Jill BlackmoreDeakin University · School of Education
Jill Blackmore
Ph D. Stanford; M Admin. & Policy, Stanford; M.Ed. Monash; BA Hons, Dip Ed , Melbourne.
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160
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 2008 - July 2015
April 1987 - April 2014
Publications
Publications (160)
Geopolitics is shaping the international education landscape. International education has trationally been used as a tool to boost transnational cooperation, foster multilateral and global ties, and reduce tensions between nations. Such a role has been eroded and international education has been weaponised in the context of escalating political tur...
This paper analyses the composition, distribution, and history of school funding in Australia through a spatial lens (Soja 2010). We explore multi-scalar school funding policy through three layers of economic maldistribution. We sketch the funding disparities between the three school sectors (public, Catholic, and independent) exposing a spatial in...
The articulation of school autonomy into practice nationally, regionally and locally is highly situated in terms of what it enables or impedes with regard to the professional autonomy of principals and teachers. Principal autonomy does not necessarily mean greater teacher professional autonomy. In this paper, we draw on a three-year qualitative stu...
In response to the diverse deployments of ‘school autonomy’ in interviews with education stakeholders, we use material semiotics and the concept of ontological politics to theorize school autonomy as ontologically multiple. We analyze interviews conducted in Australia with forty-two school education stakeholders drawn from principal, parent and tea...
A persuasive solution for governments and systemic authorities seeking to improve the quality and equity of outcomes for students has been the localized management of schools. Believed to provide opportunities for context-sensitive decision-making, what remains unclear is how does shifting increasing management to the school-level generate the type...
This paper interrogates international and domestic peer relations in two Australian schools and how they are shaped by structural, cultural and discursive dimensions of schooling. In particular, it analyses intercultural relations between domestic and international students in the context of policies promoting "internationalisation-at-home". We arg...
Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and managemen...
This article focuses on school staff' perspectives about the value of international students, using data from interviews with 51 teachers, school leaders and international student support officers across eight schools in Australia. The positioning of international students by the interviewees shows how hosting this cohort can assist to boost school...
Recent media and government attention has focused on principal-directed violence by students, parents and teachers. Principal stress, particularly in public schools, is not new-with a body of research identifying long hours, administrative overload, media attention, multiple accountabilities, lack of time and resources as having impact on their hea...
This paper examines principals’ perceptions of school autonomy and leadership as part of a 3-year research project looking at the implications of school autonomy on social justice across four states of Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland). Drawing on interviews with principals and representatives from principal st...
Considerable investment has been made to redesign built spaces in schools, with an assumption not based on research evidence embedded in both the architectural and educational literature that this will improve teaching and learning practices. In this study of 12 Victorian case studies in Australia schools were selected based on OECD criteria, not i...
This paper provides an overview of the policies of school autonomy in Australian public education from the Karmel report in 1973 to the present day. The key focus is on the social justice implications of this reform. It tracks the tensions between policy moves to both grant schools greater autonomy and rein in this autonomy with the increasing inst...
Most research on international students’ experiences has focused on tertiary settings and consistently shows that this cohort negotiates significant risks during their time abroad. This paper draws on data from the first year of a three-year Australian Research Council funded study to address the un(der)examined cohort of young people who complete...
Abstract
Purpose
International student employability has been accorded increased emphasis in the internationalisation agendas, especially in major destination countries as it shapes universities' attractiveness to prospective international students. Having insights into returning graduates' employability in their home country has become critical gi...
In the entrepreneurial university, epistemic governance is exerted through external pressures of market competition, funding, university rankings and research assessment and internal processes of organisational restructuring and mechanisms of corporate governance to re/produce epistemic injustices. Data from a study of three Australian universities...
Twenty-first century education has become an explicitly utilitarian exercise. Its contribution to society is evaluated, almost exclusively, in terms of the development of future global citizens adaptable to rapidly changing sociopolitical, economic and technological conditions. Under this ideological premise, Languages education is defined reductiv...
In this reflective piece, I consider how the pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of Australian universities. I argue that government and university management have been careless of international students and academics and their health and wellbeing, with significant equity and long-term effects as to the role of the university in a democracy.
There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform
within Australian public education despite evidence linking this
reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper
presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered
from a broader study that is investigating the social justice
implications of school aut...
The current COVID19 pandemic has forced major adjustments, often at short notice, on schools and schooling. Educators have been working in a constantly changing environment to continue to deliver for students, families and communities all the while maintaining the necessary supports for themselves and colleagues. In Australia this has led to debate...
School autonomy policies have circulated through various modes of educational governance internationally, endorsing the view that more autonomy will improve schools and their systems. When subject to the discourses and practices of marketization, however, school ‘autonomy’ has been mobilized in ways that generate injustice. These injustices are the...
Link to the report: https://www.deakin.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/1900922/Cultural-Understandings-of-Graduate-Employability-in-Accounting-in-China-and-India-2019.pdf
The project was funded by the Global Research Perspectives Program of CPA Australia. It investigated how socio-cultural
understandings of employability and generic skills info...
Very few organisations, even local firms, are insulated from global economic activity or the social and cultural consequences of widespread global migration programs such as international education. Nonetheless, established recruitment processes remain stubbornly local, privileging candidates who conform to the criterion of ‘people like us’ to prod...
Feminist theorists critiqued classical liberalism for the gender binaries embedded in social, political and economic theory and everyday social relations. Neoliberalism economises the social and political based on autonomous individualism, equating equity with choice, naturalising the market as the mechanism to allocate social goods and education w...
The article provides comparative insights into Vietnamese and Australian students’ experience of internationalization of the curriculum. We explore how local arrangements for curriculum internationalization in Australia and Vietnam enable and/or constrain students’ individual agency in taking control of their knowledge and skills to become skilful...
Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is cons...
Post-study employment for international students in Australia has emerged as a key issue facing the international education sector. For international graduates seeking to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive labour market, foreign work experience is now seen as a necessary part of the overseas study ‘package’. However, international stu...
Increasingly mediatised policy processes influence practice in schools as education becomes a site of parental anxiety and choice exacerbated by standardised national assessment and ranking of schools in the media. This paper analyses the responses to media scrutiny of six principals whose schools’ national test results were reported in the Austral...
This chapter is a comparative study of the policies and provision of mobile touchscreen digital devices in Canada and Australia. The current environment for language and literacy teaching is changing at an extremely rapid rate as the use of mobile devices becomes embedded into educational practice and expectations rise that children be digitally li...
This paper examines school principal responses to the policy discourse of widening participation in higher education. As a critical analysis of how policy is produced, read and responded to by principals [Bacchi, C., 2009. Analysing policy: what's the problem represented to be? New York: Pearson], the paper questions the assumptions underpinning po...
Schools and school education systems within nations are vying to increase international student enrolments in secondary schools. This analysis of the change over a decade in the enrolment of international secondary students in Victoria, Australia, indicates how the processes of internationalisation and commercialisation of education have affected b...
This chapter argues that neoliberal policy, one of the drivers of this restructuring, is increasing educational inequality and producing gendered, racialized, and class-based identities, practices, and outcomes. It also argues that the restructuring of education into a global business is gendered and that gender as a “structuring structure” is cent...
Since the late 1970s, international education has steadily gained in popularity in China. An emerging middle class seeks to strengthen its position in China’s rapidly stratifying society under its socialist market economy with the shift from wealth creation for all to wealth concentration for a few. Previously, a foreign qualification was considere...
Within the context of heightened perceptions of risk within the higher education sector worldwide, responsibility for outcomes is increasingly required not only of universities but, also, of individual academics. In turn, contracts have become a key form of governance for institutions in mediating and modulating this risk and responsibility. While...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to report on a three-year Australian study of international business and accounting students and the transition to employment. For international students seeking to differentiate themselves in a highly competitive global labour market, foreign work experience is now an integral part of the overseas study “pack...
Deputy Vice Chancellor and Pro Vice Chancellor positions have proliferated in response to the global, corporatised university landscape [Scott, G., S. Bell, H. Coates, and L. Grebennikov. 2010. “Australian Higher Education Leaders in Times of Change: The Role of Pro Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellor.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and...
This chapter explores the relationship between education reform and gender equity, both within and between nation states. Utilising feminist critical policy analysis and post-colonial theory, it examines how education reform over the past decade has impacted on gender equity and how educational reform is itself gendered. It considers the nature of...
This paper draws on research by Australians on Australian education to explore the tension between being critical and being marginalised. In it, I examine how research is positioned in the changing field of education in relation to government, society and the economy in the context of the rise of edu-capitalism globally. I then explore the policy s...
This collection of essays is about the struggle between the evils of neoliberalism and the unquestioned goodness of Freirean theory. The essays ‘of opposition’ were written and delivered by Carlos Alberto Torres to diverse audiences and in different locations and languages. Yet they contain one overarching message suggesting that neoliberal globali...
Confronted with the processes of massification, commercialisation, internationalisation and reduced funding, universities also face an ageing academic workforce, with implications of a shrinking pool from which to recruit managerial and research leaders. A feminist analysis suggests that the policy problematic has been wrongly conceptualised as dis...
Mobility has become a focus of social theorists with globalisation (Urry, 2010). Appadurai (1996) typifies recent manifestations of globalisation in terms of flows and spaces: technoscapes, ideoscapes, mediscapes, financescapes and ethnoscapes. In education, flows of teachers, educational policies, and curriculum are not new, given prior phases of...
The processes of internationalisation in schooling can be understood as interrelated flows of educational goods (curriculum, certification, accreditation), people (students and teachers), ideas (policy), images (markets), culture (inclusivity and cultural diversity), and money (school funds) (Appadurai, 1996). Internationalisation in education is o...
"Mobile Teachers, Teacher Identity and International Schooling focuses on the increased mobility of teachers and curriculum and what it means for the expansion of international schooling. In the early 21st century, educational institutions have been transformed by technological innovation and global interconnectivity. The demographic, ideological,...
Over three decades there has been a shift from ideologies of idealism and educationalism towards instrumentalism in higher education due to the global circulation of neoliberal ideologies. Facilitated by digital technologies and encouraged by international ranking systems, there is a paradoxical trend towards homogenisation rather than heterogeneit...
This chapter will explore how different feminist theories and theorists have informed what counts as research, what is defined as a research issue, and methodological approaches to research in higher education. It will consider the theoretical and methodological tools feminist academics have mobilized in order to develop more powerful explanations...
Since the 1980s, there has been a burgeoning literature on women and educational leadership. The focus has primarily been on the underrepresentation of women in leadership informed by a feminist critique of the mainstream literature. Over time, key feminist theories and research have been appropriated in education policy and are now embedded in the...
Market principles now dominate the education and social policies of many Anglophone countries, including Australia, but articulate differentially within specific contexts. Existing historical legacies, local economic and social conditions, and geographical settings interact with federal and state funding and transport policies to shape the nature o...
My life and intellectual history are closely connected to the late 20th Century rise of the second wave women’s, student and civil rights movements. These decades also witnessed the professionalization of women’s traditional fields of work— teaching and nursing—with their introduction into the academy. But as all feminists know, and my intellectual...
In recent times, many key host nations have made it easier for foreign graduates to migrate after graduation. These students are often considered ideal migrants, possessing local qualifications along with a degree of acculturation, language skills and, in many cases, relevant local work experience. For the student, the opportunity to obtain interna...
Education as a field of policy, research and practice has been reconfigured over four decades by economic, social and cultural globalization in conjuncture with neoliberal policies premised upon markets and new managerialism. One effect has been shifting boundaries between, and understandings of what constitutes the public and the private with rega...
Not until the late 1990s did the rational/emotional binary embedded in mainstream literature on educational leadership and management come under challenge. Now the emotional dimensions of organisational change and leadership are widely recognised in the leadership, organisational change and school improvement literature. However, the dissolution of...
This article explores the relationship between education reform and gender equity, both within and between nation states. Utilising feminist critical policy analysis and post-colonial theory, it examines how education reform over the past decade has impacted on gender equity, and how
educational reform is itself gendered. It considers the nature of...
For one of the few academics remaining in Education@Deakin over twenty-two years, the notion of a Deakin Education diaspora produces feelings of both nostalgia and discontent. It is easy to be nostalgic about the period during the late1980s when a critical mass of education scholars created the Deakin ‘critical edge’. This feeling is tinged with so...
The issue of gender and leadership, both contested notions in education, has been addressed within mainstream literature, as a variable of analysis, or ignored. Feminist literature sees organizations, cultures, and leadership as historically infused with notions of masculinity and femininity that advantage most men and marginalize most women in ove...
This study draws on data gathered during a three-year project on women and leadership undertaken in schools, universities and technical and further education colleges in Australia, and focuses specifically on the experiences of women in universities in leadership positions. Five paradoxes are identified that are shaping the work of women in these p...
Purpose
This paper argues that because leadership is a relational practice and leaders are gendered and racialised, in socially diverse schools and societies, leader preparation around difference is potentially emotionally confronting to leaders' professional and personal identities.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on critical race and...
Parental involvement in schools, generally seen to be a good thing, is now closely linked through policy to the educational achievement of their children. In this Victorian case study, teacher and parent responses to policies advocating parental involvement are examined. It explores the intersections of gender and class in the context of changing h...
This paper draws upon critical discourse analysis, cultural studies and communication theory, studies on media and educational reform, and the work of Bernstein, Bourdieu and Luhmann in particular, to explore how the print and media 'mediated' a period of educational change marked by moves to self-management in schools in Victoria, Australia. It co...
This paper provides a critical review of papers in this special issue on Bourdieu and practice. What is different about this collection is that, in analysing policy and practice through a Bourdieusian lens, the thinking tools of field, disposition (collective and individual), logics of practice and doxa have been mobilised with regard to the social...
Leslie Roman states 'white is a colour too'. Yet the whiteness of educational leaders is rarely questioned, although masculinism—the enduring capacity of different masculinities to remain the norm in leadership—is increasingly under scrutiny. Rarely do white men or women leaders question their whiteness, whereas indigenous and other minority groups...
In this chapter I identify and elaborate, from a feminist perspective, upon the theoretical shifts and key concepts that inform sociological analyses of gender and educational organizations. Gender inequalities are embedded in the multi-dimensional structure of relationships between women and men, which, as the modern sociology of gender shows, ope...
This entry traces the ways in which gender has been conceptualised in the field of leadership and administration.
Universities have focused on teaching and learning at a time when quality has become the marker of distinction in international higher education markets. Education markets have meant pedagogical relations have become contractualised with a focus on student satisfaction, exemplified in consumer‐oriented generic evaluations of teaching. This article...
This chapter considers how globalisation has produced new discourses, created new sites of political action and requires a
rethinking about feminist claims upon the state for gender equity in education. Globalisation is generally associated with
both universalising and particularist tendencies at the local level. The discussion draws from feminist...
This article is framed in two ways. First, by an editorial concern regarding the Americentricity of a special issue for the "Journal of Research on Educational Leadership" on leadership preparation. And second, Jean-Marie, Normore, and Brooks' (2009) desire for a "new social order" for a "multinational dialogue" as expressed in their paper "Leaders...
This chapter is concerned with education as a factor in shaping life opportunities. Education affects, and is affected by, individual and collective health and well-being. It is now well established that the health and well-being of students impacts on their educational experience and outcomes, and that those experiences and outcomes impact on stud...
Research on women's leadership has tended to focus upon detailed micro studies of individual women's identity formation or, alternatively, to conduct macro studies of its broader discursive constructions within society. Both approaches, although providing helpful understandings of the issues surrounding constructions of women's leadership, are inad...
There is now significant evidence that school and leadership redesign is necessary in order to achieve more socially just educational futures for all students and a productive and professionally rewarding environment for teachers. Redesign requires some fundamental shifts in how schools work; engagement with and through learning communities based o...