(Re)Visioning the Centre: Education reform and the ‘ideal’ citizen of the future

Discourses of public education reform, like that exemplified within the Queensland Government's future vision document, Queensland State Education‐2010 (QSE‐2010), position schooling as a panacea to pervasive social instability and a means to achieve a new consensus. However, in unravelling the many conflicting statements that conjoin to form education policy and inform related literature ( ), it becomes clear that education reform discourse is polyvalent ( ). Alongside visionary statements that speak of public education as a vehicle for social justice are the (re)visionary or those reflecting neoliberal individualism and a conservative politics. In this paper, it is argued that the latter coagulate to form strategic discursive practices which work to (re)secure dominant relations of power. Further, discussion of the characteristics needed by the ‘ideal’ future citizen of Queensland reflect efforts to ‘tame change through the making of the child’ ( , p. 201). The casualties of this (re)vision and the refusal to investigate the pathologies of ‘traditional’ schooling are the children who, for whatever reason, do not conform to the norm of the desired school child as an ‘ideal’ citizen‐in‐the‐making and who become relegated to alternative educational settings.     

Classroom teacher effectiveness research and inquiry,and its relevance to the development of public education policy: an Australian context

This paper has as its focus an analysis of the question and problem of classroom teacher effectiveness research and inquiry. It presents an examination of what counts as valid and worthwhile research in classroom teacher effectiveness studies for the development of education policy within an Australian context, the State of Victoria. The Government’s Blueprint, the major education policy document of the Victorian State Labour Government, outlines its educational approach. Important and core features of government direction for education policy include a focus on social and economic disadvantage. A priority for the Victorian State Labour Government is tangible and measurable improvement in the performance of the public education system. A particular concern is the problem of academic underperformance within public schools, particularly those designated as low-performing and situated in socially and economically disadvantaged communities. Building the capacity of the State’s teacher workforce forms a key component of the Blueprint, and State Government direction in public education. The paper utilises a qualitative theoretical framework. Eight education policy actor/participants were interviewed and their responses analysed using a critical discourse approach. The main findings indicate that education policy actors advocate a strong belief in particular forms of evidence-based research for the development of education policy in the area of classroom teacher effectiveness.     

Early career teachers in Australia: a critical policy historiography

Amid the growing ‘teacher quality’ discourse, early career teachers have increasingly been positioned as problematic in Australian education policy discourses over the past decade. This paper uses a critical policy historiography approach to compare representations of early career teachers in two key education policy documents, from the late 1990s and mid-2010s. Starting with the Government response to A Class Act: Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession (1998) and moving to the Government response to Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers (2015), it explores changing representations in the context of broader shifts in education policy related to teachers’ work over this timeframe. It argues that the early career teacher ‘problem’ is articulated in very different ways in these two timeframes, explores the antecedents of key tenets of the current policy settlement, and, using the theory of practice architectures, considers the implications of these for the preconditions that shape and frame teachers’ work in contemporary times.     

Educational policy for citizenship in the early years in Australia

Understandings of young children as active and capable citizens, while evident in discourses of early childhood education and research, are not widely reflected in the policy for the early years of schooling in Australia. This paper makes an analysis of the gaps and tensions between discourses of young children as active citizens and policy for citizenship education at the national level in Australia and at the Queensland State level. There is a widespread discourse within early childhood that regards young children as citizens and democratic participants in their own lives, as a reflection of the oft-cited Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, educational policy and curriculum for citizenship in Australia, by and large, adheres to age and stage understandings of children that deem young children unable to conceptualise and/or articulate ideas of what it means to ‘be a good citizen’. We ask which discourses are being harnessed in educational policy for citizenship in Australia, what discourses are silenced or ignored and what this tells us about how young children are thought about in Australian politics and education.     

Researching educational policy and change in ‘new times’: using critical discourse analysis

A number of writers have drawn attention to the increasing importance of language in social life in ‘new times’ and Fairclough has referred to ‘discourse driven’ social change. These conditions have led to an increase in the use of various forms of discourse analysis in policy analysis. This paper explores the possibilities of using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in critical policy research in education, drawing on a larger research project which is investigating the equity implications of Education Queensland’s reform agenda. It is argued that, in the context of new times, CDA is of particular value in documenting multiple and competing discourses in policy texts, in highlighting marginalized and hybrid discourses, and in documenting discursive shifts in policy implementation processes. The last part of the paper discusses how such research might be used by policy activists inside and outside education department bureaucracies to further social democratic goals.     

Education policy: explaining,framing and forming

This paper presents a new heuristic device for the analysis of educational policy. Through an examination of the Evaluative State and the work of Brian Fay, the paper considers the way in which educational policy is subject to rational and linear forms of policy action and implementation. To counter this, positioning theory is deployed to consider the way in which we are produced both by discourse and the language of the ‘moment’ in discursive acts. Using the work of Gee, the paper contends that policy texts and policy Discourse ‘themselves form policy, that is, they position policy-explanation and policy-framing within the bounds of the institution and so give policy form’. Problematically, such mechanisms may succumb to the ‘death of subject’ and accordingly I offer a third method by which we might conceive of education policy: the discursively produced position call. Subsequently, I propose a tri-partite theory for the examination and understanding of policy: policy-explaining, the production of policy texts; policy-framing, the ways in which all can be positioned by texts and Discourse to produce the meanings imbued upon policy; and, policy-forming, the impact of moment-by-moment conversational acts for their production of the policy text itself, that is, the ways in which policy is locally formed rather than locally mediated.     

Discovering democracy: an analysis of curriculum policy for citizenship education

Citizenship education has become the focus of renewed interest internationally as governments are struggling with issues of national identity in an era of globalisation where there is much ‘talk’ of threats to the legitimacy of nation states. Within this context, the Australian Commonwealth Government took another step in an accelerating trend of becoming involved in curriculum policy with the introduction of its citizenship education curriculum package, Discovering Democracy, in the late 1990s. Legally, education in Australia is a State government responsibility. However, over the last half century, the Commonwealth Government has increasingly set education agendas, justified in terms of'the national interest’ and has achieved them using financial levers which result from the vertical fiscal imbalance between the Commonwealth and the States.

This article examines citizenship curriculum policy processes and practices associated with the enactment of the Commonwealth's Discovering Democracy curriculum package in the State of Western Australia (WA). The study employed a framework of a policy trajectory extending from the Commonwealth Government (macro level) through State (WA) policy enactment (meso level) to individual classrooms (micro level). Documents and interviews with key players, including the Commonwealth Minister for Education, were the main data sources.

Analysis of the policy process revealed the emergence of power struggles as a result of the provision of a national curriculum on citizenship education by the Commonwealth Government, and these struggles occurred at national, State and local levels. These power struggles resulted in extensive transformation of Commonwealth and State level policy intent as the policy enactment proceeded at the classroom level. The study demonstrates the need for better alignment of conceptualisations and discourses in the processes of curriculum development if a greater congruence is to be achieved between expectations and realities in curriculum renewal. Meta‐level issues to emerge from the data, in particular the nature of policy consultative processes and the construction of teacher professional identity, have broader implications for education policy processes in other domains and in other countries.     

‘Quality revolution’ in post-Soviet education in Russia: from control to assurance?

Employing the analytical framework of a discourse-driven social change, this paper unpacks the neoliberal concept of ‘educational quality’ in the course of Russian education modernisation reform from 1991 to 2013. Since the early 1990s, the global neoliberal discourse has served as the backbone for post-Soviet educational ideology. Alongside other major reform initiatives, the ‘quality revolution,’ proclaimed by the Russian Government in the early 1990s, signified a rhetoric shift away from the Soviet-era quality control towards a neoliberal quality assurance paradigm. Through fine-grained textual analysis of policy documents and political statements by key educational stakeholders, the analysis unpacks the discursive underbelly of the new quality paradigm, in an attempt to determine whether a paradigmatic transformation has taken place. The paper argues that despite the nominally proclaimed shift towards a quality assurance model of educational governance, the representation of educational stakeholders and responsibilities within the new quality paradigm continues to correspond to the Soviet-era command-and-control authoritarian model. The study challenges the popular claim of a neoliberal turn in Russian education and suggests that a neoconservative authoritarian approach to education governance has been smuggled in under the disguise of ‘quality assurance.’     

School Education as Social and Economic Governance: Responsibilising communities through industry‐school engagement

This article examines shifts in educational and social governance taking place in Queensland, Australia, through Education Queensland's Industry School Engagement Strategy and Gateway Schools program. This significant educational initiative is set within the context of Queensland's social investment agenda first articulated in its education policy framework, Queensland State Education‐2010. The article traces the historic extension of this overarching governmental strategy through establishment of the Gateway Schools concept, brokering state‐wide industry‐school partnerships with key global players in the Queensland economy. Industry sectors that have formed partnerships in Gateway projects include Minerals and Energy, Aerospace, Wine Tourism, Agribusiness, Manufacturing and Engineering, Building and Construction and ICT, with more industries and schools forecast to join the program. It is argued that this ‘post‐bureaucratic’ model of schooling represents a new social settlement of neoliberal governance, which seeks to align educational outcomes with economic objectives, thereby framing the conditions for community self‐governance in Queensland.     

Rethinking Social Policy

The swift nature of school reform enacted by the new Conservative-led coalition government has sparked debate over the future of state education in Britain. While the government rhetoric suggests a decisive break with past policies, there is evidence to suggest that these reforms constitute the next stage of a long revolution in education reform, centred around neoliberal market discourse. In the following paper, I examine the current government’s education policy discourse and, by employing techniques of post-structuralist discourse analysis, reveal the government’s attempts to rearticulate education around the logics of market, responsibilisation and self-esteem, which act to shift responsibility for social problems from the state to the individual. Furthermore, I shall argue that such rearticulation has been coupled with an ideological fantasy of ‘empowerment’, which conceals the subordination of actors to these neoliberal logics by constituting the parent and, more recently, the teacher as powerful actors who have been freed from legal and bureaucratic constraints forced upon them by central government.     

The politics of ‘lifelong learning’ in post‐1997 Hong Kong

This article is concerned with the politics of lifelong learning policy in post‐1997 Hong Kong (HK). The paper is in four parts. Continuing Education, recast as ‘lifelong learning’, is to be the cornerstone of the post‐Handover education reform agenda. The lineaments of a familiar discourse are evident in the Education Commission policy documents. However, to view recent HK education policy just in terms of an apparent convergence with global trends would be to neglect the ways in which the discourse of lifelong learning has been tactically deployed to serve local political agendas. In the second part of this paper, I outline what Scott has called HK’s ‘disarticulated’ political system following its retrocession to China and attempts by an executive‐led administration to demonstrate ‘performance legitimacy’—through major policy reforms—in the absence of (democratic) political legitimacy. Beijing’s designation of HK as a (depoliticized) ‘economic’ city within greater China must also be taken into account. It is against this political background that the strategic deployment of a ‘lifelong learning’ discourse needs to be seen. In the third section of this paper, I examine three recent policy episodes to illustrate how lifelong learning discourse has been adopted and has evolved to meet changing circumstances in HK. Finally, I look at the issue of public consultation. The politics of education policy in HK may be seen to mirror at a micro‐level, the current macro‐level contested interpretations of HK’s future polity.     

Remove ‘care’ and stir: modernizing early childhood teacher education in Norway

ABSTRACT

There is growing concern within the field of education regarding how the implementation of national frameworks based on the European Qualifications Framework displaces tacit and less traditionally formalized knowledge from policy. This issue is particularly salient concerning national frameworks that regulate early childhood teacher education, in which knowledge and competencies about caring are crucial, though under-articulated. The proportion of under three-year olds who participate in government subsidized early childhood education and care programs in Norway has risen from 37% in 2000 to over 82% in 2016. Amidst this historic rise, the word ‘care’ was removed from Norway’s most recent National Framework for Early Childhood Teacher Education. Whilst policy analyses generally focus on the content of policy texts, in this article, I examine the circumstances surrounding the curious disappearance of text, namely the key concept of care. Combining a Foucauldian concern with discourse with Malabou’s concept of plasticity, this article reports on a plastic discourse analysis of the removal of care from the newest framework for early childhood teacher education in Norway.     

New structures of power and regulation within ‘distributed’ education policy – the example of the US Common Core State Standards Initiative

Abstract

This article focuses on the growing development towards new forms of ‘distributed’ governance within current large-scale educational reforms. The emphasis is on so-called ‘governance through standards’ as a transformative reform complex which manifests itself in a simultaneous process of regulative destabilisation and (global) reconstruction of policy control. This newly emerging regulative policy ‘ensemble’ is found to be directly related to the growing collaborative activity of cross-field networks between governmental, non-governmental and private actors. Empirically, this article refers to the so-called Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative which has fundamentally reshaped US education policy since 2001. The initiative comprised the negotiation, implementation and controlling of supra-state core skill standards for K-12 education as the benchmark for other regulating instruments such as assessments, monitoring and teacher training. In the context of the CCSS, the aforementioned new structures of regulation can then be located within an entrepreneurial alliance around the non-profit organisation Achieve, Inc. Through its function as a core policy network manager, Achieve generated simultaneous practices of collaboration and distinction, discourse initiation and (invisible) norm stabilisation.     

Teacher education in France under the Hollande government: reconstructing and reinforcing the republic

Successive republican governments in France have constructed a complex educational context, which is rhetorically committed to a myth of provision of educational equality of opportunity whilst in practical terms it is characterised by a system focused on the production and reproduction of elites. This article aims to consider the political drivers and levers that are transforming French teacher education during the current challenging economic, social and cultural context. It uses a relatively new methodological approach to the analysis of policy evolution and development by applying a critical analysis of discourse, which considers the ways in which teacher education policy is ‘reproduced and reworked’. This is achieved through the discourse analysis of a policy speech made in October 2013 by the then Minister of Education, Vincent Peillon, contextualised by comparisons with reforms enacted by the previous Sarkozy government (masterisation). The article, therefore, utilises a systematic framework that allows analysis at the levels of contextualisation and deconstruction of the text and so highlights developments to date in the arguably unique approach of the Hollande government, driven by the relationship between the republican state and the education system in France. The article also considers how reaction following the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015 afforded opportunities to assert new validity for the teacher education policy espoused within Peillon’s speech.     

A systematic form of Japanization in Okinawa: Japanese identity construction through a Japanization discourse in textbooks and a textbook guide

This research examines some modes of Japanization through education in Okinawa where Japanese influences on education have permeated after Japan’s annexation. I investigate how a book excerpt entitled Mizu no Tōzai, included in high school textbooks in Okinawa, constructs Japanese identity. Mizu no Tōzai functions as nihonjinron discourse, which is characterized by ‘Japanese culture,’ ‘Japanese uniqueness,’ and ‘Japaneseness.’ The ‘East-West’ dichotomy, depicted in this nihonjinron discourse, induces students to choose ‘Japan’/‘Japanese culture’ and become ‘Japanese.’ Practice sections of Mizu no Tōzai in textbooks as well as a textbook guide operate to be complicit in this Japanese identity construction. Through a critical analysis of discourse, I reveal that the nihonjinron discourse operating as official knowledge, in collusion with the other discursive texts, produces a position subjected to the discourse of Japanization within which Okinawans become ‘Japanese.’ I problematize these discursive texts as a systematic form of Japanizing Okinawans’ minds through education.     

Education and nationalism in Scotland: governing a ‘learning nation’

Abstract

Nationalism is a key resource for the political work of governing Scotland, and education offers the Scottish National Party (SNP) government a policy space in which political nationalism (self determination) along with social and cultural forms of civic nationalism can be formed and propagated, through referencing ‘inwards’ to established myths and traditions that stress the ‘public’ nature of schooling/education/universities and their role in construction of ‘community’; and referencing ‘outwards’, especially to selected Nordic comparators, but also to major transnational actors such as OECD, to education’s role in economic recovery and progress. The SNP government has been very active in the education policy field, and a significant element of its activity lies in promoting a discourse of collective learning in which a ‘learning government’ is enabled to lead a ‘learning nation’ towards the goal of independence. This paper draws on recent research to explore recent and current developments in SNP government education policy, drawing on discourse analysis to highlight the political work that such policy developments seek to do, against the backdrop of continuing constitutional tensions across the UK.     

What's wrong with ‘the student experience’?

Speaking about ‘the student experience’ has become common-place in higher education and the phrase has acquired the aura of a sacred utterance in UK higher education policy over the last decade. A critical discourse analysis of selected higher education policy texts reveals what ‘the student experience’ has come to signify, and how it structures relations between students and academics, institutions and academics, and higher education institutions and government. ‘The student experience’ homogenises students and deprives them of agency at the same time as apparently giving them ‘voice’. This paper examines the dominance and sacralisation of the discourse of ‘the student experience’ and questions its positioning as a means of discriminating between the value of different experiences of education.     

Education and nationalism: the discourse of education policy in Scotland

The paper draws on critical discourse analysis to examine and discuss some of the key developments in the governing of education in Scotland since the election of the Scottish National Party (SNP) government in May 2007. It analyses these developments, drawing on a study of key policy texts and suggests that discourse analysis has much to contribute to the understanding of the governing strategy of the minority SNP administration as reflected in its education policy. We suggest that there is a self-conscious strategy of ‘crafting the narrative’ of government that seeks to discursively re-position ‘smarter Scotland’ alongside small, social democratic states within the wider context of transnational pressures for conformity with global policy agendas. Thus the paper connects to current debates on the relationship between an emergent global education policy ‘field’ and the capacity of ‘local’ contexts to develop and sustain particular, embedded assumptions and practices.     

Changes in Brazilian education policy and the rise of right-wing populism

This article shows the intersections of right-wing conservative discourse and evangelical religious proselytism in shaping right-wing populist discourse in Brazil and its implications on the education policy in the last decade. Since re-democratisation in the 1980s, the policy path sought to guarantee progressive and inclusive public education, which became under threat due to the escalation of right-wing populist activism. In the last few years, the ‘No Party School Movement’ (NPSM) and the ‘Evangelical Parliamentary Front’ (EPF) established a tactical alliance. Affiliated members have been trying to pass various bills in different states and cities, stating that educators should not rely on ideological, political and partisan views, and should respect the ‘traditional values’ of families. Othering was a fundamental articulating mechanism of right-wing populist movements and politicians’ actions to forge a discourse that attacks Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, gender ideology and ancestral African religions. Through the analysis of different types of data, this interpretative case study deepens our understanding of the importance of right-wing discourse in forging influential political alliances influencing education public policy in Brazil. Understanding how right-wing populist activism creates enemies through othering educators, women, LGBT and black people is essential to analyse its influence on recent policy changes.