Jane Kenway

Making ‘Hope Practical’ Rather than ‘Despair Convincing’: feminist post‐structuralism, gender reform and educational change

Abstract This paper explores the work and effects of gender reform in schools through the use of feminist post‐structuralist theory. Focusing on the discourses designed to enhance girls’ post‐school options, it examines the ways in which teachers and students, particularly girls, write, read and rewrite these discourses and on the basis of this suggests some new directions for researching, theorising and practicing gender reform in schools. In particular, it raises questions about the ways in which feminist pedagogies in schools deal with the female body, difference, pleasure and pain.

Marketing education in the postmodern age

This paper demonstrates that Australian public education is taking up a series of market identities and raises a number of selected matters that caused us concern as we both surveyed the field and the available critical literature and considered the social justice issues which are raised by markets in education. These matters are, first, the inadequacy of current conceptual, frameworks for categorizing various developments and, second, the relative blindness of commentators to the connections between the growth of markets in education and certain wider cultural as opposed to economic shifts. It seems to us that some more recent forms of education markets raise social justice issues that the literature has either not engaged or has engaged in a rather restricted manner. We will identify some of these in the process of exploring the possibilities which theories about postmodernity provide both for explaining the rapid momentum and acceptance of the market lexicon in education in Australia and elsewhere and ...

New education in new times

This paper is concerned with ‘new times’, new policies for education in Australia and the new issues that they generate for education. More particularly, the papers focus is upon the various educational forms that have emerged now that governments have let the market ‘genie’ out of the bottle. It identifies particularly those market forms to which information and communication technologies are integral and a range of ways in which education, markets and such technologies are coming together. In so doing, it offers a general sociological framework within which to understand these developments and a specific conceptual framework to assist in categorising such new educational forms.