Search

This paper considers the implications of the current landscape of education policy reform in Australian schooling. We argue that the decontextualisation of education policy enactments and the eschewing of concerns relevant at the local level of the school over the past two decades have prompted various reform agendas to fail. We contend that recognition of the deep contextualisation of schools is paramount in any attempt at renewal. Therefore, it is at the local school-level that reform agendas can and should be directed by the pedagogical and innovative work of educators. We focus on ‘relational pedagogy’ because it offers opportunities to enact school-wide reform and enhance the professional capacities of educators as pedagogical innovators. Contemporary education reform agendas are best situated and registered within school sites and relational pedagogy stands as a deeply contextualised provocation for enacting school renewal. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Our contribution to this collection responds through collaborative writing to the editors’ summons for writing that aspires to “free impulses to generate different creations and different connections” (p. 8). During our 2014-15 collaborative writing project at Edinburgh we – a group of faculty and students – engaged in writing and creating practices that asked us to think again about citationality. We found ourselves borrowing each other’s words and phrases to inspire new writing of our own; we took cues from each other’s breathing and sighs; we riffed off each other’s movements and gestures. Our processes were iterative, relational, affectively responsive: tightly bounded understandings of citation fail to recognise the ubiquity of the indirect citational practices in which we all are continuously involved. In this paper we draw from and inquire into these practices, thinking with Deleuze and Guattari as we become-monstrous in our collaborations. Citing all the while.