Prioritizing social and moral learning amid conservative curriculum trends: spaces of possibility

Conservative trends across western schooling contexts are signalling an explicit devaluing of social and moral learning within their official curriculum mandates. These mandates are increasingly privileging the ‘academic rigour’ of traditional subject disciplines. This paper draws on interview and observation data from a case study of a large and highly diverse English secondary school to explore this school’s prioritizing of social and moral learning. Such prioritizing is supported at this school by its ‘Academy’ status—which in the English context allows schools a measure of freedom over curriculum as part of broader government moves to increase school autonomy. The paper’s focus is on how these conservative trends are understood and disrupted to support a critical view of existing curriculum and a desire to modify and re-shape it to support more relevant and connected learning for students. The paper describes particular examples of practice at the school in the areas of Citizenship and Religious Education to illustrate this approach. Engaging with social and moral learning along these lines is argued as productive in working within and against the constraints of current conservative curriculum priorities.

Mobilising spaces of agency through genealogies of race and gender: issues of indigeneity, marginality and schooling

This article presents data from a case study of a non-traditional secondary school for Indigenous girls located in a suburban area of Queensland (Australia). The focus is predominantly on the identity and practices of Nicole who is one of the school’s teachers. Nicole’s identity as an Indigenous woman and teacher and the school’s approach to supporting its marginalised students are theorised in relation to particular elements of feminist genealogy. These elements are associated with the possibilities for agency opened up through the subject’s critical reflection on, and resistance of, the discursive relations that constitute the self. The article draws on feminist theories to explicate the potential of such reflection and resistance to disrupt and transform gendered and racist norms and to legitimise alternative constructions of female indigeneity – to that represented in dominant colonial discourse.

Feminist struggles to mobilise progressive spaces within the ‘boy-turn’ in gender equity and schooling reform

This article presents the stories of two Australian feminist educators, ‘Kath’ and ‘Kim’. Drawn from a small‐scale interview‐based study, the stories highlight these women’s struggles to mobilise progressive spaces within the current boy‐focused equity and schooling agenda. Such struggles are located within the new possibilities for feminist intervention enabled by current educational trends in Australia. The stories focus on Kath and Kim’s experiences leading the professional development of teachers from several schools in Queensland (Australia) as part of the $19.4 million national initiative, Success for Boys. The article draws on feminist understandings of ‘progressive’ spaces and highlights the requisite conditions necessary for mobilising such spaces. In particular, Kath and Kim’s stories bring to light the powerful role emotions continue to play in both enabling and constraining gender reform and the continued significance of attending to, and working with, such emotions to enhance the pursuit of gender justice in schools.