Reconfiguring the Public Sphere: Implications for Analyses of Educational Policy

This paper outlines a case for the reconfiguration of the public sphere as discursive space, arguing that such a reconfiguration better enables investigations into public debates on education. The paper focuses on one such investigation, which studied one newspaper's reporting of a review of the school curriculum in Queensland, Australia. It employs Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse the interrelationships between policy discourses and the discourses about the review that were constructed in the print media. The paper shows how the dynamic structure of the public sphere enabled discursive connections to be made across sites in order to privilege a shared public discourse on education policy, schools and teachers. In so doing, it demonstrates the capacity of the public sphere to define educational issues and identities in particular ways.