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The role and significance of schooling in maintaining and renewing social disadvantage is particularly evident in upper secondary education, and especially so in the high-stakes final examination at the end of Year 12. This paper focusses on Senior English in this context, with specific regard to the Australian state of New South Wales. Building on a recent study of the outcomes of the Higher School Certificate (HSC) in 2017, it analyses what the data reveal about the relationship between Senior English and social inequality in this instance. It does so with reference to a brief account of the history of English teaching and senior secondary curriculum policy in New South Wales and also, comparatively, a now well-established comprehensive study of senior secondary schooling in Victoria. It concludes with some implications of this account for further investigations of Senior English and subject English more generally, as well as of the social meaning of senior secondary education in Australia, in particular with regard to the nexus between curriculum and assessment, knowledge, and power.

All too often lost in the pressure and intensity of the current practice of English teachers and literacy educators is due acknowledgement of the continuing importance of history. This paper brings together two concerns: the work of Margaret Meek Spencer as a key figure in the history of English teaching, reading pedagogy and literacy education, and the value of curriculum inquiry as a resource for re-focusing and renewing the field. In that context, the paper introduces a particular notion of literature as curriculum, working first with one of Meek's most generative texts and then linking with another key figure in English curriculum history, James Moffett, to outline what is possible when the relationship between literature and curriculum is richly reconceptualised.

With the explicit goal of today's school students being active citizens, critically engaged and democratically minded over the long course of their schooling, the authors of this article focus on the notions of rhetoric and, relatedly, rhetorical agency. While these notions are increasingly understood in secondary school contexts, their application in primary and early-childhood settings is under-explored. We define and propose rhetorical agency as a purposeful focus of school literacy practice and pedagogy, illustrating this with four examples in which rhetorical agency can be supported in the primary classroom. These relate to research we have undertaken or supported around children learning bilingually, students engaging in place-based investigations, rich text use, and critical literacy in the early years. Ultimately, we invite consideration of how primary classrooms and public schooling, and more specifically the practice of language and literacy education, might be enhanced expressly through a rhetorical lens. Keywords Rhetoric * Agency * Literacy * Pedagogy * Primary schooling, 1 Introduction: a rhetorical lens In this paper, we make a case for the concept of rhetoric, as a 'new' organising and framing principle for language and literacy studies in [...]

How best to understand the curriculum problem in doctoral research education: that is the question that this paper engages. It begins by noting that curriculum as such is little referenced and inadequately theorised in higher education and certainly in doctoral education, and indeed has been described as a "missing term". The paper then reviews a now longstanding research programme in the latter field addressed specifically to research supervision, focusing on notions of pedagogy, textuality, subjectivity and knowledge. Over more than a decade and a half, a body of work has been produced in this regard, informed by literary and cultural studies, feminism and poststructuralist theory and philosophy, thereby opening up the field to new theoretical resources and perspectives. Following this, the paper goes on to draw more directly on contemporary curriculum thought and on what is called post-Reconceptualist curriculum inquiry to outline a curriculum-theoretical perspective on doctoral studies and research education, bringing together notions of representation, emergence, practice and futurity. It does so here with reference to both the PhD and the professional doctorate, but arguably has relevance for doctoral education more generally. (Contains 2 figures.)

Education "is" changing, as is knowledge more generally, to a significant degree energised by what has been described as the digital revolution. This has been widely discussed with references to notions such as globalisation, the New Media Age, open access, and the Network Society. Something definitely to be considered is what this could mean for the future of Education itself, as a distinctive disciplinary field--a "research" field. What is its distinctive knowledge project? How to think about its own knowledge-generating practice, something that is all the more complicated given that working with knowledge is at the very heart of the educational endeavour. It is appropriate at this point, too, to look to the larger history of the field, bearing in mind that it is essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon, at least in terms of its consolidation and formalisation. That history might be characterised overall as the becoming-science of Education, with a close relationship forged with Psychology and a growing focus on measurement, consistent with its epistemological and methodological location within the new disciplinary formation of the social sciences. Even now, a decade into a new century, and indeed a new Millennium, the will to science is powerful and persistent. How educational theory and practice responds to the digital challenge can be linked in interesting ways to the imagining of new and different alliances and trajectories. In this article, the author endeavours to open up the question of knowledge for renewed scrutiny and debate. This is partly in specific response to recent work in educational sociology seeking to develop a new understanding of the nature and role of knowledge in education and society. (Contains 8 endnotes.)

In this address, the author engages both with the possibility "and" the impossibility of the educational project--and suggests something of what it means to say this. His presentation is specifically addressed to the theme of the (im)possibility of the educational project. He draws from philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and history, as well as educational scholarship, to explore what it means to take this theme of (im)possibility seriously. (Contains 1 figure and 7 endnotes.)

This article problematises representations of professional practice. It investigates assumptions behind received accounts of professional practice, including professional standards that purportedly capture what accomplished English teachers "should know and be able to do", "scientific" studies that construct accounts of classrooms from the standpoint of academic researchers, and narratives written by teachers that claim to explore dimensions of classroom teaching that elude outside observers. Especially significant are attempts by practitioner researchers to develop accounts of their professional practice vis-a-vis constructions of their work from other standpoints. We argue that it is timely for practitioner researchers to reflexively examine the conditions for producing such accounts, and to address the question of the validity of their knowledge claims. Yet this is also--crucially--more than an epistemological issue, but one that requires acknowledging the primacy of practice for engaging with the complexities of classroom settings. This article gives an account of our ongoing efforts to develop forms of representation that might begin to do justice to the complexities of practice in comparison with accepted accounts of what English teachers know and do. We intend it to be read as a position paper which outlines a framework for research on English teaching as a dynamic culture practice. (Contains 5 footnotes.)

The installation of the new Australian Curriculum offers rich possibilities for rethinking English in Australia, and beyond. This paper proposes that rhetoric is usefully drawn into this work of reconceptualisation, as strategically an organising principle for English curriculum theory and practice. It reviews existing work on rhetoric and proposes ways of connecting it with new understandings of textuality and meaning. It thus seeks to bring together rhetoric, history and pedagogy, as crucial considerations for the renewal of English teaching.