Principal self-government and subjectification: the exercise of principal autonomy in the Western Australian Independent public schools programme.

The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault and Foucauldian scholarship, this article examines how the IPS programme functions as a regime of government and self-government. Data collected from two IPS principals is used to examine the subjective effects of power as it is exercised in the IPS regime. The article finds that the IPS initiative introduces new possibilities for principals to actively participate in practices of self-formation, through which these principals self-steer, exercise their freedom and govern themselves and their schools. It illustrates how governmental mechanisms depend on, harness and shape the autonomy of these principals, and how their individual practices of self-government align with neoliberal governmentalities

Enacting the Independent Public Schools program

The Independent Public Schools (IPS) program began to be implemented in some Western Australian schools in 2010. The IPS program devolves a number of responsibilities to principals and is part of the political objective of removing the constraints of the education bureaucracy by fostering school level decision-making, problem-solving and innovation. This paper argues that IPS can be understood as an instance of 'advanced liberal government'. It then explores the enactment of IPS in a Western Australian high school. This paper suggests that while IPS was designed to empower principals from the constraints of the Department of Education, and principals are taking up the flexibilities offered by the program, some principals may be experiencing a lack of support and resources that imposes constraints in their capacity to innovate and problem-solve

Extinction, education and the curious practice of visiting thrombolites

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The Earth is in the midst of a recent acceleration in the rate of species extinction and the unravelling of ecological communities. The authors think with the emerging field of Extinction Studies to explore educational approaches to ecological endangerment and extinction. Using a notion of visiting as ‘curious practice’, we story encounters between the authors, young children and the endangered Noorook Yalgorup-Lake Clifton thrombolites and their ecological community in south-western Australia. These visits were not intended to teach about extinction or the thrombolites. Rather, our aim was to generate pedagogical insights through approaching the threatened thrombolites and their environment with curiosity, openness and attentiveness, and framed by perspectives that trouble human exceptionalism and Western dualisms. Guided by Haraway’s notion of ‘staying with the trouble’, we argue this approach to encountering extinction generates insights into learning and living with ecological crisis in our shared world. Specifically, that for educators and children to relearn the world and their place in it, educators must enable new senses, meanings, perspectives and stories to populate the Earth and for this to occur they should listen with openness to, and think with, children

Translations of new public management: a decentred approach to school governance in four OECD countries

Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a ‘decentred approach’ to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. “Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance.” European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices

Captured becomings: an assemblage of sexual difference, neoliberal capitalism and bodies in the boys' education debate

This study investigates the current influence of conservative political, social and economic forces in structuring the perspectives of five pre-service teachers on the education of boys. I argue that these perspectives are constituted by a conservative assemblage of essentialist discourses of sexuality and neoliberal capitalism and these largely extend the indomitable power of conservative forces increasingly shaping social relations inside and outside the field of education. The interviews reveal that conservative discourses of sexual difference dominate the perspectives on boys and their schooling and this reliance on essentialist notions of sexuality effectively gives rise to a conflicting roles discourse that informs a recuperative masculinity politics and feminist backlash. I argue the social transformation effected by neoliberal economics is largely silenced when discussing boys and education and this allows participants to largely 'blame' feminism for the transformation of labour markets, work patterns, family relationships and gendered subjectivities, silencing its powerful influence. I contend personal insecurity and anxiety generated by neoliberal economic transformation have proliferated conservative discourses of sexuality, producing a defence of rigid sexual boundaries that proscribe the potential of male and female bodies by capturing their 'becoming', and to this extent I argue that conservative discourses of sexual difference are coextensive with the aims of neoliberal capitalism. However, rather than position men as victims, I argue the conservative assemblage including the boys' debate make available diverse ways for many individuals to experience their body powerfully, with the attributes and capacities of hegemonic masculinity being proliferated. The boys' debate is one resource for producing powerful subjectivities while extending the territory of the conservative assemblage increasingly constituting our world. Methodologically this is a qualitative inquiry that utilizes discourse analysis extensively informed by poststructural theories of knowledge, power and the subject. I also make connections with the work of Deleuze and Guattari and the theories of corporeal feminism, including a theory of the body as a machinic assemblage in order to interrogate the conservative territorialisation of subjectivity and social relations. Finally, I argue the need to consider the alignment of discourses of sexual difference, neoliberal capitalism and the body in order to create a future beyond the limits currently defined by our culture

The governmentality of school autonomy and self-management: A Foucauldian analysis

Over the past four decades in Australia, many politicians, policy-makers, experts and social commentators have sought to increase the organisational autonomy of public schools and their principals. This trend of shifting the locus of educational decision-making and management away from bureaucratic centres to individual schools and parents continues, with the Western Australian state government recently introducing the Independent Public Schools policy. This policy devolves an increased range of organisational and curriculum responsibilities from the state education bureaucracy to selected public schools. This thesis examines what appears to be the enduring trend towards school autonomy and self-management. The perspective of this thesis is informed by the theoretical, analytical and historical insights of Foucauldian studies of government, or governmentality. Foucault’s studies have increasingly influenced sociological and historical studies in education. His notions of power and discipline have been elaborated and applied in the study of the micro power relations of schooling. Unfortunately, while the study of schooling as a technology for disciplining the individual’s mind and body has received most attention, Foucault’s studies in government have been less widely understood, elaborated and used. This thesis explores Foucault’s genealogy of the formation of the modern liberal state (and governmentality) and the rich and subtle insights it provides into the complex relationship between the state, politics, society and the government of education. I explore Foucauldian studies in government with the aim of teasing out their implication for our understanding of the relationship between selfmanaging school reforms and the state, politics and government. In particular, I argue that the trend in public schools towards school autonomy and self-management cannot be adequately understood without understanding the inherent dilemma embedded within the discourses of politics and government of modern liberal democracies. This problem can be described as an agonistic tension in liberal governmentality between political and governmental authorities enabling individual and economic freedom, whilst needing to secure the state and the welfare of its constituent elements under the condition of freedom. This tension fuelled a ‘crisis of liberalism’ or a ‘crisis of liberal governmentality’ in the late twentieth century. This crisis involved vociferous critiques of the welfare state in conjunction with a cultural renewal of the discourses of individual freedom, emancipation, liberation and empowerment. According to Foucault, central to this crisis was concern about the costs of the perceived growth of excessive government of the post World War Two era, measured both economically and in terms of personal and political freedom. This thesis puts the case that the emergence of ‘self-managing school reforms’ is linked to this ‘crisis of liberalism’. The self-managing school constitutes both an instrument and object of government, re-regulating the domain of education according to an ethos of individual empowerment, activity, enterprise, autonomy and responsibility. To illustrate some of the consequences of these reforms, two case studies are examined. The first explores the emergence at a national level of the devolution of responsibilities and authority to schools, particularly canvassed in the Schools In Australia report (1973) and by the Commonwealth Schools Commission (1973-1988). The second case study examines the use of self-management techniques and practices in schools. These reforms have sought to strengthen the capacity of those within schools to manage themselves and their schools as competitive enterprises with diminished reliance on central education bureaucracies. I argue that this development, like the case of devolution, is linked to the new ways of rationalising and enacting the care and government of the population and the state emerging from the crisis of liberalism. I conclude with a discussion of the implication of this trend towards self-management, specifically in terms of what is at stake for the liberal state from a mode of government that seeks to govern for its citizens’ freedom and also, often antagonistically, for the state’s security