The "Australian Curriculum: History" has emerged out of a neoliberal federal education policy landscape. This is a policy landscape where pragmatic and performative, rather than pedagogic concerns are clearly foregrounded, and this has implications for curriculum development and implementation. A useful way to conceptualise the features,…

This paper explores the storylines of four student ballet dancers who attend a specialist performing arts secondary school and who, in differing ways, envisage futures which "look straight at ballet". When decisions about schooling intermingle with long-held imaginings of futures in ballet, thought is provoked about ways the young…

This paper explores how performance culture could affect students' learning about, and disposition towards, acting as organisational change agents in schools. This is based on findings from an initiative aimed to enable students to experience acting as change agents on an aspect of the school's culture that concerned them. The initiative…

This paper asks, what more can we think in relation to debates around young people's use of mobile phones at school? Rather than attempting to answer the question of whether mobile phones are "good" or "bad" for young people, this paper recasts the debate's ontological underpinnings. To do this feminist appropriations…

This paper applies a Butlerian-inspired "queer(y)ing" methodology to disrupt the utility of agency being framed within the binary of escape and coercion. In particular, it uses Butler's concept of performative resignification to analyse how Simon, a 16-year-old white male student, maneouvres his way through the social conventions of…

This article explores the potential of queering as a mode of critique by problematising the ways in which liberal politics of race shape normative understandings of health in a high school classroom. Drawing on findings from an Australian and New Zealand (NZ) research project designed to respond to religious and cultural difference in school-based…

This paper explores the metonymic slippage surrounding the discourse of public education, through observations and interviews with Lawson High School active campaigners in the state of Victoria, Australia. The notion of campaigning for public education has become an ever-present issue on an international scale, and this article aims to contribute…

This paper draws upon Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and field to better understand and appreciate the conditions which encouraged the productive professional development (PD) practices of one very capable teacher working in a secondary school in the British Midlands. Rather than celebrating this teacher's practices and…

In concert with Singapore's ambitions of a global city well engineered to the human capital needs of the transnational knowledge economy, its schools in recent years have emphasized the teaching of critical thinking. Such efforts, however, are not without tensions and contradictions. Given that such a curricular ideal is underpinned by…

Drawing on post-structural and post-colonial conceptions of gender, this paper explores multiple student masculinities and femininities in the classrooms of four junior secondary schools in Botswana. These gendered identities, it is argued, are negotiated within broader institutional constraints that have been socio-historically produced. Such…

Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and illustrating with examples from the English system, the paper addresses the hidden racist dimension to contemporary education reforms and argues that this is a predictable and recurrent theme at times of economic crisis. Derrick Bell's concept of "interest-convergence" argues that moments of…

Because the dynamics of race are wrongly ignored in a current shroud of post-racialism (i.e. re-election of Barack Obama as president of the USA, shifting racial demographics in the USA, etc.), there are still communities in the USA and throughout the world that experience the damaging effects of racism entangled with the realities of class. Many…

This article mobilizes story-telling to narrate my lived experience of teaching English as a minority academic in one Australian university. Positioning myself as living "in-between" two cultures and as an "Other", I tell my story of how I have been "racialized" and "Othered" because I do not look White, and my spoken English is distinctly…

This article makes a connection between youth work spaces, emotions and some elements of memory, exploring the construction of spaces dangerous for social justice in both meanings of the term "dangerous for". It investigates the contribution to social justice of lesbian and gay youth work and other non-heteronormative youth work in a British…

British schools have been positioned by recent educational policy discourses as sites of innovation and transformation in new technological contexts, but more recent concerns about well-being suggest a more "affective turn" in educational policy-making. This article provides an analysis of a project which has explored the ways in which schools are…