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In this paper we respond to this special issue's critical focus on mental health in education by considering the medicalised and homogenising approaches to the mental health of young people and the severely negative consequences for young people. Our argument is underpinned by the need to destabilise the hegemony of the current dominant discourses and practices of mental health used in education. The problem with these discourses and practices, informed by particular forms of psychiatry and psychology, is precisely their dominance and their popularised proxy take-up of these. We firstly outline this problem, explore the emergence and saturation of a 'damaged self' in education and consider the impact on young people. We offer counter-narratives that involve a reframing of the self in relation to ethics, politics, capability and the arts and can assist in countering the psy-dominance in education. The paper concludes with some reflections on how teachers might work against the damaging effects of the psy-disciplines and instead support young people in finding their counter-narrative selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shotgun metagenomic sequencing of the collective genomic information carried across microbial communities is emerging as a powerful approach for monitoring antibiotic resistance in environmental matrices. Metagenomics is advantageous in that known and putative antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) (i.e., the resistome) can be screened simultaneously without a priori selection of targets. Additionally, as new ARGs are discovered and catalogued, stored sequencing data can be reanalyzed to assess the prevalence of emerging genes or pathogens. However, best practices for metagenomic data generation and processing are needed to support comparability across space and time. To support reproducible downstream analysis, guidance is first needed with respect to sampling design, sample preservation and storage, DNA extraction, library preparation, sequencing depth, and experimental controls. Here we conducted a systematic review to assess current practices for the application of metagenomics for AR profiling of wastewater, recycled water, and surface water and to offer recommendations to support comparability in the collection, production, and analysis of resulting data. Based on integrated analysis of findings and data reported across 95 articles identified, a field to benchtop metagenomic workflow is discussed for optimizing the representativeness and comparability of generated data. Through the reanalysis of 1474 publicly-available metagenomes, appropriate sequencing depths per environment and uniform normalization strategies are provided. Further, there is opportunity to harness the quantitative capacity of metagenomics more overtly through inclusion of sequencing controls. The recommendations will amplify the overall value of the metagenomic data generated to support within and between study comparisons, now and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both academic and policy spaces, learning is often cast as lifelong, dynamic, constructive and in particular, agentic. Despite this focus students' voices are rarely privileged in these spaces – especially in policy. We respond to this oversight by deploying Foucault's theories of knowledge to explore how students understand themselves as learners, considering this alongside dominant political and academic discursive constructions of learning. Using a metaphor card approach, we explored metaphors for learning articulated by students in longitudinal focus group interviews. Conducted over a two-year period with 47 students from four Western Sydney schools, student metaphors for learning were diverse and wide-ranging, frequently reflecting strategic approaches to learning that aligned with requirements of high stakes exit exams. Significantly, student descriptions of themselves as exhausted, passive containers of impermanent learning were at odds with national and international policy and higher education constructions of learning as 'lifelong and agentic'. This contradiction raises critical questions about students' experiences of learning in schools, the role of teacher education, and re-direction of university equity programmes aimed at increasing access and participation for educationally marginalised students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water environments are increasingly recognized as a conduit for the spread of antibiotic resistance, but there is need to standardize antibiotic resistance monitoring protocols to ensure comparability across studies. Quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) is attractive as a sensitive means of quantifying antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) and has been applied broadly over the past two decades to various water matrices. QPCR avoids challenges and biases associated with culture-based methods, providing a reproducible and highly sensitive measure of ARGs carried across a bacterial community. However, there are numerous quality assurance and other aspects of protocols that need to be addressed to ensure that measurements are representative and comparable across studies. Here we conducted a critical review to identify gene targets that are most commonly measured by qPCR to quantify antibiotic resistance in surface water, recycled water, and wastewater and to assess corresponding protocols. Identified targets monitored in water samples included sul1, tetA, and intI1, given their abundance and tendency to correlate with anthropogenic inputs, and vanA and blaCTX-M, as more rarely detected, but highly clinically-relevant targets. We identified 117 peer-reviewed studies meeting search criteria for application of these assays to water matrices of interest and systematically assessed the corresponding protocols, including sample collection and concentration, DNA extraction, primer/probe specificity, amplification conditions, amplicon length, PCR inhibition evaluation, and limit of detection/quantification. Gene copy numbers reported across studies were further compared by assay and water matrix. Based on this comprehensive evaluation, we recommend assays, standardized workflows, and reporting for the five target genes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mandatory Aboriginal education units of study in teacher education programmes are often constrained by overcrowded curriculum, time and classroom-based learning which limit opportunities to engage with and learn from local Aboriginal people and communities. Recognising these issues, at an urban Australian university two of the authors introduced 'Learning from Country' (LFC) cultural immersion experiences led by local Aboriginal community-based educators. These LFC experiences are now integral in several Aboriginal education electives. Emerging from these experiences, we developed an organic, iterative conceptual framework to articulate and make visible what LFC looks, feels and sounds like. In this paper we explain the LFC framework and discuss how it can be used to support preservice teachers to incorporate LFC principles into their professional practice and become part of their personal and professional identities in order to affect change in Aboriginal education in the schools and classrooms in which they will work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parent involvement in a child's education is usually viewed as integral for building educational participation. Critical work has examined the complexity of issues that work to exclude certain social and cultural 'groups', as well as practices that can work to build inclusion. This article sets out to contribute to the latter by examining how an approach we term strategic discourse production offers possibilities for practices of subjectivation that can deviate from the dominant discourse that portray parents who experience educational disadvantage as 'not involved' or 'not engaged' in their children's learning. Drawing on Foucault's work on practices of subjectivation, the article outlines the adaptation of social marketing techniques to create strategic discourse production. The article discusses Lead My Learning, an example of strategic discourse production that was guided by Australian Aboriginal Protocols. By drawing on Foucault's concepts of subjectivation and procedures of truth as well as his work on subjugated knowledges, strategic discourses of parental involvement in their children's education were produced. The article argues that this creates possibilities for an otherwise to be articulated, for parents to experience practices of subjectivation that prompt possibilities for forms of avowal that articulate their inclusion in the learning of their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A review of the article "Foucault as educator" by the author Stephen Ball which appeared in the 2017 issue is presented.

There are well documented concerns with the imposition of high stakes testing into the fabric of school education, and there is now an increasing focus on how such tests impact children’s ‘well-being’. This can be witnessed in reports in the popular news media, where discussion of these impacts frequently refer to ‘stress’ and ‘anxiety’. Yet, there is no work that is able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and children who are living this schooling in the day-to-day; whether this is best considered through the languages of ‘stress’; or what the implications – emotional, educational, embodied – of these experiences might be. This paper develops a transdisciplinary approach that brings social and biological accounts together in order to address the ‘more-than-social’ of the emotionality of childhood and schooling. We seek out opportunities for transdisciplinary connectivity and for new ways of seeing and knowing about learning. We consider what these ways of seeing and knowing might offer to education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) is a national, extra-curricular mentoring programme that is closing the educational gap for young Indigenous Australians. So what is AIME doing that is working so well? This article draws on a large-scale classroom ethnography to describe the pedagogies that facilitate the teacher–student relationships in this programme. We use Shawn Wilson’s theorisation of Indigenous ways of knowing in order to ‘unpack’ how these approaches succeeded in creating the egalitarian and trust-filled relationships reportedly experienced in the AIME programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on widening university participation and brings a focus on the classed and embodied nature of young people’s imagination to existing discussions. We interviewed 250 young people living in disadvantaged communities across five Australian states who had experienced disengagement from compulsory primary and secondary schooling. We asked them about their education and their educational futures, specifically how they imagined universities and university participation. For these young people, universities were imagined as ‘big’, ‘massive’ alienating schools. The paper explores how the elements of schooling from which these young people disengaged became tangible barriers to imagining and pursuing participation in university education. The primary barrier they described was their relationships with school teachers. Our analysis shows how relationships with teachers can impact the imagined improbability/probability of university participation. We offer suggestions for how barriers to university created by poor relationships with teachers may be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Educators in resettlement countries are grappling with ways to adequately engage and meet the needs of newly arrived refugee students. In this article we argue that to fully meet the needs of refugee students a deeper understanding of their educational experience as ‘a refugee’ prior to resettlement is vital. In particular we foreground the stories of three young former refugees and explore the ways in which they actively constructed new identities in order to access school in their host countries, prior to resettlement. This article discusses how the negative discursive positioning of ‘the refugee’ in the world today has limited the resources and access to education for young refugees. It concludes by arguing that as these students move into education in Australia there is a danger to quickly relabel young former refugees with deficit terms rather than opening up a discourse to include the intricate complexities of each refugee experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The principles of social inclusion have been embraced by institutions across the higher education sector but their translation into practice through pedagogy is not readily apparent. This paper examines perceptions of social inclusion and inclusive pedagogies held by academic staff at an Australian university. Of specific interest were the perceptions of teaching staff with regard to diverse student populations, particularly students from low socio-economic (LSES) backgrounds, given the institution's reasonably high proportion of LSES student enrolment (14%). A mixed-method approach was utilised: (i) in-depth interviews with a representative sample of academic staff and (ii) an online survey targeting all academic staff across the institution. The results point to the dual responsibilities of students and institutions in enacting inclusivity in order to move beyond reductive standpoints that simply apportion blame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the study that determined character representations of Autism SPectrum Disorders (ASD) in 15 films, using Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS2) assessment tool. Topics discussed include distribution for filmic autism-related symptoms representations skewed to the left, suggesting very high levels or extreme levels of autism-related symptoms, and higher than average symptoms presented in almost every CARS2 category than anticipated for average population affected by ASD.

Pesticides have a pervasive presence in aquatic ecosystems throughout the world. While pesticides are intended to control fungi, insects, and other pests, their mechanisms of action are often not specific enough to prevent unintended effects, such as on non-target microbial populations. Microorganisms, including algae and cyanobacteria, protozoa, aquatic fungi, and bacteria, form the basis of many food webs and are responsible for crucial aspects of biogeochemical cycling; therefore, the potential for pesticides to alter microbial community structures must be understood to preserve ecosystem services. This review examines studies that focused on direct population-level effects and indirect community-level effects of pesticides on microorganisms. Generally, insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides were found to have adverse direct effects on algal and fungal species. Insecticides and fungicides also had deleterious direct effects in the majority of studies examining protozoa species, although herbicides were found to have inconsistent direct effects on protozoans. Our synthesis revealed mixed or no direct effects on bacterial species among all pesticide categories, with results highly dependent on the target species, chemical, and concentration used in the study. Examination of community-level, indirect effects revealed that all pesticide categories had a tendency to reduce higher trophic levels, thereby diminishing top-down pressures and favoring lower trophic levels. Often, indirect effects exerted greater influence than direct effects. However, few studies have been conducted to specifically address community-level effects of pesticides on microorganisms, and further research is necessary to better understand and predict the net effects of pesticides on ecosystem health. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The medicalisation of the behaviour of children is a phenomenon that is attracting growing attention, with particular concern about the increased likelihood of children living in disadvantaged contexts receiving a medical diagnosis, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and treatment. This paper reports on a study of professionals involved with children experiencing behavioural problems. The professionals interviewed in this study articulated their own reservations about the medicalisation of children’s behaviour and revealed a number of strategies for interrupting the process towards diagnosis. These interruptions, analysed using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of deterriorialisation, took place along linguistic, visual and affective planes and were successful in encouraging teachers and head teachers to see alternatives to the medical route. The findings have implications for existing practice in the response to, and support for, behavioural problems and for teacher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we highlighted the stories of university student mentors who are involved in the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME). The AIME program works with young Indigenous school students, at primary and secondary school levels, to encourage continued participation in education and to consider university as a viable life goal. The AIME program is explored from the perspective of the university students who are selected to mentor young Australian Indigenous school students. Adopting a narrative inquiry approach, the article presents richly descriptive insight into the motivations of these mentors and highlights how this experience has impacted upon them. While the research presented focuses on narratives of mentors, the data indicate that the AIME program employs an innovative approach to mentoring that enhances cultural understanding for mentors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teaching in university education programmes, can, at times, involve the uncomfortable situation of discriminatory speech. A situation that has often occurred in our own teaching, and in those of our colleagues, is the citation of homophobic and heterosexist comments. These are comments that are more likely to occur in foundation subjects such as philosophy and sociology of education. The occurrence of such situations has prompted debate regarding 'silencing words that wound'. This has prompted the question, 'should we keep students from stating such discriminatory speech?' Our article takes up this issue, and considers it from the perspective of the importance of critique. Working with Foucault's What is Critique? together with his discussion of subjectivation in the 1981-82 lectures at the Collège de France, we set out to make the case for the significance of the relationship between truth and critique. This leads us to a position where we ask the question, if we silence, what do we risk doing to critique? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fat bodies are not, fait accompli, bad. Yet in our international research, we found overwhelmingly that fat functioned as a marker to indicate health or lack of health. A body with fat was simply and conclusively unhealthy. This article reports on how this unbalanced view of fat was tied to assessments of healthy bodies that were achieved by the act of looking. Despite the efforts of health education in each of the three countries in our study, children and young people cited the act of looking at bodies to assess health and when did they arrived at the conclusion that fat on bodies is unmistakably bad. The article uses a Foucauldian analysis of medical perception together with material from Conrad Gessner's sixteenth century Historia Animalium to outline how the children in our study placed great reliance on information about fat to make almost exclusively visual assessments of health. The article makes the case that, despite a great deal of health education in schools, these judgments reveal a tendency for children to make incorrect assessments of health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the influence of policy on body pedagogies, the moral panic on obesity, and new health imperatives among English children.

ABSTRACT One of the numerous responses to the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007 has been the call for higher education institutions in the United States to take an increased role in identifying troubled students. This has had widely felt effects, with educational institutions across the United States developing mechanisms such as Threat Assessment Teams to respond to the perceived heightened threat of campus violence. At the core of these responses is the notion of the troubled student that brings dangerousness and depression together. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to this, arguing that extreme violence has been extended from the provenance of the dangerous mad individual to a potential characteristic of the depressed individual. Interrogating this shift takes on special significance because understanding depression and violence is deemed vital to 'connect the dots' to detect the troubled student, thereby preventing campus violence in higher education institutions. To consider this shifting conceptualization, this article draws closely on Hannah Arendt's distinction between factual and rational truths and Michel Foucault's analysis of melancholy. The Arendtian distinction between factual and rational truths facilitates analysis of the truths of the troubled student, as well as underscoring the importance that this recognition has for debate. Foucault's investigation of melancholy together with his emphasis on the 'structure of perception' is employed to tease out how truths of the troubled student are produced, and thereby demonstrate that they are rational truths. Drawing on these ideas, the article offers a critical examination of how depression figures as potency and advances the argument that in the take-up of these emerging conceptualizations, there is a significant shift in how the troubled student is understood in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effort to make schools more inclusive, together with the pressure to retain students until the end of secondary school, has greatly increased both the number and educational requirements of students enrolling in their local school. Of critical concern, despite years of research and improvements in policy, pedagogy and educational knowledge, is the enduring categorisation and marginalisation of students with diverse abilities. Research has shown that it can be difficult for schools to negotiate away from the pressure to categorise or diagnose such students, particularly those with challenging behaviour. In this paper, we highlight instances where some schools have responded to increasing diversity by developing new cultural practices to engage both staff and students; in some cases, they have responded to decreasing suspension while improving retention, behaviour and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychopathologisation, broadly understood as processes that lead to the effects of being psychopathologised, can have considerable consequences for isolating students from education. This can be especially the case for children and young people affected by the racialisation of behaviour and/or socio-economic disadvantage. Drawing on Foucault's analysis of the relationship between the psychiatrist and the asylum in his lectures 'Psychiatric Power', the argument is made that these effects can be tantamount to being institutionalised in a mobile asylum. Portrayal of the asylum in the American television series House MD is used to highlight how, if we rely on classic depictions of the asylum-psychiatrist couplet, we risk missing - or minimising, the mobile asylum that some young children experience when they are psychopathologised in schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptualising difference is a key task for inclusive pedagogy, and vital to the politics of inclusion. My purpose in this paper is to consider the place that imagination has in helping us to conceptualise difference, and to argue that imagination has a key part to play in inclusive pedagogy. To do this I draw closely on the work of Maxine Greene and Hannah Arendt. Arendt's work provides a means to conceptualise difference whereby difference is itself at the very heart of what constitutes our humanity. Greene's work on the arts has outlined the value of the imagination, and has argued for the place of the arts in education and pedagogy. What is needed, however, is a careful account of how the imagination is connected to politics. In this paper I take up Greene's call to 'release the imagination' and, drawing on Arendt, develop an account of the relationship between the imagination, thinking, and politics and how this can be used to argue the place of imagination in inclusive pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Judith Butler's discussion of the intersections between governmentality and sovereign power in Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. We consider this interrelationship with a view to considering how this might enable us to expand our understanding of contemporary discourses governing young people within and outside Australia. In particular we focus on the production of groups of young people, such as those classified as 'illegal immigrants' who may be situated outside the frame of 'public good' or the 'private interest'. This enables for a theorisation of the lives of groups of young people who may 'have no definitive prospect for a re-entry into the political fabric of life, even as one's situation is highly, if not fatally, politicized'. It is questionable whether the Foucauldian notion of governmentality gives sufficient account of the lives of these young people whose conduct is effectively considered irrelevant by the State. As educators, it is arguable that we have an ethical imperative to encourage our students to care for themselves, and for others, especially those others whose lives have been 'fatally politicized'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a Foucauldian‐inspired strategy applied to the analysis of the production of truths about psychopathology, sexuality and young people. Drawing on an interpretation of Foucault’s genealogical tactics, this strategy involves the deployment of four angles of scrutiny: discontinuity, contingency, emergences and subjugated knowledges. The authors discuss how these angles can be drawn on to scrutinize those practices that diagnose young people with behavior disorders—or that make essentialist claims about a young person’s sexual identity. Drawing on examples from their own research in education relating to the construction of psychopathology and sexualities, the authors consider how these angles of scrutiny can be applied to critiquing essentializing truths, and thereby inform the task of qualitative data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It appears that being young and queer seems to be all about woundedness: it means experiencing suffering, including the risk of suicide, increased drug use, homelessness and violence. Yet how are these wounded truths told, and further, why is it that people in education seem to tell them "unproblematically"? This paper considers these questions by analysing wounded truth telling in the recent debate over the Western Australia Lesbian and Gay Law Reform Bill. Using Foucault's (2001) discussion of Greek parrhesia (truth telling), the Western Australian debate is analysed in terms of its problematisation of wounded truth telling. Questions are raised regarding the implications of unproblematised educational practices that engage in the telling of wounded truths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that Foucault's notion of subjugated disqualified knowledge can be drawn on to provide a methodological tool for analysing psychopathological discourses of behaviour in education. In so doing, the paper presents a study of Ben, a young man diagnosed with ‘conduct disorder’. As a mental disorder, conduct disorder functions as an influential knowledge that can subjugate and disqualify a young person. Through the discussion of Ben's experiences, the paper shows how subjugated disqualified knowledges can indicate the existence of dominating knowledges and argues that the perspectives of young people such as Ben can be of strategic value for analysing the use of psychopathological discourses of behaviour in education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Young people may become disengaged from schooling in the middle years for a multitude of reasons. We consider the story of one young woman from the state of New South Wales, in Australia, who left school early, and consider some of the factors that contributed to her decision to remove herself from compulsory education. This young woman encountered injurious speech relating to her race, gender, sexuality, size and ability. In undertaking this analysis, we draw on Foucaultian theorizing of the subject and on the related Butlerian notion of performativity. Performative acts that occur within and around schools have the power to injure, to alienate and to potentially exclude students from access to schooling. This article details how performative acts may operate as mechanisms of exclusion, obfuscating the social conventions and institutional structures that invest them with power. Our analysis of how performative acts function in school settings concludes with some suggestions of how teachers and students might think differently about the production of their own and others' existence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a dearth of scholarly analysis and critique of the Australian newsprint media’s role in the medicalization of child behaviour. To begin to redress this lack this paper analyses newsprint media’s use of metaphors that re/describe and construct realities of ADHD with a medicalizing effect. The interdisciplinary team used theFactivaTMdatabase to locate and review 453 articles published in Australian national and metropolitan newspapers during the decade 1999–2009. Data analysis involved generating statistical descriptions of the dataset according to attributes such as: date, state, newspaper titles and author names. This was followed by inductive analysis of article content. Content analysis revealed pervasive and striking use of metaphor in newsprint media reporting of ADHD content, especially when describing health professionals, educators, parents and children. This collection of metaphors was striking, and while the metaphors deployed were varied, this diversity seemed underscored by a common functionality that increased the risk that child behaviour was explained using medicalized knowledge. We contend that these metaphors collectively and coherently functioned to simplify and delimit meanings of children’s health and behaviour to favour depictions that medicalize problems of children and childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]