Education as a ‘risky business’: Theorising student and teacher learning in complex times

This paper employs sociological literature on risk and the commodification of education to explain current schooling practices in a context of increased concerns about students’ behaviour and results on standardised tests of achievement. Drawing upon teacher and student learning practices in three school sites in south-east Queensland, Australia, the article reveals how specific tests, packages and programmes have been employed as technologies of governance to minimise the risk of adverse student behaviour, maximise student outcomes on standardised tests, and provide teachers with discrete learning experiences construed as improving such outcomes. The sum total of these foci is the construction of education as an increasingly ‘risky business’ which employs a myriad of products and tests to manage perceived and actual risks. The paper also reveals how these products and processes constitute student misbehaviour and inadequate teacher and student learning as ‘risk objects’ requiring constant intervention, but which also inhibit inclusion in schooling settings, and challenge teachers’ professionalism.     

Access to Public-Sector Information in Europe: Policy, Rights, and Obligations

The article reviews the debates and policies on access to public-sector information (PSI) in Europe in relation to the contests between policies of open access, rights of access to PSI by citizens and business, and the assessment of the cost benefits of PSI to the economy and society. The political dimension of these debates within the European Union is highlighted to demonstrate the complexities of the governance of information within a pan-European regulatory framework.     

The importance of academic deans' interpersonal/negotiating skills as leaders

This paper outlines core features of what it terms consumer-based learning and relates this to the context of increasing utilitarian goals and values of higher education. It argues that this presents challenges broader than the immediate teaching and learning environment and student experience, which also potentially impacts the future lives of graduates leaving university.     

Instrumentalism amongst students: a cross-national comparison of the significance of subject choice

Both educational policies and academic literature assume that students take an instrumental approach to their studies at university. However, despite wide-ranging discussions in the academic literature about contemporary arrangements and practices in higher education, empirical examinations of these conditions are notably scarce. This article reports on a comparative qualitative study into undergraduate students’ accounts of studying business or sociology at universities in Britain and Singapore. Drawing on Eric Fromm’s distinction between learning as ‘having’ and ‘being’, the article demonstrates that – regardless of national context – those studying business displayed many elements of passive, instrumentalised, or ‘having’ orientations to learning, whilst those studying sociology showed clear signs of the more active and less instrumental ‘being’ mode of learning. By examining subject allegiance across national borders, this article underscores the importance of recognising subject choice, alongside other important contextual factors, in moving towards a nuanced understanding of student dispositions.     

The tangled roots of real estate markets,the state,and public education

In this article, I use a case study of education in nineteenth-century Oregon to place the twentieth-century phenomenon of ‘shopping for schools’ within a broader historical context. In doing so, I make three points. First, documenting previously unacknowledged links between the spread of public education and efforts to market land, I suggest that education, real estate markets, and the state have deeper and more tangled roots than scholars have imagined. Second, I contend that wrestling with these tangled roots suggests the need for scholars to reexamine the role of private markets in shaping the organisation of educational opportunity across places and time. Third, I argue that histories like Oregon’s demonstrate that ‘state’ and ‘market’ are neither stable nor mutually exclusive categories.     

De‐Schooling Art and Design: Illich Redux

Using Ivan Illich's seminal works, Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality as touchstones, this paper returns to further pursue the thrust of my article in iJADE 25.3 (2006), ‘Domain poisoning: the redundancy of current models of assessment through art’, and might be considered as a more radical addendum. The central strand of Illich's work on ‘deschooling’ is an indictment of the trend to dehumanisation and the counterproductivity which results from institutionalisation. This paper argues that it is time to revisit Illich's call for deschooling with particular reference to the teaching of art and design, and, in turn, to look at the construct of the art teacher for the twenty‐first century as connoisseur/critic/animateur, aloof from the world of domain‐based assessment. As has been suggested many times before within these pages and beyond, accountability makes teachers risk averse. In short, this article suggests that it is time that we took a structural risk and removed this glass ceiling to aspiration while calling for complete deregulation of art and design education and the reinstatement of the art teacher as an autonomous ‘agent of change’.     

New capitalism,educational modernisation and the new role of the professional student

Current times are witnessing multiple challenges in the economic, political and social domain, which modern citizens and professionals are required to address with an enterprising mindset. Young people have not been left intact by the spirit of new capitalism. In the face of ongoing educational changes on a European level, being a student transcends the boundaries of the school community. Young people thus oscillate between different identities: on the one hand, that of the child who lives in the here and now, and on the other hand, that of the pseudo-adult and in-the-make professional. In this light, the paper explores the new role of the professional student and discusses the implications of a neoliberal student model. It concludes by proposing a more humanistic understanding of the student role, which positions young people in a dynamic learning process and relationship with the world around them.     

The cultural transition of Indigenous Australian athletes’ into professional sport

This article reports on a study that inquired into the journeys of sixteen Indigenous Australian athletes from their first touch of the footy to the Australian Football League (AFL) and National Rugby League (NRL) that identified two distinct stages of their journeys. These were: (1) the development of expertize and of a distinctly Aboriginal style of play from their first touch of a footy to around the age of thirteen and, (2) a process of cultural transitioning toward and into the AFL and NRL. This article takes an interdisciplinary approach to focus on the second stage of transitioning into the world of professional sport and sport as business. Identifying this as a process of cultural transitioning from local Aboriginal culture to the culture of professional sport provided insight into this transitioning process while illuminating the profound importance of culture in this process. It also helped identify the ways in which tensions between local approaches to ‘footy’ as play and cultural expression and professional sport as work, within the global culture of sport-as-business, were manifested in the challenges that the participants had to overcome. This article thus contributes to knowledge about Indigenous development of sporting expertize, of the specific challenges they face in transitioning into the global culture of commodified sport and how they succeed from a cultural perspective.     

Beatrix Potter - a Tale of Commodification: Examining the Place of 'Classics' in the Primary Classroom

This article examines the reasons behind the long‐term appeal of Beatrix Potter's Tales, whilst focusing particularly on the phenomenon of commodification. This term will be used to describe the transition of literary characters from the page to commercial merchandise. The place of such classic texts, both in the primary classroom and in our wider society, is considered in light of Potter's stable popularity, the qualities her texts offer young readers and the ways the texts have lent themselves to careful commodification ‐ a process started by Beatrix Potter herself.     

The academic as consumed and consumer

ABSTRACT

In an increasingly competitive environment that positions students as consumers, universities have become ever more marketised, responding to policy contexts that foreground value for money, consumer choice and competition. The intensity of marketisation is argued to have profoundly affected the nature of academic work and scholars themselves, recreating academics as commodities to be weighed and measured, becoming corporatised, alienated and inauthentic in their practice. Yet with the majority of accounts of the commodification of higher education focusing on students, the actual process of how academics become consumed is under-theorised. This article therefore begins with a discussion of the historical context, providing evidence of the familiar indices of marketisation such as rampant self-promotion, the scramble for external funding and intense competition. It argues that this commodified DNA of the university provides the context for the seduction of the modern academic within the consumer society, a movement from the gratification of needs to the perpetual frustration of desires through the ‘Diderot Effect’ of policy shifts. It concludes with an examination of how contemporary academic work can be viewed through the lens of consumerism and how academics themselves have become consumers.