Improving schools: productive tensions between the local, the systemic and the global

This unique book explores school improvement policy – from its translation into national contexts and school networks to its implementation in leader and teacher practices in individual schools and classrooms within this network of schools and its impact on students’ learning. It draws on multiple conceptual and theoretical resources to explore the complexities attached to a school improvement process in a network of schools in Australia. These conceptual and theoretical resources include discourse, practice, representation and network, concepts common to both policy research as well as studies of leadership and classroom practice. They lead to a more detailed understanding of the intersections between educational policy and intervention processes, and the complex reality of school processes and teaching practices. In the book we trace the implementation of school improvement policies through its multiple phases, levels and contexts. Our data-collection and analysis methods draw on a variety of perspectives in the way different players perceive their roles and the nature of the initiative and the ways in which these intersect. The research findings are used to seek productive approaches to school improvement that combine policy integrity with local flexibility. The book contributes to the school improvement literature through its exploration of tensions between global and systemic settings and local practices and histories.

Victorian local government and women's political participation in small towns.

Rural women were involved in the struggle for women's suffrage in Victoria but their entry into local government has been slower than in urban centres. This paper takes as its starting point Ken Dempsey's analysis of the hegemonic masculine structure of small Victorian towns in the 1980s and Amanda Sinclair's notion of the maternal feminist being the prototype of the rural woman councillor at that time. My study, which is based upon a qualitative interview study with 12 women councillors across rural Victoria during February 2004, reveals that women in small towns are now much more likely to challenge the notion of masculine hegemony by playing a more proactive role in community affairs in small towns. For them, local government service is a logical and practical way to help improve the quality of life in their constituencies. This is also because the traditional rural definition of local government with its main function to ensure adequate infrastructure provision for its ratepayers to maintain viable farming and other productive operations is changing. Furthermore, these women challenged the notion of the maternal feminist by embracing broader political agendas and operating with different representational styles than those associated with previous generation of women on local councils in small towns. On a theoretical level, the paper concludes by suggesting that while the notion of a 'critical mass' in terms of women's political participation is important, there is also a need to explore women's accounts of ‘critical acts’ in the everyday decision-making of local government.

'Particularly happy' arrangement?: Idealism, pragmatism and the enclosed open spaces of Perth garden suburbs

One of the hallmarks of many planned garden suburbs of the early twentieth century is the internal reserve: open space at the rear of residences, without street frontage. An idealistic conception with direct links to overseas planning theory, these spaces were not always well received by either local councils or residents; despite this, many survive today as legacies of early suburban reformism. Perth’s highest-profile planning advocates of the interwar years, most notably town clerk William Bold and the progressive surveying  partnership of Hope and Klem, embraced and encouraged the idea and a number of middle-ring suburbs in Perth feature internal reserves which have survived both encroachment and resubdivision. Some have been given heritage status in recognition of their importance to the history and fabric of particular suburban communities; others remain neglected and essentially unacknowledged. All raise ongoing usage, maintenance and management issues for the councils that have inherited them.

Negotiating cultural difference in everyday life : some insights for inclusionary local governance

With the waning of state-sponsored multiculturalism, local governments in Australia have assumed leadership and responsibility for establishing and maintaining collaborative relationships with stakeholders to promote diverse and inclusive cities. Engaging with residents often through consultation processes and interacting with key institutions, local governments aim to value local knowledge and mobilise citizen participation. This social interactive approach to building local knowledge in places officially and popularly identified as socially disadvantaged and culturally diverse, however, is fraught with interethnic tensions if cultural practices unintentionally priviÌege whiteness. In this paper I argue that such tensions can also give rise to moments of affective ambivalence that ate productive if it leads to the acknowledgement and questioning of white privilege within the formal agencies of government. Such questioning provides the possibility to value the voices of local residents and engage in meaningful intercultural dialogue. This paper draws on indepth interviews with planners, elected local councillors and residents in the City of Greater Dandenong, Melbourne, to illustrate the potential that the affective dimension of living with cultural diversity has in building governance capacity and inclusive understandings of citizenship.

Clinical audit, guidelines and standards : a productive relation for managing clinical practices

This paper contributes to the knowledge about the process of standardisation within the domain of medicine. Standardisation has become an important form of governance and co-ordination, and there is limited empirical knowledge about its nature and consequences (Brunsson et al., 2000). This paper aims to explore the development, circulation and standardisation process of a specific clinical audit programme: the Scottish Hip Fracture Audit. This audit started as a local initiative and now has developed into a sophisticated arena (Sahlin-Andersson, 2000) which provides Scottish hospitals with monthly ‘real-time reports’ outlining their performance against Scottish government targets. The paper argues that the interrelation between clinical audit and evidence-based medicine (EBM) can become a ‘productive relation’ (Mykhalovskiy, 2003), that opens up spaces of intervention, in which the clinical communities engage with processes of change of clinical procedures, and in these spaces, clinicians and managers are in a position to refine clinical practice and service organisation, to reflect upon their own actions and to allow insight into the rationalities of their work (Berg, 1997).

The rhetoric of ‘community’ : ABC local radio's coverage of the 2009 Victorian bushfires

This article joins recent debates in media and communication studies concerning audience participation in news journalism. Specifically, we investigate the impact of an increasing reliance on audience-generated content on newsroom practice in traditional media organisations. We do this by recounting and analysing the experiences of journalists involved in ABC Radio's coverage of the dramatic Victorian bushfires of early 2009, which relied heavily in listener contributions and was closely integrated with the ABC's online coverage. Interviews with two staff at ABC Gippsland, and the ABC's Manager of Emergency Broadcasting provide the basis for a case study of the kinds of tensions that media workers routinely confront within an organisation like the ABC. The interviews suggest that in negotiating the possibility of increased audience participation, journalists and their managers are thinking about much more that the rhetorics of democracy and the validity of news values: their focus is also on a complex structure, the need for skill (re)development and the precise mechanics of creating and maintaining productive relationships with local communities. The significance of the research lies in its attempt to bring together a number of related factors: the increasingly active role of audiences in generating and supplying news content; the impact of digital communications technologies on news production practices; and the ABC's ongoing development of its now contested role as an 'emergency broadcaster'.

Education for productive futures: a white woman learning from Aboriginal voices

High incarceration rates of Aboriginal Western Australians leads to between 1800 and 2000 Aboriginal prisoners at any one time. Despite this little is written or noted in Australian peer reviewed academic literature about education provision to Aboriginal prisoners. "Closing the Gap: learning from and privileging Aboriginal voices to learn what helps and hinders educationin WA prisons" is a PhD project nearing submission. It has been conducted in partnership with the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee as we ll as with the support of a local community legalservice. The findings are relevant beyond a prison context.This paper specifically focuses on how understandings of the concept of productivity can differ. Itconsiders what might or might not be helpful in achieving productive educational and trainingoutcomes in Western Australian prisons for Indigenous individuals, families and communities. Itrelies heavily on the words of the author's teachers; the Aboriginal participants in the project alongside Indigenous authors and academics. The paper concludes by considering implications for developing and evaluating training programs in more flexible ways that respect diversity.