Literacy education in a changing policy environment: introduction.

Comber, Barbara ; Freebody, Peter

Literacy has long been at the heart of discussions about improving the quality and equitable distribution of educational outcomes. The last decade, however, has seen a dramatic redirection of policy effort in this regard. The effects of this policy redirection are playing out now; it may be that new policy emphases may have consequences for how educators think about what matters in literacy, how they can, and should, make judgements about what matters, and how they can, and should, act on those judgements. This issue of the Journal focuses on the changing landscape of policy and practice in literacy education.

Educators in many countries have encountered increasingly intensive government moves to centralise and standardise school education. In Australia national testing of literacy and numeracy began relatively recently. The results for individual schools have been publically reported since 2009. Following trialling in 2010 and 2011, most states and sectors are now beginning to implement new Australian curriculum in English, Mathematics, Science and History. These implementations call on teachers to design and implement curriculum that ensures students develop both subject-specific literacies and literacy as a set of generic capabilities. The rationale is provided in these terms:

Students become literate as they develop the skills to learn and communicate confidently at school and to become effective individuals, community members, workers and citizens. These skills include listening, reading and viewing, speaking, writing, and creating print, visual and audio materials accurately and purposefully in all learning areas. (http://www. acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/The_Shape_of_the_ Australian_Curriculum_V3.pdf; accessed April 23, 2012)

So have these changing policy emphases begun to make any difference in schools, classrooms and families? How do school leaders and classroom teachers take account of these new demands in their everyday work, in the huge variety of sites that comprise Australian school education? How do educators and community members evaluate these initiatives? To what extent do they find the national imperatives stimulating, helpful, annoying, or troublesome? What differences, if any, do these policy shifts make to students and their families?

Education policy researchers are increasingly trying to illuminate the ways in which policies play out in actual school communities (Comber, 2012; Kostogriz & Doecke, 2011; Lingard, 2010; Maguire, Hoskins, Ball & Braun, 2011; Nichols & Griffith, 2009; Thrupp & Lupton, 2006). The redirection of effort is not just in school settings or in educational bureaux; social policy analysts, youth sociologists, economists, and educational researchers, especially those working in areas related to educational measurement, are among the groups with a new-found set of conceptual and methodological challenges and opportunities. The level of multi-disciplinary complexity and activity of the field has increased, while not paralleled by an increase in effective inter-disciplinary collaboration. We see the potential of policy interventions to be generative, if not of better teaching and learning, then at the very least of purposeful activity--reminiscent of Foucault's observation, made most forcefully in his History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1978), that the hypothesis that power is exclusively repressive is not supported by close historical analyses of instances of the exercise of power: power also says 'yes'; it creates a focus for purposeful effort, work, jobs, the distribution of money, new ways of conducting public debates, and new techniques and new levels of displays of commitment to assessing the efficacy of public practices.

In this special issue, educational researchers located in Australia and New Zealand engage with these issues as they play out in various educational settings. In particular we invited articles that reported on empirical research with and in school communities. Our point in collecting these papers is not to indicate that schooling is somehow a more contested field today than it has been over the decades of its universal reach in developed countries. It has long been influenced by agenda that go beyond the apparently key goals of good teaching and learning, the building of cultural and community cohesion, the effective and productive interface with labour markets and productivity, and equality of access and outcomes.

But our point is that there are new intensities of effort redirected onto new conceptual, ideological, and practical contestations. The issues traversing and disrupting education in Australia and globally include:

* the place of education in the national and international marketplace,

* the standardisation of education materials and standards in the face of cultural and linguistic diversity,

* 'choice' in public and private schooling, and

* the institutional taming or liberation of the transformative potential of digital and online technologies.

The build up of this redirected effort has resulted in 'policy epidemics' in educational bureaux and schools, and 'quality audits' in academies, colleges and universities, and the construction of consensus via the deployment of 'metrics' that claim cultural and ideological neutrality.

This edition offers a forum for professional or public debate, encouraging exchanges around the substantial rather than the procedural aspects of current moves in literacy education as policy and practice. This goal is based on recognising that deep disagreement on big issues is a necessary accompaniment to developing productive ways forward.

References

Comber, B. (2012). Mandated literacy assessment and the reorganisation of teachers' work: Federal policy and local effects. Critical Studies in Education, 53(2), 119-136.

Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: An introduction. (Trans. R. Hurley). New York; Pantheon.

Kostogriz, A. & Doecke, B. (2011). Standards-based accountability: reification, responsibility and the ethical subject. Teaching Education, 22(4), 397-412.

Lingard, B. (2010). Policy borrowing, policy learning: testing times in Australian schooling. Critical Studies in Education, 51(2), 129-147.

Maguire, M. Hoskins, K. Ball, S. &A. Braun (2011). Policy discourses in school texts. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(4), 597-609.

Nichols, N. & Griffith, A.I. (2009). Talk, texts, and educational action: an institutional ethnography of policy in practice. Cambridge Journal of Education, 39(2), 241-255.

Thrupp, M. & Lupton, R. (2006). Taking school contexts more seriously: The social justice challenge. British Journal of Educational Studies. 54(3), 308-328.

Barbara Comber

Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland

Peter Freebody

The University of Sydney, New South Wales