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Increasingly mediatised policy processes influence practice in schools as education becomes a site of parental anxiety and choice exacerbated by standardised national assessment and ranking of schools in the media. This paper analyses the responses to media scrutiny of six principals whose schools’ national test results were reported in the Australian press following the release of the federal Labour Government’s MySchool website in 2010. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, the concept of cross-field effects, and associated research on mediatisation, the evidence suggests that the relationships between the press, education policy and schools are highly contested, and that principals have some agency in talking back regarding their school’s reported ‘performance’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students' results on national literacy and numeracy tests - the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) - in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers' learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as 'enactment') of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students' learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we draw on pro-feminist, anti-essentialist espistemological and theoretical frameworks, in conjunction with adopting autoethnographic narratives, both to provide critical insight into and contextualize the particular testimony and witnessing of our own personal involvement in the gendering of a government-commissioned research project on boys’ education. The research project was undertaken in a politically volatile environment, when the ‘what about the boys?’ debate was at its zenith in Australia. As pro-feminist men attempting to ameliorate some of the negative impacts of the boys’ debate, whilst contributing to the new sociology of masculinities field, we had to negotiate a complex gender politics operating within the bureaucracy, including aligning with allies, to undertake this research in ways that remained honest to our own politics and the research evidence we collected. Our experiences and negotiation of the gendered and politicized relationships between the bureaucrats who commissioned the research and us as researchers constitute the foci of this paper. The paper demonstrates the ways in which doing research produces a ‘set of findings’ beyond those that are the subject of the research questions. The approach adopted in the research rejected ‘epistemological innocence’ by making evident our own ‘positionalities’ and in so doing demonstrates the ways in which this research was socially framed, managed and contested and tells us much about the topic of the research and about the gendering of research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Australia, fluoridation was first endorsed as an effective, safe and equitable means of improving population oral health over fifty years ago. However, recent opposition to attempts to introduce the measure in several regional Victorian towns has demonstrated that it remains a highly controversial health policy. This paper investigates the history of the Victorian fluoridation debate within a national and international context. It finds that although the evidence concerning fluoridation has advanced considerably, the essential arguments put forward by proponents and opponents have remained largely unchanged over that time. Protagonists incorporate the same scientific evidence yet come to polarised and unshakeable conclusions. I argue that the concept of deep structure ideation is a useful means to understand how this occurs. Furthermore, analysis of the ideas and social processes that determine a partisan position in the fluoridation debate makes this an important case study for approaching other durable scientific controversies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]