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1.
In curriculum policy, discourses of ‘policy partnerships’ and ‘communities of practice’ have become increasingly prevalent and were reflected in Western Australian curriculum policy processes from the mid‐1990s to the late 2000s – a period of significant, highly contested change. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study into the impact of curriculum reform on the changing dynamics within and between the government and non‐government education sectors, drawing on critical theory and post‐structuralist approaches to policy analysis within a broader framework of policy network theory. This approach is used to highlight power issues at all levels of the policy trajectory. This research found that despite policy discourses of collaborative and consultative processes to create a ‘shared’ curriculum, the government and non‐government education sectors remain largely distinct due to significant power differentials, as well as structural and cultural differences. The analysis reveals three closely connected emergent themes – limited collaboration, regulated consultation and enhanced state control of curriculum policy agendas. It is argued here that although discourses of ‘policy partnerships’ and ‘community of practice’ are increasingly evidenced in contemporary curriculum policy, they do not take sufficient account of embedded hierarchical power relationships. Further, such discourses can be used as legitimisation strategies to promulgate policy changes which enhance the steerage capacity of the state. Deeply entrenched power differentials operate simultaneously to distort policy partnerships and communities of practice, by both including and excluding particular sets of policy actors.  相似文献   

2.
While numbers, data and statistics have been part of the bureaucracy since the emergence of the nation state, the paper argues that the governance turn has seen the enhancement of the significance of numbers in policy. The policy as numbers phenomenon is exemplified through two Australian cases in education policy, linked to the national schooling reform agenda. The first case deals with the category of students called Language Backgrounds Other than English (LBOTE) in Australian schooling policy – students with LBOTE. The second deals with the ‘closing the gap’ approach to Indigenous schooling. The LBOTE case demonstrates an attempt at recognition, but one that fails to create a category useful for policy-makers and teachers in relation to the language needs of Australian students. The Indigenous case of policy misrecognition confirms Gillborn’s analysis of gap talk and its effects; a focus on closing the gap, as with the new politics of recognition, elides structural inequalities and the historical effects of colonisation. With this case, there is a misrecognition that denies Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and cultural rights. The contribution of the paper to policy sociology is twofold: first in showing how ostensive politics of recognition can work as misrecognition with the potential to deny redistribution and secondly that we need to be aware of the socially constructed nature of categories that underpin contemporary policy as numbers and evidence-based policy.  相似文献   

3.
School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is ‘public’ about schooling. In this paper, we examine the ways in which different articulations of ‘the public’ are brought to bear in contemporary debates surrounding school funding. Taking the Australian Review of Funding for Schooling (the Gonski Report) as our case, we analyse the policy report and its subsequent media coverage to consider what meanings are made concerning the ‘publicness’ of schooling. Our analysis reveals three broad themes of debate in the report and related media coverage: (1) the primacy of ‘procedural politics’ (i.e. the political imperatives and processes associated with public policy negotiations in the Australian federation); (2) changing relations between what is considered public and private; and (3) a connection of government schooling to concerns surrounding equity and a ‘public in need’. We suggest these three themes contour the debates and understandings that surround the ‘publicness’ of education generally, and school funding more specifically.  相似文献   

4.
This article explores the uptake of so-called fast policy solutions to problems in different education policy contexts and highlights the potential impacts that can arise from such policymaking approaches. We draw upon recent literature and theorising around notions of fast policy and evidence-informed policymaking, which suggests that, in an increasingly connected, globalised and temporally compressed social world, policymaking has become ‘speeded up’. This means that policymaking is now largely predicated upon looking around to foreign reference societies to borrow ‘ideas that work’, thereby encouraging particular forms of evidence, expertise and influence to dominate. We focus on three different examples of fast policy schooling documents – namely the OECD’s PISA for Schools report, the edu-business Pearson’s The Learning Curve and an Australian state (New South Wales) education department report entitled What Works Best – to show how all three documents promote an overly simplified, decontextualised and ‘one-size-fits-all’ understanding of schooling policy. This reflects what we describe as a ‘convergence of policy method’ across vastly different policy contexts (an IGO, global edu-business and government department), in which similarly fast policies, and methods of promoting such policies, appear to dominate over potentially more considered and contextually aware policymaking approaches.  相似文献   

5.
Abstract

Background: Early childhood education and care has been an area of significant policy attention, public investment and private market activity in Australia over the past three decades. Australian educationists and policy-makers have looked to international examples for evidence, policy design and institutional models. However, this area is under-researched in Australia, with regard to how these knowledge flows are theorised, and how policy is implemented on the ground.

Purpose: The paper’s purpose was to contribute new Australian-focussed conceptual and empirical insights on the trajectories, development and implementation of evidence-based policy in the field of early childhood education and care.

Sources of evidence: The paper is based on three main sources of evidence: ? the critical literature on policy transfer and policy mobility

? policy statements, reports and planning documents produced by national- and state-level governments

? data from fieldwork analysis of new capital works and programmes in the early childhood field.

Main argument: International research and evidence on the benefits of investment in early learning has had a significant impact on the framing of Australian policy. So too has a move in several countries to align early childhood institutions with schools. However, a dominant paradigm of policy transfer, reliant on pluralist and rationalist frameworks of policy-making, fails to account for the dynamics of policy development and implementation across and within jurisdictions and geographical space. Conceptualising a new alignment in Australia between children’s centres and schools as ‘educare’, this article employs the theoretical lens of policy mobility to account for the circulation and transformation of educare policy in Australian settings. Through an empirical analysis of a new educare centre in the growth corridor of western Melbourne, the article demonstrates the extent to which neoliberal policy settings outside the educational sphere, around public finance, partnership, place and infrastructure provision, influence the implementation of ‘educare’ policy.

Conclusions: The educare discourse in Australia addresses a complex and multiscalar set of policy problems that associate child development with concerns around human capital formation, economic efficiency and productivity, place making and community building, and the role of the public sector in neoliberal democracies. International circuits of knowledge, policy design and institutional models in the educare field have been significant in shaping recent Australian policy, despite well-publicised views expressed in Australia on the disconnection between academic research and policy. The strength of policy mobility as a theoretical lens to assist our understanding of these influences lies in its critique of formalism in policy-making and in its attention to fluidity and transformation. The mobility lens encourages new empirical research that focuses on spatial and institutional dynamics, assisting our reading of on-the-ground developments in Australia’s fastest growing city.  相似文献   

6.
In 2017 Universities Australia (UA), the peak body representing Australian universities released its Indigenous Strategy 2017–2020. The document unites universities together in common goals for Indigenous achievement, filling a notable gap in the Australian higher education landscape. The Strategy outlines a comprehensive plan for enhanced Indigenous outcomes in critical areas of higher education including student access and success, graduate research, and community engagement. This paper focuses on the implementation of Indigenous curriculum for all Australian university graduates which is a key aspect of the Strategy. The changing Indigenous higher education landscape invites the nuanced analysis that critical examination of universities, as organisations, might elicit. Drawing on de Certeau’s notion of tactics and strategies, the paper examines the policy and cultural climate of an Australian university which supports an Indigenous Graduate Attribute curriculum project.  相似文献   

7.
We discuss an investigation into the understandings of trainee teachers about government policy, using, as an example, the UK government's ‘Every Child Matters’ (ECM). We discuss the research methods used to gather and analyse data from 197 initial teacher education trainees in three institutions in England drawn from six subject areas. The project focussed on trainees' reactions to the anticipated outcomes of ECM and their confidence to help implement the initiative in their roles as form tutors (home room teachers) and subject teachers. Trainees react positively to ECM but reveal uncertainty about its precise meaning and about the roles they would need to adopt as teachers. We suggest that it is problematic for governments to expect teacher education communities to assist with the implementation of policies that have been inadequately characterised. We make recommendations about the role of initial teacher education in the further development of ECM.  相似文献   

8.
The Bourdieuian concept of ‘position-taking’ is applied in this analysis of recognition of prior learning (RPL) policy and practice in Australian higher education. Data from institutional documents and participant interviews indicate that, within RPL policy, the universities selectively employ prevailing discourses of ‘quality’ and ‘equity’ to reinforce or potentially improve their reputation and symbolic power in the field of higher education. There is no common consensus about either equity or quality across the sector, as each university interprets the two concepts for its own benefit. The evidence suggests that, despite rhetoric in government policy implying that both are equally important, quality is a far stronger discourse and policy imperative than equity in RPL policy and practice. Also, RPL policies and practices provide an insight into how the key policy priorities of equity and quality are addressed by universities, when applied to a specific educational process or practice.  相似文献   

9.
Whilst early childhood education is regarded as important for young Indigenous Australians and it has been a feature of policy since the 1960s, it does not receive the same attention as compulsory schooling for Indigenous Australian students. A serious lack of large-scale research contributes to the devaluing of early childhood education for young Indigenous Australians by some stakeholders such as governments, academics and research, but not for the main stakeholders, namely young Indigenous Australian children and their parents. This paper aims to address this by drawing on large-scale qualitative and quantitative data from the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children. First, it will analyse data pertaining to the experiences of Indigenous Australian children to uncover what they believe to be special about their early childhood education. Second, it will analyse data pertaining to the specific choices made by their parents regarding their early childhood education. The paper concludes by discussing the role of research in strengthening areas within Indigenous Australian early childhood education and identifying areas where it is valued to the same level as compulsory schooling.  相似文献   

10.
This paper argues that the logic of neoliberal choice policy is typically blind to considerations of space and place, but inevitably impacts on rural and remote locations in the way that middle-class professionals view the opportunities available in their local educational markets. The paper considers the value of middle-class professionals’ educational capitals in regional communities and their problematic distribution, given that class fraction’s particular investment in choice strategies to ensure their children’s future. It then profiles the educational market in six communities along a transect between a major regional centre and a remote ‘outback’ town, using publicly available data from the Australian Government’s My School website. Comparison of the local markets shows how educational outcomes are distributed across the local markets and how dimensions of ‘choice’ thin out over the transect. Interview data offer insights into how professional families in these localities engage selectively with these local educational markets or plan to transcend them. The discussion reflects on the growing importance of educational choices as a marker of place in the competition between localities to attract and retain professionals to staff vital human services in their communities.  相似文献   

11.
This paper focuses on the ‘problem’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education represented in the Australian Curriculum’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority. Looking beyond particular curriculum content, we uncover the policy discourses that construct (and reconstruct) the cross-curriculum priority. In the years after the Australian Curriculum’s creation, curriculum authors have moulded the priority from an initiative without a clear purpose into a purported solution to the ‘Indigenous problem’ of educational underachievement, student resistance and disengagement. As the cross-curriculum priority was created and subsequently reframed, the ‘problem’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education has thereby been manifested in policy, strategised as curriculum content and precipitated in the cross-curriculum priority. These policy problematisations perpetuate contemporary racialisation and actively construct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, histories and knowledges as deficient.  相似文献   

12.
This paper explores the experiences of 12 young people, all teenagers, who have chosen to attend alternative schools known as flexible learning options within the Australian context. Using a phenomenological approach, the study seeks to understand their experiences outside the normalised public discourse that they had ‘disengaged’ from mainstream school. A phenomenological approach is employed because of its potential to draw attention to predetermined assumptions about, in this study’s case, student disengagement, a concept commonly framed within a pathologised and deficit perspective. The study gives evidence for the utility of a phenomenological approach in providing insight into how macrosystem policy, such as a nationalistic neoliberal agenda, influences ‘schooling’ and subsequently students’ experiences with schools. The implications of this study with attention to the nexus between methodology and policy are discussed, especially in drawing attention to how phenomenology as a qualitative methodology provides a means of agency for the disenfranchised to challenge existing policy and public assumptions.  相似文献   

13.
Drawing on a qualitative study of 32 UK student teachers, this paper asks what constitutes the vocational culture of teaching by exploring contradictory discourses of care and authority as they are presented to, and interpreted by, trainee teachers along their journey to becoming newly qualified teachers. Introducing the concept of ‘vocational habitus’ in relation to teaching, ‘ideal teacher narratives’ recounted by respondents are examined and mismatches between the expectations of individuals, institutions and wider policy contexts are explored. The later part of the article focuses specifically on three trainee teachers who struggled more than other research participants with their new roles as teachers. Their experiences suggest that simultaneous and gendered notions of caring and commanding respect can present considerable obstacles for the acquisition of a ‘successful’ vocational habitus. In light of proposed changes to teacher training in England, this paper argues that for government teacher education policies to be successful, they need to demonstrate an awareness and consideration of these contradictory notions.  相似文献   

14.
The attainment gap associated with socio-economic status is an international problem that is highly resistant to change. This conceptual paper critiques the drive by the Scottish Government to address the attainment gap through the Scottish Attainment Challenge and the National Improvement Framework. It draws upon a range of theoretical perspectives but principally examines the problem through the lens of Steiner-Khamsi’s concepts of ‘reception’ and ‘translation’ of policy and through examination of the international and national (Scottish) policy contexts. The paper argues that, rather than focussing narrowly upon attainment outcomes, an holistic approach should be adopted which takes account of the economic, social and relational constraints which impact upon families in poverty, calling for a systems-level approach. ‘Schools cannot go it alone’: there is a need to focus upon a wide range of public policy to redress inequalities in society. Whilst the Scottish Government has looked to the London/City/National Challenge as a potential solution to the problem, the complexities and limitations of policy borrowing need to be understood. Higher Education Institutions, government agencies, local authorities and schools need to work in partnership to develop research informed practice which will impact upon learning outcomes for all children and young people.  相似文献   

15.
Unacceptable inequity in health status between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians remains despite much work in the area. The imperative for graduating health professionals capable and ready to work with urban and rural Indigenous communities has led to a focus on curriculum development, but less focus has thus far been applied to academic staff capability to deliver the content. We surveyed academic staff at a large multi-campus Australian university on their practices and attitudes towards teaching Indigenous content in health professional programs. Indigenous and non-Indigenous academic staff were surveyed online about whether Indigenous content was included in the curricula they taught; whether they felt confident and capable of delivering curricula related to Indigenous issues; what challenges they found in including Indigenous content; and what, if any, supports and resources they felt were needed. Sixty-three per cent of respondents said that they included Indigenous content in their curricula, but 43% said that they did not access Indigenous resources; 60% reported feeling awkward, unsure or avoided teaching Indigenous content; most (74%) were comfortable teaching discipline-specific content to Indigenous students but only 26% felt comfortable teaching Indigenous content to Indigenous students. The findings reflect a level of discomfort experienced by some academic staff when teaching Indigenous content in health professional degrees. Reasons for this include being worried they would make mistakes, not knowing what to teach and finding it ‘too hard’. We suggest that three levels of action are required within universities to address this discomfort in academic staff: (i) provide a rationale (‘why’ teach Indigenous content); (ii) develop a plan (‘where’ and ‘what’ Indigenous content to teach) and (iii) develop capability in academic staff regarding ‘how’ to teach Indigenous content.  相似文献   

16.
ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the findings of a genealogical study and argues that the global discourse of quality in early childhood education and care (ECEC) is based on a number of problematic assumptions that converge to identify ‘quality’ as the site of government investment. Using the Australian policy context as an example, the assumption that only quality ECEC is beneficial for children is linked to the historical privileging of mother-care and the male breadwinner through family policy. Using Foucault’s notion of the ‘art of government’, the implications of the discursive logics of quality are outlined, including how ‘not quality’ childcare is positioned as potentially harmful, yet, the workforce can never be ‘quality enough’. It is recommended that early childhood sector academics, advocates and professionals work to introduce new discursive statements to the global policyscape, in order to create and foster diverse representations and understandings of the benefits and value of ECEC.  相似文献   

17.
Non-government actors such as think-tanks are playing an important role in Australian policy work. As governments increasingly outsource policy work previously done by education departments and academics to these new policy actors, more think-tanks have emerged that represent a wide range of political views and ideological positions. This paper looks at the emergence of the Grattan Institute as one significant player in Australian education policy with a particular emphasis on Grattan’s report ‘Turning around low-performing schools’. Grattan exemplifies many of the facets of Barber’s ‘deliverology’, as they produce reports designed to be easily digested, simply actioned and provide reassurance that there is an answer, often through focusing on ‘what works’ recipes. ‘Turning around low-performing schools’ is a perfect example of this deliverology. However, a close analysis of the Report suggests that it contains four major problems which seriously impact its usefulness for schools and policymakers: it ignores data that may be more important in explaining the turn-around of schools, the Report is overly reliant on NAPLAN data, there are reasons to be suspicious about the evidence assembled, and finally the Report falls into a classic trap of logic—the post hoc fallacy.  相似文献   

18.
In this paper, we contribute to land education research by focusing on the Torres Strait Islands in the Coral Sea at the far north of tip of Cape York, Australia. We describe the Torres Strait Islander concept of Sea Country and Torres Strait Ailan Kastom (translated as ‘Island Custom’). We then analyse some of the ways in which settler colonisation has challenged these ways of knowing and being. Our inquiry looks at how Sea Country is positioned within two contemporary Australian examples of environmental education: firstly, within the new Australian Curriculum cross-curriculum priorities that mandate that special attention be given to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures and also to the concept of sustainability; and secondly, within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s Sea Country Guardians programme This analysis of environmental education curriculum and practice identifies the ways in which the concept of Sea Country and the Indigenous cosmology it represents are simultaneously supported and ignored in the current Australian environmental education context.  相似文献   

19.
As the last century closed, and a bright new millennium dawned, the concept of ‘student voice’ within education emerged as something to be ‘identified’ and ‘captured’. In effect, it became reified and driven by a raft of government and institutional policies and strategic initiatives; initially within the compulsory sector, but soon followed by the post-compulsory sector as the 2000s moved on. In an increasingly quasi-consumerist environment, a mechanism had emerged with potential to ‘measure’ student satisfaction. Institutions quickly took up the ‘call to arms’, assigning responsibilities to ensure there was evidence of ‘student voice’ engagement; but there was no conversation with the ‘students’ about how this was experienced by them. This concept had become a ‘portmanteau’ term; a ‘catch all’ competing between two narratives—student voice as democratic and transformational; and student voice as ‘policy’ and strategic initiative. Formal research that could contribute to this discussion has been sparse and this paper takes a critical stance to the literature and policy, exploring the current status of student voice and proposing a research focus that has the potential to involve students in a discussion about how their voice is heard, and for what purpose.  相似文献   

20.
In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia’s federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on ‘policy assemblage’ within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant ‘component parts’ in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests ‘the national’ is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often reflect transnational traits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems.  相似文献   

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