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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 community reform in contexts of disadvantage, but closer analysis reveals it to be pre-disposed to deployment as a cover under which to blame schools and communities, while handing over responsibility. What is posited as an alternative is a "community organizing" approach that is more political, activist, and attuned to providing forms of analysis and leadership skills with which communities and schools can begin to tackle some of the underlying conditions producing the debilitating inequities.

Amid this global landscape for education and policy, this paper focuses on the subject of teacher quality through the lens of teacher education reform and one particular Australian policy initiative: The "Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education" (LANTITE). Introduced by the federal Australian government in 2016 as a gate-keeping mechanism for students entering teacher education, we apply a four-dimensional framework to analyse LANTITE's role as a reform measure aimed at improving teacher education, and its impact on shaping understandings of 'teacher quality' and 'quality teacher education' in relation to the broader field.

There is a changed "structure of feeling" emerging in higher education systems, particularly in OECD nations, in response to changed social, cultural and economic arrangements. Taking a student equity perspective, the paper names this change in terms of "mobility", "aspiration" and "voice". It argues that (1) new kinds and degrees of mobility are now a significant factor in sustaining unequal access to and experience of higher education for different student groups, (2) despite government and institutional aspirations to expand higher education, students' desires for university are not a given among new target populations and (3) while universities are seeking to enroll different students in greater numbers, the challenge now is how to give greater voice to this difference. Drawing on these themes of mobility, aspiration and voice and taking recent changes to higher education policy in Australia as the case, the paper presents a new conceptual framework for thinking about student equity in HE. The framework extends from established approaches that focus on "barriers" to accessing higher education in order to focus on people's "capacities" in relation to higher education participation. (Contains 5 notes.)

This paper provides a critical review of papers in this special issue on Bourdieu and practice. What is different about this collection is that, in analysing policy and practice through a Bourdieusian lens, the thinking tools of field, disposition (collective and individual), logics of practice and doxa have been mobilised with regard to the "social practices" of educational policy--its production, circulation and reception. First, these papers illustrate how, as a field, education has its own language, boundaries and power relations informed by particular modes of distinction and legitimation around different forms of capital formation, thus providing explanations for both social mobility and social stratification. Second, this collection foregrounds "policy as practice" in terms of the social practices involved in the production of policy, the practices involved with the articulation and vernacularisation of policy through the processes of its reception, as well as the intent and effects of policy changing practice. Third, in focusing on specific policy problematics in higher education and schools, teacher professional development, leadership and educational reform, these contributions illustrate multiple methodological approaches as to how Bourdieu's thinking tools can be used to theorise educational policy, change, practice and effects. The value of Bourdieu's work lies on getting past the impasses between divisions between material and cultural analyses, between the materialist and linguistic focus, by talking about social practices, what people are doing, how they are thinking and how they are acting.

Ideas about what makes a good teacher are important in thinking about educational reform, and have come into focus recently. These ideas are contested and open to change. The first part of this paper traces models of the good teacher in Australia from the colonial-era good servant, through an ideal of the autonomous scholar-teacher, to contemporary lists of teacher competencies. The second part looks more closely at the incoherent but insistent way the good teacher is now defined under neoliberal governance by teacher registration authorities. The third part of the paper makes proposals for a new understanding of good teachers: based on understanding the labour process and occupational dynamics of teaching, the intellectual structure of Education studies, and the overall logic of education itself. (Contains 1 note.)

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 restricted in this neoliberal climate and policy framework. I argue that there is an urgent need to restore notions of educational and social responsibility to the forefront of educational policy making. In particular, I argue, if educational success for all students is to be a key aim of education (and surely most commentators would claim it should be), then schools will have to ensure that they reach out to all students and their communities, welcome them, and engage them in learning that is relevant and meaningful to their lives within their particular social, cultural and economic circumstances. (Contains 2 notes.)

This paper explores the spatial dimensions of neoliberalism, in relation to educational policy change in the inner-city of Sydney, Australia. It offers a response to Peck and Tickell's challenge that studies of neoliberalism are often undertaken as discrete macro- or micro-analyses without attention to the links between, and across, these scales. The paper posits the notion of "neoliberal spatial technologies," a bricolage of neoliberalism, governmentality and relational space, to contribute to cross-scalar understandings of neoliberalism in relation to inner-city educational policy change. An adumbrated analysis is presented of the practices surrounding the outcome of educational policy change in inner-Sydney. The paper concludes that these practices, drawing on discourses of neoliberalism and relational space, constitute particular students as possible neoliberal educational subjects. (Contains 7 notes.)

The paper reports on an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with staff from four Australian universities. These universities are shown to be undergoing significant social change as processes of marketisation impact on the everyday practices of academic workers. The universities are analysed as sites of contestation between the new professional managers and the established academic profession over the control of the conditions of work, the production of expert knowledge and the worksite itself. The theory of academic capitalism is examined, and the relevance of Bourdieu's work for the analysis of a university sector in a context of marketisation is assessed. Bourdieu's interlinked concepts of capital, habitus and the field are employed to investigate the nature of the contestation, revealing a dynamic process in which academics innovatively respond to threats to reduce their autonomy, to increased levels of surveillance and other constraints on practice. In addition, the study illustrates the processes through which actors within the sector, through acts of both conformity and resistance, contribute collectively to the growth of academic capitalism in the neoliberal university.

Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of "scaling up". This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement "what works" across all schools. In this paper, I use Bourdieu's notions of misrecognition to consider the current orthodoxies of scaling up. I argue that the focus on "process" and "implementation problems": (1) both obscures and legitimates the ways in which the field logics of practice actually work and, (2) produces/reproduces the inequitable distribution of educational benefits (capitals and life opportunities). I suggest that the notion of misrecognition might provide a useful lens through which to examine reform initiatives and explanations of their success/failure.

Bourdieu argued that his research was biographical: he sought to reflexively understand the social production of many of his life experiences without resorting to the illusion that they were unique, a-historical and transparent. To this end he systematically developed and applied a methodological toolkit, built around the concepts of field, capitals and habitus. Following Bourdieu's argument about the social-personal, I seek in this paper to focus in on the position of the headteacher. I argue that post-WW2, headteachers in England and Australia have pushed for more and more freedom and autonomy arguing "I/we know what's best for my/our school. They [local authority, central office, politicians and policymakers] don't. If only they would give me/us the resources, stop interfering and leave me/us alone, we could just get on with it." Mobilising Bourdieu, I sketch an argument that the quest for freedom is (re)produced as a disposition necessary for headteacher/principal practice in a de- and re-centralising schooling field. I offer this as a possible agenda for further research. (Contains 1 note.)

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 particular, we argue that this example of the mediatisation of education policy has worked to stifle pedagogical innovation as advocates of middle schooling reform struggle against what appears to be a backlash to the social-democratic reforms of the post-World War II era. Such backlash politics is understood in terms of a struggle to maintain the role of teachers as curriculum designers and not be merely technicians; to sustain critically reflective learning communities of colleagues and friends; and not succumb to pedagogies of resentment that are driven by a logic of deficit views of students and their communities. (Contains 6 notes.)

This paper explores the trend towards a decentred social organization of learning that has become evident over the last 30-40 years. This is illustrated by the shifting imagery of education, from the red brick school to dispersed learning networks, or "learning bubbles", that constitute new learning spaces. In the context of our large funded research project that aims to assess new learning spaces, we problematize this decentring of education and consider theoretical social and spatial resources that help us to understand this shift in the social organization of learning. We draw these insights together as suggestions for framing a socio-spatial research agenda and the key themes that help us to interrogate decentring and the emergence of new learning spaces, how these trends are manifest in educational practices, and the implications for affective learning, learners and their life chances. (Contains 2 figures and 3 notes.)