Quality in education at the tertiary level is constantly questioned, and increasingly "professional standards" are offered as the solution to the perceived decline in quality. Foucauldian archaeological analysis of teacher graduate and geography graduate standards in Australia is conducted, revealing tensions between the different…

This paper investigates the language of the 2009 NSW Stage 6 English Syllabus. I argue that the language of the syllabus aims to create two distinct subjects: Subject English, that is, what students learn; and the subject position of its students, that is, what students are expected to become. Analysis reveals themes of personal development and…

The concept "language legitimacy", which entails issues of social class, ethnicity and culture as well as those of dominance and power, is a very important one with implications for both educational policy and practice. This article begins with a brief discussion of the two major ways in which the concept of "language…

School leadership as a key for school reforms has become a dominant theme in education, as demonstrated by a growing body of research during the last 15 years. Still, little attention has been paid to how changing international discourses on school leadership are translated into national public policy documents during the last decade. As such,…

The discourses around feedback and assessment within higher education are often proliferated as critical to student learning, and attention to student (dis)"satisfaction" is often high on the agenda. As academics spend extensive time and effort on the production of summative feedback, this paper draws on the initial findings from a…

This qualitative inquiry, situated within the social networking site, Facebook and an urban public library, examined the way six Black adolescent girls represented self and made sense of and disrupted representations of Black girlhood through book club discussions of the street literature text, PUSH by Sapphire. Online discussions, field…

Studies of teacher beliefs have been important in teacher education research since the late 1960s. For the most part, these studies have utilized representational approaches that conceptualize teachers' beliefs as individualistic and representative of teachers' mental states. However, a growing body of scholarship suggests studying talk at the…

We applied techniques from systemic functional linguistics to examine how a student and a tutor construed meaning related to linear functions during a 1-1 tutoring session. The student and tutor varied in how they discussed rates of change. This difference highlights that there are multiple correct ways to use this term in algebra, although small…

This study aimed to find out the implications of linguistic deviations of swardspeak to the language competencies of the gay students. This research also sought to determine the linguistic deviations in swardspeak used by the gay students; investigate the implications of the use of swardspeak to the language competencies of the students; and…

We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students' emergent reform-oriented science meaning-making in our project-designed assessments. We…

Botanic gardens are popular destinations for school visits to learn about plant-based science. However, little is known about teaching and learning in such settings, in particular about school visits guided by professional botanic garden educators (BGEs). The purpose of this study was to identify the pedagogical moves of the BGEs during guided…

This article takes a discourse analytical approach to elements of the 40th commemoration of the Portuguese Revolution, focusing specifically on the absence of themes and participants by groups who were most directly involved in the Revolution, either as actors (the "Captains of Abril"), the "retornados" (Portuguese nationals…

Drawing upon data from twenty-five interviews, this paper examines how the Maryland State Department of Education's Cross-functional Team navigates its changing role from compliance monitor to breakthrough partner in terms of discourse, time, and flexibility, as it carries out the work of the Breakthrough Center. It also examines how the role of…

This article analyses the ways in which a policy actor constructs its agency through the production of knowledge. Taking the example of the concept of "autonomy" as constructed in the discourse of the European University Association (EUA), the article draws on the theory of discursive framing and agenda setting, as well as on Meyer and…

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence-internally. Similarly, most work on children's language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however,…