About

Sue Thomas provides a meticulously detailed account of the relation between media representations of education policy, and the process through which policy is developed. Focusing upon a major review of the Queensland school curriculum, known as the Wiltshire review after its chair, Professor Ken Wiltshire, Sue Thomas provides us with an analysis not only of the process and outcomes of the review-itself an important contribution-but she also presents a detailed analysis of the mass mediated context in which it took place and therefore the issues and public pressures with which it was required to deal...

What Sue Thomas's book does is open up a whole area of investigation - the media discourses used to represent education-as fundamental to an accurate and informed sense of the context within which the actual work of education goes on. The links between public perception and policy formation are explicit and dramatic, in this account, substantiating Sue Thomas's conviction that educationists would be well served by better understanding, and perhaps directly intervening in, the media representation of education issues and policy.

This is brave and eminently useful research. Brave, because it works across several disciplinary fields where there has been a failure to accept the importance of the issues it raises. Taking on several disciplines at once to remind each of them of the gaps in their understanding is certainly an important task, but it takes courage and endurance to complete. Useful, because while the project has a highly political provenance, it is not a work of polemic: it is detailed, thorough, and socially engaged research. The evidence presented here will enable further study and carries potential to expand the range of information available to the disciplines concerned.... this is a most valuable piece of work that deserves publication and dissemination amongst all those interested in the public debate about Australian education.

Prof. Graeme Turner
Director
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
University of Queensland

Proudly published by Post Pressed

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Contents

Foreword: Graeme Turner

PART ONE: Investigating Public Discourses on Education

CHAPTER 1: Questioning Public Representations of Schooling
Policies for Teacher Quality
Media Coverage of Educational Issues
Investigating Education Policy in the Media
CHAPTER 2: Media Discourses and Education Policy
Research on Media Representations of Education
Public Discourses: Media Items and Educational Policies
The Interrelationships between Media and Policy Discourses
CHAPTER 3: On Discourse and Ideology
Textually Mediated Discourses
Ideologies, Discourses and Power
Investigating the Nexus between Discourse and Ideology
CHAPTER 4: Critical Discourse Analysis
Definitions of Critical Discourse Analysis
Methods of Analysis
Dimensions of Discourse
Textual Features
CDA: a tool for investigating discourses and power
CHAPTER 5: Mapping Media Discourses on Wiltshire
A Contextualised Interdisciplinary Study
Collecting the Data: policy documents
Collecting the Data: media items
Collecting the Data: the Interviews
"Doing the Investigation"

PART TWO: The Wiltshire Story

CHAPTER 6: Establishment
Origins and Motivations
The Print Media on "Standards"
Negotiating the Parameters of the Review
The Press Announcement
The Failure of Schools
Wiltshire: the First Stage
CHAPTER 7: First Impressions
Getting Started
The Interim Report
Competing Discourses: Preferences, Alternatives and Contradictions
Wiltshire: the Second Stage
CHAPTER 8: Together we can Shape the Future
Three Volumes and an Overview!
Reporting Wiltshire
Tracing Discourses in Shaping the Future
Wiltshire: the Third Stage
CHAPTER 9: Aftermath
Back to Basics?
Reading through the Basics
Responses, Negotiations and Deliberations
A Cabinet-in-Confidence Committee
Lobbying for Change
The Final Recommendations
Reporting the Changes
Wiltshire: The Fourth Stage

PART THREE: Conclusion

CHAPTER 10: Discourses on Education in the Public Sphere
Mapping the Wiltshire Discursive Field
Lessons from Wiltshire
Placing the Media in the Educational Policy Process

Endnotes, References & Appendix

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