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This article examines the accounts of actions undertaken by Early Career Teachers (ECTs) recently graduated from a social justice-oriented Initial Teacher Education (ITE) program and employed in complex school settings with high levels of student diversity, disadvantage, and poverty. The study drew on theories of teacher agency and agency more broadly to examine the workshadowing observations of the teachers' practice in classrooms augmented by their reflective accounts in interviews. The study found that the ECTs' agency, or contextualised social action, can be conceptualised as temporally embedded social engagement directed at addressing their students' cultural, social and academic needs. The teachers drew on past learnings from their ITE program, committed to future-oriented innovations in teaching, and made in-the-present decisions about actions to resolve emergent contingencies such as resource shortages. We argue that these understandings are usefully enhanced by recognising contingency, consciousness, criticality and creativity as additional features of the teachers' deliberative programs of action.

This article examines teachers' work as part of the everyday life of classrooms, schools and communities--as curriculum design, dynamic pedagogies and as an oeuvre which is assembled over time. One of the hardest aspects of the everyday work of teachers, and perhaps one of the most under-rated and under-studied, is listening, really listening. This article firstly explores the dangers of teachers not listening. Secondly, it highlights the contributions of teacher researchers who take students and their worlds seriously. We argue that teachers listening to students in the context of their communities can underpin responsive pedagogies and creative curriculum design, which in turn can allow students to assemble repertoires of complex communication practices for representation, participation and taking action. Finally, we speculate about how, over time, teachers, as artists, assemble an oeuvre--an assemblage of curriculum design and responsive pedagogies which could inform teacher education and research.

The fields of science and literacy education continue to be shaped by pervasive gender inequality. Previous research has documented how the formation of a 'science identity' is contingent on access to science capital while research in literacy education continues to highlight how boys struggle in their literacy acquisition. Despite a robust scholarship on gendered literacy practices and gender in STEM subjects, to date, there has been little investigation of the relationships between boys' science identity/ies and their literacy practices. We draw on a case study of 24 middle school boys living and learning in two different regions (e.g. metropolitan, rural) where we focus on how boys conceive of themselves as learners in two curriculum areas: science and literacy. Bridging multiple areas of scholarship (e.g., science literacy, science identity, boys in schooling), we concentrate on the participants' "self-belief in science" and "self-belief as readers" and consider the way they inform each other in reference to place. The implications of our study concern how the "science literate boy" comes to be in reference to the construction of discursive performances of science masculinities and how they are maintained alongside literate identities.

Parental involvement in schooling has been shown to have a positive impact on children's educational outcomes. With changing mathematics curricula and pedagogical approaches as a context, we explore how mathematical dispositions emerge through gendered and classed experiences with mathematics homework. We share the experiences of mothers from eight Canadian families as they negotiate mathematics homework with their children. We consider the impact of their differing access to resources and highlight the way mathematics homework disrupts family time, creates tension, and contributes to a sense of inadequacy for some mothers. This results in mothers and children having negative experiences with mathematics homework, which can lead to the compounding of intergenerational negative mathematical dispositions and identities.

The importance of community has been widely recognised in the field of early childhood education. However, the various ways it has been conceived, together with taken-for-granted notions of education, have made it difficult to actualise the processes involved in contextually meaningful ways. This article draws on cultural models theory to explore educational leaders' re-imagining and redesigning of early childhood educational learning communities in a range of diverse settings. The examination of the processes and artefacts used to promote democratic identities and agency highlights the significance of establishing shared principles, sociality and challenging power relations to engage in processes of communing that are contextually meaningful, sustainable and democratic.

Improving the quality of education for young people growing up in high poverty and culturally diverse communities is an escalating problem in affluent nations with increasing gaps between the wealthy and the poor. Improving the quality of teachers and improving the quality of teaching are amongst the prominent solutions offered to redress the differences between student academic performances related to socio-economic family circumstances. This article examines the different discourses of "quality" in relation to the preparation of pre-service teachers to work in high poverty schools such as graduates of the National Exceptional Teaching for Disadvantaged Schools pre-service teacher education program. Key tenets of "quality teacher" and "quality teaching" solutions are summarized along with their critiques. An alternative approach starting from a position of social justice is considered. This approach situates the work of teaching within high poverty school communities and considers what pre-service teachers need to understand and learn to do with respect to context.

This article disrupts dominant discourses around boys and reading that often homogenise young males as reluctant, disengaged and, at times, adversarial readers. Rather than essentialising boys, we argue there is a need for a more sophisticated knowledge base about the influences, constraints and diverse experiences of boys as readers in society today. Drawing on interviews (n = 30) with Year 4 (8 to 9-year-old) boys at six schools, we consider their personal recounts of their enjoyment in reading, their preferred reading choices and narratives related to their experiences as readers at school. Analysis highlights boys' emerging reading interests, sophisticated and specific reading preferences, and changes in reading identities over time. Boys' preferences for particular fiction authors, novel series and genres dispute the common assumption in educational contexts that boys prefer to engage with non-fiction books. This finding is significant, as negative gendered stereotypes can impact on boys' reading self-concepts. It is also critical given Jerrim and Moss's recent research highlighting the importance of fiction in the development of reading skills. We consider implications for pedagogical practices that broaden reading experiences for the diversity of emerging masculine reading identities in nations such as Australia, where there is an absence of reading for pleasure in education policies.

Building on work that brings literacy instruction and student science learner identity together, this study addresses a gap in research related to student experiences as readers in middle school science classrooms. To understand student perceptions of pedagogical approaches to reading in science, we asked 45 middle school students to reflect on what sort of reading participation was valued in their classroom and what they thought characterised a good learner in science. Findings show that evaluative reading is not perceived as central to learning; rather, a transmission pedagogic model of reading with an overreliance on fact sheets, worksheets and PowerPoint was reported. Students also drew attention to how listening to the teacher for information and following instructions related to practical activities is integral to a 'good science student' identity. Findings suggest that beliefs about what is valued in science classrooms has implications for science learner identities.

Few studies in science education have examined how place-based experiences influence students' STEM career aspirations. Rural school students' lived experiences of place and non-traditional STEM career aspirations such as farming are scarcely considered in dominant narratives around science aspirations and career pathways. Adopting a critical relational perspective that considers place as a lived experience we ask "How do rural Australian students' ethnogeographies related to people and place influence their STEM career aspirations?" Drawing on a broader study (n = 45) of science aspirations, we focus on semi-structured interviews with six middle school students (13-14 years of age) in rural Australia who aspire to be farmers. Thematic analysis of the data demonstrates students' intended careers as farmers relate to their "connections to people" and "belonging to place." This article works through rural-urban binaries to present a counternarrative that legitimises farming as an important STEM career for young people and challenges dominant narratives around post-compulsory participation in senior secondary school and tertiary science as the ideal or only career pathway. Finally, implications of our findings for designing place-conscious school science education are discussed. This includes place-attentive strategies related to policy, pathways, and practice that appreciate the complex realities, strengths, and inequities in rural communities.

This article explores how early-career teachers working in high-poverty schools in Australia account for their decision-making during critical classroom incidents. Classroom management solutions are problematized by investigating how two teachers take up particular positions, make decisions, and enact what they believe to be 'quality teaching' in context. Through a combination of interviews and observations of teachers "in situ," we examine what these teachers do, why they do it, what informs their decisions, and how they reflect on their actions. The complexity of teachers' work in schools located in high-poverty areas is highlighted. We argue that both early-career teachers prefer to position themselves within 'pastoral', in contrast to 'disciplinarian', discourses, as part of constituting the school as a site of possibility and teachers who advocate for youth growing up in poverty.

The authors explore the possibility that school literacy practices sent home as homework are changing family reading interactions by adding to the tasks that teachers expect parents to undertake. The authors consider how reading, formerly an elective leisure practice between parents and their children, has been reorganized and how this positions parents differently. The authors also examine teachers' views on the importance of parents reading to their children and teachers' expectations of parents to support school literacy practices in the form of homework. Evidence that teachers now depend on parents to support school-based literacy practices and how this serves to change the nature of literacy practices in the home is discussed.

The satellite city of Elizabeth, located 30 km north of South Australia's capital Adelaide, was established in the 1950s as an experiment in urban sociological planning, populated with new arrivals and hailed as the 'City of Tomorrow'. By the 1970s, it had declined into one of the most disadvantaged communities in South Australia, with intergenerational unemployment, poverty and social dysfunction leading to disengagement and disenfranchisement of the current generation of young people living there. In 2007 the local council developed a community facility to attract young people into creative learning and expression through music and the performing arts. This was the council's response to its shared responsibility for caring for the young people in its community and their personal, social and educational wellbeing. 'Northern Sound System' offers programs and resources for contemporary music composing, recording and performance. This article reports on the affordances of applying a youth participatory inquiry approach in a study in Elizabeth, to establish young people's views on music and the creative arts in relation to their lifeworlds, in particular their interests, personal wellbeing and social interactions. Most young people reported music played a large part in maintaining a positive outlook. However, there were differences in how young men and women talked about the creative arts in their lives, which may have implications for the provision of programs and safe spaces for young people to 'hang out' and engage in creative pursuits.

This article is a call to literacy teachers and researchers to embrace the possibility of attending more consciously to the senses in digital media production. Literacy practices do not occur only in the mind, but involve the sensoriality, embodiment, co-presence, and movement of bodies. This paper theorises the sensorial and embodied dimension of children's filmmaking about place in two communities in Australia. The films were created by pre-teen Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Logan, Queensland, and by Indigenous teenagers at the Warralong campus of the Strelley Community School in remote Western Australia. The films were created through engagement in cross-curricular units that sensitised the students' experience of local places, gathering corporeal information through their sensing bodies as they interacted with the local ecology. The analysis highlights how the sensorial and bodily nature of literacy practice through documentary filmmaking was central to the children's formation and representation of knowledge, because knowledge and literacy practices are not only acquired through the mind, but are also reliant on embodiment, sensoriality, co-presence, and kinesics of the body in place.

Examining how young children learn to write is increasingly important as global society moves further towards a knowledge economy, where the production of texts of various kinds is an increasingly ubiquitous practice in everyday life and work. While there has been recent policy and practice focus on children's writing performance in standardised tests, in this article, the authors focus on what can be learned by listening to children's voices as they are engaged in 'draw and talk' methodologies. While children's drawings have a material reality, they are also representations of children's perceptions of their experiences with learning to write. In this article, the authors explore the processes, practices and relationships involved in learning to write, depicted in children's drawings when they are asked to draw themselves learning to write. The authors identify representations of writing, evident in the children's drawings focusing the relational, the material and the spatial elements of writing.

Lately I have been thinking and writing about the idea of a teacher's oeuvre -- the notion that over time teachers create a significant body or work that might be compared to that of an artist or composer. I have argued that too often the contributions that teachers make remain invisible, under-valued and unknown in the field of education. This is true certainly when compared to the impact of educational theorists and researchers. Classroom teachers are rarely remembered beyond the local networks in which they have practised. In taking up this opportunity to honor the contribution of Allan Luke as an educational scholar, researcher and theorist, I will argue that, along with his publications, his oeuvre also necessarily includes his work as a teacher and teacher educator in institutional and everyday situations; hence I will refer to my experiences as a student, colleague, collaborator and friend. Being a researcher necessarily involves personal, professional and political dimensions because scholarly personae and milieu extend beyond the university into everyday life.

School-age populations in many nations are becoming increasingly diverse (in terms of languages, countries of origin, ethnicity, faith traditions and so on) especially in low socio-economic communities where recent arrivals tend to be accommodated. In Australian classrooms, it is not unusual for a single classroom to include children who speak many different languages. Their family trajectories to their current dwellings and lifeworlds may be very different from each other. Catastrophic weather events and other disasters change the very landscapes in which families and teachers work. At the same time, what constitutes literacy continues to evolve as new technologies and communication media enable different forms of meaning-making. Yet simultaneously, what counts as literacy is increasingly "fixed" by the normative demands of high-stakes, standardised tests. This paper employs Hilary Janks' (2010) synthesis model of critical literacy to explore some of the risk and possibilities for innovative and equitable pedagogy inherent in this contemporary demographic, policy and practice mix. (Contains 1 table and 5 footnotes.)

The enduring nature of the problem of inequality in education suggests that new ways of understanding and ameliorating it are needed. Non-representational ontology is yielding new insights in other fields but is yet to gain traction in education. The requisite ontological shift would attend to inequality as a specific material effect of practices of knowing, rather than a social, natural, or discursive reality requiring representation. In this paper, we investigate the potential of such a shift to advance our fundamental commitment to social change through equity and justice. Drawing mainly upon the work of Karen Barad, we offer a reconceptualistion of educational inequality as a doing, not a thing, which becomes meaningful as it is defined by the circumstances required to measure it. We re-examine data collected during a recently completed longitudinal study of schools in the northern-rustbelt-suburbs of Adelaide, specifically the phenomenon of teaching literacy in the classrooms of two teachers in one school in our completed study.

The increased regulation of teachers' work is a global phenomenon across education sectors. In Australia the governance of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) embeds international priorities for quality improvement in educational programmes. The implementation of a National Quality Framework (NQF) for the assessment of ECEC services has mobilised the production of a suite of regulatory texts. The regulation of teachers' work is legitimised through the discourse of quality embedded in policy guidelines. Drawing on interview data from preschool teachers, this paper employs institutional ethnography (IE) to investigate teachers' accounts of producing a Quality Improvement Plan. As teachers operationalise the expectations of quality assurance in the NQF, their work is oriented to gathering evidence of an approved quality of practice. The findings indicate a shift in professional focus to increased documentation of 'quality of practice', goal setting and evidence of the collaborative construction of Quality Improvement Plans.

In this paper, we draw on accounts from students to inform a Middle Schooling movement that has been variously described as "arrested", "unfinished" and "exhausted". We propose that if the Middle Schooling movement is to understand the changing worlds of students and develop new approaches in the middle years of schooling, then it is important to draw on the insights that individual students can provide by conducting research with "students-as-informants". The early adolescent informants to this paper report high hopes for their futures (despite their lower socio-economic surroundings), which reinforces the importance of supporting successful learner identities and highlights the role of schooling in the decline of adolescent student aspirations. However, their insights did not stop at the individual learner, with students also identifying cultural and structural constraints to reform. As such, we argue that students may be both an important resource for inquiry into individual school reform and for the Middle Schooling movement internationally. (Contains 2 notes and 1 table.)

This article examines the resources, tools, and opportunities children enact as they engage with teacher-devised writing experiences within their classroom space. We begin with discussion about classroom writing time from the perspective of both the teacher and children of one Grade 1/2 composite class. We also reveal resources within the classroom space to consider the expertise available during writing times. We then examine a 5-week unit that focused on multimodal text construction. Using optical flow computer vision analysis to examine the movement of children during four video-recorded independent writing instances, we provide commentary about how the classroom writing experiences have been interpreted as the use of space, resources, and interactions come to the forefront. In taking this approach, this article will explore learning to write from a sociomaterial perspective, as we investigate the operation of the classroom.

This article explores the possible relationships between geography, literacy, pedagogy, and poverty. It characterizes poverty as a wicked problem, which sees economic inequality escalating in a number of neoliberal democracies. Key insights from theorists of economic inequality are summarized. The enduring nature of poverty in particular places is noted, and the associated risks of "fickle literacies" are considered. A case study of one child growing up and attending school in a location with intergenerational unemployment is discussed as an example of the risks associated with literacy policy and pedagogy in an era of global educational reform. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Massey, it is argued that despite the discourses of standardization, teachers can continue to educate culturally diverse young people in ways that help them to negotiate and imagine positive and productive ways of learning together. The possibilities for working against deficit views of people in poverty are explored through three classroom examples of place-conscious pedagogies which position young people as critically literate cosmopolitan citizens. The article concludes by advocating the need for translocal research alliances to work explicitly for social justice through place-conscious pedagogies and critical literacy education.

The educational research and policy scene in Australia over the past decade has featured a number of contradictory developments. National policy has sponsored more interdisciplinary and applied research, while moving down a Research Quality Framework pathway which prioritises measurable quality and impact measures. At the same time, recent international and national policies in literacy education have been dominated by a psychological (rather than socio-cultural) view of literacy, wrapped within a discourse that valorises "evidence-based" practice. As literacy researchers coming from an ethnographic, collaborative and critical tradition, we have had to be strategic to secure funding to continue our research agenda in innovative, ethical and scholarly ways. This paper uses the case of a recent research project to explore some of the ways in which our approaches have been contradictorily positioned within this policy context. (Contains 5 footnotes.)

Sourcing information related to socio‐scientific issues requires sophisticated literacies to read and evaluate conflicting accounts often signified by disagreement among experts, multiple solutions or misinformation. Much of the previous work exploring how young people approach conflicting information has tended to focus on students in the secondary and tertiary years, often taking an epistemic approach to analysis, rather than a literacies lens. At the heart of such endeavours, however, is the need for sophisticated reading skills accelerated by shifts to digital platforms to source information. Given the limited empirical studies in the field of literacy that articulate how middle school students approach sources of information, this study investigates 45 middle school students' (13–14 years of age) self‐reported strategies for investigating health risks associated with mobile phone use. We asked the students to imagine that a close friend was worried about the health risks of using their mobile phone and had asked them for advice. Students were then prompted to describe how they would search for information about the issue and how they would know if the information was reliable. Our analysis identified three dominant themes in the interview data, namely: (i) mistrust of the internet—people can be reliable sources; (ii) reliable sourcing requires consensus across sources; and (iii) criteria help to determine a reliable source. An interesting finding was the level of scepticism of the internet expressed by students. We draw on examples from the students' interview dialogue to illustrate the themes and engage in discourse related to their approaches including implications for teaching in English classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literacy skills are essential if students are to access knowledge and achieve academic success in middle school science. A key difficulty with interpreting literacy practices in any discipline is the problem of conceptualising what constitutes literacy. Our study contributes new understandings to the discipline of science where there are ongoing debates concerning the meaning of literacy and confusion regarding what constitutes essential literacies in the field. Our scoping review first identifies how literacy in middle school science is conceptualised in empirical studies published between 2006 and 2019 and, second, addresses a significant gap in understandings by identifying how dominant discourses inform practice. Specifically, our findings show the dominance of a narrow conception of literacy in the science classroom relating to skills-based pedagogic instruction. Based on our review, we conclude that the field of science requires a broadening of what constitutes literacy, and engagement with New Literacy Studies which focuses on literacy as a social practice closely interwoven with student identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers what it means to teach and learn in places of poverty through the narratives of front-line workers--particularly students and teachers. What is the work of teaching and learning in places of poverty in current times? How has this changed? What can be learned from both the haunting and hopeful narratives of front-line workers? Is it possible to continue to educate in these times and in ways that allow for critique, imagination and optimism? These questions are addressed by drawing from studies conducted over three decades in schools located in high-poverty neighbourhoods. Literacy education is considered as a particular case. Educational researchers need to remain on the front line with teachers and students in places of poverty because that is where some of the hardest work gets done. Reinvigorated democratic research communities would include teachers, school leaders, policy workers and young people.

Parental involvement in schooling has been shown to have a positive impact on children’s educational outcomes. With changing mathematics curricula and pedagogical approaches as a context, we explore how mathematical dispositions emerge through gendered and classed experiences with mathematics homework. We share the experiences of mothers from eight Canadian families as they negotiate mathematics homework with their children. We consider the impact of their differing access to resources and highlight the way mathematics homework disrupts family time, creates tension, and contributes to a sense of inadequacy for some mothers. This results in mothers and children having negative experiences with mathematics homework, which can lead to the compounding of intergenerational negative mathematical dispositions and identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the global escalation of gaps between rich and poor, contemporary work in critical literacy needs to overtly question the politics of poverty. How and where is poverty produced, by what means, by whom and for whom and how are educational systems stratified to provide different kinds of education to the rich and the poor? Yet rather than critical literacy, international educational reform movements stress performative standards on basic literacy. In this context literacy researchers need to ask policy-makers hard questions about taken-for-granted rhetoric that surrounds poverty, literacy and education. At school, regional and state levels, educational leaders need to argue for fair resourcing and decision-making for their communities and students. In classrooms teachers need to weave critical questioning and inclusive learning interactions into the fabric of everyday life.

This paper draws upon several decades of literacy research in schools in high-poverty environments to explore what matters in young people's education. In dialogue with themes from Kevin Marjoribanks' work, such as student aspirations, family environments and teacher expectations, key insights are summarised. Referring to longitudinal case studies and a current ethnographic project, the interplay between literacy, poverty and schooling, and young people's aspirations and education outcomes is explored. Although the work of educators in high-poverty communities continues to be highly demanding, there are some schools and teachers making a durable positive difference to learner dispositions and literate repertoires. Teacher expectations and discursive practices are crucial in this process.

The fields of science and literacy education continue to be shaped by pervasive gender inequality. Previous research has documented how the formation of a 'science identity' is contingent on access to science capital while research in literacy education continues to highlight how boys struggle in their literacy acquisition. Despite a robust scholarship on gendered literacy practices and gender in STEM subjects, to date, there has been little investigation of the relationships between boys' science identity/ies and their literacy practices. We draw on a case study of 24 middle school boys living and learning in two different regions (e.g. metropolitan, rural) where we focus on how boys conceive of themselves as learners in two curriculum areas: science and literacy. Bridging multiple areas of scholarship (e.g., science literacy, science identity, boys in schooling), we concentrate on the participants' self-belief in science and self-belief as readers and consider the way they inform each other in reference to place. The implications of our study concern how the science literate boy comes to be in reference to the construction of discursive performances of science masculinities and how they are maintained alongside literate identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As educators encounter a policy landscape where increasingly the education lexicon includes keywords such as data, evidence, quality, and standards, it is interesting to revisit Garth Boomer's contribution regarding teachers as researchers. In "Fair Dinkum Teaching and Learning," Boomer (1985) clearly named at least two key problems that the author believes still face the educational community. First, drawing on the sociologist Basil Bernstein, he explained that schools typically contribute to the reproduction of educational success and failure, whereby some students come "to believe that they are capable of seeking, possessing, and banking on knowledge" (Boomer, 1985, p. 122) and "the other group, those who fail, tend to believe that knowledge is 'elsewhere,' not to be possessed, to be deferred to, rebelled against, or distrusted." Second, he named the divide between what he called "big R" research, which he saw as "a postgraduate luxury," and what actually goes on in schools (which he argued are not thinking and learning institutions). In this article, the author revisits what she has learned from her collaborative work with teacher-researchers, with Boomer's key messages in mind.

Schools bring people together. Yet for many children there are major discontinuities between their lives in and out of school and such differences impact on literacy teaching and learning in both predictable and unpredictable ways. However if schools were reconceptualised as meeting places, where different people are thrown together (Massey, 2005) curriculum and pedagogy could be designed to take into account students' and teachers' different experiences and histories and to make those differences a resource for literacy learning. This paper draws on a long-term project with administrators and teachers working in a school situated in a site of urban regeneration and significant demographic shifts. It draws particularly on the ways in which one teacher re-positioned her grade 4/5 students as researchers, designers and journalists exploring student and staff memories of a school. It argues that place, and people's relationships with places, can be a rich resource for literacy learning when teachers make it the object of study.

As part of this special issue on 'Literacy for social justice', and at this moment of post‐pandemic transitions in education, we invited Professor Barbara Comber to reflect on the needs for and trends in critical literacy education, both in her local context, in Australia, and internationally. In September 2022, we met with Barbara online to discuss her thoughts about what critical literacy educators need, how scholars and educators can work together to produce change, and where we can see hope in critical literacy and social justice education right now, as part of promising anti‐racist, decolonizing, and intersectional literacy frameworks and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how mandated literacy assessment is reorganising teachers' work in the context of Australia's National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy, which was implemented in 2008. Students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are tested annually, with school results publicly available. The wider policy context and the emergence of different forms of interconnected educational work associated with the testing phenomenon are described. Taking an institutional ethnography approach, the local effects of the federal policy regime are examined through a case study of one school. What mandated literacy assessment "does" to educators' work in a culturally diverse low-socioeconomic school community is discussed. Key themes include strategic exclusions of students from the testing process, appropriations and adaptations of literacy theory, work intensification and ethical mediation of results. Questions concerning equity are raised about the differential effects of policy in different school contexts. (Contains 13 notes.)

Mandated literacy assessment is now a ubiquitous practice in many western educational systems. While educational researchers, principals, teachers and education unions continue to offer vociferous resistance in some nations, in others it is now commonplace in the educational landscape and built into the rhythms of the school year. This paper is taken from a current project in which we are looking ethnographically to see how national policies are mediated in different institutional contexts--specifically in state and regional policy sites and in schools. Here we discuss some of the ways in which mandated literacy assessment, specifically the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), is reorganising principals' work. First, we examine the ways in which the principal is positioned in official policy documents to show the way that the actual uses of test result are euphemised in these materials, emphasising mainly individual support for students, while inserting principals into a web of responsibilities to mediate participation in the tests. We then move to examine the way that the work of one principal in a diverse school setting is impacted to show how a great deal of new work has arisen; work that is very complex in a setting where families are not confident with literacy themselves and having to deal with English as a second language. We show that principals, especially, are asked to take responsibility for both increasing school and student performance on the one hand, while maintaining the fiction that the tests are simply for student support on the other. Much of this work is becoming normalised and invisible even while the major burden is felt by professionals in schools serving poor or diverse communities. This paper attempts to make such processes more visible to scrutiny and evaluation by the teachers and school leaders. (Contains 2 tables and 1 note.)

This paper argues for the need for critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability that often promotes reading comprehension as readily assessable through students answering multiple choice questions of unseen texts. Based upon a 1 year study investigating literacy in Years 4-9 the ways strong-performing primary schools develop serious and in-depth reading for learning are explored. School and teacher features which allow for the development of sophisticated pedagogical repertoires and space for critical reading comprehension, without losing the complexity of curriculum offerings, are outlined. How one experienced middle primary teacher operates strategically, ethically and critically in supporting her ESL students to learn to read is illustrated. The teacher's work is situated within the complex accountability demands faced by classroom teachers. This was accomplished by a teacher whose pedagogical repertoire has been assembled across a career teaching in low-SES high ESL communities in a school with a balanced literacy program and high level of collegial support. Risks for schools and teachers whose circumstances work against their capacities for prioritisation and strategic decision-making are identified and discussed.