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This paper explores the notion of a ‘just imaginary’ for social inclusion in higher education. It responds to the current strategy of OECD nations to expand higher education and increase graduate numbers, as a way of securing a competitive advantage in the global knowledge economy. The Australian higher education system provides the case for analysis. Three dilemmas for social inclusion policy in this context are identified: questions of sustainability, aspiration and opportunity. The paper argues that while social inclusion policy has ‘first-order’ effects in higher education, ajustimaginary is required for more inclusive ‘second-order’ effects to be realized. It concludes that transformation of the current imaginary will require a more robust theorization of relations between social inclusion and higher education, to give new and unifying meaning to existing practices and to generate new ones. Short of this, social inclusion may be little more than justimaginary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Schools represent the primary setting where refugee children learn about Australian life and culture. They serve as a broad context for acculturation not only for academic development and language acquisition but for cultural learning too. This paper focuses on the after-school homework tutoring programme that uses University of Western Sydney (Australia) secondary teacher education students as tutors for African refugee students in secondary schools to facilitate their inclusion into Australian society. African refugees may receive lower returns for education in comparison with other Australian migrants. Using Bourdieu's theory of social capital and cultural reproduction as a conceptual framework, this paper discusses the part played by schools in constructing barriers that prevent under-represented groups such as refugees participating in the education process. It aims to explore the success of community engagement programmes like Refugee Action Support, which is designed to act in the interests of others (refugees) characterised as socio-culturally disadvantaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that competency-based training in vocational education and training in Australia is one mechanism through which the working class is denied access to powerful knowledge represented by the academic disciplines. The paper presents a modified Bernsteinian analysis to argue that vocational education and training students need access to disciplinary knowledge using Bernstein's argument that abstract, conceptual knowledge is the means societies use to think 'the unthinkable' and 'the not-yet-thought'. I supplement Bernstein's social argument for democratic access to the disciplines with an epistemic argument that draws on the philosophy of critical realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an investigation into central features of institutional schooling that, collectively, constitute the 'symbolic architecture' of education. In particular, this paper provides an analysis of the practices associated with school uniform, badges and mottoes, drawn from a sample of over 500 schools in the state of Queensland, Australia. The analysis reveals a large degree of uniformity in the meaning content of these school icons, derived from a common core of educational values established during the formative decades of universal school but resting on older heraldic principles. The authors contend that the propagation of these values within the iconic discourse of schooling constitute a significant ideological practice that focuses a pupil's consciousness towards social norms and further reifies the institutional character of education. These processes are not .straightforward but are often contested in instances where pupils recreate mottoes in ways which mock the values that are consecrated in the formal symbols of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with a case study regarding the `rise and fall' of a promotions committee within an Australian College of Advanced Education The paper considers the internal organisational factors involved with the abolition of promotion by merit as part of increasingly dominant managerialist practices The paper attempts to contextualise these institutional developments in terms of the restructuring of the Australian economy and concomitant pressures upon state expenditure and consequent increasing pressures on tertiary education institutions to `pay their own way' The study fits within the `imperialist strategy' within organisational analyses where the study of organisations is "merged within a wider analytical framework geared to the examination of historical transformations in institutional structures and the principles which underlie these long-term historical movements" In the concluding section, some critical remarks are proffered regarding the way senior administrators within tertiary education institutions have responded to these privatisation pressures upon them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of the still limited literature on education in non-metropolitan areas adopts an understanding of rurality as a fixed and known geographic entity. This paper departs from such a functionalist perspective to explore how rurality is constructed in a programme for at-risk teenagers in remote Australia. Drawing on a range of texts about the programme, including a documentary series entitledOutback Kids,we examine how the rural space is imagined as simultaneously therapeutic and disciplining and therefore appropriate for troubled youth. Alongside this discussion we map the way in which other qualities and values associated with bifurcated definitions of the rural as a place of tradition and authenticity, and the urban as a place of disorder and pretence, are engaged in the texts to endorse the programme and its practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 reconstitution of social justice as equity in Australian and OECD policy, and analyse NAPLAN and PISA as technologies of governance that re-articulate equity as a measure of performance. These re-articulations are set against the extension of neo-social economistic rationalities to all domains of life and the topological production of new spaces of policy and power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The way in which private schools use rhetoric in their communications offers important insights into how these organizational sites persuade audiences and leverage marketplace advantage in the context of contemporary educational platforms. Through systemic analysis of rhetorical strategies employed in 65 ‘elite’ school prospectuses in Australia, this paper contributes to understandings of the ways schools’ communications draw on broader cultural politics in order to shape meanings and interactions among organizational actors. We identify six strategies consistently used by schools to this end: identification, juxtapositioning, bolstering or self-promotion, partial reporting, self-expansion, and reframing or reversal. We argue that, in the context of marketization and privatization discourses in twenty-first-century western education, these strategies attempt to subvert potentially threatening discourses, in the process actively reproducing broader economic and social privilege and inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that growing inequalities make it imperative that schools reinvent themselves around the issue of social justice. Through a case study of an Australian primary school, teacher-based forms of social capital are explored revealing progressive pedagogies to be an important precursor to the 'socially just school'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most pervasive educational issues confronting Australia, and other countries, at the moment is the declining completion rates in high schools. While a period of success was experienced after the Second World War, there is now a pressing need to reform high schools in the ways they connect with young lives. In this paper, we present a 'sociology of the high school' as a way of encapsulating the high school as an institution that: is still largely stuck in a 'continuity of practice' (Elmore, 1987); has an 'attachment to familiar pedagogical routines' (Eisner, 1992); fails to listen to students; is hierarchically structured; treats students in immature ways; is hung up with passing on content; and seems more concerned with insulating itself from, rather connecting with or appropriating, young lives into the curriculum. As an alternative, we examine the notion of middle schooling that requires a version of whole school reform that engages with structures, cultures and changing pedagogy in ways more resonant with, and respectful of, young lives. We examine the tensions and dilemmas experienced at Investigator [1] High School in Australia, and conclude that the centerpiece has to be breaking the mold of the 'scripted' teacher and its replacement by the 'teacher-as-improviser'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How we obtain more complex understandings of the phenomenon of 'dropping out' of school is one of the most urgent policy and practice issues facing educational practitioners, policy-makers and sociological researchers at the moment, as increasingly numbers of young people fail to complete their secondary schooling. In this paper, we argue that a different 'sociological imagination' is required - one that is simultaneously more attentive to the lifeworlds of young people, that is more reflexive of its own agenda, and that is mindful of the wider politics within which 'dropping out' is being experienced. A heuristic around 'voiced research' is discussed in the context of an Australian study that explored the circumstances of 209 young people who left school prematurely. It is argued that such an approach enabled the phenomenon to be 'named' in a different way, which was more inclusive of the lives, experiences, aspirations and complexities of what was occurring at the point these young people decided to exit school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational outcomes have descended on schools with a ferocity unimaginable a few years ago. We have reached the point where outcomes rhetoric is so deeply embedded in the official discourses of schooling that it appears to be `the only game in town'. This paper outlines the economic rationalist origins of outcomes orientations, and uses an Australian background to expose the pervasive myth about the relationship of outcomes to aspects of leaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of pedagogical relationships offer insights into policies and practices which have the capacity to promote progressive change in educational practice for children in poverty This paper focus on relationships established in three differently-located Australian primary schools. Greytown a medium sized inner-city school in New South Wales, Manger, a large suburban school in Queensland, and Meiks, a small rural school in New South Wales Each school is a designated disadvantage school and finded according through accordingly through a fedral Disadvantage Schools Program, is located in working class area and is ethincally diverse. The schools' pedagogical response to children in poverty are contrasted and analysed in terms of their capacity to contribute to socially just outcome from schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate on teacher quality and quality in teaching and teacher education has been as vigorous in Australia as it has been in the UK and the USA In Australia, however, reform in teacher education has been subsumed within a national metapolicy of corporate federalism which is an amalgam of beliefs or discourses including neo-corporatism, economic rationalism, corporate managerialism and human capital The paper analyses the most recent document on reform of teacher education in Australia (the Ebbeck Report) and shows how its policy formulation is influenced by the discourse of corporate federalism It also shows how micro-economic reform in this sector is related to reforms in other sectors of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Directions in schooling for tribal Aborigines in Australia have long been influenced by psychological and anthropological perspectives. This paper argues that these are inadequate and cannot account for the frequent failure of school to meet community expectations. It is argued that there is a need for new directions based on analysis of the social relations of Aboriginal education. The possibilities opened up by such an analysis are discussed with reference to recent Aboriginal initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]