Australia has a long and sometimes turbulent relationship with the migrant Other. This paper examines a component of this relationship via the window of contemporary multicultural policy. The paper begins with an analysis of the political and social conditions that enabled a national and bipartisan policy of multiculturalism to emerge as…

Drawing upon our experience as university faculty in teaching novice educators, we explore the issue of resistance from students around learning that entails critical reflection. By novice educators, we refer to pre-service teacher candidates and graduate students in Education faculties, particularly graduate students in adult education/lifelong…

Bullying behaviours remain common in schools despite an abundance of policies and programs aimed at curbing them. In this paper, the author argues that such policies and programs are problematic not because they are flawed in themselves, but because they draw from the dominant and usual ideas about what bullying is taken to be. These ideas are…

Much educational research on globalization aims to prepare students to be successful citizens in a global society. We propose a set of three concepts, drawing on systems theory (Nassehi, Stichweh) and theories of the subject (Butler, Foucault), to think the global which enables educational research to step back from hegemonic discourses and…

This paper explores how Foucault's concept of the panopticon, power and knowledge impacts on the identity of young Nunga males in a secondary educational institution. I argue that the regulation of the Nunga body in schools is embedded in the discursive formations of knowledge about Indigenous people and the workings of power that are tied up in…

The paper suggests that the idea of quality in higher education is ideologically constructed and conducted. In a spiral of mutual reinforcements, quality regimes naturalise experience, while the theories of that practice legitimise the naturalness of "quality". I shall suggest that quality regimes provide too narrow readings of higher education.…

This paper reports on an analysis of public documents produced by the government of Malaysia for the purpose of guiding the enactment of educational technology efforts in Malaysia. The analysis explores the concentration of discourses that make possible certain framings of technology in educational contexts that seek to act upon the notions of…

My paper focuses on the formulation of Islamic Religious Education (IRE) at two Swedish Muslim schools where fieldwork was conducted in 2005-2008. Its aim is to contribute knowledge to ways in which IRE is formed as a confessional school subject within the framework and under the jurisdiction of the Swedish school system. Even though the general…

Academic disciplines in the school curriculum which engage explicitly with cultural identities pose a major dilemma for liberal, pluralist societies seeking to foster the dual imperatives of diversity education and social cohesion. This paper uses the case of Islam as school knowledge to analyse the relations between political stances and symbolic…

The scene for this paper is set in the USA immediately post-9/11 when the meaning of nation shifted dramatically, in turn shaping Muslim American identity. I examine Muslim American undergraduate women's performance of immigrant, gendered, youthful, Muslim and American identities. The findings are framed within symbolic interactionist, Foucauldian…

This first paper in the series concentrates on school context and outlines a framework which identifies and relates a variety of factors that influence differences in policy enactments between similar schools. In taking context seriously in our four case-study schools we argue that policies are intimately shaped and influenced by school-specific…

In this paper I present the "everydayness" of a particular group of young Muslim women and their families as they dance between a range of contradictory and shifting discourses. Through an analysis situated between the social and the cultural, the paper argues that as an "in-between" generation these young women are now part of communities who are…

In this paper, we focus on some of the ways in which schools are both productive of and constituted by sets of "discursive practices, events and texts" that contribute to the process of policy enactment. As Colebatch (2002: 2) says, "policy involves the creation of order--that is, shared understandings about how the various participants will act…

This paper explores two different ontological positions from which policy in schools and teachers can be viewed. On the one hand, it explores the ways in which policies make up and make possible particular sorts of teacher subjects--as producers and consumers of policy, as readers and writers of policy. On the other, it begins to conceptualise the…

This paper considers the "policy work" of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the "problem of meaning" and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get "enacted". It argues that "policy work" is made up of a set of complex and differentiated activities which involve both…