Making the Difference: 20 years on

Making the Difference (Connell et al., 1982 ), a sociological study of Australian families and schools, generated considerable interest and some controversy when it was published in 1982. This essay revisits the way the book was reviewed at the time and considers its contribution two decades later. In the 1980s it provided a substantial account of the relevance and limitations of reproduction theory to Australian education and it was also seen internationally as an exceptionally insightful study of the class-based and gendered relationship between families and schools. Although the research agenda signalled by Making the Difference was subsequently disrupted by the rise of the New Right, it is argued that its theoretical and empirical concerns provided a foundation for recent work on the impact of postwelfarist education policy and in this sense it remains highly relevant to the sociology of education today. The book's policy stance, although not without problems, also anticipated some of today's debates about the best form of educational provision for diverse social groups. It is concluded that Making the Difference was not only seen as a remarkable account in its time but in important respects was well ahead of its time.     

Constants and Contexts in Pupil Experience of Learning and Schooling: Comparing learners in England,France and Denmark

The article reports on some key findings of a major research project which examines the relationship between national educational values as these are mediated by the school context, teacher beliefs and classroom processes, and eventually translated into pupil perspectives on learning and schooling. These findings are drawn from questionnaires to 1,800 secondary school pupils in England, France and Denmark, and from individual and group interviews with a smaller sample of pupils in each country. Through an examination of pupil perspectives on the purposes of schooling and on themselves as learners, the article explores the significance of the cultural context in which learning occurs. It considers the extent to which there are significant differences related to the national context, or whether pupils' experience of schooling is becoming more similar as they try to construct their identities as learners and as adolescents and to negotiate pathways which lead to success on the dimensions of academic achievement, peer status and social conformity. 'Constants' and 'contexts' of pupil experience in the three countries are identified, together with some of the factors which influence the development of a learner identity.     

Leadership for Organisational Learning and Improved Student Outcomes—What Do We Know?

The Leadership for Organisational Learning and Student Outcomes (LOLSO) Research Project addresses the need to extend present understandings of school reform initiatives that aim to change school practices with the intention of supporting enhanced student learning. In this article results from LOLSO's teacher surveys ('teacher voice') and student surveys ('pupil voice') are organised around six of the project's major research questions: how is the concept of organisational learning (OL) defined in Australian secondary schools (teacher voice)? What leadership practices promote OL in schools (teacher voice)? What are some outcomes of schooling other than academic achievement (pupil voice)? What are the relationships between the non-academic and academic outcomes of schooling? Do school leadership and/or organisational learning contribute to student outcomes? What other factors contribute to student outcomes? The answers to these questions lead to four clear implications relating to distributive leadership, development, context, and a broader understanding of student outcomes. The answers also raise concerns about the current emphasis on transactional leadership, that is school leadership that overemphasises the managerial or strategic.     

Students Take Control: the 1980 boycott of Coloured Education in the Cape Peninsula

The article focuses on the boycott of Coloured Education by students in South Africa's Cape Peninsula during 1980. It describes the way in which students seized control of their schooling, overthrew staff authority replacing it with democratic student control, introduced a counter‐curriculum, and involved themselves in supporting two working class campaigns which overlapped with their boycott. By means of a case study the article illustrates the possibility of communities, as part of a popular struggle for societal transformation, extending the degree of the control they exercise in the arena of schooling such that the schooling itself, and its effects within a wider social context, are in some real measure transformed. Issues are raised concerning the nature and determination of schooling and the potential for radical practice on educational terrain.     

Negotiating Methodological Dilemmas in a Range of Chilly Climates: A story of pressures,principles and problems

This article discusses methodological, ethical and material issues related to the author's work on a qualitative, longitudinal research project, the 12 to 18 Project. It discusses the difficulty of balancing concerns about reactivity with concerns about obligations to the research subjects; the effects of the current Australian university funding regime on the shaping and conduct of research; and the difficulty of taking up particular research questions in certain political climates.     

Subjectivity and Schooling in a Longitudinal Study of Secondary Students

This article addresses the question of how to interpret the relation between the production of subjectivity and the effects of different forms of schooling. Two kinds of problem are explored. The first is the immediate empirical and historical one of understanding how gender and class subjectivity takes shape and is embodied by Australian secondary-school students. This is investigated through close readings of interviews with two young people who are participants in a qualitative, longitudinal study of Australian secondary-school students—the '12 to 18 Project'. The article thus examines the developmental and longitudinal aspect of identity formation, and addresses the impact of feminism on gender change. The second problem is how to theorise the subjectivity schooling relation, and this is explored through an analysis of the interactions between individual biographies and the aspirations and discursive practices of different schools. After considering some contemporary approaches to subjectivity, the discussion proposes a return to Bourdieu's notions of habitus and social field and, through an analysis of the two case studies, illustrates how habitus is formed over time.     

Being a ‘wog’ in Melbourne – young people's self-fashioning through discourses of racism

The Greek community in Melbourne, Australia, is large and has a long history in the city. It is diverse and associated with a range of cultural, social and political structures. It has strong transnational links and in many ways exemplifies ‘diasporic’ in contradistinction to ‘migrant’. This paper focuses on young people from this community, particularly those who attend schools established to promote Greek language and cultural maintenance. In this paper, we examine such students’ explorations of their cultural identifications, most specifically how they adopt the term ‘wog’. This term is complex and its place in Australian discourse has shifted over time. Tracking these shifts and considering them as a context for these young people's use of the term allows us to consider the processes involved in their self-fashioning. We argue that their uptake of ‘wog’ involves the deployment of irony, given their awareness of its strong association with racism. We are also interested in the potential for women's experience to be silenced through the common association between ‘wog’ and protest masculinities. We argue that these students’ use of the term illustrates self-fashioning that provides insights into the complexities that surround cultural identification at the micro level, including schooling, but also in the broader context of globalisation.     

Working out Intimacy: Young people and friendship in an age of reflexivity

Drawing upon a longitudinal, interview-based study of Australian secondary school students, this article explores young people's friendship experiences and attitudes to intimacy and the interpersonal. The discussion develops in relation to the work of Anthony Giddens on detraditionalisation and reflexivity, and Nikolas Rose on modernity and the self. First, I argue that feminism and psychotherapeutic ways of constituting and knowing the self are reconfiguring the cultural meanings of intimacy. Second, I suggest that this reworking of intimacy has differential and uneven effects and has particular consequences for the production of gendered subjectivities. Third, I raise some critical questions about the extent to which either Giddens's or Rose's account can properly capture the gendered and situated experiences of intimacy. I offer examples in which gender is being rearticulated in new yet familiar ways and note some persistent tensions in desires for connection and community versus autonomy and freedom. Carol Gilligan's work on gender differences in orientations to autonomy and connection is briefly revisited. Overall, it is argued that we need to take more account of how class, location and schooling differences influence dispositions to friendship and the interpersonal, and this is elaborated through a discussion of the 'relationship orientations' of two white Australian young men.     

Deadly Ways to Learn a yarn about some learning we did together

The title of Western Australia's Deadly Ways to Learn project, an action research project aimed at facilitating and enhancing the teaching and learning of Australian Aboriginal students, was inspired by Aboriginal English in which 'deadly' means 'really good'. Aboriginal English is the first dialect of most Indigenous Australians and differs in fundamental and consistent ways from Standard Australian English which is the language of instruction in most Australian schools. Accordingly, most Aboriginal students receive schooling in a second dialect. Deadly Ways to Learn brought this dilemma into focus and engaged teachers and Indigenous Education Officers (IEOs) from several government, Catholic and independent schools in action research to develop two-way bi-dialectal teaching practices that would support literacy acquisition among Aboriginal students. Getting teachers and IEOs to accept the existence and validity of Aboriginal English was a huge task. The real challenge, however, was getting teachers to respect the sociocultural perspectives and value systems that Aboriginal English is used to express. Teachers and partner IEOs jointly participated in a series of collaborative forums in which candid discussions about culture and linguistics were carefully facilitated. Over a relatively short period, profound changes were observed and self-reported among participants. This paper outlines the collaborative processes employed in the project, qualitative changes that occurred among participants and key findings about two-way bi-dialectal teaching.     

Interrupting the Way Things Are: Exploring new directions in school/university partnerships

During the Australian National Professional Development Program (NPDP), 1994-1996, a large action-research project, Innovative Links between Universities and Schools for Teacher Professional Development, was undertaken. The project involved a consortium of 14 Australian universities working with over 100 schools (government and non-government) across all States and the Northern Territory. It was structured around the concept of Roundtables, whereby teachers engaged in school-based projects in conjunction with an academic associate from the partner university. The role of 'academic associate' demanded a rethinking of the role of university teacher educators in relation to teacher professional development. Six 'academic associates' and two teachers from the Murdoch University Roundtable formed a collaborative research group to investigate issues arising from their work with the project. The research was a self-reflective study of the work of the participants by those participants themselves. This paper relates the insights regarding collaborative work between academics and schoolteachers that emerged from the study.     

The Perplexity of Sponsored Environment Education: a critical view on Hong Kong and its future

This study critically examines Hong Kong's environmental education initiatives beyond schooling in the last 5 years with reference to the engagement of environmental non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) in this process under an emerging sponsorship regime. It highlights that the manifested form and mode of environmen‐talism in general and environmental education in particular are embedded within the socio‐political context of colonial governance, the proliferation of green ideas and the local adaptation of ideas of environmental education. It is observed and argued that environmental education programmes in the last 5 years, promoted mainly in the mass media domain, have been partially successful in changing people's perception on environmental affairs, but environmental groups' autonomy is questioned under a sponsorship regime. The paper ends with remarks on the future of environmental education under a new political regime in 1997 and beyond.     

Making the Difference,Then and Now

In the mid-1970s there was political interest in questions of educational justice and an intellectual situation that allowed a 'productionist' approach to class. The intensive research method used was relatively open to new insights about class and gender, and a highly collaborative process of analysis connected the work with practical needs in school systems. The empirical side of the research stands up well. The policy context, however, has changed greatly, with the rise of neoliberalism and the destruction of the policy machinery for consultation and equity work. Suggestions are made for elements of a new equality agenda in education, which moves beyond compensatory programs.     

Schooling and social justice through the lenses of Nancy Fraser

This review essay draws on Nancy Fraser's work as featured in Adding insult to injury: Nancy Fraser debates her critics to explore issues of schooling and social justice. The review focuses on the applicability and usefulness of Fraser's three-dimensional model for understanding matters of justice in education. It begins with an overview of the principles of economic, cultural and political justice as they are reflected in specific examples of equity and schooling policy and practice. This is followed by (1) a consideration of Fraser's concerns that current forms of identity politics are reifying group identity and displacing matters of distributive justice and (2) with an account of her concerns about the political justice issues of representation and misframing in the contemporary global era. With reference to the sphere of Indigenous education, the review examines some of the problematics involved in pursuing distributive, recognitive and representative justice. Fraser's ‘status model’ is presented as a way through these problematics because it engages with a politics that begins with overcoming status subordination rather than with a politics of group identity. Against this theoretical backdrop, the final section of the review briefly considers some of the future challenges for schooling and social justice.     

Boys and Literacy: Lessons from Australia

ABSTRACT This paper examines the complexity of the issues associated with boys and literacy. It initially reviews Australian research documenting gender differences in literacy performance, highlighting the interplay between gender, class and ethnicity within this research. It then develops a framework for considering the interconnectedness between literacy, various masculinities, and schooling. The paper argues that literacy, as it is constructed in the school, becomes a domain of knowledge and a set of technologies that run counter to various dominant constructions of masculinity. As a result, school literacy is often in contrast to other electronic and visually-based 'literacy skills' that boys have access to. The paper suggests an approach which works with social constructions of masculinity, and discourses on 'critical literacy', to provide strategies for boys' literacy education that will not be in conflict with the education of girls reform agenda of the past 20 years.     

Bernstein and the Middle Class

This paper explores Basil Bernstein's insights into education and social class, and in particular the relevance of his work for understanding the British middle class. Bernstein is one of the few sociologists of education to recognise and explore differences and tensions within the middle class. We begin by exploring some of the influences of Bernstein's theorisation of social class in general, and outline his main ideas on the relationship between the middle class and education in particular. We then examine the relevance of his work for research on education and middle-class differentiation through drawing on data from our 'Destined for Success' project. This project traced the educational biographies of 300 young men and women from the beginning of their promising educational secondary school career to their mid-twenties. We argue that the distinctive dispositions and orientations of the 'new' and 'old' middle class proposed by Bernstein are evident within parental preferences for types of school, processes of student engagement and, ultimately, differentiated middle-class identities.     

Lone Mothers' Involvement in their Children's Schooling: Towards a new typology of maternal involvement

Parental involvement in schooling is currently advocated by both education policy and theorists in the UK as a solution to 'falling' educational standards. However, this parental involvement is presented as ungendered, with no recognition that the work required of mothers by schools is difficult to do under conditions of sole supporting mothering and low income. This article offers a way of conceptualising lone mothers' understandings of their involvement in their children's schooling by deconstructing the standard educationlist and school-based typologies of parental involvement and constructing a (new) typology of maternal involvement based in lone mothers' understandings. In doing this, the article explores the hidden assumptions about class, 'race', gender and family form behind the parental involvement discourse.     

Globalisation and Its Educational Discontents: Neoliberalisation and its impacts on education workers' rights,pay and conditions

This article examines some impacts of neoliberal education policies during the current period of the intensification of neoliberal capital. Section 1 examines the relationship between education and capital, identifying three plans capital has in relation to education. It sets out some of the major aspects of neoliberal policy developments in schooling and further education. Section 2 describes, analyses and evaluates the research methodology used in developing this article, locating the methodology within the debate between 'methodological purists' on the one hand, and 'committed research' on the other. The research for this article, within the 'research for social justice' paradigm, is rationalised. Section 3 examines the impacts of neoliberalisation on education workers' securities - their pay/ salaries, conditions of employment, stresses and pressures at work, and their work identity and status. It also examines the impacts on the rights and powers of education trade unions. The article ends, in Section 4, by briefly calling for resistance to the global neoliberal capitalist agenda in schooling and education.     

Globalisation,Neo-liberalism and the Limitations of School Effectiveness Research in Developing Countries: The case of Nepal

This paper considers the nature and implications of the increasingly global school effectiveness research tradition. It argues that such research, by focusing primarily on student cognitive achievement, creates an unnecessarily narrow definition of 'good' schools, and undermines the role of schooling for societal change. This is especially important in developing countries where schooling plays a key role in the process of modernisation. An example from Nepal illustrates the pervasive influence of neo-liberal tendencies in education, and is used as a point of departure for a more ethnographic research agenda that explores schools' aims and processes and the meaning that their various stakeholders attribute to them.     

Students ‘at‐risk’ policy: competing social and economic discourses

Within a context of global reform agendas that promote economic ideologies in education the discourses surrounding ‘school failure’ have shifted from ‘individual risk’ to ‘a nation at‐risk’. Enhancing the quality of schooling through improving educational outcomes and standards for all, and thereby reducing ‘school failure,’ is simultaneously constructed as enhancing both social justice and a nation’s economic advantage in the global marketplace. Within this broader context, this research explores the complexity of issues related to policy for students at educational risk through an analysis of the Education Department of Western Australia’s ‘Making the Difference: Students at Educational Risk Policy.’ This research adopted a theoretical framework of a ‘policy cycle’ (that allowed for an exploration of power relations within the policy process. Primarily, consideration is given to the competing social and economic discourses found within the policy text and subsequent tensions reflected and retracted throughout the policy process from macro (system), to meso (district) and finally to micro levels within the schools and classrooms.     

Social class and parental agency

This paper explores the relationship between social class and parental agency. It does so through an analysis of the findings of a recently completed qualitative research project exploring parental voice in relation to secondary schools. The first part of the paper presents a summary of a typology of parental interventions. This illustrates some of the differentials between parents in terms of their access to and deployment of a range of social, cultural and material resources, all of which translates into varying levels of effectiveness in finding and using a voice in their relationship with their children's school. The second part of the paper focuses on the middle-class parents at both schools, suggesting that more nuanced differences in their attitudes to various educational issues (namely discipline and appropriate parental involvement) are closely linked to the class fractions which they belong. It is argued that, despite the broad title of 'middleclass', variations within this general grouping in parental education, occupational pathways and spatial mobility affect their approaches to the education of their children.