Jan Currie

This article explores the effects of neoliberalism and performative educational cultures on secondary school drama classrooms. We consider the ways Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and Butler’s concept of gender performance enable us to chart the embodied, relational, spatial and affective energies that inhabit the often neoliberal and heterosexually striated space of the drama classroom. These post-humanist analyses are useful methodological tools for mapping the complexities of student becomings in the space context of the secondary school. We also show how Foucault’s governmentality and Ball’s theory of competitive performativity are particularly salient in the context of immanent capitalism that shapes the desires of its subjects. These frameworks, when combined, can be useful in critiquing neoliberal educational assemblages and in indicating emerging deterritorializations and lines of flight in teachers and students.

This article examines the relationships between the embodiment of dramatic characters, gender, and identity. It draws on ethnographic data based on observations and interviews with 24 drama teachers and senior secondary drama students in Western Australia. We explore how student becomings in year 12 drama classrooms are mediated and constituted through socially overcoded gender binaries in a dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. We ask the questions: What constructions of femininity and masculinity are students embodying from popular dramatic texts in the drama classroom at a critical time in their social and emotional development? Are these constructions empowering? Or disempowering? What factors are influencing teachers’ choices of texts for their predominantly female students? Our research shows that what is delimiting about this potentiality in a time of identity exploration and formation are the constraining gender-binary roles available to young women particularly, and the performative pressures teachers are experiencing.

This paper explores Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis in relation to student and teacher becomings and the way these are actualised within the neoliberal and heterosexually striated spaces of the secondary school assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari considered a narrow approach to education problematic and called for creativity as a site of ‘resistance’. Drama is one subject rich with potentiality for students to strengthen their creativity and ‘speak back’ against the neoliberal project. What our research revealed is how the drama classroom is an open, dynamic space where students can embody different identities at a critical time in their adolescent development. What is delimiting about this potentiality is the proclivity of teachers and students, as desiring machines, to conform to the dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. The paper proposes that schizoanalysis offers new insights for mapping complex desire-flows and embodied identities through and against the dominant performative and heterosexist culture.

The supervision journey is often a bumpy one. Students and supervisors should welcome making it smoother. This study investigated how the use of information and communication technology (ICT) and a more collaborative pedagogy could improve supervision. We interviewed eight supervisors and nine students in two Australian universities to explore the current use of ICT and its integration with supervision pedagogy. Recent literature demonstrated new forms of supervision pedagogy emerging that embraced the idea of creating communities, involving greater connectedness, collaboration and more intense relationships. Not all studies found movement away from the traditional form of supervision dyads. The students and supervisors in our study used email, mobile phones, Skype and Dropbox; some used social media like Twitter. Studen ts reported their supervisors were competent in using ICT, sometimes initiating the uptake of new technologies. Overall, they identified the need for an increased use of ICT and its integration with supervision pedagogy.

This article examines the intersection between the senior secondary drama classroom, creativity and neoliberalism. Informed by a research project involving fifteen West Australian drama teachers and thirteen students, it considers the drama classroom as one site where tensions between the performative needs of neoliberal education and the more humanistic desires that drama teachers embody are enacted. This paper suggests that drama education can be a powerfully transformative vehicle for creative and innovative thinking because of its spatially unique classroom environment and embodied nature. However, collisions between rhetoric and reality, social good and economic return, can mean that young people are denied opportunities for choice and the capability development that drama education brings.

The much touted “difficult economic times” we live in have in recent years resulted in a drastic reduction in arts and education funding in western capitalist nations (Fowles 2014; Henwood and Featherstone 2013; Murray and Erridge 2012; Smith 2013). For example, in Australia, the 2013 landslide victory of the conservative Abbott government resulted in an almost immediate slashing of funding for education (A$1.1 b) and the arts (A$87.1 m) (Riddle et al. 2014, Tregear et al. 2014). Simultaneously, the new Federal government decided to spend A$12 billion on fifty-eight F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft (Tregear 2014). This prioritizing of government spending accords with what Henry A. Giroux would call the twin ideologies of neoliberalism and violence, or what he refers to as “today's culture of consumerism and violence” (Giroux 2013, 458)...

Studies worldwide have found that women's pay lags behind men's in academia. This article describes pay equity policies in Australia and overseas and the use of a pay equity audit as a strategic tool to reduce gender inequities at The University of Western Australia (UWA). As a research-intensive university, UWA resembles similar universities globally and, like them, is vertically segregated with power and advantage in the hands of males. Based on the average annual salaries in 2008, UWA's pay equity audit found a gender pay gap of 15% for academics and 12% for professionals. Discretionary allowances revealed additional pay differences with academic men, on average, receiving $8,744 more than academic women and professional men receiving $1,987 more than professional women. This article concludes with the micropolitics of how key players reacted to these findings and how the university may act to reduce gender differences in allowances.

Studies worldwide have found that women's pay lags behind men's in academia and women are underrepresented at the top of universities. This is the situation in Sweden and Australia, the two countries under examination in this paper. Gender pay equity reviews are compared at four universities: two in Australia and two in Sweden. This paper also explores the strategies these universities use to reduce gender inequities. The two countries have different types of legislation to implement pay equity reviews. Sweden's legislation requires mandatory pay analyses and wage remediation; whereas, Australia has voluntary pay equity audits with no wage remediation. In terms of gender representation, Swedish universities are more balanced across all levels except for the professorial level, which remains dominated by men. Australian universities have fewer female associate professors, professors, and senior managers. The paper concludes that, despite the regulation of salary scales in the four universities, pay gaps persist due to historic and cultural factors. This underlines the need for a different approach, one which mobilises grassroots action and tangible executive support to dismantle any existing barriers and alter the subtexts related to recruitment and promotion.

This study describes the interlocking networks of corporate directors serving on publicly listed corporate boards and those on the boards of nonprofit organizations in Western Australia in 2006. When this study was undertaken, the state was the beneficiary of a booming economy in resource development prior to the global financial crisis, yielding a substantial number of resource companies with their headquarters in Perth, the capital city of Western Australia. Through social network analysis using NetDraw, we trace the extent of interpersonal connections of prominent individuals who serve on these boards in this relatively isolated state in Australia. The network figures demonstrate the inner circle of companies and nonprofits with their interlocking directorships that suggest the growing interpenetration among the state, the market, and civil society. As a result of reduced government funding during the last two decades in Western Australia, nonprofit organizations have had to use market strategies to increase their revenues, which is one factor that has led to this greater interdependence between previously separate groups. Thus, market forces have blurred the boundaries that once separated private companies from nonprofit organizations, increasing the interlocking nature of their board directors.

Assistive technologies are often promoted to schools, parents and educators as tools to assist students with special needs by providing a compensatory value, to remediate learning problems and to promote personal independence. These technologies range from simple spellcheckers to more complex speech recognition systems and educational software. Many research projects have examined the effectiveness of these assistive technologies – primarily in terms of their remediation and assistive functions. This paper describes the results of a systematic search of research-based studies published in the last six years that examined the effectiveness of assistive technologies that have reading, writing, spelling and speech as their focus. After a rigorous process, 15 empirical research articles were selected based on the following criteria: empirical studies involved students who identified as having special needs; the assistive technologies had a literacy and speech focus; participants were in years K–12; and a clear skill or academic improvement was shown. Findings revealed that while some programs saw no improvement in spelling, reading or writing as a result of using the assistive technology, the majority of studies found consistently improved outcomes