Víctimas de un experimento: Conflicto multicultural en el programa de oportunidades

This article presents a reflection of the application of multiculturality principles into tertiary educational programs at the University of Los Andes, Bogota Colombia. The main focus of this paper is debating the concept of 'positive discrimination' as a challenge taken by educational centres in societies with cultural diversity populations.

Family Mobility : Reconciling Career Opportunities and Educational Strategy

Family mobility decisions reveal much about how the public and private realms of social life interact and change. This sociological study explores how contemporary families reconcile individual members’ career and education projects within the family unit over time and space, and unpacks the intersubjective constraints on workforce mobility. This Australian mixed methods study sampled Defence Force families and middle class professional families to illustrate how families’ educational projects are necessarily and deeply implicated in issues of workforce mobility and immobility, in complex ways. Defence families move frequently, often absorbing the stresses of moving through ‘viscous’ institutions as private troubles. In contrast, the selective mobility of middle class professional families and their ‘no go zones’ contribute to the public issue of poorly serviced rural communities. Families with different social, material and vocational resources at their disposal are shown to reflexively weigh the benefits and risks associated with moving differently. The book also explore how priorities shift as children move through educational phases. The families’ narratives offer empirical windows on larger social processes, such as the mobility imperative, the gender imbalance in the family’s intersubjective bargains, labour market credentialism, the social construction of place, and the family’s role in the reproduction of class structure.

Troubling silences and taboo texts : constructing safer and more positive school climates for same-sex attracted high school students in Australia

This chapter offers three insights into the relationship between curriculum decision making, positive school climate, and academic achievement for same-sex attracted (SSA) students, highlighting the need for students to be offered more than heteronormative narratives and silence on issues of sexuality in the official school curriculum. The authors firstly provide a review of research and report on findings of a doctoral study (Mikulsky, 2007) explaining the impact of SSA students’ perceptions of school climate on their motivation and academic self-concept. Situating the work in the context of the Australian Curriculum for English and associated classroom texts, the dominant discourse of ‘straight, white female’ heroines as exemplified in the globally popular young adult novel The hunger games and other texts popular with Australian students are critiqued, with an argument made for expanding notions of what it means to ‘attend to’ gender and sexuality through textual choice and critical pedagogy. The authors show how texts that feature LGBTQ characters and storylines continue to be marginalized and constructed as taboo and demonstrate how curricular choices can and do impact academic outcomes for marginalized students. Issues of gender and sexuality are framed as a cross-curriculum imperative, with recommendations made for the explicit inclusion of materials exploring gender and sexuality in the official curriculum of all key learning areas.

Working the iceberg : a staffroom morality play

This play comes from a research project about how teachers understand and sustain their work in challenging secondary school classrooms. The research asked “How DO teachers work in these classrooms?” not “How SHOULD they?” In the play you meet three teachers who speak candidly about their principles, priorities and vulnerabilities to a pre-service teacher as they move between classes and staffroom. These are real people, real quotes and real feelings taken from real interview data, not idealised guidelines for ‘best practice’. Rather than templates for practice, the play offers a variety of models, issues and food for thought to discuss in teacher education programs. The project was interested in the moral dynamics of classrooms created under the Council of Australian Governments’ 2009 Compact with Young Australians, a policy move that required students to be ‘earning or learning till 17’ across all Australian states. By removing the unemployment benefit for this age group, and tying school attendance to family welfare entitlements, these policies effectively raised the minimum school-leaving age. The risk in this well-intended policy move is that a lack of suitable job opportunities will keep young people at school longer than they want to be there. The effects of this ‘earning or learning’ policy will impact some communities, schools and classrooms much harder than others. The title uses the metaphor of an iceberg to refer to the complex community-school relations that lie below classroom interactions. The idea of a morality play in the play’s title refers back to a medieval form of popular play that used characters to instruct the audience in virtues and values. In the same way, this play seeks to bring to the surface and embody the different moral principles that can inform teacher’s work. The research involved classroom ethnographies of classes for 16 to 17 years olds in non-academic pathways. Eight different teacher/ class combinations were sampled across 2 high schools, 2 TAFE colleges and I hybrid TAFE/school program in three towns experiencing chronic youth unemployment. Their timetabled lessons were observed across 3 to 4 weeks and the teachers and some students were interviewed in each site. The project was funded by an ARC Discovery Early Career Award, 2012-214.

The private problem with public service: Rural teachers in educational markets

Staffing rural and remote schools is an important policy issue for the public good. This paper examines the private issues it also poses for teachers with families working in these communities, as they seek to reconcile careers with educational choices for children. The paper first considers historical responses to staffing rural and remote schools in Australia, and the emergence of neoliberal policy encouraging marketisation of the education sector. We report on interviews about considerations motivating household mobility with 11 teachers across regional, rural and remote communities in Queensland. Like other middle-class parents, these teachers prioritised their children’s educational opportunities over career opportunities. The analysis demonstrates how teachers in rural and remote communities constitute a special group of educational consumers with insider knowledge and unique dilemmas around school choice. Their heightened anxieties around school choice under neoliberal policy are shown to contribute to the public issue of staffing rural and remote schools.

Making trouble: Ethnographic designs on ruling relations for students and teachers in non-academic pathways

Since 2009, all Australian states require young people to be ‘earning or learning’ until age 17. Secondary schools and vocational colleges now accommodate students for whom the conventional academic pathways of the past were not designed. The paper reflects on a project designed to explore the moral orders in these institutional settings for managing such students in extended compulsory schooling. Originally designed as classroom ethnographies, the project involved observations over three to four weeks and interviews with teachers and students in five sites in towns experiencing high youth unemployment. The project aimed to support teachers to work productively in such classrooms with such students, under the assumption that teachers orchestrate classroom interactions. However, it became clear events in these classrooms were being shaped by relations and parties above and beyond the classroom, as much as by those present. Teachers and students were observed to both comply with, and push against, the layers of policy and institutional processes regulating their behaviours. This paper re-thinks the original project through the gaze and resources of institutional ethnography, to better account for the layers of accountabilities and documentation practices that impacted on both teacher and student behaviours. By tracing the extended webs of ‘ruling relations’, it shows both how teachers and students could make trouble for the institutional moral order, and then be held accountable for this trouble.

Understanding classroom trouble through regulative gravity and instructional elasticity

This paper aims to develop a more nuanced analytic vocabulary to typify how and where classroom trouble can manifest in pedagogic discourse. It draws on classroom ethnographies conducted in non-academic secondary school pathways and alternative programs in Australian communities with high youth unemployment, where the policy of ‘earning or learning’ till age 17 has effectively extended compulsory schooling. Three concepts are developed and exemplified: ‘regulative flares’, being moments when teachers resort to explicitly reasserting the lesson’s social order; ‘moral gravity’ to describe the degree to which the moral order underpinning the regulative discourse is tied to the immediate context or beyond; and ‘instructional elasticity’ to account for trouble originating in the instructional register.

Postscript: Policy, Markets and the Local

A critical review and discussion of research studies of the impacts of market-based reforms on Chinese education, with a specific emphasis on local uptakes and effects of policy.

Forward: On Chineseness

A critical commentary on issues of Chinese identity, habitus and language.

Tracking the neoliberal juggernaut: A virtual edition

This is an editorial introduction for a virtual edition focused on neoliberalism in educational sectors for the journal, "Critical Studies in Education". The introduction outlines the nature and progress of neoliberalism, then reviews the selected articles from the journal's archives.

Internationalizing school curriculum in Australasia: As niche, by test, or at heart?

Global citizenship has emerged as a pressing curricular priority which all educational systems are currently grappling with. The challenge is to negotiate how this orientation might sit alongside the more traditional mission of mass school curriculum in building collective ballast for a national identity through a common morality and shared narratives, or may conflict with efforts to protect and promote indigenous and minority identities. As a case study of how these agendas interact, this chapter will consider curricular responses to global imperatives in the variegated conditions across the Australasian region (defined as Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea). The chapter will outline recent developments in the social, economic and political contexts surrounding curricular reforms in these settings, and demonstrate how these developments have changed the conditions of possibility and strength of purpose behind efforts to internationalise school curricula. Three types of systemic responses are then described: firstly, an appetite for globally branded curricula such as the International Baccalaureate, Montessori, and Cambridge University Certificates to distinguish some in a stratified market; secondly, convergence in curriculum to improve national performance on international standardised tests; and thirdly, the infusion of cosmopolitan sensibilities, regional identities and intercultural competencies as a core curricular goal for all. The chapter considers the various pragmatic interpretations of ‘internationalisation’ in these responses, and argues that the third response seems both the most difficult to enact, and the most vulnerable to political interference.

Seeking continuity: Educational strategy in and for mobile ADF families

This report shares findings and insights from an interview study conducted in 2009, with 34 ADF families. These families were identified in the communities of primary schools in both state and Catholic systems with high ADF family enrolments in 3 towns across 2 states, with the assistance of the DCO and their embedded Defence School Transition Aides (DSTAs). In the interviews the parents were invited to describe their history of ADF relocations, and how they managed transitions for each member in terms of school choice, child care arrangements, spouse employment, and educational transitions. Parallel interviews were conducted with 12 teachers and 6 DSTAs across the identified schools to describe how schools cater for mobile ADF families flowing through their classes. Parents were invited to tell the story of their family’s sequence of moves and how each member made the transition, then reflect more generally on what advice they’d give other mobile families. Teachers were asked to describe how they respond to the mobile families in their school community, and to illustrate some of the issues and challenges from the institutional perspective. By offering perspectives from both parents and teachers, the report hopes to facilitate a dialogue between parties to address their common goal – promoting productive continuities in education for children in mobile families.

Morality in 21st century pedagogies [Guest Editorial]

The set of papers in this focal issue draw on sociological and philosophic theory to explore the historical conjuncture and interplay between public moralities and schooling in the increasingly diverse and vexed settings of the 21st century...