Christopher Drew

Starry eyes and subservient selves: Portraits of ‘well-rounded’ girlhood in the prospectuses of all-girl elite private schools

This article continues a discussion about the ways in which gender is constructed in the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. While before we focused on the construction and promotion of valorised masculinities in elite private boys school prospectuses (Gottschall, Wardman, Edgeworth, Hutchesson & Saltmarsh, 2010), we now extend that work by investigating the versions of femininity celebrated in the promotional materials of elite girls schools. We also contrast, compare and critique the subjectivities constructed by elite private girls schools in relation to the elite private boys schools. Drawing on feminist and post-structuralist theoretical frames and semiotic techniques, we consider how the text, layout and images of the prospectuses work to legitimate and/or disrupt hegemonic versions of ‘well-rounded’ femininity predicated on physical beauty, passivity and subservience.

Elitism for sale: Promoting the elite school online in the competitive educational marketplace

Australia’s neoliberal education agenda drives a competitive market climate where schools compete for potential clientele. In this climate, school impression management and self-promotion has become an important factor in maintaining a financially viable school. Schools produce image management texts including school prospectuses, newspapers advertisements, and school websites. Examining fifteen elite school websites from New South Wales Australia, this paper argues that the websites construct elite ideological discourses in order to position themselves as desirable within the neoliberal education context. The placement of promotional images and hyperlinks in salient places on the websites reveals the importance of self-promotion and the production of images of elitism in the marketised education climate. The school websites examined are found to have multiple animated and interactive functions that are used in the promotion of the schools as elite.

Students in Space: Student Practices in Non-Traditional Classrooms

The discourse of the non-traditional classroom has found itself fundamentally intertwined with the rationalities of creating learning relevant for the future-orientated twenty-first century. In such an imaginary the idea of the conventional classroom – with its four walls, blackboard, ‘closed’ door, teacher-centred pedagogy and student learning conceptualised through the logics of the industrial era – is being renegotiated. This article focuses on an empirical examination of some of the changes to student classroom practice enabled by the material conditions of non-traditional learning spaces. In particular, it highlights the ways in which non-traditional learning spaces have become complex settings through which students negotiate increased learner autonomy, co-operative learning, acceptable classroom behaviour and fluid relations with teachers and peers. The article presents a discussion of the discourse of ‘twenty-first-century learning’ and focuses on non-traditional classrooms as an example of a localised expression of this discourse, supported by ethnographic data generated from field visits to three primary schools in Sydney, Australia to explore student practices enabled by such spaces.

Issues of teacher professional learning within ‘non-traditional’ classroom environments:

In response to the demands of the ‘21st century learner’, classroom environments are increasingly moving away from traditional models of a single-teacher isolated in their classroom. There is an advent of ‘non-traditional’ environments that challenge long-held practices in teaching. To support these changes there is a pressing need to create opportunities for professional learning. This article reports on a study undertaken within three primary schools that had recently adopted ‘non-traditional’ classroom environments. The study aimed to identify how these new spaces were shaping teaching practices and the challenges that they presented for professional learning. This article presents findings from this study with recommendations for how systems and schools can better manage the opportunities presented by these ‘non-traditional’ environments.

Putting “structure within the space”: spatially un/responsive pedagogic practices in open-plan learning environments

Non-traditional open-plan schools and classrooms are currently enjoying a resurgence in Australia, with proponents arguing for the necessity of educational spaces that more readily accommodate the needs of twenty-first century learners. However, these learning environments can pose considerable pedagogic challenges for teachers who must balance the ethos of spaces designed to facilitate autonomous and flexible student learning, while simultaneously managing the complexities of shared space and resources, decreased staff–student ratios, and highly variable student responses to learning in open-plan settings. This paper draws on observational and interview data from an Australian study of three primary schools operating in open-plan spaces. Informed by cultural theories of spatial practice, we argue that the ways in which teachers conceptualize and operationalize notions of “structure” is pivotal to the responsiveness of pedagogic approaches within open-plan spaces.

Fuzzy books and sideways looks: discourses of schooling on Australian television advertisements

Media constructions of schooling provide suggestions about what should be expected of the school experience. Studies on discourses of schooling have examined how the school is framed in media discourses, but few have examined how it is formed mundanely and repeatedly in advertisements promoting products that are not directly educational. This paper examines how the school is constructed in a range of television advertisements that sell products that are not directly educational such as cereal and broadband Internet, focusing on how schools come to be framed negatively in advertising narratives. The television advertisements often use the technique of governmentality, whereby they attempt to direct the conduct of viewers by suggesting that self-improvement is achievable through personal enterprise. These advertisements position parents as agentive consumers of education, whose consumption habits are central to their childrens scholarly success within problematic educational spaces.

Edutaining audio: an exploration of education podcast design possibilities

Abstract The versatility, intimacy and ease of production of podcasting make it a logical technology to apply to flexible education contexts. As a result, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the value of education podcasting in recent years. While education podcasting literature has tended to explore podcast implementation in institutional contexts, education podcasts outside of academia have also grown in popularity, to the extent that “education” is a common sub-group in podcast aggregation sites. This paper adapts Fernandez, Sallan and Simo’s framework of variables in education podcast design, to conduct a textual analysis of emergent design themes in non-institutional education podcasts. The findings reveal how highly successful podcasts from outside of educational institutions can both reinforce and challenge norms about education podcast design that exist within academic discourse, including in regard to podcast length, pedagogical approaches and the position of the podcast in the learning experience. It is the hope that the findings of this study might shift discourse from an interest in universalising ideas about “good practice” in education podcast design, towards more nuanced discussion of design practices that fit within specific contexts.

The Spirit of Australia: Learning about Australian Childhoods in Qantas Commercials

For over a decade the Qantas Spirit of Australia advertising campaign has worked to incite pride and nostalgia in Australian consumers. Its widespread success has led to four renewed television commercials, strategically released to coincide with key (inter)national sporting events, including the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the 2004 Rugby World Cup. All four Spirit commercials feature children singing Peter Allens I Still Call Australia Home in picturesque global and national landscapes. As a result of the Spirit campaigns widespread success, Peter Allens song has become almost synonymous with the Qantas brand. The iconic Spirit commercials are exemplary in (re)affirming the public consciousness towards Australian childhood identity. Exploring national issues of freedom, race, youth and adventure, the commercials are situated among diverse social signs that attempt to typify Australian children. Influenced by post-structural theoretical frames, the author analyses the ‘social’ semiotic dimensions of these advertisements. His intention is to contribute to understandings of the discursive constitution of Australian childhoods in advertising. The unique iconic status of the Spirit campaign, he argues, lies in its capacity to be commensurate with, and (re)affirm, Australias public perceptions of self and community.

Wholesome homosexuality: Normative childhoods in same-sex family advertisements

Conducting a multimodal discourse analysis of 40 television advertisements featuring same-sex families across 10 countries between 2005 and 2015, this article examines the discourses of childhood that emerge within the advertisements. It argues that same-sex parented children are dominantly framed within mainstream advertising in ways that are normative in terms of gender and social class. The study shows how same-sex families, while increasingly visible in mainstream advertising, are often discursively constructed by television advertisements in ways that limit subject positions that family members can occupy if they are to be seen as an ideal family unit. The article discusses how exclusionary discourses of same-sex families have implications for social inclusion of such families into social ideals of familyhood, as well as for how children of same-sex parents can be anticipated through discourse prior to being materially encountered.

Four Questions to Ask When Using YouTube in the Classroom

With the rise of the flipped classroom concept, videos from platforms such as YouTube are increasingly being embedded in education courses. Teachers use videos they find online not only as stimulus materials, but also because they can explicitly teach concepts to learners. This article proposes teachers reflect on the pedagogical value of such videos before using them as educational materials. Based on constructivist principles that emphasize active learning and critical thinking, four simple questions are presented for teachers to ask about videos that are designed to explicitly teach before selecting them as tools that do teaching their courses.