Contemporary discourses in educational administration have exponentially grown the number of adjectival leaderships, challenged traditional organisational structures, and offered autonomy as a solution to performance issues. In this theoretical paper, I ask "what does the principalship look like after autonomy?" Despite the range of…

Developing an emancipatory interest enables individuals to free themselves from the intersubjective or commonly held meanings that dominate their understanding of their current world, and subsequently change their practices. We argue that developing an emancipatory interest is critical in learning to create social change, that is, wanting to…

The discourse of remote education is often characterised by a rhetoric of disadvantage. This is reflected in statistics that on the surface seem unambiguous in their demonstration of poor outcomes for remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. A range of data support this view, including National Assessment Program-Literacy and…

Public relations educators are frequently challenged by students' flawed perceptions of public relations. Two contrasting case studies are presented in this paper to illustrate how socially-oriented paradigms may be applied to a real-client project to deliver a transformative learning experience. A discourse-analytic approach is applied within the…

In this paper, the authors combine Pierre Bourdieu's concept of hysteresis (the "fish out of water" experience) with the discourse historical approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a theoretical and analytical framework through which they examine specific moments in the schooling experiences of one refugee student and one…

This paper furthers a discussion about the ways in which idealised versions of gender permeate the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. Specifically, we consider how the written text, layout and images used in 12 Australian private girls school prospectuses function in constructing discourses of…

This article draws on data from an ethnographic study that begins with the experiences of educational professionals doing the "work" of educationally supporting students with long-term health conditions in a paediatric health-care setting in Victoria, Australia. The study was conducted over the same period of time but separately from the…

Civic participation of young people around the world is routinely described in deficit terms, as they are labelled apathetic, devoid of political knowledge, disengaged from the community and self-absorbed. This paper argues that the connectivity of time, space and social values are integral to understanding the performances of young people as…

The research reported here brings together three settings of conceptual and methodological inquiry: the sociological setting of socio-economic theory; the curricular/pedagogic setting of educational drama; and the analytic setting of ethnomethodolgically informed analyses of conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis. Students…

At the University of New England in the rural town of Armidale, Australia, preservice teachers undertake courses in contextual studies in education, introducing the idea that context frames the curriculum. Some students, however, struggle to appreciate the relationship between curriculum and context, principally because socioeconomic dynamics and…

Over the past twenty years much work has been done by teachers of secondary English to describe and make explicit the semiotic resources used to access and critique the discourses of powerful institutions such as schooling. At the same time, however, there has been a growing recognition that the rhetorical resources needed for adolescents to…

As a lens through which to read and understand a subject area and its curriculum content and issues, a sociocultural perspective is a recent and arguably significant change for the Health and Physical Education (HPE) Key Learning Area (KLA) in Australia. Its significance lies, first, in the fact that it seems to represent a notable departure from…

This article reports on key aspects of a theory generative study into social presence in text-based online learning environments. The focus of the article is the nature of social presence as experienced by online learners in those environments. Employing a collective case study design, the study accessed online learners' experience-based heuristic…

Uncritical acceptance of the discourses of government economic policies is counterproductive to the development of teamwork and flexible skills due to the insecurity they create. Therefore, discourse analysis should be a crucial element in adult education and training. (SK)