Background/Purpose: Indonesian Stand-up Comedy (SUCI) Comics use comedy to articulate concerns on societal issues, hence offering social critique. Abdurrahim Arsyad presented a social critique regarding schooling at the special program "Pahlawan Perlu Tanda Jasa 'Heroes Need Honors' (HNH)". An effective SUCI encompasses the comedians'…

In this paper, we provide an overview of the policies that have existed in relation to Australian First Nations students' languages, and English language and literacy learning before exploring how the politics of distraction manifests in this context. We then share our findings of an analysis of Australian language education policies for First…

The National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has been a key tenet of Australian education policy since its launch over a decade ago. Print media coverage of NAPLAN and myschool.edu.au, which displays and compares NAPLAN results across Australia, has played a role in both reporting and shaping this aspect of education policy.…

This research aimed at investigating the most dominant of transitivity process used in report text and how it relates with the nature of report text. It employed descriptive qualitative design and applied Systemic Functional Linguistics on Transitivity. The data were 29 clauses taken from report texts used in ninth grade's National Exam. The…

Since 2007, 'Closing the Gap' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people has been an ambition of Australian state and federal governments in areas including education, employment, and health. This paper examines media responses to government policies aimed at closing the achievement gap in schools. The paper analyses print and online newspaper…

This study examined the Swedish national tests in chemistry for implicit and explicit values. The chemistry subject is understudied compared to biology and physics and students view chemistry as their least interesting science subject. The Swedish national science assessments aim to support equitable and fair evaluation of students, to concretize…

Tackling mathematics tasks often involves reading and interpreting different semiotic resources such as natural language (words), mathematical notation, and images. This study aims to enhance knowledge of how meaning relations, in the form of "cohesive ties" between and within different semiotic resources, are related to how difficult it…

In 2018 NAPLAN (National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy) reached a 10-year milestone. Introduced in 2008 by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), NAPLAN assesses student literacy and numeracy in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. As a key education reform in Australia, NAPLAN has provoked critical debate across…

The aim of this paper is to analyse how Swedish grade three children are discursively positioned as pupils when they are taking national tests in mathematics and when they reflect on the testing situation afterwards. With support from theories about affective-discursive assemblages, we explore children's body language, emotions, and talk in light…

This study critically examines the discursive reconstruction of ethnic hierarchies in English language textbooks used in public schools in post-conflict Sri Lanka. Set against a social and political backdrop of larger nation state-building and national reconciliation taking place in Sri Lanka after it ended a three-decade ethnic conflict, this…

School leaders in Queensland, Australia, are working in a rapidly shifting policy landscape, expected to work towards system-defined improvement measures involving increasingly higher external accountabilities. This article analyses a group of long-term case studies of the effects of school improvement expectations on principals since the…

This study applies discourse analysis to Israeli media coverage of national and international standardized examinations within Israel's public education system. Through systematic analysis of the topic in the two main Israeli financial publications between the years 2000 and 2013, we explore the nature and narrative of the media and compare the…

Studies have shown that school leaders are important in work with large-scale policy reforms in schools. However, the issue of how school leaders and teachers discuss and enact policy is under-studied. This article explores the discursive processes in school leaders' and teachers' policy enactment as they construct responses to policy. The data…

This paper examines the ideological construction of educational discourses embedded within the South Korean print media. Significantly, these discourses have recently promoted the resurrection of a sweeping national testing and test results release policy. Through careful examination of the "test plus release" policy, the authors show…

Drawing on a critical theoretical paradigm and critically engaging with the externalization thesis that Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Jurgen Schriewer have developed, this article examines the politics of "Finnish education" in the ongoing Japanese education reform debate. More specifically, it examines the various discursive uses of…