Purpose: In January 2021, the state government of NSW, Australia, announced that all year 9 and 10 elective courses developed by schools will be phased out. This paper offers a brief historical account of school-developed board-endorsed courses (SDBECs) in NSW and a close analysis of the policy to phase them out. Design/methodology/approach: I…

This article is aimed at analysing the modes in which educational instruction and equality are joined together in the official pedagogic discourse in Argentina during the period 2003-2019. This short period encompasses two moments of engaging in debates over the nature of this articulation--namely, the presidencies of Néstor Kirchner followed by…

The article aims to depict the political framing of three grading reforms in Swedish compulsory school, in terms of the political problem they are supposed to solve and what kind of attention is given to the lowest performing pupils. Discourse analysis is employed, focusing on statement producers. The empirical material consists of policy…

In this paper, we examine the rise of authoritarian populism in Brazil following the election in 2018 of Jair Messias Bolsonaro to the Presidency and reflect on the consequences of his far-right-wing politics for education. Our focus is broadly on three historical blocs (with five different presidents of the Republic) which make up the policy…

Higher education professional associations (HEPAs) are well-established agents of knowledge production and have been influential in shaping higher education policies and practices. In the context of US international higher education, HEPAs have contributed to the rise of 'internationalization' as a discursive practice. Proposing an analytical…

This article explores how an environmental education policy text comes to be constituted by discursive strategies that reproduce or challenge particular ideologies of environmentalism in relation to education. Using a qualitative analysis of discourses in the National Policy of Environmental Education of Colombia (NPEEC), we examine how these can…

Language education policy in Arizona has been on a rollercoaster over the last five years. Between 2019 and 2024, the state shifted from strict English-only enforcement to loosening restrictions and encouraging dual language approaches, then back to strict English-only enforcement. In this forum piece, we use approaches from critical discourse…

This research examines how the U.S. newspapers portrayed the Common Core State Standards between 2010-2017. Lexical choices and discursive strategies in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were identified using the Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies framework (Partington & Marchi, 2018; Reisigl, 2018). As a diachronic study focusing…

In 2015, the Government of British Columbia (BC), Canada, reversed a long-standing mandate to provide tuition-free Adult Basic Education (ABE) to all adults. Drawing upon internal government policy documents and inter- and intra-ministerial communications obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) tools, key policy documents, social media…

In this article, we address the questions: How is the purpose of higher education constructed within policy texts from the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), England and Sweden? How does this position students in making the transition from Bachelor to Masters? We do this through analysis of two recent policy documents from each of the EHEA,…

The aim of this article is to analyze discourse from historically pertinent policy and strategic documents of the Norwegian Schools of Music and Performing Arts, in order to explore the nature of the intractable discrepancy between curriculum, policy, and practice. Popular music has long been part of Norwegian compulsory-school and higher music…

Education acts as an important catalyst for socioeconomic and democratic evolution in society and is a critical tool for building an equitable system. In our paper, we have historicized one of the most important educational policies, viz. Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SAMSA) in India that carries large expectations to minimize the educational divide.…

A growing body of research has demonstrated that neoliberal discourses have negatively impacted dual language bilingual education (DLBE) for students designated as English learners. This study uses the concept of expropriation to refer to the co-opting and dispossessing of educational resources, opportunities, and rights from language-minoritized…

In pronouncements of early childhood education and care (ECEC) policy the importance of quality appears as a seemingly irrefutable concept. Yet, attention to ECEC policy history reveals tensions between discourses that construct quality in ways that endure whereas other ways are ostensibly forgotten. Drawing on a Foucauldian-influenced…

Understanding the media as co-producer of education policy is at the centre of this study. The media's strong focus on education crisis in recent decades serves as a background. The aim is to investigate education discourses that are dominantly actualised in media texts during electoral periods, and to analyse how they construct education and…