One genre of reality television constructs working-class youth as the dysfunctional antithesis of the aspirational middle-class consumer who normally features in lifestyle media. Sent to boot camps, unruly youths undergo makeover by education into ways of living deemed to accrue superior cultural capital. This article analyses how one lifestyle…

In this paper I explore the popular Australian television character of Ja'mie King--a teenage private school girl created and performed by male comedian Chris Lilley. I conceptualise Lilley's satire as a public pedagogy of young femininity. My reading of his satire responds to recent feminist scholarship around young femininities and "girl power",…

This paper explores the "social movement learning" operating within one site of critical public pedagogy and, specifically, examines how the anti-consumption activist group "Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping" encourages transitional spaces of learning through a "pedagogy of the unknown." Bill Talen, a.k.a. "Reverend Billy", is an…

In this paper I draw on ethnographic data generated inside an English "special" school for boys designate as having "social, emotional and behavioural difficulties". I offer a detailed analysis of one teacher's pedagogic practices inside her ICT classroom and the boys' responses to this. I suggest that the teacher's pedagogy, and the classroom,…

This article addresses the notion of "being critical" in the application of the theoretical approach of Pierre Bourdieu to educational policy research. It stems from a concern to avoid a kind of "critical ghetto", where educational research is reinterpreted in Bourdieusian terms, or metaphorised in his conceptual language, without realising the…

This study is an empirical account of the professional development (PD) practices that constituted part of the work of a group of teachers and school-based administrators working together in a cluster of six schools in southeast Queensland, Australia, during a period of intense educational reform. The data comprise meeting transcripts and…

Bourdieu argued that his research was biographical: he sought to reflexively understand the social production of many of his life experiences without resorting to the illusion that they were unique, a-historical and transparent. To this end he systematically developed and applied a methodological toolkit, built around the concepts of field,…

The paper draws on data and theorising from the Knowledge Production in Educational Leadership (KPEL) Project where we have investigated New Labour's education policy and investment in headteachers as school leaders in England. New Labour took up office in May 1997 with a modernisation agenda and the leadership of schools is central to this…

Much contemporary educational research draws upon Bourdieuian concepts such as field and the metaphor of the game for its inspiration. Yet his theory of practice remains an under-explored concept in educational leadership. Perhaps this is because the preceding concepts are better equipped to perform the required conceptual labour compared to…

This paper provides a critical review of papers in this special issue on Bourdieu and practice. What is different about this collection is that, in analysing policy and practice through a Bourdieusian lens, the thinking tools of field, disposition (collective and individual), logics of practice and doxa have been mobilised with regard to the…

The main argument presented in this paper is that the mediatisation of education should be viewed as forms of practice linked to specific practice effects. Drawing on Bourdieu's conceptualisation of practice--as elements of practice, practice games and field effects--the paper argues that viewing mediatisation as practice provides a set of…

A key assumption of equity policies in Australia, as in many countries, is that pathways from lower-status, vocationally oriented "second" tiers of tertiary education to "first" tier higher education are able to act as an equity mechanism. This is because students from low socio-economic backgrounds are over-represented in former and…

This article seeks to explore the importance of the affective politics of fear in education and to discuss the implications for educational policy, theory and practice. The aim is to explore how discourses of fear work in some educational contexts and draw significant boundaries between "us" and "them" through the structuring of curriculum and…

No one publicly defends unequal educational opportunity, Christopher Jencks claimed in a well-known article two decades ago. But is this actually true? With the rise of a "global war for talent" and the push by business and political elites for a "global meritocracy", the terrain on which educators work is shifting radically. This article argues…

Ideas about what makes a good teacher are important in thinking about educational reform, and have come into focus recently. These ideas are contested and open to change. The first part of this paper traces models of the good teacher in Australia from the colonial-era good servant, through an ideal of the autonomous scholar-teacher, to…