Literacy education in a changing policy environment: Introduction

Abstract

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. …