Long division : state schooling in South Australian society

Rethinking National Curriculum Collaboration: Towards an Australian Curriculum

There is a burgeoning literature on educational change ‐ how to make it and how to understand its failures in order that the causes can be remedied next time. Much of this literature implies that when free and autonomous policy agents know what they are doing, they can shift institutional structures and habituated ways of doing and being. In this article we mobilize Bourdieu, who rejected this binary of structure and agency, in favour of the notion of ‘field’, ‘habitus’ and ‘capitals’, to theorize one case of change. We describe the shifting policy-scape in Australia in the latter part of the twentieth century which created some opportunities for students to act as educational leaders and participate in making decisions about their learning and schooling. We then develop a specific and situated theorization of change in a contested and hierarchical educational ‘field’. We argue that the continued press from the political field and the wider field of power to increase levels of mass schooling produced a ‘principal opposition’ in the schooling field between democratization and hierarchization. This opposition, we propose, is now in policies, institutional changes and the varying actions of educators, making the field not only contested but also unstable: this produces further spaces and opportunities for both hierarchic and democratic changes.

Theorizing Change in the Educational "Field": Re-Readings of "Student Participation" Projects.

This article is an exercise in historical sociology. It deals with inconsistencies, absences, and unresolved issues in understandings of children’s usefulness. Demography, histories of childhood, feminist research on housework and welfare states, time-use studies, psychology, ethnography, and “new sociology of childhood” often use incompatible notions of the productivity of children’s time and effort. What does and does not constitute work is also one of the most keenly contested issues between children and adults. Taken together, these debates and skirmishes are at the heart of fundamental social categories. They help constitute the distinction between children and adults, work and learning, self-care and helping others, current and future usefulness, academic excellence and mediocrity, paid and unpaid effort and time, home, school, and workplace, altruistic and commercial exchange. The bulk of the article deals with countries of the North and draws on English-language studies. The concluding section uses material on countries of the South to suggest that the “majority world” might be pioneering new understandings and practices of growing up. This article is an exercise in thinking through some inconsistencies, absences, and unresolved issues in social science understandings of the usefulness or otherwise of children and young people. 1 Above all, it is an exercise in historical sociology. Without attempting a comprehensive coverage of each discipline, I refer to representative historical, quantitative, ethnographic, and psychological studies to

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Useful and Priceless Children in Contemporary Welfare States

The central argument in this paper is that talk of crisis functions as an important shaper of contemporary understandings of Physical Education, and in this sense becomes a means for intervention by 'experts' into the form and function of the institutional practices and understandings that work to define the field; in other words, talk of crisis is properly understood as crisis discourse. This argument carries an important implication in that when we attempt to intervene via the activities of 'expertise' in our institutional practices, especially when we do so within crisis discourse, we need to recognise that notions of control over where this intervention will lead are little more than illusory. Implicit here is a recognition that the current field of Physical Education, as it has historically emerged, is not given to us outside of our own construction of it and, yet, that field, though contingent on our thought and actions, possesses a certain objective density which imposes itself on us. Recognising t...

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Crisis Discourse in Physical Education and the Laugh of Michel Foucault

Submitted in (partial) fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, 2012.%%%%"2nd December 2011".%%%%%%%%%%%%ch. 1 The 'organic filament': New Idealist through thought and media  – ch. 2 'Higher order journalism': Australian print journalism, talks programming and New Idealism  – ch. 3 'Fire, life, inspiration': Australian Idealists in the media on education  – ch. 4 'The problem of today and tomorrow': Australian Idealists in the media on the state and society  – ch. 5 'The hand that turned the key': Australia and the world  – ch. 6 'Unite or perish': War and Post-war reconstruction  – ch. 7 'A bridge between minds': the media and public reception of Australian Idealism%%%%This thesis argues that journalism has been neglected as a major source in researching histories of ideas and public intellectualism in Australia. It responds to calls by historians for a close examination of journalism and undertakes an extensive survey of articles from 1885 to 1945 in the Sydney Morning Herald, Daily Telegraph, Adelaide Advertiser and Register newspapers and transcripts of Australian Broadcasting Commission talks programs.%%%%The study focuses on one form of philosophical and political thought, New Idealism, which has received little detailed academic attention in Australia. New Idealism, also known as British Idealism, was a philosophical movement of the mid to late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century that migrated to Australia with the former students of the British philosophers T. H. Green (1836 – 1882) and Edward Caird (1835 – 1908). New Idealism was very much a practical philosophy and its followers were just as likely to be found in public lecture halls and on school boards as in university offices.%%%%In Australia this public face of New Idealism extended to the media. The thesis identifies a considerable body of previously unknown work in newspaper articles and radio broadcasts by five Australian Idealist thinkers: William Jethro Brown (1869-1930); Francis Anderson (1858 – 1941); Mungo MacCallum (1854-1942); Garnet Vere Portus (1883 – 1954) and Ernest Burgmann (1885 – 1967). Four areas of thought as revealed in the media are examined: on education; the role of the state; international relations and war and post-war reconstruction. The thesis finds a sympathetic media, particularly the Sydney Morning Herald under the proprietorship of the Fairfax family, facilitated coverage of these debates and enabled the Australian Idealists to have, at times, considerable influence as public intellectuals. This leads to a conclusion that an historical focus on the journalistic report is a highly successful research approach in intellectual history.%%%%%%%%1 online resources (315 pages) illustrations

Long division : state schooling in South Australian society

Citations

Rethinking National Curriculum Collaboration: Towards an Australian Curriculum

Theorizing Change in the Educational "Field": Re-Readings of "Student Participation" Projects.

Useful and Priceless Children in Contemporary Welfare States

Crisis Discourse in Physical Education and the Laugh of Michel Foucault

The dissemination of New Idealist thought in Australian print and radio media from 1885 to 1945

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