In this paper we make an argument for paying close attention to the materiality of practice in understanding the work of teacher educators; specifically, the meanings of artefacts used by teacher educators in the course of their daily work. We locate this analysis within a dialectical materialist understanding of the development of human activity,…

Educational action is a species of praxis in both an Aristotelian sense and a post-Marxian sense: in the first, it involves the morally informed and committed action of the individual practitioners who practise education; in the second, it helps to shape social formations and conditions for collectivities of people. In this paper, it is argued…

The term "critical literacy" refers to use of the technologies of print and other media of communication to analyze, critique, and transform the norms, rule systems, and practices governing the social fields of everyday life (A. Luke, 2004). Since Freire's (1970) educational projects in Brazil, approaches to critical literacy have been…

This article synthesises the social and economic dynamics of both non-market and market production in national education systems, drawing primarily on Marx's analysis of the commodity and Hirsch on positional competition. Market production has six principal aspects: a defined field of production, protocols governing entry/exit, the production of…

Informed by recent Marxist education theory, the author gives a new account of the changes brought about by the 1875 Education Act in South Australia. Many of these changes, although couched in terms of morality and efficiency, represented a direct assault on the lifestyles and culture of the laboring people. (RM)

This paper offers a critique of Evers' and Lakomski's 1991 book, "Knowing Educational Administration," and their discussion of neo-Marxist and critical theory. This paper argues that the science of educational administration is a historically contingent product of particular social forces and interests at a particular time. The kind of…

This volume is part of a series of monographs from Australia devoted to outlining an alternative approach, based on neo-Marxist concepts, to policy studies in education. The opening essay in this volume is a historical analysis of federal involvement in Australian educational policy development. After a descriptive overview of the role of…

This monograph presents a fictionalized case study of a real Catholic school in Australian society, Christian Brothers College (C.B.C.), which illustrates the manner in which "forces" for both continuity and change are negotiated at C.B.C. After a brief introduction, the volume opens with four thematic papers by separate authors,…

This volume is part of a series of monographs from Australia devoted to outlining an alternative approach, based on neo-Marxist concepts, to policy studies in education. The opening essay in this volume argues that the controversy over inequalities in education is essentially a school-level issue, involving what administrators and teachers do with…

The introductory essay in this volume examines the relationship between philosophy and common sense as these pertain to educational administration, and suggests that philosophy should become a form of critical self-reflective decision-making that occurs within the domain of social action and does not stop with the achievement of clarity of…

This volume is part of a series of monographs from Australia devoted to outlining an alternative approach, based on neo-Marxist concepts, to policy studies in education. The opening essay in this volume argues that real and significant educational reform will not come about through a revolution in decision-making and managerial technology, but…

This volume is part of a series of monographs from Australia devoted to outlining an alternative approach, based on neo-Marxist concepts, to educational administration. The opening discussion is a critique of conventional student evaluation practices aimed at tracing the social influences that are brought to bear on students, teachers, schools,…

The introductory essay in this volume presents a case study of class-based organizational control and contestation in secondary schools in Victoria (Australia) in the 1970s, based on a critical perspective derived from the Frankfurt school, a perspective that undertakes to reveal the power structures, class hierarchy, and legitimating ideologies…

This volume is part of a series of monographs from Australia devoted to outlining an alternative approach, based on neo-Marxist concepts, to policy studies in education. The opening monograph is a critique of policies favoring transition programs aimed at training students to fit into the prevailing structure of the workplace, suggesting that such…

This volume is part of a series of monographs from Australia devoted to outlining an alternative approach, based on neo-Marxist concepts, to educational administration. The introductory essay in the volume is an argument for the democratization of education by establishing a case for changing schools: by discussing industrial democracy as a…