Legitimating and contesting the commodification of schooling: the case of teachers’ learning in Queensland

Abstract

This paper draws upon research into the nature of teachers’ learning practices in the context of current policy conditions in the state of Queensland, Australia. The research explores how teachers in one school in the north of the state responded to policy pressure to adopt a specific standardised approach to ‘explicit teaching’, associated with an elite private school in Victoria, Australia. The research utilises literature on the privatisation and commodification of education, in conjunction with Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of practice, to elaborate the nature and complexity of the teacher learning/take‐up of this approach. The research reveals how the ‘explicit teaching’ approach in question had become legitimised through its take‐up in this elite private school setting, and how this influenced teachers’ work and learning in a very different context. This was not a straightforward process, however, with evidence of contestation occurring alongside these legitimation processes. The result was a complex and contradictory process in which teachers resisted a standardised, commodified form of teaching and its associations with a particular elite private schooling context, even as they were dominated by these practices.