Bob Lingard

The University of Queensland | UQ · School of Education

Privatisation and commercialisation in education encompass a range of interrelated practices, including the outsourcing of educational services as well as increased reliance on commercially produced resources for the delivery of learning and assessment. An increase in these practices has accompanied the shift from centralised systemic management of...

Este artigo aborda, por meio de uma revisão de literatura, a obra teórica de Pierre Bourdieu e seu impacto na pesquisa em educação. Exploram-se várias maneiras pelas quais o trabalho de Bourdieu se relaciona com a pesquisa educacional, com ênfase em sua relevância para pesquisadores na área. Além disso, é examinada a adaptação da obra de Bourdieu e...

This chapter proffers a response to the introductory chapter by the collection’s editors. It also provides responses to the granular case studies of ever-changing relations between pressures for alignment between EU member nations’ schooling systems and the schooling policies of three German language Northern European school systems, three Romanic...

As an introduction to this special issue, this paper presents a discussion of different theoretical and methodological challenges in analyzing the ways in which global policy flows are shaping education policies and practices within and across federal systems. We argue that the dynamics between the global and the federal systems are complex, non-li...

Accepted TESOL in Context Journal 32(1). Privatisation and commercialisation in education encompass a range of interrelated practices, including the outsourcing of educational services as well as increased reliance on commercially produced resources for the delivery of learning and assessment. An increase in these practices has accompanied the shif...

This paper focuses on a comparative analysis of two schools – an international school in Singapore and an independent school in Australia – and their engagement with and processes of internationalization with a focus on Global Citizenship Education (GCE). These schools have adopted international education models, the International Primary Curriculu...

This article draws on a qualitative comparative research study of global citizenship education (GCE) in two primary schools, an international school in Singapore and an independent school in Australia. This paper focuses on the implementation of GCE within the two specific school contexts, Singapore and Australia, examining the tensions which exist...

Our chapter focuses on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools, an instrument designed to assess individual school performance in reading, mathematics, and science against the national (and subnational) schooling systems measured by the main PISA test. Suc...

This paper focuses on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) PISA for Schools assessment. Our first substantive focus is a descriptive and analytical account of changes and developments in the functioning of this groundbreaking assessment since its creation in 2012. These changes include an expansion of the number and di...

Drawing upon research in Bangladesh, we highlight the role of "imagination" in the way policy networks pursued social entrepreneurial reforms within primary education and NGO sectors. Applying a cultural globalisation lens to network ethnography as method, we found such pre-emptive "imaginations" to be performative insofar as key network actors men...

Our chapter focuses on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Schools, an instrument designed to assess individual school performance in reading, mathematics, and science against the national (and subnational) schooling systems measured by the main PISA test. Suc...

Introduction We find ourselves in a moment where the unprecedented need for, and generation of, performance data in education is drastically reshaping schooling. Alongside demands for increased accountability and transparency in public schooling, these data have produced new urgencies around finding ‘evidence-informed’ (Lingard, 2013, 2021) solutio...

State-run schooling systems around the globe are witnessing the growing influence of external actors on articulations, provisions, policies, and outcomes of education. For instance, academies and charter schools, parental choice, contracting out, public-private partnerships, for-profit providers, benefit corporations, heterarchical governance, vent...

This paper is one of two that bring together a range of education scholars to consider how education might be for democracy in a time of complex challenges facing twenty-first century societies. In this paper, scholars from Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom consider how sites of formal and informal education can respond to multiple unfolding...

Schooling systems are steered by policy, which might be seen as the ‘authoritative allocation of values’. Each aspect of that definition has been challenged by the various processes of neoliberal globalisation.

As the third-largest export industry, international education occupies an important place in the Australian economy and society. Employing Bacchi's "What is the Problem Represented to be" (WPR) approach, this paper critically analyses four key policies pertaining to international students in Australia since the 1990s. Drawing upon theorising of the...

This chapter documents emergent developments in the datafication and digitalization of education, as well as their implications for education policy and the work of systems, schools and teachers. These developments are based on enhanced computational capacities, with much of the work of schooling systems, schools and teachers now datafied and digit...

This paper provides an account of the topological and its description of contemporary culture and use as a research methodology, a topological lens, generally, and in education research specifically. Some commentary is proffered on the relationships between the topological and the topographical, between relations and locations. A critical account i...

(Project page: https://edpolicyresearch.wixsite.com/choitaehee/group/esol-privatisation/discussion) The paper explores the policy logics of privatisation through service provision for students with English as an Additional language or dialect (EAL/D) in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. In the context of EAL/D, specifically targe...

This article examines how local, social and cultural knowledges were disrupted by global flows of human and non-human things in an international private Middle Eastern school. The study examined how the interplay of local and globally transient knowledges recursively influenced the sociomaterial actions of teachers in classroom learning. Critical e...

Set against the backdrop of globalization and global philanthropy, this book offers new perspectives on the sociological dynamics and governance implications of ‘social entrepreneurial’ policy in education. It examines the spatialities, relationships and culture that powerfully mediated the making and localisation of ‘Teach for Bangladesh’. This gl...

This article describes the use of a Learning Commission to experiment with conceptualising and implementing richer modes of educational accountability. A Learning Commission is a form for collaborative thinking that brings different kinds of knowledge and expertise to bear in relation to a common matter of concern: the role of schools in relation t...

This paper analyses Twitter microblogs over a 3-day period, during the release of the results of PISA 2015 on 6 December 2016 by the OECD. We document a methodological approach to investigating the social mediatisation of policy and its inclusive potential for enabling the participation of multiple voices. We draw on two data sets from the 3-day pe...

In this editorial, the authors situate the opt-out movement in the broader context of resistance to the global educational reform movement and its specific playing out in the USA in relation to the opt-out movement. The editors review the 11 articles and commentary and discuss the contributions of the collection as a whole to the literature. They n...

Purpose Over the last five years, approximately 50% of the students in Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island and 20% across New York State have opted out of the yearly standardized tests for third through eighth grade. This article focuses on two grassroots organizations, New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) and Long Island Opt...

In 2011, the Taiwanese Ministry of Education issued a policy on the internationalisation of schooling. The policy assumes that being ‘international’ has become necessary in order to maintain economic competitiveness in a globalising world. It was published in two languages: Mandarin, the official language in Taiwan, and English, presupposed as a li...

This paper argues that more focus on the temporal is needed in critical policy sociology in education. In so asserting, the paper extends the concept of ‘historically informed’ as included in the foundational definition of policy sociology in education proffered by Jenny Ozga. There are four foci to this extension to encompass the temporal, taken t...

This article provides a critical sociological examination of how Hong Kong youth’s relationship towards Chinese identity and China is nego- tiated vis-a-vis schooling, language policy, and the broader Hong Kong postcolonial condition, and how this mediates these students’ aspira- tional imaginations regarding possibilities of studying and working...

This article contributes new insights to research on the socio-spatial dynamics of policy production by synthesizing the concepts of “policy assemblage” and “scalecraft”. By conceptualizing scale as socially-crafted rather than pre-existing (a priori), we argue that assemblage and scalecraft provide generative means for examining how scale is imagi...

This paper traces the complexities, contingencies and tensions involved in the creation of a new, ‘scientific’ assessment in what we call Prefecture A in Japan. We start with a thick, granular description of the complicated and ongoing narrative of a new policy emergence. This descriptive account serves as a precursor to our application of an Actor...

The introduction of new assessment policy can reverberate throughout all levels of schooling. This paper presents an in-depth investigation into one school’s response in the Junior years of secondary education to the introduction of a new Senior years’ assessment system. The investigation focuses on the educational context of a high-performing scho...

The academisation of schooling in Northern England is an example of a new mode of educational governance that promises greater autonomy for schools and school leaders. A common claim regarding the benefits of academisation is that it will improve student outcomes by delivering greater autonomy for Headteachers. In this paper, six Headteachers from...

This paper focuses on the perspectives of minority/racialized students in urban high schools. It is based on findings of interviews with 85 students in six secondary schools in Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, and in Melbourne, Australia, during 2016–2019. While there has been increasing attention to closing the racial achievement gap and some minori...

This paper draws on Bourdieu's theorising (particularly habitus and field) to think about position‐making of teachers in respect of the early enactment of the Australian Curriculum. Position‐making, a concept developed from the analysis proffered, can be contrasted with the more common practice of position‐taking endemic in a relatively stable fiel...

Analysing psycho-biographical data collected through a research interview with the founder of Teach For Bangladesh (TFB), this chapter explores the idea of ‘social enterprise’ in the way it is experienced, understood and most importantly embodied by the Founder. Biographical and experiential episodes of diasporic life shaped the Founder’s aspiratio...

This paper focuses on the complex, entangled relationships between research and policy and suggests this is a very important topic in the contemporary era of so-called, ‘evidence-based’ or ‘research-based’ policy in education. The paper argues that we can only ever have ‘evidence-informed’ and ‘research-informed’ policy because all policy is an adm...

Led by an Australian team who witnessed the proliferation of local and global private companies, foundations and semi-government services seeking to ‘partner’ with schools, this special issue seeks to unpack global patterns in the ‘outsourcing’ of curricula. More specifically, using the ‘problems’ of obesity and mental health, the project aims to u...

This article illustrates how the British Council Bangladesh (BCB) made use of panel discussions and commissioned research as policy vehicles to persuade the government of Bangladesh of the value of social enterprises for public service delivery, including in education. Drawing upon Appadurai's notion of 'imagined worlds' in relation to influential...

Transnational articulation programmes are one way China is attempting to advance its higher education (HE) system. We report a study of twelve Chinese students’ experiences in two China-Australia 2 + 2 articulation programmes. In our analysis of semi-structured interviews, we use Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus to understand the impact on...

This paper on the political sociology of school choice policies has been written as a supplement to the essays in the 2020 Politics of Education Association Yearbook and locates them in cognate literatures. In addition, the papers are situated against the changing political and global contexts of such policies, as global pressures, discourses, and...

This article documents the methodological thinking that underpined a sociological study of Teach for Bangladesh ( TFB ), a globally mobile yet locally embedded education policy situated in a developing world context. In order to reassess education policy vis-à-vis spatialities–power, relationships–resources, culture– change and imaginations–flows o...

Over the last two decades, parents and community members in New York have increasingly resisted the neoliberal corporate reform agenda in schooling, including rejecting high-stakes testing. The parent-led opt-out movement in New York State has successfully opted around 20% of eligible students out of the Common Core state standardized tests over th...

Introduction On 8 February 2018, the New York State Board of Regents Chancellor and Commissioner, and the Board of Regents, who are together responsible for the general supervision of all educational activities in the state,1 filed a lawsuit against the State University of New York (SUNY) Charter Schools Committee and other SUNY committees for adop...

This chapter focuses on a largely hidden dimension of the privatization and commercialization of public schooling systems, namely the role of edu-businesses in relation to the creation of data infrastructures that are indispensable to the structuring of government schooling systems today. Large, private ed-tech companies are an important element of...

This chapter provides a comparative analysis of print and social media representations of Australia’s changing performance on the OECD’s triennial Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), focusing on the 2016 dissemination of the 2015 results. After identifying media logics of practice, we draw on concepts of mediatisation to analyse pr...

Juxtaposed with the emerging body of literature about datafication in schooling, this paper examines the increasing encroachment of data into the Japanese education system, in particular, the use of data associated with standardised academic assessments for governance purposes. In so doing, we use the Japanese ‘case’ to expose the possible limits o...

Set against globalization and as an expression of it, transnational higher education (TNHE) has become an important part of the Chinese educational higher education (HE) system. Research has widely investigated macro topics, for example, policy and developmental history of Chinese HE. However, limited studies have explored Chinese students' learnin...