed in the two countries. Drawing on governmentality studies we explore how school food pedagogies seek to regulate mothers and their children's food related choices. We consider school lunches and the various techniques that have been deployed in both countries to consider the moralising work that takes place around food and motherhood. (Contains 1 figure and 1 footnote.)

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

Syllabus and policy documents in many states and countries around the world, and more specifically in Queensland are underpinned by an emancipatory agenda, in particular the principles of social justice. Educators are called upon to achieve this through a pedagogy which is immersed in the language of critical theory. Two elements that underpin emancipatory politics, that is, a transformative attitude towards the future, and the aim of overcoming the illegitimate domination of some individuals or groups by others, seem to be unobtainable within a choice generation, with its focus on lifestyle and consumerism. This paper focuses on the discourses of youth that are legitimated through the accounts of young people for whom emancipation is not a key issue. Such students may achieve the syllabus outcomes related to the critical agenda, yet it begs the question: Are contemporary youth making choices that further the critical transformative cause, or are our critical pedagogies simply serving to perpetuate dominant understandings? This paper explores and interprets performative accounts of youth and their multiliterate lives, within a critical poststructuralist framework. (Contains 1 table.)

Because children and young teenagers usually associate in same-sex groups, psychological research concerned with adolescent aggression has often concentrated on within-sex relationships. However, during adolescence, boys and girls increasingly interact socially. This paper reports a study of boy-to-girl aggression as perceived by girls, boys and their teachers. Focus group discussions were conducted with groups of Grade 9 adolescents (aged between 14 and 15 years) across four middle class schools in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia, and individual interviews were conducted with their teachers. Thematic analyses revealed different understandings by girls, boys and teachers of the same behaviour. Girls and teachers reported that boys frequently use verbally offensive language including sexual harassment toward girls but boys argued that they were often not being malicious but rather just joking and that girls over-reacted. Girls, boys and teachers agreed that boys often harassed girls in order to impress other boys and for their own entertainment or fun. Teachers also emphasised home and cultural background factors in influencing boys' behaviour toward girls. All three groups agreed that boys' behaviour toward girls could have devastating effects on the girl victims. Girls' appearance was reported as a major contributing factor associated with boys' victimisation such that, while physical attractiveness could protect a girl from boys' meanness, over-weight girls or those seen as being unattractive or "uncool" were vulnerable. However, girls were not seen universally as passive victims. Girls, boys and teachers reported that many girls responded assertively and even matched boys' aggression. Girls and boys agreed that teacher intervention was often not helpful. In contrast, teachers reported the effectiveness of school anti-harassment policies and a range of successful interventions. This study highlights the importance of understanding behaviour from different perspectives and confirms research that emphasises the crucial role of the peer group in influencing aggressive interactions among students in schools.

The last eight years have created radical realignments in Australia's political landscape. The Prime Minister's bitterest enemies are precisely the same people who would once have been Australian Liberalism's stalwarts. The author writes on the legacy of Australia's culture wars. For responses, see EJ848173: "Aussie Battler, or Worldly Opportunist?" ( James Walter); EJ848174: "Mr Howard Goes to Washington--and Brings Home Victory" (Dennis Glover); and EJ848175: "Something to Chew on" (David Burchell).

Market theory positions the consumer as a rational choice actor, making informed schooling choices on the basis of "hard" evidence of relative school effectiveness. Yet there are concerns that parents simply choose schools based on socio-demographic characteristics, thus leading to greater social segregation and undercutting the potential of choice to drive quality improvements. In this paper, we explore segregation by examining catchment areas for a range of public high schools in a specific middle-class urban area. We focus on socio-demographic characteristics, including levels of income, country of birth and religion affiliation, in order to explore residential segregation according to public high school catchment areas. Our data suggest distinct residential segregation between catchment areas for each public school within our data-set, particularly for the schools deemed to be popular and rejected, that may pose risks for broader equity concerns. We argue that, in contrast to market theory, even more affluent and active choosers are not equipped with information on the programmatic quality of their different school options, but instead may be relying on socio-demographic characteristics of schools--through surrogate information about the urban spaces that the schools occupy--in order to choose peer groups, if not programmes, for their children.

Working-class students tend to be less socially integrated at university than middle-class students. The present research investigated two potential reasons for this working-class social exclusion effect. First, working-class students may have fewer finances available to participate in social activities. Second, working-class students tend to be older than middle-class students and, consequently, they are likely to have more work and/or childcare commitments. These additional commitments may prevent them from attending campus which, in turn, reduces their opportunity for social integration. These predictions were confirmed among undergraduate students at an Australian university (N = 433) and a US university (N = 416). Strategies for increasing working-class students' social integration at university are discussed.

Research points to sections of the middle-class repopulating the "ordinary" urban public school and whilst there are key differences in how they are navigating public school choices, from "seeking a critical mass" to resisting traditional methods of choice and going "against-the-grain", or collectively campaigning for a brand new public school, the urban middle-class are developing contemporary methods to challenge the existing ways of thinking about middle-class choice. Drawing on this literature, this paper explores the symbolism of public schooling for relatively affluent choosers in the city of Melbourne, Australia. The positioning of public schooling as essentially secular and liberal indicates how the public school is valorised within the contemporary market place. Within a market that tends to undersell the public school, the perceived lack of organised religion and progressivism may be the unique selling point for the cosmopolitan, globalised consumer.

In the past decade, there has been increased scholarly interest in the purpose and functions of community language schools, also known as heritage, supplementary or complementary schools. In particular, previous studies have focused on schools operating in minority communities deriving from Asian and Eastern-European countries, showing that notions of identity and belonging to a "mother country" are key purposes of these schools. However, community language schools in Australia operate in minority communities with diverse cultural, historical, social and migration histories and findings from other studies may not be generalisable to other community language schools. To broaden our understanding of the aims and purpose of these schools and to allow for meaningful comparisons, this study focuses on parents reasons for enrolling their children at a Swedish community language school in Australia, often described as a "high-shift," "non-visible" minority community. Seven parents were interviewed. Findings show that reasons for perpetuating Swedish language derived from notions of identity and belonging, but that parents also aimed for their children to invest in Swedish language as cultural capital valuable in Sweden, Australia and elsewhere.

This article explores parents' use of private tutoring services for their primary school children in Sydney, Australia's largest city. Using Bernstein's theories of invisible and visible pedagogies, we look, through the eyes of a small group of middle-class Chinese-background interviewees, at the tensions between certain pedagogic forms associated with private tutoring and schooling in contemporary contexts of educational competition. We show how some parents are openly seeking more explicit, visible forms of instruction through using private tutoring, to compensate for the perceived "invisible", pedagogically progressive approach of Australian primary schooling. We argue that these parents' enlistment of supplementary tutoring is a considered approach to their identification of a mismatch between (apparently) relaxed, child-centred classroom practices, and the demands of the more traditional examinations that regulate entry points to desired educational sites such as academically selective high schools and prestigious universities. Our findings show how paid tutoring is a contemporary pedagogic strategy for securing educational advantage, not just a "cultural" practice prevalent among certain migrant communities, as it is often characterised. We suggest that an analytic focus on pedagogy can help connect issues of class, culture and competition in research on home-school relationships, offering a productive way for the field to respond to the tensions these issues engender.

The present research tested the hypotheses that (a) working-class students have fewer friends at university than middle-class students and (b) this social class difference occurs because working-class students tend to be older than middle-class students. A sample of 376 first-year undergraduate students from an Australian university completed an online survey that contained measures of social class and age as well as quality and quantity of actual and desired friendship at university. Consistent with predictions, age differences significantly mediated social class differences in friendship. The discussion focuses on potential policy implications for improving working-class students' friendships at university in order to improve their transition and retention.

This paper reports on research undertaken in a middle-class Australian school. The focus of the research was on the relationship between gender and students' engagement with high school chemistry. Achievement data from many OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries suggest that middle-class girls are achieving equally as well as, if not better than, boys in many subjects. This has led to claims that the "girls and science" agenda is no longer necessary, and indeed may have been detrimental to boys' achievements in science subjects. The data collected from students at this site indicate that at this school this agenda is far from a completed one. These data indicate that whilst girls' achievement levels are comparable with those of the boys, for many students chemistry is still perceived as a masculine subject. Hence, the girls in the chemistry classrooms at this school construct themselves, and are constructed, as outsiders in the subject.

This paper examines forms of boundary work undertaken by parents in a regional Australian city to negotiate social processes around the school market amidst rising economic insecurity. It outlines structural changes, which have increased economic inequality in Australia and impacted on educational reform, and the specific challenges faced by public schools in regional settings. Drawing on 18 months' qualitative research in one regional location, it identifies and analyses forms of boundary work undertaken by middle-class families to manage these uncertainties in a field of scarce economic and cultural resources. Theories of class culture, stigma and whiteness are used to show how local social labels such as "ferals" and "shiny people" acted as classed and racialised ways of negotiating this social and economic landscape through the school field. Such practices engendered feelings of security and control and shed light on feelings of class-based resentment and anxiety in regional Australia, specifically a middle-class "fear of falling".

Staffing rural and remote schools is an important policy issue for the public good. This paper examines the private issues it also poses for teachers with families working in these communities, as they seek to reconcile careers with educational choices for children. The paper first considers historical responses to staffing rural and remote schools in Australia, and the emergence of neoliberal policy encouraging marketisation of the education sector. We report on interviews about considerations motivating household mobility with 11 teachers across regional, rural and remote communities in Queensland. Like other middle-class parents, these teachers prioritised their children's educational opportunities over career opportunities. The analysis demonstrates how teachers in rural and remote communities constitute a special group of educational consumers with insider knowledge and unique dilemmas around school choice. Their heightened anxieties around school choice under neoliberal policy are shown to contribute to the public issue of staffing rural and remote schools.

This paper draws on David Harvey's theories of absolute and relational space in order to critique geographically bound school choices of the gentrified middle-class in the City of Melbourne, Australia. The paper relies on interviews with inner-city school choosers as generated by a longitudinal ethnographic school choice study. I argue that the participants construct their class-identity in relation to their geographical (or residential) positioning and this influences their schooling choices. In the light of this argument, I theorise "geo-identity" in thinking about how geographies inform and instruct identity and choice. This paper contributes by offering a focused analysis of Harvey's spatial theories and class-identity in processes of choice.

This paper reprises the argument for the emergence of a global education policy field and then focuses on the shared habitus of global and national policy actors and technicians. It is argued that this shared habitus is constituted as a reflection of and a contribution to the creation of the global education policy field. Bourdieu's approach to habitus as both methodological tool and concept is used and the significance of the interview encounter to understanding habitus is argued. The authors also draw on the content of interviews with five elite policy-makers and technicians. It was found that the policy actors and technicians shared a similar middle-class embodied habitus; in terms of schemes of perception, they identified with a high-modernist confidence in both science and technology; they identified with a cosmopolitan outlook and sensibility; and demonstrated scientistic approaches that held real confidence in understanding the social through quantitative social science methods.

In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference. We bring together the rich body of work that has been conducted on middle-class educational identities, with explorations of the centrality of the feminine in representations of class difference from the field of critical girlhood studies. This is done in order to explore how young femininities mediate the representation of class difference in the environment of the private girls' school. Drawing from our two research studies, located in private girls' schools in Australia and the United Kingdom, we argue that the notion of "disgust", commonly used in recent engagements around class, has only limited purchase in understanding the representation of class difference in these schools. It is the inconsistencies and complexities in how class and class relations are produced that we wish to illuminate.

This paper explores the metonymic slippage surrounding the discourse of public education, through observations and interviews with Lawson High School active campaigners in the state of Victoria, Australia. The notion of campaigning for public education has become an ever-present issue on an international scale, and this article aims to contribute qualitative knowledge regarding the key concepts that lobbyists produce and articulate within their meetings concerning public education. Data have been obtained through direct participatory observation within a contextually specific campaigning site, lobbyists' publications and one-on-one interviews with active campaigners. Findings indicate that campaigners present distinct conceptualisations of public education as a discourse and a well-defined model of their school-of-choice.

We investigated cultural influences on young children's acquisition of social-cognitive concepts. A theory of mind (ToM) scale (Wellman & Liu, 2004) was given to 129 children (71 boys, 58 girls) ranging in age from 3 years 0 months to 7 years 10 months. The children were from three distinct cultural groups: (a) trash pickers ("pemulung") living a subsistence lifestyle in Jakarta, Indonesia; (b) middle-class Jakartans living and attending preschools within 5 km of the "pemulung" group; and (c) middle-class Australians. All children were individually tested in their native language. Cross-group comparisons revealed no significant differences among the three groups in mastery of false belief (the traditional ToM indicator), despite their widely different socio-economic circumstances. However, the "pemulung" children were slower than the two middle-class groups in mastering two other ToM concepts, namely knowledge access and emotion concealment. These findings shed new light on patterns of cross-cultural consistency in false-belief mastery, as well as revealing cross-cultural variation in other ToM concepts that plausibly reflect variation in children's everyday life circumstances. (Contains 3 tables.)

This article focuses on the continuing impact of recuperative masculinity politics in the schooling of economically advantaged boys (elite and middle class); yet, it also indicates resistance to this politics. An understanding that the gender order is unstable and that variants of hegemonic masculinity continue to morph in the context of globalisation is also exemplified. Two case studies are analysed, both focused on remaking masculinities: Balfour, an elite all boys' school in Scotland and Springtown Religious School, a middle-class, coeducational Australian school. The cases show that the remaking of masculinities is shaped by social class politics and confirm the diversities within the categories of "boys". At Balfour, the remaking of elite masculinities was framed by the perceived needs of the globalised labour market (especially in finance) and the changing practices of professional, elite femininities. At Springtown, a school known for rejecting competitive sport and for their commitment to gender equity, girls and some staff resisted changes to the outdoor education programme framed by recuperative mythopoetic discourses. The article illustrates the production and reproduction of privilege and advantage and the remaking of elite and middle-class masculinities within an ever-changing gender order, an important insight for those working towards socially just gender policy and praxis. (Contains 3 notes.)

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.

In this paper, the author discusses the life of Jane Hay Brown, later Hamilton (1827-1898), who worked as a governess and schoolmistress from the late 1840s to the mid 1880s. She was a woman whose life would have remained largely unknown without emigration which resulted in a rich collection of family letters. Jane's letters provide insight into the life of a lower middle-class woman whose voice is usually only faintly heard. Jane remained outside the growing state sector of education in the late nineteenth century largely because she lacked a training certificate, but found that running her own small school better fitted her family circumstances and allowed her to combine employment with domestic responsibilities. Marjorie Theobald has noted that whereas Jane's establishment of a school for young ladies in Victoria in 1867 appears "the last throw of a desperate woman--an enduring stereotype of the lady school-keeper," her letters give another, more positive impression. The author also shows that Jane herself had benefited from the development of secondary education for middle-class girls in Scotland which had begun in the 1830s and which had been pioneered by men. Despite the patriarchal nature of the Scottish educational tradition, its democratic aspect meant that girls had access to academic (although generally not classical) learning. (Contains 88 footnotes.)

This article assumes that literacy practices are social practices. Based on the New Literacy Studies (Street, 2005) this view of literacy provides an understanding that the ways a person reads and writes change, depending on that person's identity, the type of texts that are involved and the context in which those texts and identities are located. This article also assumes that the use of new technologies has changed both the types of texts and the contexts for using these texts (Leu et al., 2009) and that these changes have impacted on the purposes of schooling. These ideas have informed the analysis of data collected in 2008 in Queensland, Australia around the use of digital texts in classrooms. A philosophical framework that uses the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) within educational research contexts has been used to develop the analyses. Using Deleuze's figuration of a rhizome to explain the production of discourses within particular texts enables an account of the linkages and connections between discursive plateaus operating within texts. In the complex rhizome of this data these connections were formed by the omnipresence of the rituals and normative practices of literacy classrooms that obstruct engagement with new texts and new literacy practices. Teachers and students constitute themselves as competent members of classrooms through their engagement with these pedagogical routines while simultaneously attempting to engage with digital texts. (Contains 2 figures.)

This paper explores the ways physical and health education is justified in two school settings: a private girls' school and a co-educational government school located in the same Australian city. Physical and health education policies and interview material with teachers are drawn on to explore the meanings taken up by the schools. Whilst similar sets of "truths" around young people and health were drawn on to define the place of physical and health education in the lives of their students, there were also stark differences. It is argued that through these differences important discursive work is being performed. In particular, this paper explores how the schools are implicated in the discursive continuation of particular "classed" subjectivities. For example, a set of discourses around "at-risk", "disadvantaged", "youth" were drawn on by the teachers from the government school to construct physical and health education as a means for "saving" their students' lives. By comparison, in the private girls' school's texts, emphasis was on inviting students to become particular "independent", "responsible" young women. It is argued that the exposure and access to these different notions of "health" positioned students quite differently as particular "classed" subjects.

Based mainly on my own ethnographic research, which is committed to uncovering the constructed or "practiced" nature of social life, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which Australian school teachers, administrators, students and parents are engaged in a re-productive process that simultaneously reinforces and reinvents schools and schooling. Set against a backdrop of concern bordering on panic among some groups about middle-class flow away from Australian government schools, this paper explores the practices of social class and its structurating effects. A sample is presented of the ways in which those working in Australian schools tend to direct their energies towards ensuring market share of middle-class students, a practice emerging out of beliefs and experiences that lead teachers to find middle-class schools "stimulating and encouraging places to teach in", in contrast to the "disruptive" and "wearing" working-class schools. The study raises important questions not just about how we want to organize our schools and education system, but ultimately about what sort of society are we seeking to re-produce right here, right now? (Contains 2 notes and 1 figure.)

Australia has been one of the countries to most enthusiastically embrace the neo-liberal conditions conducive to the dismantling of equitably provided public schooling. The article argues that part of the explanation for the absence of any effective challenge to this trajectory lies in the contradictory nature of the Australian identity. The ensemble of policies that have been officially promoted to produce this situation, include: an official process of disparaging public education, while eulogising the alleged virtues of private education; promoting school choice as the mechanism for upholding standards and accountability; encouraging structures and school cultures that bolster marketised views; deliberately cultivating inequities in resources and funding that exacerbate exit of a fearful middle class; and generally producing a compliant view of educational leadership that is deferent to management views. The effect has been a major shift of social justice off the wider Australian educational and political agenda. (Contains 1 figure and 70 footnotes.)

Children in middle class Australia, and many western countries around the world experience restricted opportunities to engage in free play in their neighbourhood streets and parks. The impact of this has been a drastic decrease in children's independent mobility and environmental play. Recent research has focused on the physical environment of neighbourhoods' in an attempt to understand how they might be designed to encourage children's play and increase their environmental learning. This paper explores these same issues but from a different perspective. That is, to explain some of the changes in childhood environmental behaviours I explore children and parent relationships, in particular, the phenomena of 'bubble-wrapping' children to appease the anxieties of some middle class parents. I acknowledge when making these claims that parenting is a complex and highly individual enterprise with many variables, therefore this paper is only seeking to draw attention to a broad pattern of behaviour of a select group within society. I will conclude with an overview of some of the key attributes and competencies that are being lost when children lack independent mobility in their neighbourhoods and will subsequently argue why opening the front gates of our middle class suburbs is important to enhance children's environmental learning. (Contains 5 figures and 2 notes.)

Background: Sport Education (SE) and Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) are two curriculum models that were developed to help students participate in fair and equitable ways and challenge their thinking beyond the replication of techniques and skills. Given that the general aim of both models is to employ more democratic pedagogies and provide sporting experiences which really allow students to learn how to play well, and considering both models attempt to realize this goal in slightly different ways and have different foci, it would seem logical that a coalition of the two might lead to some real pedagogical breakthroughs. Purpose: To provide descriptive, detailed information about the researcher's experiences and the students' reactions to a unit designed following the structure of SE (seasons, formal competition and student roles), but with the skills and tactics taught using problem solving and guided discovery approaches rather than a more command style. Participants and setting: 29 sixth-grade students (11 boys and 18 girls) at a middle class primary school in a metropolitan Australian capital meeting daily for 30 minutes over a 5-week period. Intervention: A 22-lesson hybrid season of "batting and fielding games" formed the basic content of instruction. The organizational structure of the unit was pure SE, however the main pedagogical style employed was pure TGfU. Research design: The design followed that of a "teaching experiment" having four foundational goals: (i) to examine teaching, learning and subject matters as part of a complex system, (ii) to describe the learning of subject matter as it occurs in the classroom, (iii) to identify from the teacher's perspective the issues, problems and challenges that arise during teaching, and (iv) to develop, refine or provide illustrations of theory. Data collection: Following each lesson, each student completed a "critical incident reflective sheet". Four "tactics quizzes" were given throughout the season. Each team designed its own batting and fielding game using a "game design form". At the completion of the season, each team participated in a group interview that explored why they chose to incorporate certain rules or equipment into their own games and how they would teach the tactics of their games. Data analysis: Critical incidence data were sorted into thoughts and perceptions, and the frequency of thoughts and perceptions within each category and subcategory were computed. Tactical quizzes were analyzed to determine the number of students who provided an appropriate response to the scenario. Interview text was reduced to a series of thoughts and perceptions, and these were then coded and categorized using the same procedure employed during the analysis of the critical incident data. Findings: The students responded well to the myriad of problems they were asked to solve and by the unit's conclusion, were able to understand, appreciate, and execute a number of rudimentary batting, bowling/pitching, and fielding tactics and strategies and some which were fairly sophisticated. They also understood the overarching principles, rules and structures of batting/fielding games, appreciated their importance, and were able to transfer them from one game to another. Particularly impressive in this respect, was their ability to include risk/reward strategies and avoid problematic skills in the games that they invented. Conclusions: It is important to emphasize that combining the two models did not weaken most of the structural advantages research has suggested SE has over more traditional curricula. However, combining SE and TGfU placed more emphasis on the teacher to drive and give momentum to the proceedings and, therefore, teaching was more labour-intensive. In particular, we concluded that to be successful when delivering a hybrid SE-TGfU unit, a teacher would have to possess superior content and pedagogical content knowledge. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

This paper reports on a qualitative case study that investigated how the professional identities of trainers in the adult sector in Australia are shaped by intersecting relations of social class, ethnicity, gender and the discourses of vocational adult education. Interviews with two trainers as well as observations of them at work are analysed and presented here to illustrate how social class, considered in relation to gender and race, is played out through the trainers' identity investments in discourses of nurturance and care and economic rationalism. Such identity investments shape the relationships the trainers develop with their students and the training strategies and practices they privilege. The paper argues the need for trainers to develop critical reflective practices and to interrogate how their investments in particular classed identities shape their views about learning for work and training for work. It also argues the need for more research around social class and trainer identity within the adult sector. (Contains 4 notes.)

In a recent study Judith Brett has raised the "problematic" of the middle class in Australia and its support for a liberal tradition where the prime focus is on the individual citizen rather than the state. She suggests that Australian liberalism was drawn from the heritage of British Protestant dissent with its ethic of independently minded individuals free to follow their own convictions. This tradition became associated in Australia with a "moral middle class"--a "projected moral community"--founded in Protestantism and committed to civic duties of sacrifice and service. It is the post-war destruction of those values that in part explains the rise of "neo-liberalism" which preaches the rights rather than the duties of individuals. The relationship between the individual and the state and its effect on social class formations has long fascinated Australian historians of education studying the creation of colonial schools in the nineteenth century. In this paper the authors present a discursive discussion of Australian liberalism, the middle class and "public education" (with a focus on school education although they make mention of "public" universities). This contribution is not intended as a final word on the subject but rather is suggestive of how under the general influence of British ideologies and culture Australian liberals came to adopt and sponsor public education in the nineteenth century both as a common good as well as being in the interests of their own social class only to abandon such commitments in the late twentieth century with the rise of a more globalised form of market liberalism.

In a doctoral study undertaken at Edith Cowan University the author set out to investigate the influence of home and school environments on the academic performance and educational/occupational aspirations of high school students from eight Chinese-Australian and Anglo-Australian families residing in a middle class suburb of Perth metropolitan area. These students graduated from a high school where the author conducted this research as a teacher-researcher. In this longitudinal study data were collected by employing ethnographic techniques such as participant observation, semi-formal interviewing and document analysis. The author spent 500 hours in the homes of the participating students, observed and interviewed them at school for 2 years, and collected data on their educational performance from Year 8 to Year 12. Pivotal to this research was the key question: Do Chinese-Australian and Anglo-Australian high school students perform differently? If so, how do we account for this difference? An investigation of the home experiences and attitude towards school revealed the existence of "Asian high achieving syndrome" in Chinese-Australian students and "self-deprivation syndrome" in Anglo-Australian students. Nonetheless, the unexpected finding is that excessive parental pressure takes its toll on the mental health of Chinese-Australian students and deprives them of the other opportunities that Australia offers. On the other hand, the leisure and sports oriented life style of Anglo-Australian parents leads to low educational expectations and their children fail to reach their full potentials. To substantiate this claim the experiences of students from four families are discussed. (Contains 3 tables and 3 footnotes.)

Presents a study investigating Eysenck's paradox of socialism: the tendency of working class individuals to hold conservative social and radical economic attitudes and that of middle class individuals to hold conservative economic and radical social beliefs. Reports no evidence supporting economic belief predictions, but some evidence that middle class subjects endorsed radical social beliefs. (DK)

In this article, the author comments on Judith Brett's article (see EJ848172). Brett dissects the differences between the Howard world-view and that of the intelligentsia, using Robert Merton's dichotomy between "locals" and "cosmopolitans" as her means. On this account, Howard's preoccupation with national sovereignty--and hence with border control and security--is the characteristic trait of the "local", knowing "in (his) bones that home and its ways are best". His critics, the "cosmopolitan" intelligentsia, are too ready to ascribe his policy preferences to bigotry and cynicism, failing to recognise that locals "place their obligations to their fellow nationals much higher than to those outside the boundary of the nation". They refuse to see the world from Howard's perspective, and hence have given him an opening: "He has captured much Australian vernacular nationalism for the Liberals and in so doing created a workable language of national unity". The author contends that Brett's book is wonderfully persuasive on this last point, showing Howard's political savvy and skill in deploying a plain man's rhetoric to wrong-foot more knowing critics. She establishes one point beyond refutation: that unless the critics can imagine themselves in Howard's shoes, appreciate the skill with which he has used everyday language to create a political imaginary, and understand the appeal of that construct to a constituency, they will never lay a glove on him. Nonetheless, Brett is too ready to identify belief rather than calculation as the source of Howard's actions, and this is because of three limitations in her argument. First, noting historical changes in the roles of knowledge elites suggests that, rather than speaking for "the broad mainstream" against elites, Howard is part of a battle between elites that has clear political purposes. Second, in her attention to Howard and the Australian context, Brett omits the comparative dimension, and so understates how closely Howard's tactics are modelled on anti-elite discourse and the "securitisation" of politics in Western polities. In this, he is firmly enmeshed in a cosmopolitan network. Third, Howard has adopted a mode of Realpolitik based on what he calls "a coalition of interests" that is progressively alienating what Brett calls the moral middle class--and this may no longer matter for the Liberal Party. The argument, so extended, suggests that Howard is both a national patriot--seeing the world much as Brett suggests--and a breathtakingly hard-nosed opportunist. (Contains 8 footnotes.)

Confirmed the hypothesis that happiness leads to self-indulgence when children have no reason to believe that excessive self-gratification is morally wrong but that happiness promotes self-denial when children fear that excessive self-gratification violates a moral rule. Results with 112 White, middle-class, Australian children ages four to five and eight to nine showed effects by sex and age. (Author/CB)

Investigates the sensorimotor exploration of novel stimuli of 18 Aboriginal and 18 Caucasian Australian children of 4-6 years. Findings indicate that Aboriginal and Caucasian children displayed similar levels and patterns of visual and tactile exploration of a novel object, with Aboriginal children manipulating at a higher rate. (RJC)

It was hypothesized that distinctive verbal processing styles would be characteristic of different social classes and different sexes, and that these differences could be largely explained by earlier socialization experiences. (BW)

Cognitive style differences exhibited by middle class and working class male and female adolescents were examined. Dimensions of cognitive style measured include: conceptual differentiation, categorizing flexibility, conceptual preference, originality, ideational fluency, flexibility, and category width. (Author/BW)