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This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal of educational policy proceeds as though teachers are malleable and ever-responsive to change. Some argue they are positioned as technicians who simply implement policy. However, how teachers go about their work and respond to reform agendas may be contingent upon many factors that are both biographical in nature and workplace related. In this paper we discuss the work of middle school teachers in low-socioeconomic communities from their perspectives. Referring to reflective interviews, meeting transcripts and an electronic reporting template, we examine how teacher participants in a school reform project describe their work - what they emphasise and what they down-play or omit. Using Foucaultian approaches to critical discourse analysis and insights from Dorothy Smith's (2005) Institutional Ethnography, we consider the 'discursive economy' (Carlson, 2005) in teachers' reported experiences of their everyday practices in northern suburbs schools in South Australia in which a democratic progressive discourse exists alongside corporate and disciplinary discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary schooling contexts that, in current times, are beset with 'crisis' conditions and constrained by policy rationales that make it difficult to pursue issues of justice. Within the project, university investigators and teachers collaborated in action research that drew on a range of conceptual resources for redesigning curriculum and pedagogies, including: funds of knowledge, vernacular or local literacies; place-based education; the 'productive pedagogies' and the 'unofficial curriculum' of popular culture and out-of-school learning settings. In bringing these resources together with the aim of interrupting the reproduction of inequality, the project developed a methodo-logic which builds on Bourdieuian insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss educational issues in Australia and New Zealand involving standardisation of education materials, educational policy and quality audits in schools.

For the past four decades, the question of how long it takes to achieve academically in a second language has been the subject of research. It is a key policy question informing the allocation of resources for the support of English language learners in schools, with the existing research from the United States (US), Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) showing it takes varying lengths of time depending on a range of variables. Until this present study, no research had been done on the trajectories of English language learners in the Australian context, where increasing numbers of English learners form the student population. As part of a broader mixedmethods study designed to address this gap in the research, we present quantitative analyses of longitudinal school data on NAPLAN reading results for two large regions in Queensland from the years 2009-2015. Using two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures, we identified the academic trajectories of EAL students as compared with the trajectories of the same age cohort, most of whom are English as a first language speakers. The findings show that EAL students who had been in schools long enough to sit four NAPLAN tests reached parity by Year 7, suggesting that it takes the whole of primary school for them to achieve at the same level as their English-speaking peers. Those who entered between Year 3 and Year 5 reached parity within two to four years of arrival in Australia. For older learners entering school between Year 5 and Year 7, reaching parity took much longer. The implications of these findings are far reaching for policy, teacher preparation, and the provision of high quality language support programs in Australian primary and secondary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]