Ian Hardy
Biographic Data
| ID | 112290 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Hardy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Hardy |
| SIGNATURE | HARDY I |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8124-8766 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 81 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 211 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 81 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
‘Tracking’ learning: Residualising risk through dashboard data
This article provides preliminary insights into how a particular data technology platform was introduced into one school site in a large Australian state and how it served as a ‘policy instrument’. The research draws upon critical data studies, and notions of risk, to develop the metaphor of ‘tracking’ in relation to students’ learning; such tracking helps to elaborate the myriad ways in which data were understood in the context of this platform.…
Pursuing a Doctoral Degree in Southeast Asian Developing Countries: Contextualising Chinese Students' Decision‐Making Processes
International student mobility (ISM) flows have historically involved students moving from developing regions to developed countries. However, recently, there has been a shift, with more Chinese students pursuing doctoral studies in several Southeast Asian developing countries, including Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. Their decision‐making processes remain under‐researched. This study addresses this gap by contextualising the decision‐ma…
Thinking the unthinkable: Generative AI for collaborative, intra-active policy analysis
In this paper, we report an exploratory collaboration in data analysis between a human researcher and Generative AI (GenAI). Specifically, we reveal how human-AI collaboration might contribute to alternative interpretations in theory-informed policy analysis. We draw on Karen Barad’s philosophy of agential realism as an anchor point to consider the ethico-onto-epistem-ological affordances and limitations of incorporating GenAI in social sciences …
Beside and beyond: Recognising and extending Stenhouse’s legacy in a datafied, digital era
The ‘NGOisation’ of education reform: The case of Transforming Teaching Education and Learning (T-TEL) in Ghana
Despite the growing recognition of the significance of non-state actors, inadequate attention has been paid to how donor funded projects transition to become indigenised NGOs in developing country contexts. This is particularly important at a time when the traditional role of the state in education provision is being shared among many policy actors, including those with substantial financial and technical resources. Drawing upon the case of Ghana…
Governmental rationalities and misrecognising human and social conditions in English-in-education policy for individual and social development
Although contemporary language-in-education policy (LEP) in developing societies often represents English as a panacea for poverty and a key tool for empowering people from socioeconomic disadvantage, not much is known about how this development potential unfolds for disenfranchised people. Motivated by social justice, and drawing on a framework that construes development as an ideology and utilises social theories from Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Fo…
Caught ‘in-between’: Insights into international students’ doctoral thesis writing practices in China
An increasing number of international students pursue doctoral studies in China, a non-traditional learning destination compared with English-dominated Western countries. Despite considerable research on the challenges doctoral students face when writing theses in English in Western countries, relatively few studies have explored comparable issues in China. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s thinking tools of field, habitus, and capital and the notion of in…
Australian schooling policy: A risky proposition
This article utilises recent Australian schooling policies and associated international educational policies as a stimulus to reflect on the extent to which schooling provides genuinely ‘educational’ opportunities for students. To do so, the article draws upon Gert Biesta’s notion of the ‘risk’ of education to analyse the extent to which recent and current key federal government policies in Australia, and significant OECD and UNESCO policies, see…
‘I want to stay but … ’ Exploring the complex desires of international doctoral students’ post-graduation mobility in China
International student post-graduation mobility has been widely studied, particularly from developing to developed countries. However, little research has explored this phenomenon in non-traditional destinations like China, now an emerging educational hub for international students. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire and Lingard’s notion of global-national-local imbrications, this qualitative study explored how international docto…
The impact of internship on employability of Chinese professional master degree students: The role of authenticity, reflective learning, and social relationships
Acculturating for Change: An Institutional Logics Perspective on Postgraduate Policy Implementation in China
Data, datafication and data citizenship: Managing, moderating and ameliorating testing in Singapore
In this article, we draw upon notions of datafication and data citizenship to explore assessment practices in Singapore schools. Interviews with teachers, principals and students illustrated how they were actively involved in a much more ‘educative’ form of engagement with data, characterized by efforts to ameliorate consequential negative effects of testing, even as meritocratic tendencies challenged such efforts. The research highlights the ben…
Testing times: The affective impact of tests in Bangladeshi schools
Great expectations: Understanding Perceptions of the Affordances and Constraints of Dashboard Data
Drawing upon literature and theorising in relation to the sociology of expectations and critical data studies, we elaborate perceptions of the nature of dashboard data in one state educational jurisdiction in Australia. Our research utilises interviews with senior educational bureaucrats, who engaged with a new dashboard, and the data it generated, during the initial stages of the development and implementation of the dashboard. This included per…
Navigating datascapes: Mapping testing practices within and across national and global contexts
We draw upon Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ and Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) to interrogate historical and spatial flows in relation to specific testing technologies. We reveal how testing systems, conceptualised as actor-networks, rearticulate colonial legacies of inequality which are intensified by new and emerging technologies. ANT helps trace social and relational interactions occurring in various national and global data spaces, and helps make …
Contextualizing and hybridizing academic identity formation: An analysis of international returnees and locally trained scholars in China
Academic identity formation is strongly influenced by higher education contexts. In the past decades, the Chinese higher education sector has attempted to integrate academic internationalization at the local level. In this context, international returnees and locally trained scholars may encounter different issues in the process of constructing academic identities at various stages of their careers. However, relatively few studies have critically…
To give: Ethically storying data
We live in a data-driven world. The voluminous scale of data gathered can lead to diminished consciousness of ethics whilst economic interests are prioritised. Across recent decades education has come to be heavily data driven and datafied. We have witnessed the dehumanising and increased labour impacts of school datafication. In search for alternatives, we wonder about the role and hope of story. We look to the etymological roots of data to see …
The ‘Problem’ of University-Industry Linkages: Insights from Australia
Re-presentations and im-possibilities: The politics of dashboard data
Data infrastructures exist in a variety of formats. This article draws on the insights of senior personnel involved in developing a new data dashboard in one state jurisdiction in Australia. While literature on dashboards often focuses on the teachers and learners influenced by them, there is less attention to those involved in their development and the politics that attend their work. While the dashboard initiative holds out the hope of enabling…
Language for learning? International students’ doctoral writing practices in China
A growing number of international doctoral students choose to study in China, a non-traditional learning destination. However, relatively few studies have investigated these students’ academic writing practices while undertaking their studies in China. This study draws upon Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and capital, and the notion of global-national-local imbrications, to explore 20 international doctoral students’ language-engagement ex…
Understanding Chinese national vocational education reform: A critical policy analysis
Drawing on Carol Bacchi’s post-structural analytical approach, this study examines the nature of recent policy reforms in China in relation to vocational education (VE). The article reveals key problem representations that characterise the Implementation Plan of National Vocational Education Reform (IPNVER) issued by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 2019, and how these have arisen in light of previous reforms. These pr…
Australian policy on international students: Pivoting towards discourses of diversity
Problematizing Human Capital Development in English Language Education in Bangladesh
This article draws on a framework based on Bernstein’s three-message systems of schooling and Ball’s notion of policy cycle to examine how the human capital development goal incorporated into the Bangladesh secondary English curriculum has been translated into pedagogy and assessment practices. Data were collected from classroom observations and teacher and principal interviews and document analysis. Findings indicate that while the curriculum ha…
Construction of English language skills as human capital and ELT as development aid in Bangladesh
The discourse of English Language Teaching (ELT) development aid for the Global South has undergone significant changes since its introduction in the post-WWII period. Specifically, in the contemporary context of globalisation, both the aim and operation of ELT aid exhibit the influence of neoliberalism. This article examines policy documents about the introduction and implementation of a UKaid-funded development project in Bangladesh called Engl…
Inclusive education policies – objects of observance, omission, and obfuscation: Ten years on
This article draws upon a critical policy analysis approach to examine the state of inclusive education policy in Global North settings over the past decade.Building on an earlier paper on this topic ten years ago, this updated article seeks to explore whether and how inclusion and inclusive education have been understood in varied international, national and sub-national policy settings over time.While it might be anticipated that schooling syst…
Inclusive education policies: Discourses of difference, diversity and deficit
This paper provides an analysis of inclusive education policies across international, and Anglo-American national and provincial/state jurisdictions to reveal how policies discursively construct inclusion under current, increasingly neoliberal conditions. In making this case, the paper draws upon primary UNESCO and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development policies, and a selection of key policies in United States, Canada, England an…
A logic of enumeration: The nature and effects of national literacy and numeracy testing in Australia
This paper reveals the array of practices arising from strong policy pressure for improved student results in national literacy and numeracy tests in Australia: the National Assessment Programme in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The paper provides an account of a policy context characterised by significant pressure upon teachers and principals to engage in practices to ensure improved outcomes on standardised literacy and numeracy tests, and of …
A logic of appropriation: Enacting national testing (Naplan) in Australia
This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students’ results on national literacy and numeracy tests – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) – in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers’ learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at nati…
The ‘doublethink’ of data: Educational performativity and the field of schooling practices
This article provides insights into teachers’ and school administrators’ responses to the current ‘fetishisation’ of school performance data in Australian schooling. Specifically, the research investigates the accountability practices that emerged in a Queensland metropolitan primary school in response to this broader focus upon performance data. Drawing upon interviews with teachers and school administrators, literature and theorising on educati…
Tracking the Topological: The Effects of Standardised Data Upon Teachers’ Practice
This article draws upon recent theorising of the ‘becoming topological’ of space– specifically, how new social spaces are constituted through relations rather than physical locations – to explore how standardised data, and specifically test data, have influenced teachers’ work and learning. We outline the varied ways in which teacher practices at a primary school in Queensland, Australia, were actively constituted through processes of ‘tracking d…
Educational neoliberalization: The Mediatization of Ethical Assertions in the Voucher Debate
This study focuses on the evolving ethical claims and empirical evidence being advanced within U.S. media relating to voucher-style programs. As such, the research seeks to better understand how and why these policies proliferate, despite scant evidence recommending them. Our specific media focus reflects the recognition that issues, problems, and solutions are defined and set within ‘ethical’ frameworks through the media, often in efforts to inf…
I’m just a numbers person’: The complexity, nature and effects of the quantification of education
This paper draws upon the sociology of numbers, particularly work by Theodore Porter, to reveal the multifarious ways in which numbers actively constitute practices in schools. Drawing upon a case study of one low-performing school in a low-performing region in the state of Queensland, Australia, and theorising into the sociology of numbers, the research explores the complex ways in which numbers came to constitute and dominate the practices in t…
Education as a ‘risky business’: Theorising student and teacher learning in complex times
This paper employs sociological literature on risk and the commodification of education to explain current schooling practices in a context of increased concerns about students’ behaviour and results on standardised tests of achievement. Drawing upon teacher and student learning practices in three school sites in south-east Queensland, Australia, the article reveals how specific tests, packages and programmes have been employed as technologies of…
Teacher professional development as an effect of policy and practice: A Bourdieuian analysis
This article draws on Bourdieu’s field theory and related concepts of habitus and capitals, to explore policy implementation in relation to a particular case of teacher professional development in Queensland, Australia. This implementation process is described as an effect of the interplay between what is called the policy field and the field of teachers’ work. The policy field demonstrates intra‐field tensions between the federal Quality Teacher…
Data, Numbers and Accountability: The Complexity, Nature and Effects of Data use in Schools
This article draws upon research in one school in Queensland, Australia, to explore how the push to data influences teacher work and subsequent student learning. This ‘rise of data’, often oriented towards ‘external’ and performative processes of accountability, exhibits itself in many ways, but is particularly evident in teachers’ engagement with various forms of regionally and centrally sanctioned, and often standardized, measures of attainment…
Critiquing teacher professional development: Teacher learning within the field of teachers' work
This study is an empirical account of the professional development (PD) practices that constituted part of the work of a group of teachers and school-based administrators working together in a cluster of six schools in southeast Queensland, Australia, during a period of intense educational reform. The data comprise meeting transcripts and interviews with teachers and administrators involved in a reform-oriented professional development initiative…
The quandary of quantification: Data, numbers and teachers’ learning
Drawing upon recent theorising of numbers and data, and applications to schooling, this paper reveals how tensions between more accountability-oriented logics, and more contextually-situated conceptions of engagement with data, played out in one school in a regional community in northern Queensland, Australia. The research reveals that at the same time teachers’ work and learning were heavily influenced by more reductive processes of quantificati…
Beyond the binary: Rethinking teachers’ understandings of and engagement with inclusion
This article presents research into Canadian elementary and secondary teachers’ understandings of inclusion. The research investigates how a sample of 120 teachers in the southern part of Ontario defined inclusion, and the extent to which they believed an inclusive classroom is an effective way to teach all students. The article draws upon literature into how inclusion is currently defined followed by research into the politics of diversity in in…
Language for learning? International students’ doctoral writing practices in China
A growing number of international doctoral students choose to study in China, a non-traditional learning destination. However, relatively few studies have investigated these students’ academic writing practices while undertaking their studies in China. This study draws upon Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus, and capital, and the notion of global-national-local imbrications, to explore 20 international doctoral students’ language-engagement ex…
Pursuing doctoral research in an emerging knowledge hub: An exploration of international students' experiences in China
International doctoral students are an influential group in knowledge creation and cross-national engagement. Existing studies have mainly focused on this cohort’s learning and research experiences in developed countries. However, relatively few studies have explored these students’ experiences in non-traditional learning destinations. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and habitus, and the notion of global-national-local imbricat…
Equity and opacity in enacting Chinese higher education policy: Contrasting Perspectives of Domestic and International Students
Drawing upon notions of a global higher education policy field and recently theorised conceptions of ‘global-local’ imbrications in social space, this article explores the complex tensions that characterise the enactment of internationalisation policies in Chinese higher education (HE) and their contrasting effects upon domestic and international students. Ten domestic Chinese and ten international students attending an elite university in China …
Language and education policies in Southeast Asia: Reorienting towards multilingualism-as-resource
Over the past few decades, many Southeast Asian governments have promoted English language education (hereafter ELE) as a linguistic pathway for developing human capital and improving global economic competitiveness of their nations. However, Kirkpatrick (2017. Language education policy among the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). European Journal of Language Policy, 9(1), 7–25. https://doi.org/10.3828/ejlp.2017.2) raises a valid co…
Aspirational ambivalence of middle-class secondary students in Hong Kong
The research explores Hong Kong students’ dispositions towards higher education and employment in relation to understandings of their schooling experiences in English Medium of Instruction (EMI) schools in Hong Kong. The research draws upon Bourdieu’s theory of practice, Appadurai’s notion of the ‘capacity to aspire’, and Taylor’s concept of ‘social imaginary’, to help make sense of students’ aspirations for the future. Data included observation …
Academic architectures: Academic perceptions of teaching conditions in an Australian university
This article reports a case study of academics’ perceptions of how the conditions under which they worked, at one campus of a multi‐site regional Australian university, influenced their teaching practices. The data comprise transcripts of periodic meetings of a group of seven education academics, as they reflected upon the nature of their teaching practices during the first half of 2008. To understand how the conditions under which they worked we…
Inclusive education policies – objects of observance, omission, and obfuscation: Ten years on
This article draws upon a critical policy analysis approach to examine the state of inclusive education policy in Global North settings over the past decade.Building on an earlier paper on this topic ten years ago, this updated article seeks to explore whether and how inclusion and inclusive education have been understood in varied international, national and sub-national policy settings over time.While it might be anticipated that schooling syst…
Data infrastructures as sites of preclusion and omission: The representation of students and schooling
In this article, we reveal the nature and effects of data infrastructures on the authorisation of data that represent students and educational practitioners, including how such data can misrepresent and govern educational policy and practices in sometimes problematic ways. To better understand the governance capacities of data infrastructures, we draw upon notions of discursive practices and materiality, and apply these to a specific school manag…
Ritualisation of testing: Problematising high-stakes English-language testing in Bangladesh
Although use of high-stakes tests is common across developing societies, very little is known about how these tests are designed, what principles and criteria guide test construction, and what factors influence this process. The present study investigates the development of the English Paper-1 test for the Higher Secondary Certificate examination in Bangladesh, drawing on curriculum policy and test documents, and particularly on the perspectives …
A critical examination of Teach for Bangladesh’s Facebook page: ‘Social-mediatisation’ of global education reforms in the ‘post-truth’ era
In this paper, we examine how Teach for Bangladesh (TfB) has utilised Facebook since 2012 in its effort to extend its policy influence and message to young Bangladeshi graduates and local population. We reveal this as an example of how Facebook has become a powerful new platform for policy mediatisation. This is also a developing world-example of a [global] policy rewritten [locally] as audio-video bytes. Our analyses reveal three ways in which T…
Governing teacher learning: Understanding teachers’ compliance with and critique of standardization
This paper examines how policy pressure for increased performance on standardised measures of student achievement influenced the teacher learning practices that arose in a school setting in Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon research and theorising of governing by numbers, and applications to the governance of education, and particularly teachers’ learning, the research analyses how a group of Year 3 teachers collaborated to better inform themse…
The power of one? Conditions which challenge managerial professional development practices
This paper draws upon Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and field to better understand and appreciate the conditions which encouraged the productive professional development (PD) practices of one very capable teacher working in a secondary school in the British Midlands. Rather than celebrating this teacher's practices and perspective as evidence of the capacity of the heroic individual to overcome sometimes adverse circumstances, this pape…
Sex Ratios: Concepts and Research Methods
Covering sex allocation, sex determination and operational sex ratios, this multi-author volume provides both a conceptual context and an instruction in methods for many aspects of sex ratio research. Theory, statistical analysis and genetics are each explained and discussed in the first three sections. The remaining chapters each focus on research in one of a wide spectrum of animal, plant and microbial taxa, including sex ratio distorting bacte…
Foreign Language Students' Conversational Negotiations in Different Task Environments
Journal Article Foreign Language Students' Conversational Negotiations in Different Task Environments Get access Ilonca M. Hardy, Ilonca M. Hardy Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Joyce L. Moore Joyce L. Moore Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Applied Linguistics, Volume 25, Issue 3, September 2004, Pages 340–370, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/25.3.340 Published: 01 Se…
Teacher professional development as an effect of policy and practice: A Bourdieuian analysis
This article draws on Bourdieu’s field theory and related concepts of habitus and capitals, to explore policy implementation in relation to a particular case of teacher professional development in Queensland, Australia. This implementation process is described as an effect of the interplay between what is called the policy field and the field of teachers’ work. The policy field demonstrates intra‐field tensions between the federal Quality Teacher…
The politics of educational policy studies: A preliminary analysis of leading educational policy journal publications
This paper argues that the content, analytical approaches and institutional affiliations of authors of articles published in the latest issues of two leading educational policy studies journals provide useful insights into the contested nature of educational policy studies. The paper draws upon a selection of articles published in 2007/08 issues of two flag-ship policy journals, the UK-based Journal of Education Policy, and the US-based Education…
Policy, leadership and professional development as practice: Bourdieu and educational research
Critiquing teacher professional development: Teacher learning within the field of teachers' work
This study is an empirical account of the professional development (PD) practices that constituted part of the work of a group of teachers and school-based administrators working together in a cluster of six schools in southeast Queensland, Australia, during a period of intense educational reform. The data comprise meeting transcripts and interviews with teachers and administrators involved in a reform-oriented professional development initiative…
Academic architectures: Academic perceptions of teaching conditions in an Australian university
This article reports a case study of academics’ perceptions of how the conditions under which they worked, at one campus of a multi‐site regional Australian university, influenced their teaching practices. The data comprise transcripts of periodic meetings of a group of seven education academics, as they reflected upon the nature of their teaching practices during the first half of 2008. To understand how the conditions under which they worked we…
Teacher learning: A Call to Complexity
Teacher professional learning in an age of compliance: mind the gap, by S. Groundwater-Smith and N. Mockler, Dordrecht, Routledge, 2009, 150 pp., €59.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4020-9416-3 Connectin
Journal Rankings: Positioning the Field of Educational Research and Educational Academics
This article explores the way in which journal ranking processes in education impact upon the field of education and educational researchers. The article draws upon the recent moves to rank order journals in academic disciplines/domains of research in Australia through the introduction of the ERA – Excellence in Research for Australia – as a means of evaluating academic work. Drawing upon an analysis of the specific ordering of ‘leading’ journals…
Teachers’ professional development in special needs settings: Creating ‘kid-cool’ schools in challenging times
This paper explores the nature of teachers’ professional development (PD) practices in special needs/special education settings in Australia under current neoliberal and managerial conditions. The research is based on individual interviews with teachers from a juvenile justice centre and a dedicated special needs school in a regional city in the state of New South Wales. Bourdieu’s conception of social practice as contested is applied to make sen…
Foucault and educational leadership: Disciplining the Principal
The educational leadership literature is heavily informed by heroic conceptions of exceptional individuals working under difficult circumstances. However, and somewhat ironically, such conceptions often lack a strong empirical base which focuses on the lived practices of those in formal leadership roles. Richard Niesche’s focus upon the nature of the lived practices which characterize principalship is an important and welcome intervention
Changing Practices, Changing Education
Inclusive education policies: Discourses of difference, diversity and deficit
This paper provides an analysis of inclusive education policies across international, and Anglo-American national and provincial/state jurisdictions to reveal how policies discursively construct inclusion under current, increasingly neoliberal conditions. In making this case, the paper draws upon primary UNESCO and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development policies, and a selection of key policies in United States, Canada, England an…
I’m just a numbers person’: The complexity, nature and effects of the quantification of education
This paper draws upon the sociology of numbers, particularly work by Theodore Porter, to reveal the multifarious ways in which numbers actively constitute practices in schools. Drawing upon a case study of one low-performing school in a low-performing region in the state of Queensland, Australia, and theorising into the sociology of numbers, the research explores the complex ways in which numbers came to constitute and dominate the practices in t…
A logic of appropriation: Enacting national testing (Naplan) in Australia
This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students’ results on national literacy and numeracy tests – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) – in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers’ learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at nati…
The power of one? Conditions which challenge managerial professional development practices
This paper draws upon Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, capital and field to better understand and appreciate the conditions which encouraged the productive professional development (PD) practices of one very capable teacher working in a secondary school in the British Midlands. Rather than celebrating this teacher's practices and perspective as evidence of the capacity of the heroic individual to overcome sometimes adverse circumstances, this pape…
A logic of enumeration: The nature and effects of national literacy and numeracy testing in Australia
This paper reveals the array of practices arising from strong policy pressure for improved student results in national literacy and numeracy tests in Australia: the National Assessment Programme in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The paper provides an account of a policy context characterised by significant pressure upon teachers and principals to engage in practices to ensure improved outcomes on standardised literacy and numeracy tests, and of …
Education as a ‘risky business’: Theorising student and teacher learning in complex times
This paper employs sociological literature on risk and the commodification of education to explain current schooling practices in a context of increased concerns about students’ behaviour and results on standardised tests of achievement. Drawing upon teacher and student learning practices in three school sites in south-east Queensland, Australia, the article reveals how specific tests, packages and programmes have been employed as technologies of…
Data, Numbers and Accountability: The Complexity, Nature and Effects of Data use in Schools
This article draws upon research in one school in Queensland, Australia, to explore how the push to data influences teacher work and subsequent student learning. This ‘rise of data’, often oriented towards ‘external’ and performative processes of accountability, exhibits itself in many ways, but is particularly evident in teachers’ engagement with various forms of regionally and centrally sanctioned, and often standardized, measures of attainment…
Beyond the binary: Rethinking teachers’ understandings of and engagement with inclusion
This article presents research into Canadian elementary and secondary teachers’ understandings of inclusion. The research investigates how a sample of 120 teachers in the southern part of Ontario defined inclusion, and the extent to which they believed an inclusive classroom is an effective way to teach all students. The article draws upon literature into how inclusion is currently defined followed by research into the politics of diversity in in…
Praxis, educational development and the university sector in Australia
In this article, we utilise recent theorising on praxis and educational development to explore how academics in universities can foster public, institutional and more personal development, even as they are challenged by what are sometimes described as more ‘managerial’ and ‘neoliberal’ conditions. The research draws upon a variety of sources of data, including publicly available correspondence on the university sector in Australia, interviews wit…
Legitimating and contesting the commodification of schooling: The case of teachers’ learning in Queensland
This paper draws upon research into the nature of teachers’ learning practices in the context of current policy conditions in the state of Queensland, Australia. The research explores how teachers in one school in the north of the state responded to policy pressure to adopt a specific standardised approach to ‘explicit teaching’, associated with an elite private school in Victoria, Australia. The research utilises literature on the privatisation …
Measuring, monitoring, and managing for productive learning? Australian insights into the enumeration of education
This article reflects upon how teacher learning is currently construed under conditions of increased measurement of student learning outcomes, and the effects of advocacy for such enumeration processes. It draws upon a broad range of literature on the practice of education, measuring learning, and its effects on teachers’ learning. To help ground the analysis, the paper analyses the meeting transcripts of an ongoing, long-term teacher learning in…
The ‘doublethink’ of data: Educational performativity and the field of schooling practices
This article provides insights into teachers’ and school administrators’ responses to the current ‘fetishisation’ of school performance data in Australian schooling. Specifically, the research investigates the accountability practices that emerged in a Queensland metropolitan primary school in response to this broader focus upon performance data. Drawing upon interviews with teachers and school administrators, literature and theorising on educati…
Tracking the Topological: The Effects of Standardised Data Upon Teachers’ Practice
This article draws upon recent theorising of the ‘becoming topological’ of space– specifically, how new social spaces are constituted through relations rather than physical locations – to explore how standardised data, and specifically test data, have influenced teachers’ work and learning. We outline the varied ways in which teacher practices at a primary school in Queensland, Australia, were actively constituted through processes of ‘tracking d…
Sociology (68 works) · Political science (62 works) · Pedagogy (45 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (37 works) · Psychology (30 works) · Law (29 works) · Public relations (25 works) · Higher education (23 works) · Politics (23 works) · Social science (23 works)