Interrogating policy contradictions in literacy reforms about persuasive texts

Objectives Our overarching objective is to demonstrate the political contradictions about about how persuasive texts should be taught in the middle years of schooling, analysing two contradictory Australian wide educational reforms. We consider the complexities of power and access to literacy for students in relation to these reforms about the privileged genre of persuasion. Our work is framed by our appreciation of literacy as a social justice issue, and the notion of students’ pedagogic rights (Bernstein, 2000). Specifically, we introduce and analyse the knowledge and skills about persuasive text sanctioned by the Australian high-stakes test, the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), for students in the middle years of schooling (ACARA, 2013). We compare this to the contemporary emphasis on multimodal persuasive texts sanctioned by the recently released Australian Curriculum English (ACARA, 2014). We conclude our analysis by identifying biases in the structure of particular knowledges and the inherent threats to democracy.