Sound Bites,Spin and Social Change

Abstract

The news media is an essential player in the policy making process. Social work students learning how to scrutinize, and influence, the complex world of social policy can benefit from an educational model that incorporates the media. This article first examines the theoretical framework for understanding the media's role in public policy formation. This framework is then used to construct a classroom exercise for analyzing the public discourse using basic content analysis of media texts. A case example drawn from a study of welfare reform and the media is described. By exploring how social problems are translated into public conversations, students can enrich their knowledge of social problem formation, and learn more effective rhetorical techniques and strategies for influencing the public debate.     

Clarifying and reframing the neoliberal critique of educational policy using policy process theories

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the vocabulary and frameworks offered by two theories of public policy process: the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) and the narrative policy framework (NPF) and what they offer to the study of global education reform. The foci of ACF are policy subsystems, formation of advocacy coalitions around policy issues, and their impact on policy change; the emphasis of NPF is the divergent narratives developed and used by these coalitions. This paper reviews each theoretical framework, summarizes existing research literature on their education policy applications, and then poses alternative questions and suggest alternatives to study global education policies, especially those presently critiqued using the term neoliberal which we position as nebulous in its current usage. The aim is to open channels of communication for scholars from different disciplines by introducing different theoretical approaches to analyse the role of the numerous elements that shape global education policy.     

State of rhetoric: neoliberal discourses for education in state of the state addresses and gubernatorial press releases

ABSTRACT

Policy elites use rhetoric in speeches and press releases to provide framing that is intended to influence public opinion. These rhetorical events can be treated as instances in which speech usefully promotes particular discourses. Indeed, elected officials are able to influence how individuals think about problems and solutions through speeches and press releases. Two important rhetorical events in which political elites advance frames for social issues are annual state of the state addresses (SoSA) given by U.S. governors and gubernatorial press releases that inform media reporting about state policy. This study employed policy discourse and rhetorical analyses to examine SoSAs and press releases as rhetorical events within the context of educational policy. Our findings show that governors framed the roles of state government, governors, and educational stakeholders within a discourse that perpetuates a neoliberal version of education. In this framing, governors situated education’s purpose as being workforce and economic development, ignoring its role in addressing social issues and preparing informed, engaged participants for democratic society. Given that individuals make decisions about how to address social issues and understand public institutions based on framing provided by political elites, these findings raise implications for state educational policies and the public purposes of education.     

Policy,practice, and reconversion in Spanish educational reform: teaching and teacher education in physical education

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, reform of the Spanish education system has been justified by reformists as a response to the social and economic changes that have occurred in Spanish society since the democratic transition in the 1970s. Consolidation of democracy, development of technology and economic convergence with the advanced nations of Europe have been seen as the major challenges for educational reform. Restructuring and legitimation processes derived from the requirements of the new reform have been conceptualized as a policy of reconversion, the main purpose of which is to maintain, or achieve, a strong competitive position in the international market. In this paper, conceptualizing educational reform as a reconversion process will allow us to link aspects of the new curriculum (content, pedagogy and assessment), school organization, teaching and teacher education in physical education with wider economic, social and cultural influences and explore the tensions and conflicts between policy and practice in PE in schools. The paper will argue that there is a widening gap between the interests of progressive educationalists and the direction of market‐driven education reform.     

Identity policies of education: struggles for inclusion and exclusion in Peru and Colombia

ABSTRACT

Policy initiatives that seek to account for ethno-cultural differences in education and schooling have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. These include affirmative action measures and bilingual education models. The rationale for the implementation of these policies focuses on their potential to rectify historical discrimination by both levelling horizontal inequalities and granting equal value to different cultures and languages in the schooling process. In this framework, however, ethnic communities are often treated as discrete and static social aggregates, and social heterogeneity and spillover effects between groups are disregarded. This paper draws on empirical case studies from Colombia and Peru to show how identity policies of education can increase inter-ethnic competition, leading to protracted social conflicts. These outcomes, beyond negatively impacting local communities, raise important dilemmas surrounding the theoretical and operational foundations of these popular policy measures.     

Accountability: a key‐word in the discourse of educational reform

This paper examines the relationship between language and power in education policy. It takes the example of accountability as the specific focus for an analysis of discursive power in the shaping of education in the 1990s. In doing so, it examines the ways in which language contributes to the construction and maintenance of norms and consensual positions in education. Drawing on work in critical linguistics and cultural theory, the paper considers how recent changes in education might be analysed in a way which relates specific examples of social and linguistic practice to larger scale theoretical concerns. The examples which provide the specific focus for discussion in this paper relate to the concept of accountability and are drawn from an empirical study of the enactment of the statutory curriculum for English in secondary schools in 1992‐93.     

Environment in the science curriculum: The politics of change in the Pan-Canadian science curriculum development process

This paper draws on the experience of the Pan-Canadian science curriculum development process as an instance of the more general problem of integrating science and environmental education. It problematizes the issue of incorporation of social and environmental dimensions within the science curriculum in terms of both policy and practice. The agenda of environmental education, as eco-philosophical and eco-political, provides a radically different base from which to explore the impact of change on science teachers and schools. Thus, the very idea of environmental education as an educational policy goal must be examined in light of conflicting agendas of science and environmental education. This paper argues that transforming structures and processes of school science to enable different teacher and student roles involves closing the gap between curriculum (policy) development and professional development as well as reconceptualizing science education, but from more overtly open moral value and political perspectives than have been considered in the literature of science education.     

Making sense of teacher leadership in early childhood education in China

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical discussion on teacher leadership in early childhood education (ECE) in Chinese contexts. Since 2010, the Chinese government has initiated a comprehensive education reform in ECE, with strategies for developing teacher leadership and promoting education quality. However, at the school level there is a lack of leadership preparation and development, along with a gap between policy initiative and its implementation. How to narrow this gap between policy and practice in teacher leadership has become a critical issue for ECE in China. This paper suggests that ‘formal role or informal role’ and ‘role or practice’ are important dimensions of teacher leadership in a Chinese, policy-driven context. In this regard, it is worth exploring how teacher leadership is conceptualized and enacted in the process of quality improvement and related contextual factors. In doing so, an agenda could be identified for future research, contributing to theories on the development of teacher leadership in the global discourse.     

The representation of the national quality framework in the australian print media: silences and slants in the mediatisation of early childhood education policy

ABSTRACT

While research investigating the mediatisation of education policy has primarily been undertaken in school contexts, this paper reports on a study conducted in the context of early childhood education. The paper examines how a major policy in early childhood education in Australia – the National Quality Framework – has been mediatised in selected newspapers. Drawing on Foucauldian, critical discourse analysis and mediatisation theorising, we utilised the corpus linguistic tools of WordSmith Tools 6.0 to inform content analyses of 121 articles from two major media corporations, News Corp and Fairfax. Our findings highlight the utility of treating our data as two distinct corpora, with each corporation found to have utilised discursive technologies to proffer competing positionings of the Framework. The contested nature of the Framework – generally purported in Fairfax to be a tool that supports quality early education, as opposed to News Corp’s framing of the policy as one that inhibits affordable childcare – poses implications for which advocacy groups are regarded by the media as having authority and thus likely to influence policy through the reporting of their voices. Implications for newspaper media as a discursive influence on parents’ childcare decision-making are also considered.     

Built policy: school-building and architecture as policy instrument

ABSTRACT

School architecture is often taken for granted both in use (where it is naturalized) and in writing on education policy (tending to feature simply as policy setting.) Built policy instead points up the active and ongoing role of the material environment in shaping education. From financing and procurement to the design of individual classrooms, the paper works across architecture, sociology and policy studies to clarify the relationship between different dimensions of physical and social space and so provide a useful theoretical ground for future work. What is special about school-building and architecture that enables them to do policy? How are they used to do it? By whom? From city planners to students, a range of actors use different space-organizing resources to attempt the instantiation of (and challenges to) policy in built form. These processes are explored first theoretically, then empirically through a new Academy school in England. The paper deepens understanding of what policy is, emphasizing its intimate if taken for granted spatial characteristics, its ongoing-ness in built form and its travel by means of circulating images of buildings and spaces.     

The policyscape of transgender equality and gender diversity in the Western Australian education system: a case study

ABSTRACT

In this paper, our purpose is to investigate policy informing texts and discourses referencing transgender equality and gender diversity in the Western Australian education system. Drawing on scholarship from transgender, queer and policy studies, we highlight the interplay of progressive and conservative forces affecting the Western Australian education system’s commitment to supporting transgender and gender non-binary students. Based on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) project, the paper constructs a Western Australian case study, which threads together the critical examination of policy informing texts, qualitative interview data and media discourses surrounding public narratives, such as the Safe School Coalition Australia’s attempt to implement a school program, which builds awareness about gender and sexual diversity. Emerging through the material, discursive and spatial elements of locales and networks, our case study has the potential to deepen knowledge regarding the heuristic capacity of employing policyscape as an analytic category. In this vein, we draw attention to the possibilities and challenges for re-conceptualizing gender and providing trans-affirmative school spaces that promote equality.     

Teachers’ democratic assignment: a critical discourse analysis of teacher education policies in Ireland and Sweden

ABSTRACT

The needs of a globalized economy are rapidly changing what is legitimated as school knowledge and values, and calling up new understandings of teachers’ role in stimulating democratic spaces. We have termed this Teachers’ Democratic Assignment. We examine changing notions of teachers’ democratic assignment in Ireland and Sweden using a Critical Discourse Analysis. We tested our hypothesis that teachers’ democratic assignment has changed in unprecedented ways using an analysis of policy documents in teacher education. Our findings reported a substantive converging paradigm shift from a predominantly progressive (reconstructivist) curriculum discourse where democracy was seen as inextricably linked to everyday practice in the early years of this century, to a more essentialist (perennialist) discourse in recent times. The findings will have interest for a wider audience and have implications for the role of democracy in teacher education as well as the question of education as a social responsibility for a vibrant democracy.     

Untangling the Net

Abstract

The importance of computer training in social work education will continue to increase as the profession becomes more globalized and technological. It is the authors' premise that social work education must include the integration of training in computer technology. One resource available to educators is the Internet. The world wide web contains a vast amount of information on policy and social issues. This article discusses the use of web based learning exercises to simultaneously teach social policy and enhance student computer skills. Two learning exercises are presented which are designed for use in social work policy courses. The authors present their teaching experiences and provide suggestions on using this approach in the classroom environment. Information on resources and useful URL's for policy research is included in the discussion.     

‘Philanthropizing’ consent: how a private foundation pushed through national learning standards in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (National Learning Standards), entered the policy debate in Brazil and became the most important reform initiative of the Ministry of Education between 2015 and 2017. We argue that this accelerated policy process was contingent upon the practice of philanthropizing consent: foundations’ use of material resources, knowledge production, media power, and informal and formal networks to garner the consent of multiple social and institutional actors to support a public policy. In other words, these foundations do not impose policies on governments; rather, they ‘render technical’ high-stakes political debates on pressing issues of educational equity and then influence state officials’ consensus about which policies to adopt. We argue that this philanthropic influence is not simply a neoliberal, profit-maximizing scheme; rather, it is an attempt by foundation and corporate leaders to garner power and influence on different scales, and re-make public education in their own image. Although this educational policy game is in many ways participatory and widely accepted, foundations are only able to play this role due to their tremendous economic power, a direct product of the unequal global political economy, and the systematic defunding of the public sphere.     

The imagined subject of schooling in the logic of policy

ABSTRACT

National education policies reference a representation of an imagined subject of schooling derived from a broader social imaginary that underpins the projects of the state, in a process which I refer to here as ‘the logic of policy’. I offer an account of how this representation is derived and propose three conceptual elaborations of this view. I then consider ways in which shifts occur in this social imaginary, especially at moments of substantial social, economic and political change, and ways in which these shifts are communicated. This imagined subject is referenced in processes involving both state and non-state entities, mediated by historically specific governance instruments.

The main part of this paper offers an illustrative historical example of the working of this logic in the context of the Cape Colony and apartheid South Africa, where the instrument of governance that was central to this process was the commission of enquiry. The concluding section briefly considers whether the logic of policy works in much the same way in a contemporary policy environment, where new policy technologies have largely displaced the commission of enquiry     

Tackling early school leaving and the governing of educational transitions in Italy

ABSTRACT

This article presents a critical policy historiography of how Early School Leaving has been understood as a social problem and what policy responses have been enacted to tackle it in the Italian context, devoting a specific attention to the analysis of the translation of EU policy ideas, tools and recipes to reduce ESL. It shows how the formulation of a global and integrated national strategy to tackle ESL in Italy in 2018 can be interpreted as the result of a troubled process of re-culturing. Such a reculturing is the effect of the complex interplay between the legacies of the Italian welfare regime in education and the co-option of the ESL issue within a EU political frame that struggles to combine economic rationalism and social justice. Such a struggle is interpreted as contributing to a profound rethinking of education and its mission.     

#Eduresistance: a critical analysis of the role of digital media in collective struggles for public education in the USA

From Facebook-coordinated high-school walkouts to compelling Internet-based protest art that has accompanied recent teacher strikes, grassroots education activism in the USA has gone digital. Despite the proliferation of research on the mediatisation of education policy, few studies have explored the ways in which activists for public education engage with Web 2.0 technologies. This paper makes a contribution to this under-researched area by exploring selected activist accounts including Parents Across America, United Opt Out National, and the PS 2013 campaign in New York City. I draw on critical, feminist, and cultural studies theories of education and social movement media to analyse activist media practices in a policy and political milieu dominated by corporate media and neoliberal governance structures. The analysis reveals that progressive education activists strategically deploy digital media to amplify voice, build collective identity, and disseminate alternative knowledge to enable direct action. A situated analysis also reveals significant differences in activist media practice which are shaped by particular political histories and geographies. The paper concludes with a discussion about future lines of inquiry into the role of digital media in collective struggles for public education.