Education policy as a constellation of texts and practices: Understanding the effects of national education policymaking on teachers

Education policy as a constellation of texts and practices: Understanding the effects of national education policymaking on teachers

In the context of national school reform, teachers’ voices are critical but often missing from official policy discussion. While there is much literature on schooling policy at a national level that has examined different elements of politics, policy, bureaucracy or global influences on education, there has been limited attention given to the discourses utilised in these elements and the way these impact how teachers perceive themselves within the national policy environment. This study sought to bridge this gap between national policy and teachers’ experiences by examining the overlapping spheres of politics, schooling bureaucracy and teachers and the way actions in each of these reverberate through the schooling system to impact other parts of the policy cycle. Paper 1—Funded, then Forgotten: Politics, Public Memory and National School Reform—provides the foundation for the study, by using ministerial media releases over the life of Australia’s National School Reform Agreement as a lens to analyse how federal education ministers attempted to shape public perception of schools, schooling and school reform. Paper 2—The Aporia of Education Policy: National School Reform and the Limits of Policy Enactment—examines the elements contributing to the aporia in schooling bureaucracy, revealing that factors such as government timelines, evaluation processes and the placement of accountability on schools prevents policy from being mediated to schools as intended. Paper 3—Teacher Narratives of National School Reform: Storying the Effects of Education Policy Flows on Teachers’ Work and Lives—considers the perspectives of teachers regarding national school reform through ‘storied’ post-qualitative, composite narratives which depict how national policy is perceived by teachers ‘on the ground’. Finally, Paper 4—Bridging the Extremes of Policy Research: a Narrative Exploration of the Impact of National Education Policy on Teacher Constitution of Self—presents further post-qualitive narratives of teacher perspectives regarding how national policy affects them on a personal level and how they constitute themselves as professionals within this reform environment. Overall, this study demonstrates how policy breakdowns and aporia occur at various points as national schooling policy flows towards schools and teachers. By using narrative storying to give voice to teachers’ experiences of national school reform, this study highlights how teachers’ perspectives of schooling reform are vital to their potential success and calls for a change in the relational culture between all levels of school politics, bureaucracy and school contexts.

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