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With increasing competition and metrics focusing on teaching quality (e.g. the teaching excellence framework or TEF), there is a spotlight on learning and teaching (L&T) in policies and practices within universities. Bodies at national and institutional levels focus on disseminating policy ideas on L&T which are oriented to government priorities. This article focuses on how policy itself is discursively constructed in selected L&T policy documents and explores the means of the recontextualisation of policy discourses. I discuss the following three findings: (1) the construction of policy as 'embedded within processes and practices', (2) shifts in genre and discursive strategies as policy ideas become short guidelines and (3) the role of 'discursive mechanisms' in forcing engagement with policy ideas. Through an analysis of discursive strategies and recontextualisation, I demonstrate the seeming insecurity around policy compliance and show how constructions of L&T are never value-free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the context of a critical discourse historiographical (CDH) approach to critical discourse studies (CDS), this article applies a range of theories to the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, or Hong Kong Occupy Movement, to understand it as a discursive event. The CDH approach argues that a diachronic, historiographical approach can contribute to historiography, the writing of history, in that it can create first readings and interpretations of important events. The approach focuses on critical moments in discourse, of which the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement is considered an important one in the context of Hong Kong’s ongoing socio-historical development. Four theories are applied, in addition to the historical analysis, to further interpret the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement phenomenon: social movement theory, performance theory, identity theory and social action as text theory. It is concluded that the CDH approach to CDS and findings of the study may be useful in the consideration of other social movements and Occupy movements globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]