Traditionally, the goal of foreign language education has been to teach learners linguistic and cultural knowledge so that they could function successfully in the target language and cultural environment. But does demonstrating knowledge always help learners accomplish their interactional goals? To explore this question, this study investigate…

Given Australia's diverse student population, the need for pre-service teacher education to prepare what is a predominantly Anglo-Australian and middle-class profession to be effective teachers of diverse students is critical. In Lortie's (1975) classic study, however, he argues that the predispositions of teacher education students are a much…

This article examines interview talk of three students in an Australian high school to show how they negotiate their young adult identities between school and the outside world. It draws on Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia to argue that identities are linguistically and corporeally constituted. A critical discourse analysis of…

Recent scholarship has identified the emergence of a new modality of policy work: the mediatisation of policy. This paper provides an Australian case study which reports on the tactics of an Australian Federal Minister of Education and a media commentator who both engaged in public pedagogical work for the purpose of spinning education policy. In…

In studies of minority language education, researchers tend to base their arguments on the assumption that knowledge empowers and ignorance disempowers. In this article, however, I show two alternative dynamics of knowledge and relations of dominance by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork at a secondary school in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1997-8.…

This article aims to contribute to current debates about political power and agency relationships in education and other public sectors. In a recent clarion call for a major redirection of political principal-agent theories (PAT), Terry Moe has argued that standard information asymmetries ought no longer to be regarded as the sole foundation of…

The application of market principles to educational provision continues to attract governments across the globe, despite an international body of literature suggesting that marketisation can exacerbate inequalities. In light of a renewed policy push in Australia towards accountability via a market model, this paper analyses the impact of existing…

This paper argues that the content, analytical approaches and institutional affiliations of authors of articles published in the latest issues of two leading educational policy studies journals provide useful insights into the contested nature of educational policy studies. The paper draws upon a selection of articles published in 2007/08 issues…

This paper explores a change in a mode of governing in Japan during the administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (2001-2006) through an examination of what I call the story of blue pee. The story circulated among people engaged in implementing child welfare policies at the local level, and implied that mothers today were ignorant in the…

This paper explores some of the reasons that primary head teachers in urban schools give for staying in a highly complex and demanding professional occupation. The paper is divided into two sections. The first section contains an overview of what is involved in primary headship in the English setting and what is distinctive in the urban setting…

Against the background of an increasing drop-out rate of students with ethnic minority and working-class backgrounds, the aim of this paper is to discuss the ways in which writing practices in Swedish teacher education produce power and include/exclude subjectivities. A "conventional academic writing practice" will be compared to a "hybrid writing…

The pending reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the George W. Bush administration's iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provides an important opportunity to consider what federal education policy could be in the United States. In this paper, we explain how the rationalization of education, particularly of…

This paper critiques the notion of community capacity building (CCB) and the way it is increasingly being invoked in social policy as a way of tackling disadvantage. The paper argues that CCB and a number of its derivative terms are not as straightforward as they appear. Superficially, CCB presents as a useful way of approaching school and…

This paper reviews New Labor priority educational policies since 1997 that have attempted to break the link between poverty and low educational achievement in England. It does so by examining these policy priorities against a mapping framework developed by the author for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Education and Poverty programme. This…

In this paper I argue that values of democracy and social justice in education would seem to have been displaced in recent decades by managerialist norms that are linked to the presumed needs of business and the economy of the nation. I am concerned that conceptualizations of the nature and purpose of education, and of the roles of teachers, are…