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LAK-18, the 8th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, was hosted by the University of Sydney, Australia, from March 5 to 9, 2018. Traditionally, authors of papers that have received high scores through the review process of the conference are invited to extend their paper and submit it for a special issue of this journal. The chairs of LAK-18 have adopted a double-blind review process that has proven useful in maintaining the technical quality of the conference. Papers submitted to the special issue undergo a rigorous review process that is blind only, not double-blind, as a shorter version of the paper has been already published. The theme for LAK-18 was "Towards User-Centred Analytics". Though several of the papers receiving high scores in the review process explicitly dealt with this issue, it has been decided to devote a complete special issue of the journal to this theme and invite those papers in this special issue to come. Thus, the present special issue LAK-18 covers a broad range of themes, which reflect well the diversity and the vibrancy of the community, but excludes User-Centred Analytics. This editorial describes the story behind this special issue. This story begins with the contributions submitted to the conference and finishes with a short introduction to the papers in this issue. The two first episodes of the story, contribution type and country, include both tracks, research and practitioner. The reminder episodes refer only to the research track.

The purpose of this article is to examine the disconnect happening in relation to family-centre partnerships. Developing partnerships with families is hotly debated and provides challenges for educators teaching in the early childhood sector. Using a comparative case study analysis, several research studies conducted in the states of New South Wales and Victoria, Australia, are examined to illustrate these disconnects. These issues are examined within "Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia", a national framework that is common to all programs across Australia, which identifies practice, principles and learning outcomes for young children. This disconnect is related to the language that is used by the early childhood staff and misunderstood by the parents, the ways communication occurs and its ineffectiveness. The article argues that there is a need to move beyond the current rhetoric of engaging in partnerships with families to a space that allows for transparency, reciprocity and new language.

A trend towards evidence-based practice has developed in policy and practice in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia in recent years, evolving to become a powerful hegemonic force. This paper considers this latest impetus to teach according to the mandates of a narrow evidence base as a symptom of the post-truth condition, one that elevates a limited body of evidence to an infallible position. Drawing on interviews with practicing teachers and critical discourse analysis of policy texts, this paper explores the homogenizing effects of a tyrannical evidence-based movement, using Antonio Gramsci's (1971) writing on the relationship between consent, coercion, and the maintenance of cultural hegemony. This paper argues that the contemporary policy landscape obtains consent from teachers to accept its claims through a coercive paradigm built from a powerful set of hegemonic discourses, such as "what works" and "evidence-based." These discourses, this paper suggests, need to be considered within the current post-truth context, where the dismissal of research claims is akin to scientific skepticism; a dynamic that places teachers in an impossible bind where the evidence underpinning policy is protected by a paradigm that makes it difficult to question.

Universities in the early twenty-first century have become captive sites of global capitalism. The role of universities in this neoliberal knowledge system is to produce consumable knowledge for transnational corporations and flexible, knowledge worker-entrepreneurs. It is difficult to see where the university's roles in social justice and equity fit into the current higher education policy environment. While these are global trends in higher education, the focus of this article is on analysing key Australian policy documents from the 1950s to the 2000s. These policy texts contain discursive constructions of universities that both mirrored and produced powerful social imaginaries about higher education. Building upon earlier research, I analyse these policy documents using a form of Foucauldian archaeological analysis that seeks to trace the ways in which discourses define and delimit possible constructions of universities. This article makes an original contribution to contemporary debates about higher education policy because it engages in detailed Foucauldian archaeological analysis that opens up the present to critique, enabling us to trace how constructions of the postmodern university have emerged over time and have come to be normalised. It also offers counter-narratives about how policy futures might be [re]constructed.

The decision-making around resource allocation in universities is complex. It plays out through the structures of governance and bureaucracy, through interactions with colleagues, workplace cultures and through day-to-day individual work practices. To survive and succeed within this complex environment, teaching support staff need to be sensitive to the cues provided by their institution. This paper focuses on the cues available to teaching support staff within university strategic plans and considers the effects these cues may have on their day-to-day decision-making. The results provide a sample of the competing cues that have an impact on teaching support staff and provide a foundation for a reconsidered approach to university strategic planning.

Learning with technology is increasingly understood to be a social process involving unique and telling discourses. An emerging research agenda has resulted, investigating the links between 'talk' and student technological practices but is yet to include home-education. Preliminary evidence exists of a relationship between particular types of 'talk' and success with particular online activities, namely online search. This may prove especially pertinent to home-educators who report that their most prolific online activities are those reliant upon search engines like Google. This paper presents select findings from a study into online search and the associated discursive practices among early primary students and their parent-educators in Australia. Data from observations, tests and interviews with five home-educating families were analysed recursively using a system guided by Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis. Specifically, this paper seeks to investigate: which discursive practices are privileged in these sites during online search; the extent to which these practices contribute to relations of power and the extent to which these practices are found alongside effective online search. Findings revealed a prevalence of inequitable discursive practices, those that either inhibited the equal conversational power of speakers or which naturalised inequitable power relations more generally. These discursive practices were found alongside ineffective online searches. Notwithstanding, participants continued to speak positively about search engines and their educational power. This rhetoric-reality gap is theorized in the paper as the work of dominant ideologies surrounding technology in education. Findings can assist the growing number of home-educators and their students to use online search more effectively. Insights regarding links between discursive practice and search practice may also help ensure that discourse helps to maximise the educational benefits associated with online search.

Racialized descriptions are a constant practice in our societies and a fundamental aspect of racial discourses. This paper uses conversation analytic tools within a Foucauldian perspective on discourse to investigate how discourses of race are (re)produced, and consequently navigated, in talk-in-interaction among speakers of Chinese. Four instances of racialized person description, taken from a larger corpus of 16 hours of casual conversation among Chinese migrants in Melbourne and their acquaintances, are explored in detail. The analysis identifies two interactional sequences, joking and accounting sequences, which allow participants to resist racialized descriptions while still orienting to the interactional preference for sociality in casual conversation. The paper argues that casual and friendly interaction may provide empirical evidence for how discourses of race are destabilized at the level of talk-in-interaction.

Quality's appeal resides in the genetics of Australia's national training system and its early 1990s development. Deploying Bacchi's application of contested concepts, problem representation and their place in public policy development and implementation, it is argued that quality plays an important systemic transactional function. In addition to serving as a more traditional warranty of skills transfer and acquisition, quality facilitates the operation of a highly complex system by providing a field of contestation, allowing a variety of national organisations to manoeuvre, exert influence and seek control over vocational education and training. This discourse analysis of the contents of key 2013 documents, authorised by four national training system institutions, produced two results. One demonstrates the contested nature of quality--something claiming a singular fixed meaning, but actually showing multiple realities. Secondly, the problems created and promulgated are scrutinised for the related resolution mechanisms that give form to political aspirations.

Policy classifies and shapes people/subjects in particular kinds of ways. Focusing on the context of Health and Physical Education (HPE), this paper analyses policy documents from Australia, the United States of America (USA) and Wales. We pay particular attention to how learners are represented within and across the three policy documents, and we apply Bacchi's 'What's the Problem Represented to be?' approach to guide the analysis. For us, problematization is a fruitful and positive process that enables educators to engage with a critical dialogue regarding the policies they are expected to enact. Our analysis highlighted that common across the policies were overlapping discourses of idealism, neoliberalism, healthism, and individualism, which serve to reinforce deficit language and a focus on what learners 'lack'. The problem of 'learner as lacking' is represented within the policies via at least three subject positions: 'the sedentary learner', 'the un-educated learner' and 'the naïve learner'. The findings suggest that the three policies were producing an ideal and perhaps impossible learner (subject) whilst at the same time representing the learner as a problem that the policy could 'fix'. This paper is important because it: (i) demonstrates how certain discourses and voices are amplified and silenced within curriculum policy documents and policy work more broadly; (ii) makes educational and health politics visible; and (iii) creates space for the profession to develop greater critical consciousness related to policy. In terms of future directions, we urge curriculum policy writers and other stakeholders to carefully consider how learners are categorised, represented and governed in and through policy. If curriculum policies, by their very nature, need to produce problems -- in this case, the (im)possible subject - we invite educators to engage in critical conversations regarding the policies they are expected to enact.

Early childhood education is foregrounded in change. In Australia, this has encompassed the introduction, review and updates of national quality and curriculum frameworks from 2009, and changes to qualification requirements. Within the state of Victoria, further impacts have occurred due to the simultaneous introduction of a parallel curriculum framework. This paper draws on a qualitative study to examine how diverse teacher education discourses available to Victorian long day care educators have shaped their subject positions, discursive practices and reform engagement. Utilising Foucault's concepts of discourse, knowledge and power, and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis [FDA], findings offer insight into how diverse teacher education discourses and privileged content knowledge influence how educators engage in reform and the changing knowledge base of the field. Recommendations are put forward for consideration to better accommodate the diverse positionalities occupied by educators and ease the enduring hierarchies and tensions within the early childhood field.

This paper investigates readers' recognition of unsourced evidentials in texts in association with critical reading. To this end, we involved four Iranian postgraduate students at an Australian university in a collective case study where each student read four Persian texts and participated in in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Data analysis employed critical discourse analysis and discursive power relations to examine participants' positionalities and subjectivities. Our findings in general confirm the students' recognition of unsourced evidential in texts as an indication of critical reading. More specifically, it was revealed that linguistic sources (e.g. Persian indefinite suffix '-i'), as well as socio-cultural factors such as normalization embedded within the Persian oral narrative and discourse, play significantly in identifying unsourced evidentials. Pedagogical implications for critical reflection on texts containing instances of unsourced evidentials are suggested.

Australian early childhood education and care [ECEC] has faced a series of change and reform since 2009, including the introduction and later revisions of key curriculum and qualify frameworks, increased qualifications, shifting theoretical knowledge and pedagogies, and challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, early childhood professionals [ECPs] have been confronted with a succession of substantial changes impacting their professional practice. This paper reports on a qualitative, post-structural study identifying workplace and learning discourses as key influences for the reform engagement of eleven ECPs from kindergarten settings in Victoria, Australia. Foucauldian Discourse Analysis [FDA] revealed specific subjective positions and discursive practices among participants. Recommendations are offered to address issues related to the uptake of reform initiatives. It is anticipated that these findings may generate greater opportunities to support our existing, emerging and future generations of ECPs as they lead the transformation of ECEC and transition through complex times of uncertainty.

Teacher wellbeing is a growing international concern. Despite teachers' experiences being deleteriously impacted by education policies and organisational conditions, dominant discourses of wellbeing focus on strategies that enhance individual self-management of wellbeing. This paper critically examines teacher wellbeing and the counter-discourses of wellbeing mobilised by teachers on an online platform, Reddit. Contributors criticise the wellbeing approaches taken in their schools and education systems. They react to the erasure of how work conditions impact their wellbeing. These forums speak back to the assumption that teachers are deficient and that teachers must be positive in self-managing their wellbeing. We coin the term 'cruel wellbeing' to critique wellbeing programs that neglect teachers' challenging work conditions. We question the practices of training teachers to assume responsibility for their wellbeing using strategies of positivity. We suggest that social media is an important political tool for creating and circulating counter-discourses of teachers' work.

The Australian curriculum to be introduced in all Australian schools over the next few years provides two competing narratives about curriculum. An overt narrative provides an unproblematic view of curriculum where the rhetoric and discourse that promotes a "world-class curriculum" effectively obscures a second narrative. This second narrative indicates that the bases of the proposed curriculum are actually narrow and conservative and where implicit assumptions about knowledge, pedagogy and power have been camouflaged. This article will critically analyse "The Shape of the Australian Curriculum Version 2.0", one of the key policy documents that informs the organisation and content of the second phase of the Australian curriculum. In a tradition that has its origins in the work of Freire and other critical education theorists, this article explores the assumptions and contradictions that inhere in "The Shape of the Australian Curriculum". This article concludes that the introduction of an Australian curriculum should be an opportune time to engage in debate about an alternative narrative such as the one associated with Freire's critical pedagogy, in order to balance the prescriptive and top-down curriculum that is currently being prepared.

Assesses the Australian Language and Literacy Policy in terms of the metaphors and constructions of subjects it uses. Examines concepts of skill deficiency, continues learning, nonparticipation, the scourge of illiteracy, stunted growth, deprived subject, and disempowerment. (SK)

Force majeure circumstances, such as those witnessed in the COVID-19 pandemic, have been used to justify new technologies of governance as policy-makers around the world began to realise the magnitude of the problem and its political implications. In Australia, the coronavirus crisis focussed attention on the vital role education plays in society and was used as an opportunity by policy-makers to reinforce an agenda that, over the past two decades, has tied education policy-making to the economy and 'national interest'. Indeed, Australia's growing federal involvement, with respect to schooling policy was continued in the pandemic as the Australian Prime Minister (PM) created a national cabinet to deal with the crisis, consisting of the PM and state and territory leaders. However, despite the ongoing ambition of a national policy agenda pursued by federal policy-makers, fault lines appeared. Informed by Foucauldian notions of discourse, governmentality and biopolitics, this paper explores how Australia's federal Coalition government endeavoured to manage the population at the outset of the pandemic and subjectified teachers as responsible in the service of the economy. While COVID-19 was a crisis in search of a narrative, federal policy-makers experienced pushback as state and territory leaders assumed control and teachers refused subject positions.

Language immersion programs, which are a form of bilingual education, are shaped by multiple factors, including the specific characteristics of the region, the language, the community and the learners, as well as national and regional policies on language education. While the underdeveloped production skills of immersion students have been identified as the product of teacher-centred and controlled learning environments, it is not known what role background or heritage language students play in the Australian one-way immersion context, where their presence itself potentially enhances the speaking environment. This paper, based on a project on developing speaking strategies for a Japanese immersion program in Australia, argues that the speaking performance of students in immersion classes is also determined by other factors, such as peer interactions with background students, whose treatment in education systems in Australia remains ambiguous, reflecting the history of separation between foreign language education in schools and the maintenance of mother tongues in the community. By applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper analyses language policy and educational documents and discusses how the language performance of individual learners could be influenced not only by the curriculum but also by policy makers' improved understanding of individual learners with diverse linguistic backgrounds within schools.

This paper explores how the discourse of Japanese ethnolinguistic identity differently affected three youths in a heritage language class in Australia. Based on a case study involving these informants, I show how the discourse was contested, reproduced, and appropriated. More specifically, I show how language was disaligned from ethnicity and construed as a commodity. This, however, did not make ethnicity irrelevant. It was reconnected with language to give it added value and authenticity. The discourse of ethnolinguistic identity and the discourse of commodification were thus articulated--or expressed together--by some of the youths to construct an interstitial space between these discourses, which allowed them to reap the benefits of their putative inheritance, while exempting themselves from its obligations. The paper thus sheds light on the polycentricity of heritage language classrooms, and on the multiple, layered discourses that operate in such spaces.

School autonomy policies have circulated through various modes of educational governance internationally, endorsing the view that more autonomy will improve schools and their systems. When subject to the discourses and practices of marketization, however, school 'autonomy' has been mobilized in ways that generate injustice. These injustices are the focus of this paper. We draw on preliminary findings from a three-year study that is exploring the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across four Australian states. Drawing on interviews with 42 stakeholders, the paper identifies four key areas of paradox for social justice currently confronting public schools and school systems. The language of paradox is drawn on to narrate the oppositional politics between the discourses and practices constituting school autonomy and the pursuit of social justice. Such narration raises important questions for Australian public education. It highlights how these discourses are changing what is meant by the public in public education. Engaging with the language of paradox in thinking about school autonomy reform, we argue, is important given the broader landscape where public schooling is being reconstituted and where traditional links to social justice and the common good are under threat.

This paper explores the introduction of the new Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) for graduate teachers in Australia. We investigate how the broader discussion around TPAs has been understood by multiple agents during an eight-month period from January 2019 to August 2019. Data includes legacy media, social media tweets and a survey of school leaders. The analysis draws on Bernsteinian (1975) theory about the way particular social relations produce differing sentiments of social unity. While eschewing a strict binary, legacy media was characterised by a mechanical solidarity which promoted the TPA as akin to a test. Contributions to social media and responses to the survey suggested an orientation to organic solidarity and a recognition of the complex inter-dependence of specialised roles within initial teacher education. These diverse social discourses carry the potential to influence the broader commission of what counts as graduate teacher quality.

As the third-largest export industry, international education occupies an important place in the Australian economy and society. Employing Bacchi's "What is the Problem Represented to be" (WPR) approach, this paper critically analyses four key policies pertaining to international students in Australia since the 1990s. Drawing upon theorising of the globalisation of international education policy, we uncover contestation and problem representation in discourses around the economisation of education and of international students' experiences. The findings reveal multiple discourses of the problematisation of diversity at play, including a "pivot" towards protection of international students' rights as consumers and as potential future citizens, and increased attention to the intrinsic value of international students as people, and not simply as economic agents. The findings have implications for other national contexts, in which international students contribute to the economic viability of education, and in which internationalisation of education in universities has the capacity to foster enhanced cross-cultural understanding.

This paper explores how popular ideological discourses within public policy are influencing the views and practices of preservice teachers at a university in Melbourne. The research began by examining how educational success has been historically understood by individuals vis-à-vis government discourse. Three values and four corresponding ideological positions were used to create a theoretical framework. The researcher then surveyed a small cross-section of pre-service teachers to investigate how these values contributed to their understandings of educational success, and how these understandings were used to justify their receptions of neoliberal reforms in education. The data shows that democratic equality was the most influential value in participant understandings of educational success. However, attitudes and justifications towards the reforms diverged significantly, suggesting that these values were being positioned differently in discourse. The results were then critically analysed with reference to the theoretical framework. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential implications for policymaking in teacher education, and highlights the importance of preserving the intellectual autonomy of pre-service teachers as they enter the profession.

This paper presents data from interviews undertaken with teachers and parents of children who attend Australian bush kinders (kindergartens). The bush kinder approach is a recent adaptation of the European and UK forest school approaches, one that continues to gain momentum as increasingly teachers and parents come to understand the benefits associated with this type of outdoor learning environment. The research was undertaken using ethnography (Delamont, 1992; Madden, 2012), a useful method of research in this type of setting as ethnography enables a deep understanding of how children 'notice' in nature over time. The paper applies a discourse analysis (Gee, 2011) of teacher and parent interviews critically exploring the learning and development benefits children experience from attending a bush kinder program. Findings reveal that through their noticing, preschool children make a transition from being nature novices to nature experts. The data demonstrate the benefits preschool children can gain from learning and being 'in' and 'with' nature and the important role adults play recognising young children's noticing in nature.

International education constitutes a key industry in Australia and international students represent a third of university students at Australian universities. This paper examines the media representation of international students in terms of their English language proficiency. The study applies Critical Discourse Analysis to the multimodal data of an episode of a current affairs TV program, "Four Corners," and social media comments made to the episode. Using Social Actor Analysis, the study finds that the responsibility for declining standards at universities is assigned to international students through representations of their language use as problematic. This is supported by the visual representation of international students as different. By systematically mapping out the English-as-a-problem discourse, the paper finds that the media representation of language proficiency and language learning is simplistic and naïve and the social media discussion reinforces this. This further contributes to the discursive exclusion of international students.

This paper contributes evidence-based scholarship to how teachers understand the value of Aboriginal student-focussed programmes and how discourses of Indigeneity appear to influence those views. Interviews with n = 22 teachers across n = 3 secondary school sites in New South Wales highlighted teachers' understanding of Aboriginal programmes as primarily contributing to students' behavioural and academic improvement. The interviewed teachers spoke positively about Aboriginal students' current academic achievements and prospects for their bright futures as graduates, albeit from within deficit and colour-blind discourses. Utilising Moodie's Decolonising Race Theory framework, teachers' juxtaposing beliefs resonate with existing decolonising education research which indicates a performativity of cultural inclusion through adherence to settler-colonial practices, while at the same time, an intellectual desire to move away from the legacy of Australia's contentious colonial past.

Within the broad landscape of early childhood education and care politics and policies, calling quality reform into question is a political act. As numerous scholars have pointed out, policy structures that measure and identify what constitutes quality (and what does not) are not value-free and reflect neoliberal human capital economic agenda whose effects are rapidly changing early childhood work. This paper investigates how quality reform in the early childhood sector has reinvigorated historical distinctions between early education and early care to elevate early education as 'quality' via standardisation and systematisation regimes. Drawing on the Australian context as a local example relational to the global, the paper theorises that 'edu-quality' discourse and agenda problematically constructs early care work as intertwined with but also separate from early education inputs and outputs, attributing it unequal import and impact. The paper concludes by emphasising the need for sector stakeholders and advocates to challenge the ontological and epistemological distinctions and conflations that underpin edu-quality politics and policies.

This paper examines how quotations are linguistically constructed by expert contributors in US, UK, and Australian opinion texts, vis-à-vis their form, function, and processes. Cope's (2016) study found that authoritative expert contributors integrated a considerable number of quotations on blame and responsibility for the global financial crisis in single-authored US, UK, and Australian opinion texts. By examining the form, function, and processes of quoting in this paper, she found evidence that quoting is an intertextual form of positioning. Empirically grounded linguistic analyses investigate the language of quoting frames -- how the quoted source is specified, the quoting verb used, e.g., strong meanings ("demanded, thundered, promised") or neutral ("said, told") -- and evaluate the language of propositional content in quotations. Such analyses reveal authorial positions taken in quoting. A greater number of quotations incorporated by general newspaper opinion authors, than by specialized financial newspaper opinion authors, furthermore implies that quoting increases a writer's authority in non-specialized media sources. The specially created integrated linguistic framework draws on Martin & White's (2005) Appraisal system from systemic-functional linguistics, White's (2012, 2015) "attribution" and "endorsement," and Bazerman's (2004) intertextuality techniques. Contextual factors in language use and quoting are evaluated throughout. This paper thus provides evidence of, and implications for, quoting in cross-cultural opinion texts, and contributes to knowledge on the increasingly mediatized practice of language recycling and to media literacy.

Ideological struggles over the policy and practice of literacy education continue to characterise the field. This paper explores how 'new policy actors', market-orientated and profit-driven players, construct the crisis of literacy and schooling in Australia to reclaim the doxa of literacy education. The concept of doxa is employed to show how recent discursive practices are contributing to orthodox and heterodox positions. A mixed-methods content analysis was performed on reports produced by business groups and their proxies, analysing how these reports construct new narratives. The findings reveal how these stakeholders adopt a stance best characterised as the old doxa revisited and (re)orientated for new economic imperatives. A defence of literacy as 'common-sense' basic skills, in crisis, and predominantly developed through schooling for the purpose of work, is supplemented with a discourse which updates literacy doxa to include technological (media) dimensions where digital literacy skills are the 'new basics' of literacy education.

This paper critically examines articulations of relationality present in education policy texts that shape particular discursive representations of relationality between students, teachers and curriculum. The policy texts of Australian state and territory education departments are considered as a set of discursive statements to illustrate how concepts such as relationality are deployed in policy as floating signifiers. Without deep contextualisation, concepts like relationality are instead potentially co-opted and corrupted. We contend that through its uptake, relationality has become a handy catch-all in educational policy discourses, while remaining a sliding signifier, free from a more productive affective potentiality. Instead, we argue that relationality should be centred in education policymaking as part of a commitment to recentre teaching and learning at the heart of schooling through a more authentic, dialogic relational pedagogy.

Purpose: Recent trends in Western civics education have attempted to secure democratic institutions from perceived threats. This paper investigates how political securitisation historically operated within civics textbooks in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. It further evaluates how Maori, Aboriginal and other Indigenous peoples were variably incorporated or marginalised in these educational discourses. Design/Methodology/Approach: This discourse analysis evaluates a sample of civics textbooks circulated in Australia and New Zealand between 1880 and 1920. These historical sources are interpreted through theories of decoloniality and securitisation. Findings: The sample of textbooks asserted to students that their self-governing colonies required the military protection of the British Empire against undemocratic "threats". They argued that self-governing colonies strengthened the empire by raising subjects who were loyal to British military interests and ideological values. The authors pedagogically encouraged a governmentality within students that was complementary to military, imperial and democratic service. The hypocritical denial of self-government for many Indigenous peoples was rationalised as a measure of "security" against "native rule" and imperial rivals. Originality/Value: Under a lens of securitisation, the discursive links between imperialism, military service and democratic diligence have not yet been examined in civics textbooks from the historical contexts of Australia and New Zealand. This investigation provides conceptual and pedagogical insights for contemporary civics education in both nations.

This paper reports on efforts by three Australian academics to develop students' sociocultural awareness (in particular, their racial literacy) during a time of mounting pressure on teacher educators to narrow and standardise their approaches. The field of health education provides a vehicle for research; however, it is not the paper's central foci. Of key concern is the development of a critical disposition in students--a disposition geared toward teaching for social equity. Learning of this nature transcends topic domains, and therefore allows for collaboration between academics in different parts of teacher education. Specifically, the paper focuses upon "whiteness" and applies a whiteness lens (a form of critical discourse analysis) to portions of the research data to explore how discourses of race circumscribe the efforts of white students and teachers, often resulting in unintentional "brushes" with whiteness (or reproductions of white race privilege). A collaborative approach that develops racial literacy through direct engagement with racial representations is considered as a way forward.

Pre-service teachers' understandings, skills and dispositions as global, culturally literate citizens and agents of change have arguably never been more important. Professional standards, systemic policies and frameworks and a broad range of scholarly perspectives on culture position pre-service teachers to take up cultural education in sometimes conflicting ways. It is these orientations to culture within a teacher education program and how they sit alongside potentially incongruent policies, practices and worldviews that are the focus of this paper. The practitioner research draws on cultural identity theories, policies and pre-service teacher experiences in the teaching and learning of an undergraduate education subject entitled Education for Cultural Diversity at a regional Australian university. Through discursive analysis of policy and pre-service teacher surveys this paper explores tensions that arise in navigating cultural constructs with pre-service teachers.

The Safe Schools Coalition Australia's teaching resource All of us, or 'Safe Schools', as it became known, was subjected to unrelenting attack from politicians in the Australian Parliament. This paper draws on analysis of the Australian Parliamentary Hansard, examining 18,000 words spoken about Safe Schools by Senators and Members of Parliament from November 2015 to August 2016. This dataset was interrogated with discourse analysis strategies to examine the ways in which the SSCA's supporters and opponents constructed narratives about Safe Schools, and its intentions and capacities. The analysis found that politicians employed two familiar metaphors: 'the child' and the 'strict father', to meet discursive aims. This paper argues that the invocation of these metaphors had repercussions for the way that the narrative around Safe Schools unfolded and offers Safe Schools as a case study with implications for how to observe future education debates.

Since 2007, 'Closing the Gap' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people has been an ambition of Australian state and federal governments in areas including education, employment, and health. This paper examines media responses to government policies aimed at closing the achievement gap in schools. The paper analyses print and online newspaper articles in national and capital city/state-based newspapers that reported on the implementation and success of Closing the Gap policies in Australia's schools. The paper argues that media narratives are often based on NAPLAN results, data sourced from the "MySchool" website, or newspaper-created metrics that support their own narrative. This paper highlights the narratives being purported to readers via the selective nature of newspaper data, and subsequently how these narratives attempt to influence the public discourse.

History curriculum in Australia has moved beyond its traditional British imperial roots and currently takes a world history approach. Postmodern and postcolonial approaches have challenged the dominant Western metanarrative projected on and by curriculum and the inclusion of Asia-related histories has contributed to the diversification of the narratives represented. Nonetheless, as the analysis presented in this paper demonstrates, the traditional points of reference for framing Asia -- imperialism, colonialism, cold war structures, and the nation-state -- continue to play a significant role in the way Asia is positioned. This paper reports on a study that investigated the representation of Asia in Victorian senior secondary history curriculum documents of the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) over the last three decades. Chen's "Asia as method" and "deimperialisation" are employed to critically examine how Asia is imagined by curriculum. The paper examines the potential of deimperialisation as an intervention for disrupting dominant curricular constructions of Asia. It argues that in order to reconceptualise Asia as relational, dynamic, and an active participant in historical processes, history curriculum needs to provide opportunity for reflection on the ongoing effects of imperialism on subjectivity formation and engage with contemporary historiographical developments.