As a result of globalization and the digital revolution, the concept of creativity has become increasingly central to education policy and practice. On the one hand, the calls for creativity are driven by an economic imperative. The argument is that there has been a shift from an industrial-based economy to a knowledge-based economy to a creative…

This study analyzes the internal and external forces that led to the creation and revisions of a community college's mission statement over the course of its 53-year history. We used discourse-historical analysis to examine published college mission statements, transcripts of interviews with the founding dean of the college, and the college's…

Prior research has analyzed the purpose and composition of athletic mission statements, but no prior work has moved beyond athletic mission statements and toward athletic diversity mission statements. Specifically, this study sought to understand the prevalence of both athletic mission and diversity mission statements and how National Collegiate…

This paper presents a new heuristic device for the analysis of educational policy. Through an examination of the Evaluative State and the work of Brian Fay, the paper considers the way in which educational policy is subject to rational and linear forms of policy action and implementation. To counter this, positioning theory is deployed to consider…

Quality's appeal resides in the genetics of Australia's national training system and its early 1990s development. Deploying Bacchi's application of contested concepts, problem representation and their place in public policy development and implementation, it is argued that quality plays an important systemic transactional function. In addition to…

The purpose of this study was threefold: to expand on existing reviews of 20 years of educational technology policy in the United States, to perform an empirical content analysis of the four National Education Technology Plan (NETP) documents issued by the Department of Education since 1996, and to provide a dialectic analysis of the evolution of…

The decision-making around resource allocation in universities is complex. It plays out through the structures of governance and bureaucracy, through interactions with colleagues, workplace cultures and through day-to-day individual work practices. To survive and succeed within this complex environment, teaching support staff need to be sensitive…

This article analyzes three USAID education strategy documents (1998, 2005, and 2011) as well as USAID's requests for proposals for three projects to assess how teachers are represented. The main findings indicate that USAID education strategy documents a) treat teachers as human capital, a human resource input, rather than as human beings and b)…

Using document analysis, this paper examines the historical emergence of the quantified child, revealing how the collection and use of data has become normalized through legitimizing discourses. First, following in the traditions of Foucault's genealogy and studies examining the sociology of numbers, this paper traces the evolution of data…

In this paper, we critically analyze institutional mission statements as discursive texts replete with symbolic meaning, as we believe these texts reveal a great deal about the ways in which higher education remains increasingly stratified. We argue that beneath the generalized rhetoric of institutional mission statements, lie powerful messages…

Recent news cycles have illuminated the disparate, racialized experiences of Black people in the United States but university leadership responses have been reactionary, or worse non-responsive. This study examines how university responses to national racial incidences such as the police brutality affect how faculty of color in one discipline…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are critical to the delivery of education for all in any nation state. What they believe and what they do are critical components to creating societal impact. But what they believe and do is not always clear. Using a derivative of SWIFT (Structured Word Identification and Frequency Totals), the authors examined…

The introduction of widespread school Internet access in industrialised countries has been accompanied by the materialisation of what can be labelled as a national school e-safety agenda. Drawing upon Foucault's notions of discourse and governmentality, this paper explores how e-safety policy documents serve to constrain the conceptual…

This article involves an examination of public discourse surrounding "Ayers v. Fordice," one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to explore how such discourse affects our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi, but also more globally. Archived local newspaper…

The aim of this study is to investigate what characterizes the discourse on the role of the outdoor environment in young children's learning in educational policy documents in Iceland. Policy documents, laws and regulations, national curriculum guides for pre- and compulsory school levels, and documents from municipalities were analyzed. A…