Revolution or backlash? the mediatisation of education policy in Australia

Recent scholarship has identified the emergence of a new modality of policy work: the mediatisation of policy. This paper provides an Australian case study which reports on the tactics of an Australian Federal Minister of Education and a media commentator who both engaged in public pedagogical work for the purpose of spinning education policy. In particular, we argue that this example of the mediatisation of education policy has worked to stifle pedagogical innovation as advocates of middle schooling reform struggle against what appears to be a backlash to the social-democratic reforms of the post-World War II era. Such backlash politics is understood in terms of a struggle to maintain the role of teachers as curriculum designers and not be merely technicians; to sustain critically reflective learning communities of colleagues and friends; and not succumb to pedagogies of resentment that are driven by a logic of deficit views of students and their communities.