Abstract
There are intersections that can occur between the respective peak Australian school education policy agendas. These policies include the use of technologies in classrooms to improve teaching and learning as promoted through the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians and the Australian Curriculum; and the implementation of professional standards as outlined in the Australian Professional Standard for Principals and the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. These policies create expectations of school leaders to bring about change in classrooms and across their schools, often described as bringing about ‘quality teaching’ and ‘school improvement’. These policies indicate that Australian children should develop ‘democratic values’, and that school principals should exercise ‘democratic values’ in their schools. The national approaches to the implementation of these policies however, is largely silent on promoting learning that fosters democracy through education, or about making connections between teaching and learning with technologies, school leadership and living in a democracy. Yet the policies promote these connections and alignments. Furthermore, understanding democratic values, knowing what is a democracy, and being able to use technologies in democratic ways, has to be learned and practiced. Through the lens of the use of technologies to build digital citizenship and to achieve democratic processes and outcomes in schools, these policy complexities are examined in order to consider some of the implications for school leadership.
Highlights
Policies can be considered to be the authorized or official talk of the State [1]
If it is accepted that one of the roles of schools is to educate students so they become citizens that can take their place in the type of society government leaders envisage, and that policies about school education provide a window into what type of society and citizens schools are to produce, the intersections and alignment between democracy, technologies, digital citizenship and school leadership should be evident in Australia’s peak school education policies
In Australian school education, the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic values’ are used to refer to the type of knowledge students are expected to learn about the processes of a representative democracy
Summary
Policies can be considered to be the authorized or official talk of the State [1]. They specify what is legitimate and agreed by those with the power to make policy decisions [2]. Principals have to synthesise the respective government policies and make sense of them, so they are implemented in meaningful, cohesive and complementary ways at the local level. This policy approach can be called ‘steering at a distance’ [5]. This concept was originally developed for the Dutch higher education sector, it is applicable to Australian school education where policies are used within the context of increased school autonomy, to drive the implementation of government policies at the local level. Consistent with the work of Habermas [15], the concept of ‘democracy’ is considered as a location for cooperative, practical and transformative activities in complex, pluralistic, technology-rich, globalizing societies, of which schools are but one instrument
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