Lesley Farrell

Remaking the professional teacher: authority and curriculum reform

Globally, national curriculum policies are up for renegotiation. These negotiations are shaped by international and national top-down accountability regimes, and an increasing turn towards curriculum centralization and standardization. The new Australian Curriculum (AC) is no exception. The AC is an important educational policy event, one in which understandings about teacher professional authority is being redefined. In this paper, we examine how judgements about teachers’ professional authority are used to defend, promote and explain the AC. Drawing on an analysis of policy documents and interviews with high-level policy-makers, we argue that the AC is opening space in the policy field to reposition teachers’ work by promoting a view of teachers’ professional authority as constrained and defined through the written curriculum documentation.

'Peopling' curriculum policy production: researching educational governance through institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis

This paper explores the methodological basis for empirically researching moments of major policy change. Its genesis is in the methodological challenges presented by the initial stages of an ongoing research project examining the current attempts to establish the first nation-wide Australian curriculum. We draw on Dorothy Smith’s development of institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis to outline a methodological framework for research that has at its centre a concern to understand the social and institutional processes that enable, support and discursively prepare for significant educational reform. Working with and between these two eminent contributions to sociological enquiry, our paper explores the ways in which research can trace educational governance through the production, reproduction and subsequent enactment of generations of policy texts even before they are officially released for use in schools. In particular, we suggest that examination of the day-to-day processes involved in policy production shows how policy texts are progressively invested with institutional meanings and come to instantiate and govern institutional relations. The methodology we are developing foregrounds the creation and dissemination of discourses that support specific orientations to educational practice and governance, as well as the institutional practices that embed the logics of the field.

Researching the creation of a national curriculum from systems to classrooms

Under the auspices of its ‘Education Revolution’, the Federal Labor Government is currently implementing a national curriculum for schools. Representing an important intervention into educational practice and governance, the Australian Curriculum offers a unique research opportunity, providing substantial scope for the examination of the changing systems and school-level practices entailed in large-scale curriculum reform. Research into the Australian Curriculum also presents a valuable opportunity to develop educational research methodologies that attend to the complex and multifaceted processes of curriculum reform, from systems to classrooms. Taking two of the disciplinary towers of modern curricula (English and mathematics) and Australia’s two largest jurisdictions (New South Wales and Victoria) as the focus, this article draws on a three-year Australian Research Council Linkage Project to outline an approach to researching major curriculum reform.

From Learning in Coffee Houses to Learning with Open Educational Resources

What is ‘open’ about Open Educational Resources? How does education become ‘open’ when it is removed from the institutional housing of the school or the university and develops in public social settings? Has the Internet, in providing educational content without cost and free of copyright restrictions, provoked a unique and fundamental shift in what we understand education to be and who we understand it to be for? The authors analyse the persistent but elusive claims to ‘openness in education by examining two moments when education seemed to be released from institutional constraints to be accessible to ‘everyone’. They look at todays Open Educational Resources and the coffee houses of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Their focus is the learner – what constitutes access, the role of technologies in enhancing access, and the social and institutional constraints which are always in tension with the affordances of technologies.

Texting The Future: Work, Literacies, and Economies

The idea of a technologically enabled Knowledge Economy assumes literate engagement on a global scale. This is not so much because people need to be literate to produce new knowledge, but more because global economic activity needs people to be literate to trade knowledge (both new and established) in a globally distributed economy. Global economic activity is conducted through textual practices, mostly through electronic texts of various kinds. It relies on literate actors to interpret, modify and enact the texts, to make the global economy happen. This is not to say that local workplaces do not rely on their own local, and sometimes idiosyncratic, literate practices to get their work done on a day-to-day basis, or to produce the new knowledge that drives innovation. On the contrary, we know that people in local workplaces develop highly specialized and productive literate practices that are embedded in their histories and geographies and in the local economic and political landscapes of which they are a part. What is distinctive about global economic activity is that it demands, and to some extent produces, a repertoire of literate practices that have the potential to join up local, geographically specific, workplaces and workers, simultaneously exploiting local knowledge-building potential and standardizing literate practice (and all that it entails, including the pervasive use of English) across space and time.