The promotion of educational equity and improvement of educational quality in China are contextualised in tenets of Confucianism and policy directives, inspiring educational research and practice. In this paper, we first explore the historical and cultural roots of educational equity and quality through Confucianism and elaborate on the current…

This paper provides some background information about the Strategic Capacity Building for Australian Educational Research initiative: a joint program of work sponsored by the Australian Association for Research in Education and the Australian Council of Deans of Education. In addition, it offers some broader analysis of the contexts within which…

This paper reflects on the geography of Australian educational research in the context of the ERA 2010 and 2012 assessments results. These results reflect significant changes to the nature of educational research over the past decades, where this research is conducted and by whom. We recap the historical changes to the formation of educational…

This paper examines the report of the "Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy" (Department of Education, Science & Training (DEST) 2005) and explores the claims it makes about reading pedagogy and the centrality of particular "methods" or "approaches" to teaching backed by "scientific" evidence. Discourse analysis of the report shows that its…

In this address, the author engages both with the possibility "and" the impossibility of the educational project--and suggests something of what it means to say this. His presentation is specifically addressed to the theme of the (im)possibility of the educational project. He draws from philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and history, as well…

This paper discusses an initial analysis of the form of Australian postgraduate scholarship over the last four decades in relation to curriculum inquiry. The study forms part of an ARC funded project on the shifts and emphases of Australian curriculum policy from 1975 to 2005 which seeks to contribute to understandings of how Australian curriculum…

This essay brings together two lines of inquiry. Firstly, I revisit research on futures in education conducted during the 1980s and re-examine some of the propositions and principles that this research generated about "the future" as an object of inquiry in education. Secondly, I argue that the language of complexity invites us to rethink…

Education "is" changing, as is knowledge more generally, to a significant degree energised by what has been described as the digital revolution. This has been widely discussed with references to notions such as globalisation, the New Media Age, open access, and the Network Society. Something definitely to be considered is what this could mean for…

In this article, the author explores practices and economies of learning that make visible particular practices where educational work is embedded in places other than schools, colleges and universities, or at least in complex interaction with them. To do this, she draws on a body of work she has been involved with over the past ten years,…

This article argues that public education needs to be reclaimed to fulfill its role as a "democratising force" to address social and economic inequality and to respect and recognise diversity and difference. By analysing historical developments in federal policy, funding and economic contexts a case is developed to demonstrate that the role of the…

This paper examines theoretical issues arising from technical and further education and training reforms over the last few decades. It illustrates how these reforms have been dominated by particular knowledge concerns assumed to be central to specific areas of human activity. It then examines the reforms in terms of theoretical relationships among…

Of all Australian secondary schools in the current period, the government comprehensive high school is in most difficulty. This article looks at the developing fate of this school in terms of middle class social practice in relation to changing schooling loyalties. The recent work of Michael Pusey, Stephen Ball, Janet McCalman, Richard Teese and…

This paper argues that the re-traditionalisation of 'wishing for dragon children' creates difficulties for China's current education reforms and informs the disquiet expressed by Chinese-Australians about Australian education. We develop this argument around three key propositions. First, we explore Confucianism and the civil service examination…

Genealogies, or histories of the present, create critical spaces to remind us of the non-necessity of that which we consider necessary to our lives (Burchell 1993). Further, genealogies of governmentality attempt to create this space with a focus on how conduct is conducted. In this paper I suggest that genealogies of governmentality are one way…

This paper seeks to explain why the subject media studies looks and sounds the way it does today through the production of a genealogy of the subject. The questions addressed are first, why was this subject introduced into the curriculum in the 1970s? Secondly, how has knowledge in the subject been defined and contested, how and why has it changed…