This paper examines how high levels of social-cultural connectedness and academic excellence, inflected by gender and social class, constitute a particular school habitus of "assured optimism" at an elite Scottish girls' school. In Bourdieuian terms, Dalrymple is a "forcing ground" for the "intense cultivation"…

This paper examines the re-articulation of social justice as equity in schooling policy through national and global testing and data infrastructures. It focuses on the Australian National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyse the discursive…

This paper argues that languages, increasingly marginalised in schools in English-speaking countries, are gaining "elitist" ground as part of the "value-added" marketisation of schools and parents' desire for their children to gain "positional goods" through schooling. In arguing our case, the paper draws on survey and other data derived from…

This paper draws on a research study into the existence and use of different forms of capital--including social, cultural and physical capital--in three independent schools in Scotland. We were interested in understanding how these forms of capital work to produce and reproduce "advantage" and "privilege". Analysis is framed by a multiple capitals…

This paper focuses on the Australian federal Parliamentary Inquiry into Boys' Education, "Boys: Getting it Right", which is shown to be an exemplary instance of recuperative masculinity politics. The paper demonstrates how, through a variety of rhetorical strategies, its anti-feminist politics are masked and how the report works with essentialised…

Drawing on the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS), this paper documents the assessment practices of about 250 Queensland primary and secondary classrooms and the extent to which they align with those pedagogical practices described as "productive pedagogies" in the research. In considering the extent of this alignment, the paper…

This article reports on Australian research that developed the concept of "productive pedagogies", a model that is deemed to be socially just and appropriate for the contemporary post-modern globalised world. The model extends the modernist one of "authentic pedagogy" developed in the USA and sits as a counter to the inauthentic post-modernist…

Frequent calls for more male teachers are being made in English-speaking countries. Many of these calls are based upon the fact that the teaching profession has become (even more) 'feminized' and the presumption that this has had negative effects for the education of boys. The employment of more male teachers is sometimes suggested as a way to…