CONFERENCE PAPER No s1

CONFERENCE PAPER No. 3

The discourse of reform: A critical analysis of the New Basics curriculum

Presented by

Katie Weir The discourse of reform: A critical analysis of the New Basics curriculum

Katie Weir

Introduction In 2003 at ACSA in Adelaide I made my conference debut when I presented some interim findings from my PhD research that was a semiotic analysis of the New Basics - Rich Tasks (Weir, 2003a). I considered that moment a milestone in my academic career and in my doctoral research, both of which have since made considerable progress. This paper is evidence of that progress as this year I’m presenting a précis of my research in its entirety.

The main thing I want to highlight at this forum is the innovative approach I took to analysing curriculum, which I believe opens up new challenges to curriculum theorists. In the scheme of systemic school reform, New Basics is a relatively radical concept and this necessitated, at times, unconventional analytical frameworks that had to remain consistent with the theoretical constructs that underpin the curriculum, as well as cater for the innovative production, design and distribution features of the textual artefacts that comprise my data corpus. With this in mind, a major aim of this paper is to demonstrate the discourse-analytic approach I adopted in examining the New Basics Project and, more specifically, how a critical multisemiotic analysis of curriculum artefacts can produce valid interpretations of curriculum intent.

Another equally important reason for ‘outing’ my findings at this conference is concern over their loss of currency now that the New Basics trial is effectively complete and the official Research Report (Department of Education and the Arts, 2004), and the external evaluation of the trial (Ainley, 2004), were published nearly a year ago. The initial excitement over New Basics has all but faded although I still sense a strong current of public conversations debating what the New Basics Project really showed us. In my view, a significant outcome of New Basics was its ability to generate alternative approaches to understanding curriculum, and provide a new set of educational discourses that opened up spaces for teacher (and public) dialogue around curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. While my findings are at times critical of the implementation processes adopted for systemic reform in Queensland, the reconceptualisation of the New Basics curriculum caught my imagination in the very first instance and has had my heartfelt support and advocacy since I started exploring the project in 1999. The critical nature of my research and its unique combination of theoretical and analytical frameworks have enabled me to draw conclusions that present a positive and productive critique of New Basics by providing possible alternative approaches to curriculum policy production that may enable greater sustainability for change. In this way, my research represents a positive thesis about curriculum reform and contributes new knowledge to the field which should open up deeper insights into understanding curriculum through more “complicated conversations”.

This paper begins by presenting an overview of my doctoral research that includes some of the most significant findings revealed by this study. I then describe the theoretical and methodological frameworks that inform my work. The New Basics curriculum is based on the reconceptualist model of curriculum theory so I examine the work of William Pinar and his colleagues and ascertain the attributes of New Basics that align with their current ideas about understanding curriculum. I draw my understanding of curriculum as symbolic representation from the seminal text Pinar et al published in 1995, which summarises the field of curriculum studies at that time.

Curriculum understood as symbolic representation refers to those institutional and discursive practices, structures, images and experiences that can be identified and analyzed in various ways, (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery and Taubman, 1995, p.16)

Based on this definition my research adopts a poststructural perspective of curriculum as ‘discourse’ and as ‘text’, an approach that enabled the appropriation of Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (hereafter CDA) as the overriding analytical framework that informs my methodology. I describe the three sets of texts that made up my data corpus. These were so diverse in relation to their content and expression of communication (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001), that different analytical toolkits had to be constructed for each set. To explain the methodological minutiae for every data set is beyond the scope of this paper. However, the implications of these new methodologies and the underlying meanings they were able to uncover from the texts should signal their import for curriculum theorists relying on multimodal texts as their data source. The paper concludes with a summary of the findings from each data set and their implications with respect to implementing and sustaining curriculum and systemic reform in Queensland state education.

An overview of my doctoral research As the title of my thesis suggests, this study examines New Basics as a discourse of educational reform in Queensland through a critical analysis of salient systemic documents published throughout the course of the trial implementation of the New Basics Project. The major research focus is on how the discursive practices employed in these texts position teachers in New Basics schools and construct their relationship with Education Queensland. In other words, I uncover the textually construed power relations between Education Queensland and New Basics teachers with the aim of gaining insight into the import of these subject positions on the uptake and delivery of educational change.

The representation of the New Basics curriculum across these texts is another focus of my study. The initial conception of New Basics as way of aligning curriculum, pedagogy and assessment underwent significant transformations as the concept traversed the discursive terrain of systemic reform in Queensland. This is due in part to the staggered publication of these texts, a situation that enabled trial events to effect change in the representation of New Basics in subsequent documents. My study interprets these textual/discursive changes as changes in curriculum intent, and argues that while these are expected, the extent and direction of the change in the case of New Basics were driven by neoliberal systemic ideologies reflected in the increasing commodification of curriculum as the trial evolved. All of these ideas are based on the assumption that social/educational change is discourse driven (see Fairclough 1992, 2000, 2001, 2002a).

Overall, my research indicates that the discourse of reform in Queensland became a multimodal, multimediated extravaganza of textual representations that I have likened to a ‘commodity spectacle’ (after Kellner, 2003). The genre network of New Basics texts demonstrate how, during the institutional appropriation of New Basics discourses, Education Queensland became a ‘discourse generating machine’. That is, it was the machinery for the production of a plethora of textual products such as glossy promotional policy booklets and brochures, digitally enhanced multimodal syllabus documents, an ‘artbook’, posters, web pages, etc. This machinery naturally followed along the lines of neoliberalism resulting in the commodification of New Basics and signalling the marketisation of education through branding of a knowledge product. More specifically, as the trial progressed, the Rich Tasks became reified and, in the process, hijacked the reform process becoming the main agents for educational change.

The emphasis on assessment and accountability grew over the course of the trial and, as a consequence, the Rich Tasks emerged as the synecdochic representation of the New Basics, a situation that had significant implications for trial participants and for the uptake of curriculum reform as a whole. The discursive construction of New Basics teachers suggests these trial participants were marginalised in the reform process as they were gradually positioned as consumers, and the object of an educational commodity. My data indicate that from the outset, Education Queensland showed limited ability in establishing positive and constructive relationships with teachers in trial schools. The system consistently demonstrates an obfuscation of deontic authority in their texts avoiding normative constructions of the roles and experiences of teachers in trial schools. They try to resolve the problem of curriculum indeterminacy by commodifying New Basics into a package for teachers to deliver rather than creating appropriate professional contexts where teachers could understand and develop curriculum. This situation results in tension for teachers whose perceived desire for a ‘guide book’ enables their positioning as commodity consumers and curriculum deliverers. The internet data shows evidence of teacher resistance to this situation. However, monitoring and surveillance strategies employed by Education Queensland tend to constrain any of these divergent discourses. In the main, New Basics teachers appear to engage with Rich Tasks in a performance that affirms their existence and meets systemic accountability measures.

The implication of these findings with respect to the uptake and sustainability of the New Basics reform project are discussed in detail in the closing sections of this paper. I foreground these findings to signal the type of interpretations made possible by adopting a discourse-analytic approach to understanding curriculum. Now I regress to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that inform my research to validate these interpretations and justify the evidence that underpins my thesis.

Curriculum theory meets critical discourse analysis During the conceptual phase of the New Basics curriculum I was undertaking a Masters degree at the University of Sydney where I was fortunate enough to find a mentor in Dr. David Smith. He gently guided me into the contemporary field of curriculum studies and introduced me to the work of Bill Pinar and the reconceptualist movement. This was a defining intellectual moment that instigated my now fervent interest in curriculum theory. As I completed said MEd I was keenly observing the changes underway in Education Queensland via the internet with an eye on becoming involved in the New Basics Project and working with Allan Luke again (he had been my undergraduate lecturer at James Cook University in Townsville during the 80s). Suffice to say the rest is history but the significance of these prior events remains embedded in my approach to this thesis as they influenced the choice of theoretical and methodological frameworks. That the New Basics curriculum is conceived from a reconceptualist model and, as such signifies the first Australian attempt at shifting the paradigm in curriculum-theoretical orientation (Green, 2003), inspired my curriculum imagination enough to want to utilise contemporary curriculum theory as the overriding framework for my thesis. Whereas Allan Luke’s background in language and literacy education and educational sociology and policy, plus his position as visionary for the New Basics Project, drove the discourse-analytic approach as my choice of methodology. Personally, this latter choice demanded a fundamental mind-shift since my experience as a secondary science teacher limited adequate preparation for this move to qualitative discourse studies. In what follows in this section I explain how contemporary curriculum discourses are ‘dovetailed’ into a methodological framework based on Fairclough’s evolving model of CDA and how this combination of theory and method enabled a particular interpretation of the New Basics curriculum that relies solely on textual artefacts associated with the project.

The New Basics curriculum is in fact based on a much broader theoretical platform comprising a range of concepts around pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. During recent conversation with Allan Luke regarding my thesis, he described the conflation of particular educational discourses that brought New Basics to life: “[I]n the conceptualisation of New Basics the discourses of Sizer, Newmann, etc etc, had a particular alchemy, a set of relationships that facilitated the alignment of the three conceptual pivots” (Luke, 2005a). This is an interesting choice of metaphor for conceptualising curriculum (particularly if one considers its association with the futility of turning base products into gold) but it does reflect the heteroglossic nature of New Basics, a curriculum assembled from many ‘voices’. From this perspective New Basics exemplifies the reconceptualists understanding of curriculum as a “complicated conversation” (Pinar, 2002, 2004a, 2004b). Whether or not this approach to constructing curriculum is theoretically defensible in light of current research is the focus of discussion here which I begin with Luke’s (2001) rationalisation of how he shaped this particular ‘selective tradition’.

What’s important from a curriculum theory perspective here is that the New Basics project was based on a set of articulated principles, a cogent theoretical base, and a great deal of evidence about current pedagogy, about student needs, about changing population and demography, about projected future changes in economy and culture, and about a changing teacher workforce. In this way, it combines aspects of a ‘critical curriculum theory’ (e.g., Apple) in that it is based on a ‘critical analysis of society’; with Pinar’s reconceptualist model insofar as it is based on an envisioning of the identity, needs and imperatives for a new human subject living in new conditions. (Luke, 2001, p. 24)

This perspective clarifies the positioning of the New Basics project in critical- reconceptualist discourse in education theory and practice (Green, 2003) and also points to the rich fabric that constitutes the New Basics curriculum as text.

To explicate more fully the discourse of reform, my research ‘unpacks’ the New Basics Project Technical Paper (Luke, Matters, Herschell, Grace, et al, 2000) as the curriculum blueprint and pivotal document from which all subsequent New Basics texts are derived. It is beyond the scope of this paper to include the details from this discursive ‘excavation’ so an overview of the research and major theorists that contributed to New Basics will have to suffice. Firstly, the evidence Luke alludes to in the above quote came from Education Queensland’s laudable commitment to a research-based analysis of current conditions in state schooling that is reflected in the “Research Premise” of the project. A significant contributor to this research is The Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSLRS) (Lingard, Ladwig, Luke, Mills et al, 2001), a project based on the work of Newmann and Associates (1996) from the University of Wisconsin. It provided the main source of classroom data and was complemented with results drawn from a socio-demographic analysis of the state of Queensland (for example see Edgar, 1999 and Greco, 1999) as well as public consultations (see Education Queensland, 1999) that informed the systemic strategic plan QSE - 2010 (Education Queensland, 2000a).

The QSRLS contributed much more to the New Basics Project than evidence of classroom practices across Queensland. A major outcome of the study is the now widely acknowledged “Productive Pedagogies” framework which was incorporated into the New Basics Project to fulfil the “pedagogical premise” and provide teachers with new discourses for engaging in their core business. This premise also included the assessment component of the New Basics, the “Rich Tasks”. According to Luke (2001, p. 24), the ‘Rich Tasks’ agenda is based on John Dewey’s “project approach” and Lev Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. Add to this Sizer’s (1987, 1992, 1994) idea that students should demonstrate their learning by “exhibition”, through public performances that would engage the broader school community. All of these theories combined are underpinned by an “Equity Premise” which is fundamentally based in Dewey’s progressivist educational philosophy that is articulated by critical theorists such as Apple, Giroux and Freire. This “alchemy” of relationships enabled an alignment of Bernstein’s (1990) three educational message systems - curriculum, pedagogy and assessment - that constitute the three conceptual pivots of the New Basics Project framework.

The final premise of the New Basics Project is the “Futures Premise”: Curriculum design and pedagogic intervention should begin from a debate over those knowledges, skills and identities valued and required by society, economies and cultures (Luke et al, 2000, p.7, italics in original). The Reconceptualist model of curriculum responds to this claim from a range of perspectives but its phenomenological approach to curriculum and education is attributed with facilitating the futures-orientation of New Basics. According to Pinar et al (1995), phenomenology helps us to understand curriculum as lived text, an understanding that moves from original experience through language and back again (p. 448). This orientation is interpreted by Luke et al (2000) as building curriculum by “envisioning the kinds of life worlds and human subjects that the education system wants to contribute to and build” (p. 31). Thus in accordance with the Reconceptualist model, the New Basics curriculum encodes the lived experiences of students and teachers, connecting these with their subjective histories and projecting from these some possibilities of what might be. Closer scrutiny of the transdisciplinary New Basics curriculum organisers and the pedagogical experiences constructed in the Rich Tasks illustrate further alignment with reconceptualist ideals for public education as it reconnects the individual experience, through a focus on identity formation, to social reconstruction, through critical and transformative pedagogies. A more detailed analysis of New Basics curriculum would demonstrate further connections to reconceptualist philosophies but, for the purposes of this paper, suffice to say that the New Basics presents alternative modes for understanding curriculum that represent a counter-hegemonic move away from neoliberal educational reforms that represent the “anti-intellectualism” of public education (Pinar, 2002, 2004a, 2004b). Whilst the reconceptualist model provides a distinctly different orientation for understanding and, in this case, designing a futures-oriented curriculum, it is limited in its application for analysing curriculum per se. However, the problematic nexus between theory and practice in the field of curriculum studies can be overcome by taking phenomenological concepts about language and meaning and situating them in a poststructural framework that understands curriculum as deconstructed text (Pinar et al, 1995). In this way the curriculum as lived text is an application of Foucauldian discourse theory in that the curriculum constructs reality through discourse. Therefore, through discourse, curriculum circumscribes particular subject positions and educational experiences that are bound in relationships of knowledge and power. It stands to reason then that deconstructing curriculum texts by analysing their discursive formations of reality can provide some insight into the normalising effects of curriculum and how curriculum discourse exists as a form of “cognitive control” (Reynolds, 2003). Curriculum viewed from this perspective facilitates an opening for CDA to be utilised in deconstructing curriculum texts, especially as CDA provides opportunities to consider the relationships between text and context (Luke, 1995/1996, 2002) and the effects of discourse on social change (Fairclough, 1992, 2000, 2001, 2002a).

The parameters of this paper again limit detailed discussion about specific aspects of CDA that inform my analysis of the New Basics curriculum. Instead I outline the overriding analytical framework for applying CDA to the data corpus selected for analysis and explain how this operates in connecting this data to the broader context of systemic reform in Queensland. The schema shown in Figure 1 (below) illustrates my interpretation and adaptation of Fairclough’s (2003) model that was used in critically deconstructing three very different sets of New Basics texts. In discussions that follow regarding the data corpus and analytical finings, I clarify how different analytical ‘toolkits’ were constructed for each data set. This overriding framework is employed to situate the meanings revealed from each text in the broader socio-political context.

SOCIAL STRUCTURES SOCIAL ORDER EXPLANATION (abstract - language)  SOCIAL PRACTICES (social organization & control of linguistic variation) INTERPRETATION whose elements are DISCOURSES GENRES STYLES ways of representation ways of acting identities - ways of being  SOCIAL EVENTS DESCRIPTION (concrete events-texts) linguistic and semiotic resources Figure(ideational) 1 Overriding analytical(textual/interpersonal) framework adapted from Fairclough(interpersonal) (2003) The above schema demonstrates how three textual metafunctions are revealed through their underlying meanings as representations (ideational), relationships (interpersonal) and composition ( textual) in texts (as concrete or social events), and how these link with social/discursive practices, that is, ways of being, acting and representing, which draw on combinations of discourses, genres and styles in constructing the text. Although difficult to represent graphically, the relationships among all of these elements are dialectical, that is, “there is a sense in which each [element] ‘internalizes’ the others without being reducible to them.” (Fairclough, 2001, p.1) All of the elements and their relationships constitute a network that comprises the order of discourse. In the context of this research, the social order corresponds with the discursive construction of educational reform (specifically, Queensland’s New Basics Project), the social practices are represented through discursive practices employed in each text and the concrete or social events are signified by the texts that constitute my data corpus. Using this framework in my research has facilitated links between discursive representations in New Basics policy, syllabuses and computer- generated conversations, and their possible effects on the uptake and sustainability of New Basics discourses. The fact that this approach has assisted convergence across my findings from three very different data sets and generated meaningful interpretations from these results is testament to utility of CDA in analysing curriculum. The following descriptions of my data sets support these claims as they illustrate how the New Basics Project is fundamentally about driving educational change through new discursive representations of knowledge and control.

The data corpus New technologies have enabled the New Basics Project to be presented as a highly multi-mediated curriculum reform project unlike any other witnessed before in Queensland. The result is a network of multimodal digital and print-based texts that are generally available to teachers and the public either by downloading from the website or by purchasing them through Education Queensland’s commercial publishing arm. In order to achieve the aims of my research, I made a purposeful selection of three data sets considered to be salient ‘documents’ in this network of interrelated texts.

It was imperative my selection included New Basics policy as this would index the policy context for educational change in Queensland state schools. Education Queensland published a series of three1 policy ‘booklets’ that comprised a portion of the ‘mandated reading’ for teachers in trial schools - New Basics: Theory into Practice (Education Queensland, 2000b), New Basics: Curriculum Organisers (Education Queensland, 2000c), and New Basics: The Why, What, How and When of Rich Tasks (Education Queensland, 2001). Because these documents were written for New Basics teachers, they provide a good example of the communicative practices adopted by Education Queensland when relating to this group of trial participants. Another significant feature of these booklets is that they are derived from the ‘blueprint’ for educational reform in Queensland, the New Basics Project Technical Paper (Luke et al, 2000) and so represent the appropriation of academic discourses by bureaucratic policy makers. As such they demonstrate the initial transformation of New Basics from theoretical construct to pragmatic curriculum implementation discourses and represent Education Queensland’s interpretation of the New Basics curriculum framework. A final characteristic of this policy series that has import for my thesis is their staggered publication dates, a result of a common practice observed in Education Queensland which is to ‘roll out’ policy during the course of educational change. The significance of this practice is that reform events and other texts occurring external to these documents can effect changes in discursive practices in subsequent texts. This situation serves to demonstrate what Fairclough (2001) calls the ‘dialectics of discourse’, and begins to explain how discourse figures in the processes of change.

Whilst the New Basics policy booklets provide the systemic version of school reform under New Basics, they do not represent the official ‘curriculum-in-use’, the alignment of all three educational message systems previously represented in subject syllabus documents. The New Basics Project addresses this aspect of implementation through alternative media by producing a set of single-page, multimodal, visually desirable ‘syllabus’ texts that constitute the assessment component of the curriculum framework - the Rich Tasks. According to Matters (2005) these texts draw on creative processes to form a sort of ‘superstructure’ as they represent curriculum and assessment intertwined. This description supports my positioning of the Rich Task texts as syllabuses and validates including the set of twenty Rich Tasks in my analysis. Teachers relied on these texts to inform their collaboratively derived curriculum plans written to respond to their respective school contexts. In other words, they are the texts that transform curriculum intent into the everyday classroom experiences for teacher and students in New Basics schools.

A standout characteristic of the Rich Tasks is their multimodal format which takes curriculum design to a higher plane as it incorporates a colourful images with smatterings of written text that demonstrate new ways of representing both knowledge and control. According to Luke (2005a) these texts re-mediate the New Basics discourses through strategic commodification of visual curriculum design that is packaged with a ‘bite’, that is everything in these packages is meant to fix or set a social practice. This ‘visualisation’ of the curriculum meant new analytical toolkits were needed to unpack the semiotic and technical resources utilised in the production and distribution of these texts and this required broadening the scope of my research into the realm of postmodern visual culture and media studies. In the end I built an analytical framework for deconstructing the Rich Tasks by adopting a transdisciplinary approach and fusing together a range of perspectives drawn from a variety of theoretical backgrounds. This approach to analysing the New Basics syllabus was validated by from the results that showed congruence with the findings from the remaining data sets. Thus, the Rich Tasks are not simply about new ways of representing curriculum discourses; their semiotic complexity generated new perspectives for analysing curriculum materials. In the future, there is a possibility that curriculum documents may only be available via multimedia sources, and that print syllabuses are deemed obsolete. Should this situation eventuate, it is clear that these analytic approaches will be key. What also becomes clear is the necessity for new, multisemiotic analytical tools such as those applied in this research to enable interpretation of multimodal, online curriculum texts.

One final noteworthy feature of the Rich Tasks is that the original digital version of the texts underwent a subsequent transformation into what was considered a more useable format as a bound A3 size ‘artbook’ (Education Queensland, 2002). The artbooks were intended for distribution to every New Basics teacher so that regardless of the year level they taught, they would have in their possession the complete set of twenty tasks that facilitate a reading of the New Basics curriculum in its entirety, from Year 1 through to Year 9. The artbook format was further rearranged into A2 ‘wall posters’ that were only available by purchase, a factor that contributes to my argument in relation to the commodification of the New Basics curriculum. In the final analysis, I compiled the Rich Task ‘genre chain’ (after Fairclough, 2002b) by extracting the most salient of these interrelated texts from the network of discursive practices that constituted New Basics. This genre chain exemplifies a “commodity spectacle” (after Kellner, 2003) that came to hijack the reform process, a situation that had both positive and negative implications for the uptake of systemic educational change.

Both the series of policy booklets and the set of Rich Task texts represent ‘fixed’ sites for analysis from which I can only make speculative interpretations as to the uptake of their discourses by teachers in trial schools. In an attempt to overcome this issue and ground some of my findings, my third and final data set came from the FRAMEWORK online discussion list that was established as a key implementation strategy that used electronic media as a “way of encouraging and facilitating cooperative exchange within dynamic learning communities...”(Department of Education and the Arts, 2004, p.75). This digitally archived site represents the ‘conversationalisation’ of the New Basics curriculum that in some ways reflects the uptake of New Basics discourses by trial participants, stakeholders and other interested persons. Established in 1999, the FRAMEWORK listserv provided a new ‘public sphere’ for dialogue about aspects of the trial as well as broader curriculum issues. The enormous amount of data archived at this site meant careful decisions had to be made about a representative sample of the dialogue so that I remained within the parameters of a doctoral dissertation. Through a systematic selection process I extracted a discussion thread which, my analysis revealed, was heavily intertextually linked to other data sets both synchronically (through content), and diachronically (over time). The upshot of this inherent intertextuality in my data was convergence in the analytical findings that generated a coherent narrative that runs right across the data corpus. This moment, when my data revealed another layer of evidence that enabled a more cogent argument, was an epiphany, a climactic moment in my research that further validated the efficacy of the methodologies employed to analyse curriculum.

The different discursive (and semiotic) practices embedded in respective data sets meant adjusting my analytical toolkit for each one. Even within each set, adjustments had to be made depending on what particular discursive elements were emphasised in the texts. To go into detailed descriptions about the analytical toolkits I adopted for each set of texts is beyond the scope of this paper whereas during my presentation at the conference having the artefacts in hand will enable a more adequate demonstration of the techniques I employed. Importantly, these adjustments always maintained the integrity of the overriding CDA framework outlined previously. I believe that is it the critical nature of this framework that enabled the convergence of findings as, ultimately, all data was situated in the same context, that of educational reform in Queensland state schools, to realise the explanatory phase of the analysis and draw compatible conclusions from the evidence.

The research findings and some comments on methodologies Although I have already outlined some of the main findings from my research, this section explains my results in greater detail and provides supporting evidence for those broader claims. The findings obtained from analysing each set of data are discussed separately alongside noteworthy methodological deliberations where applicable. These findings are then brought together as I reiterate the main conclusions which I embellish with some additional interpretations of the data findings as I draw together the results.

New Basics curriculum as policy text The New Basics policy booklets are appropriately conservative for their genre but the series does have a number of consistent semiotic features that enhance their presentation. Additionally, each booklet contains several relevant images to graphically represent their respective content. The analysis of this data set centred on deconstructing the microlinguistic features of each text so, rather than omit these semiotic features, I surveyed the series of booklets diachronically and focused on shifts in macro-textual practices such as semiosis and lexico-grammatical features as policy was ‘rolled out’ over a two-year period. This simplified analysis demonstrated that, over time, the booklets increased in size, semiotic complexity (in relation to formatting and image inclusions) and lexical density (particularly in relation to excessive synonymy and information overload). These changes corresponded to a narrowing of the purpose of each booklet that was matched by a refinement of their image towards more corporate, promotional style as the trial progressed. The written text contained in each booklet was subjected to a relatively straightforward CDA based on Faircough’s (1989, 1992, 2003) evolving model and utilising Hallidayian systemic functional linguistics (SFL). As with any discourse analysis, the microlinguistic features of each booklet were analysed with respect to audience and purpose. Because each booklet explicitly states that it is “written for teachers in New Basics trial schools”, I hold this claim to be true despite evidence in some discursive practices and their availability for download from the internet that they are in fact written for a broader educational audience. When considering the purpose of these booklets, I adopted Ball’s (1994) poststructural approach to policy as text and as discourse as this aligns with my understanding of curriculum. Employing this critical policy framework meant that both power and discourse were analysed from a Foucauldian perspective. Ball (1994) interprets policy as entering existing power relations, disrupting and redistributing them, so that agents can operate in different ways. This power is exercised through the production of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ as discourses which constitute objects and practices in policy texts. Within this policy construct it is important to recognise and analyse whose ‘voice’ is positioned as meaningful and authoritative, and the existence of ‘dominant’ discourses that represent the underpinning ideologies. Armed with Ball’s conception of what constitutes educational policy, I approached the New Basics policy texts with two key lenses. One focused on enabling and constraining effects of policy representations, while the other lens was set on agency, in particular how teachers are positioned in the reform process and the sorts of operating spaces these policy discourses open up, or close down, for trial participants.

The first booklet in the New Basics policy series, Theory into Practice, is designed to introduce the discourse of reform, and legitimize the need for educational change in Queensland State Education. These goals are achieved through a problem-solution format in which current approaches to education are considered inadequate in a globalised society experiencing major economic and cultural shifts often based on rapid technological changes. An adjunct to these problems is the nature of teachers’ work, which is construed as currently unable to respond to ‘new times’. As a consequence, teachers are positioned as needy, desirous of the changes that New Basics will bring into their classrooms. The New Basics Project is constructed as the only appropriate response to these issues because of its balanced approach that aligns curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices in a prototypical attempt at educational renewal that is contingent on the uptake of New Basics discourses.

The second booklet in the series focuses attention on the New Basics as curriculum organisers as a different way of understanding how curriculum can construct new knowledge categories. In this case curriculum policy is legitimized semantically through contrastive devices in which traditional ‘outmoded’ curriculum designs are juxtaposed against innovative and futures-oriented high stakes discourses that comprise New Basics. Unfortunately this approach does little to provide teachers with substantiated theoretical underpinnings for New Basics and, as a consequence, constrains any perception of themselves as ‘expert’ curriculum developers in their local contexts. Normative statements around teacher’s work are limited to shifts from being specialist subject teachers to generalist scholars (a role that equates with the transdisciplinary nature of New Basics) and from individualist teaching practices to more collaborative educational enterprises. Once again all changes are contingent upon the uptake of New Basics discourses.

The final policy booklet is solely concerned with the assessment component of the New Basics Project, the “Rich Tasks”, and their implementation in trial schools. The timing of this particular policy aspect is significant as New Basics teachers had already developed their curriculum based on the Rich Tasks and were implementing these in their local contexts. The discursive practices employed in this document exemplify Education Queensland’s attempts at establishing epistemic authority in the reform process whilst simultaneously transferring deontic authority to the tasks themselves. In other words, this text delegates the Rich Tasks as primary agents for change in the New Basics reform process upon which all other elements are ultimately dependent. A simple analysis of the lexical descriptors employed to construct the Rich Tasks illustrates they are an over-represented entity imbued with a number of value-laden attributes. A transitivity analysis of the tasks revealed their power in a number of pedagogical processes sometimes becoming animated as they undertook processes normally attributed to human agents. Throughout this discursive construction of assessment and accountability under New Basics, teachers become marginalised in the reform process, eventually positioned as consumers of a knowledge product in the form of Rich Tasks.

Applying CDA to these policy texts has uncovered some significant identifiable trends in the language resources utilised across the series that affect the underlying meanings found in each booklet and the underpinning ideological principles of the policy. My analysis reveals a general increase in lexical density and synonymy along with shifts in syntax and semantic relations that correspond with a distinctive narrowing of content focus that entails detailed descriptions about specific aspects of the reform process. Furthermore, my analysis illustrates changes to the representation of New Basics from a balanced effort in educational realignment to a reform project driven by assessment and accountability procedures. With respect to agency in New Basics policy, my analysis suggests that Education Queensland maintains a position of epistemic authority but deontic authority is gradually transferred to Rich Tasks that become reified in the process. Teachers on the other hand are gradually marginalised in the reform process and positioned as dependent consumers of a commodified curriculum.

Rich Tasks and the commodification of curriculum The presentation of the Rich Tasks in multimodal format necessitated new perspectives for understanding curriculum. Therefore, in order to deconstruct these ‘syllabus’ documents, I broadened the scope of my research into the fields of media studies and postmodern visual culture. This resulted in the construction of an analytical framework around a multimodal theory of communication (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001) to which the concept of curriculum as a ‘Design’ for the future (The New London Group, 1996) is key. Central to the concept of ‘Design’ is ‘functional specialisation’ of semiotic resources in educational texts whereby language is used to describe the pedagogical processes and events and images represent the phenomenon of curriculum experience (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001).

While a theory of meaning is important in analysing the macrotextual features of the Rich Tasks, a visual 'tool kit' was required for a microanalysis of their finer semiotic characteristics. I adopted Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1995) visual 'grammar' for a fine- grained analysis of the tasks, and merged this analytical toolkit with understandings gained from CDA to conduct a critical multisemiotic analysis of these multimodal texts. This approach enabled me to uncover the depictions of material, social and semiotic reality (re)presented in the Rich Tasks, and interpret the design intentions of these syllabus texts. The results of this analysis present substantial evidence in relation to the way Education Queensland relates to, and positions, teachers charged with implementing curriculum reform in the 59 New Basics trial schools (for full details see Weir, 2003a, 2003b).

At a superficial level these tasks suggest that the state places significant value on images that are creative, colourful and cleverly designed. This could be read as an endorsement of the design skills associated with these characteristics and a suggestion that teachers need to be multiliterate, creative, project-oriented designers of learning experiences. The appealing nature of the images is an attempt to engage the audience with these texts, a notion reinforced with language that positions the reader as a student undertaking the task. The central image, therefore, presents a powerful invitation for the reader to engage with each task and undertake the journey that is created through the flowchart effect.

After closer inspection however, the semiotic analysis uncovered some rather prescriptive characteristics. For instance, a flowchart represents a linear, step-by-step, transactional process with definite outcomes. Additionally, the reading path set up through a carefully constructed page layout and the positioning of some distinctive images, assists in directing and influencing the task outcomes. Combine these features with the prescriptive nature of the language of the tasks, and the parameters of curriculum reform begin to emerge.

One conclusion from these findings is that the multimodal format of the Rich Tasks may be literally interpreted as a representation of 'mixed messages'. That is, the images provide a ‘writerly’ aspect to the syllabus that empower teachers with a greater sense of control over its implementation, an aspect that suggests Education Queensland is opening up spaces for teachers to plan in local contexts. But the prescriptive nature of the language used in each task defines the space available for teachers in the creation of the learning experiences and there is limited room to move outside of the parameters of each task.

In earlier discussions regarding features of the data corpus selected for my research I explained that the Rich Tasks underwent considerable changes before the final version was distributed free to all New Basics teachers as an A3 ‘artbook’. This final edition of the Rich Tasks was subjected to a simplified semiotic analysis that focused on new image inclusions as well as layout and formatting changes that were made to accommodate and highlight new accountability measures, the Desirable Features (these represent the indicators of standards of student performance on the tasks).

The shifts in semiotic and discursive practices observed in the final edition of the Rich Tasks signify the state’s re-assessment of the parameters of curriculum reform in response to the reception of the original digital versions of the tasks. By the time the ‘artbook’ was published, teachers had been working with the original versions for over a year. This new document demonstrates how re-arranging the semiotic features of the tasks to create new texts is essentially a re-packaging of the knowledges and meanings that underpin New Basics. One could argue that this final format is an attempt at narrowing the interpretation of the tasks for an explicitly differentiated audience that has already demonstrated broad variation in the uptake and subsequent implementation of the Rich Tasks. The semiotic inclusions in the new format tend to relay audience attention to more refined accountability measures and systems designed to ensure greater consistency of uptake and further narrow meaning differences across these texts. Another way of looking at this re-packaging of knowledges is as a response to national and international interest in the New Basics Project. The increasingly commercial nature of these texts signal an emerging sense that the New Basics Project transgressed into a merchandising exercise where knowledges are re-packaged for multiple audiences, as a series of multimediated texts that comprise a sort of ‘spectacle’, with a commodified curriculum at the centre.

To support the claim that the New Basics Project can be interpreted as a “commodity spectacle” (Kellner, 2003), I constructed a genre chain from the most prominent Rich Task texts that facilitated a diachronic purview of their semiotic transformation. The critical implications of these transformations were clarified by situating this genre chain within a broader context that takes into consideration the political and economic conditions of text production. My argument is based on the Rich Tasks representing manifestations of postmodern visual culture and the neoliberal discursive terrain that underpins the contemporary policy context. I referred to Fairclough’s (n.d.) ideas regarding the ‘commodification of discourse’ which he suggests is a consequence of increasing semioticity of commodities. I was able to translate these ideas to clarify an effect of ‘visualizing’ the New Basics curriculum, which is to commodify its fundamental discourses and reduce their interpretative capabilities for their audience, thus constraining potential uptake in trial schools. My research results concur with these notions as they illustrate that despite apparent design innovations that construct a set of visually inviting syllabus documents, the underlying discourses in these texts are instrumental, representing new ways of governing school reform from a distance. The upshot of this situation is the dissociation of politics from the implementation process through ‘fetishizing’ the Rich Tasks as a commodity.

The cavalcade of textual artifacts that fell out from the Rich Tasks has been positioned as a ‘commodity spectacle’ because this genre chain exemplifies what Kellner (2003) refers to when he discusses the spectacle as one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and of everyday life. His ideas are based on Debord’s (1967) thesis that, as life becomes increasingly mediated through imagery, the spectacle becomes a tool of pacification and depoliticization, and its correlates, the spectators, become submissive consumers (cited in Kellner, 2003, p. 3). These perspectives enable a particular interpretation of my findings which suggests that as the Rich Tasks became reified via the spectacle of commodified curriculum texts, they ‘hijacked’ the New Basics Project and, in the process, detached it from its original intent and from the political processes associated with its implementation. Through the commodification process, the Rich Tasks become a “synecdochic representation” (Burke, 1973, as cited in Heinz and Lee,1998, p. 88) of the New Basics Project that worked to position the Rich Tasks as the primary driver of educational change. My findings indicate that this situation led to relegating New Basics teachers to become sideline spectators of the reform and consumers of these commodified texts.

In order to better understand the implications of this interpretation for teachers and to situate these findings within the policy context of text production, I turned to Luke’s (2004) research that examines the notion of ‘teacher as consumer’. Luke argues that one of the principal effects of neoliberal educational policy is the reconstruction of the teacher as commodity fetishist. He further explains how the process of curriculum commodification reframes the pedagogical relationship to one between consumer and product, with the effect of translating educational practice into a form of commodity fetishism, “[T]hat is, it predicates the efficacy of educational policy, the practice of teaching, and particular versions of student ‘outcomes’ on product use” (p. 10). Some may argue against the inference that New Basics teachers became commodity fetishists as a result of the design of the Rich Tasks but it is worth recalling these are discursive constructions of teacher subjectivities in texts New Basics teachers are required to engage with. From this evidence it is not possible to accurately predict the way teachers actually positioned themselves in the reform process. That is where my next set of data completes the equation because it provides some evidence about how teachers and other trial participants actually engage with the Rich Tasks.

New Basics: an online curriculum conversation The data I selected from the FRAMEWORK archives (accessed via New Basics website, Education Queensland, 2001-2004) was a single discussion thread titled “NEW TASKS AND REPERTOIRES” (December, 2001). This discussion thread consists of nine messages or ‘postings’, that represent dialogue between eight listserv subscribers, including teachers, principals, critical friends and New Basics personnel. The conversation is based on adjustments made to the Rich Tasks and the timing of these changes mid-way through the trial and therefore amounts to critical feedback from trial participants to the New Basics Branch about problems with the implementation process. As such, this data set signifies an instance of uptake of New Basics discourses and demonstrates authoritarian responses to critique and divergence. The data also enables some insight into any correspondence that exists between discourses enshrined in official print-based documents and what occurs in local New Basics contexts. That is, this selection of FRAMEWORK data is not just a sample of dialogue between trail participants, it also demonstrates conversations between texts providing some insight into the dialectics of discourse and further supporting my base metaphor for curriculum as a complicated conversation.

The FRAMEWORK listserv was established as a forum for facilitating discussions about the New Basics Project as well as broader curriculum issues relating to Education Queensland’s strategic plan for the future. These intentions have egalitarian overtones that led me to review relevant research in computer mediated communication, focusing on the quiddity of online communities and the efficacy of these forums in offline contexts. The literature indicates that the egalitarian potential of online discussion groups is eroded due to offline inequities that are carried into virtual communities. Research also suggests there is a tendency for these communities to be inward-looking and not focused on the wider political processes; therefore, any sense of political agency gained online is not necessarily transferred into offline contexts. These ideas naturally had some important implications for the efficacy of the FRAMEWORK listserv in terms of fulfilling its role as a space for trial participants and interested stakeholders to have some influence in the direction of education change in Queensland State Education.

Apart from providing evidence about the interpersonal dynamics of a virtual community, the FRAMEWORK data also exemplifies some nuances of online texts, which contain discursive features that present real challenges for CDA researchers. Online discussions are essentially comprised of a series of email messages which have a tendency to possess qualities of both spoken and written texts. These characteristics can be partially attributed to the communicative medium: its operation as an asynchronous network, and the editing function of personal computers. These technical features enable authors to create texts distinguished by their manifest intertextuality and hybridity. These features result in individual messages that are a montage of voices and discourses articulated together to create highly polysemous texts with added layers of complexity that render them difficult to analyse with any straightforward model of CDA.

The difficulties encountered in the FRAMEWORK data were overcome by taking a more eclectic approach to structuring an analytical toolkit better suited to deconstructing these hybrid and linguistically heterogeneous texts (for more details see Weir, 2005). The results from my analysis demonstrate these discursive features as a manifestation of this period of intensive change as they represent epistemological struggles over discourses in a site where social fields collide and discursive boundaries are redrawn by trial participants. Thus, the FRAMEWORK data reveal what can happen when New Basics discourses traverse real educational contexts. The data are also evidence of authoritarian responses when the discourse of reform diverges too far from systemic intent. Analyzing this particular discussion thread demonstrates that the FRAMEWORK community is not an egalitarian space, mainly because offline hierarchies persist online, especially for those in positions of power. The data illustrate the monitoring and surveillance strategies employed by people in positions of authority through their online discursive practices and their effects on other, less powerful FRAMEWORK subscribers. In this way the FRAMEWORK data proved an invaluable resource for correlating results obtained from print-based texts with my interpretations about what occurs in ‘living’ New Basics contexts. The online dialogue shows how this virtual forum is a site of contestation over meaning differences around New Basics discourses. These internet discourses are evidence of some resistance by trial participants but, in the main, they indicate that teachers engage with the practical [Rich Tasks] in a performance that confirms their existence as an extra-ordinary group of practitioners with relatively more cachet than their counterparts: ‘ordinary’ teachers in non-New Basics schools. However, this position is self-annulling and contradictory as New Basics teachers give up their power and autonomy as they are subjugated by the tasks and by vigilant surveillance of Branch staff.

The FRAMEWORK data provides some insight into the uptake of New Basics discourses by a sample of trial participants. Equally significantly, the data demonstrates the application of new technologies in systemic educational reform and how they can be utilised to monitor and manage the change process. When these results are combined with those from obtained from the remaining two data sets we can begin to envisage how the New Basics curriculum represents not only new forms of knowledge but also new forms of social control in an educational context. What also emerges is a deeper understanding of curriculum as a complicated conversation.

The discourse of reform: implications for educational change What happened to the discourse of reform over the duration of the New Basics trial is the main focus of this final analysis. These discursive transformations are discussed in relation to their implications for trial school teachers, for Education Queensland and for the implementation of New Basics as an exercise in systemic educational reform. Based on conclusions drawn from my research findings, I critique the New Basics Project with a view to providing some normative statements about discursive representations of teachers and curriculum in policy and syllabus texts that may assist in the uptake and sustainability of curriculum reform. A secondary focus here is concerned with the utility of the methodologies employed in my research and their significance in relation to the application of new technologies in the design and distribution of curriculum texts.

The discursive construction of the New Basics in the Project Technical Paper (Luke et al, 2000) clearly illustrates that this reform was conceived from a cogent theoretical platform informed by evidence-based research about contemporary sociocultural contexts. New Basics is about comprehensive reform that equally positions pedagogy, assessment and curriculum in a futures-oriented framework that responds to challenges posed by a global networked society. It is positioned as an alternative approach to schooling with a renewed emphasis on educational equity that pays particular attention to those students living in marginalized communities affected by recent economic and social change. Finally, New Basics is constructed as a counter- hegemonic curriculum that resists neoliberal education reforms and the deskilling of the teaching profession. Thus, in my view, the academic discourses that constitute the New Basics Project and fulfil its five educational premises represent a theoretically defensible approach to school reform that aims to improve academic achievement and open up new life pathways for all students in the compulsory years of schooling.

The discursive transformation of New Basics into a series of educational policy booklets signalled the dismantling of some of the Project’s most commendable features, with important consequences for trial participants. For instance, there is a diminished emphasis on pedagogy across the series despite the persistent rhetoric about aligning all three educational message systems. The two other conceptual pivots of the New Basics framework are scripted as separate policy issues but pedagogy is sidelined with limited explanations about how this element articulates with curriculum and assessment. This situation arose in part from Education Queensland’s decision to mainstream the Productive Pedagogies and implement this framework system-wide. This decision had detrimental effects on New Basics teachers as it threatened their existence as an extra-ordinary group of change agents, but it also had negative consequences for non-New Basics teachers as they were asked to implement new pedagogical practices that were originally contingent on new knowledge categories (New Basics) and assessment strategies (Rich Tasks).

Another problematic aspect of the New Basics policy was an under-theorising of curriculum. Considering the possibility that the audience has operated (perhaps unwittingly) within a Tylerian rationale of curriculum development for their entire teaching career, it is imperative for policy to adequately explain the Reconceptualist model and justify its adoption in building new knowledge categories. Rather than address this issue, the New Basics policy on curriculum focuses on legitimizing the new knowledge categories through semantic relations of equivalence and difference (that is, by positioning New Basics against familiar or ‘old’ curriculum formats), a discursive strategy that unfortunately limits an understanding of New Basics to what they are not. This strategy constrains teachers’ perceptions of themselves as curriculum developers and suggests the policy makers may possess limited knowledge of the reconceptualist approach to understanding curriculum. In reality this situation transpired into limited professional development for teachers around curriculum (compared with mandatory ‘immersion sessions’ on assessment and pedagogy). The upshot of this situation was that teachers did not identify the importance of curriculum planning until they were required to account for student outcomes on the Rich Tasks. Many teachers reported involvement in planning Rich Tasks as a curriculum for three years but that planning for three years was not fully appreciated at first. It appeared that teachers became more aware of three-year planning requirements as a result of moderation (Ainley, 2004, p. 24).

This reported problem could have been avoided had appropriate professional contexts been created to facilitate teachers’ understanding of the broader implications of teaching within a Reconceptualist model of curriculum. Further illustrations of the fragmentation of the New Basics framework have been reported throughout my study as the over-emphasis on accountability and assessment, to the point where I suggest the Rich Tasks ‘hijacked’ the reform process. This claim is supported by evidence in policy where the Rich Tasks are over-represented through linguistic and semiotic devices and where, in this final booklet of the series, we find more corporate and promotional styles of communicative practices from Education Queensland. The policy data also indicates the Rich Tasks are discursively positioned as the primary agents for change that even possess human attributes as they “invite” teachers to adopt new practices and “assist” them in their everyday roles. A deconstruction of the Rich Tasks syllabus documents upheld these claims as these multimodal texts revealed the tasks to be taking over the pedagogy. However, it was not until the genre chain of Rich Task texts was extracted and analysed as a whole entity that the extent of this claim was fully realised. The increasing semioticity of these texts resulted in a commodification process that positioned the Rich Tasks as a desired knowledge product that came to be a synecdochic representation of the New Basics Project. That the Rich Tasks drove the reform process is not in itself surprising. Even Bernstein has long held that assessment and evaluation will ultimately pull curriculum and pedagogy along. The positive effects of this situation are that pedagogical practices were forced to become more ‘authentic’ in order to properly implement the Rich Tasks (Department of Education and the Arts, 2004). However, in my view, the downside of placing so much emphasis on the tasks is they became the prime measure of student engagement (twelve of the twenty-five research reports focused on aspects of assessment) and other measures were overlooked, a situation that has some implications for the equity premise of the project. Personal observations in New Basics schools indicate that there were other, equally significant benefits from implementing New Basics for the broader school community as well as for individuals (particularly those considered at- risk of disengagement) that, if measured appropriately, may have affected final decisions on the efficacy of the reform.

In relation to my overarching research question, my findings indicate that teachers were marginalised in the reform process through their discursive positioning and through the more powerful construction of other agents like the Rich Tasks. The commodification of knowledge resulted in the sidelining of teachers who became consumers and spectators of the commodity spectacle created through Rich Task texts. This is not to say that New Basics teachers did not engage with the Rich Tasks. Evidence of their engagement is found in the online data (which signifies the uptake of New Basics discourses) as well as in the evaluation of the trial (see Ainley, 2004). However, the commodification of the curriculum into a series of iterated packages of knowledge potentially arranges teachers like relay nodes on a circuit board, as transmitter switches rather than active curriculum crafters (Luke, C., 2005). While it is understood that in reality teachers did not necessarily accept these stations, it demonstrates how texts and language can potentially affect the uptake of curriculum reform by constructing inappropriate subject positions and lived experiences.

With respect to Education Queensland, my findings suggest the relationships they constructed with New Basics teachers and other trial participants were fractured and dysfunctional. It appears that the system’s preference was to maintain epistemic authority with respect to innovative concepts in curriculum rather than drive the actual reform process. Their obfuscation of deontic authority is realised in several discursive and semiotic practices but it was the transfer of authority to the Rich Tasks that I believe is most insulting for trial school teachers. In the main, my research suggests that Education Queensland is limited in its ability to manage human resources and that their rhetoric of ‘steering from a distance’ may not be the way to go for systemic reforms in the future. Some evidence in support of these claims is found in the system’s communicative practices with teachers. In several print-based texts there is a notable absence of normative statements or imperatives that define teachers’ work under the New Basics regime. These are deflected by the discourses of advertising and marketing, a form of educational promotion that reflects the corporatisation of the curriculum. Whereas, the FRAMEWORK online discussions reveal discourses of monitoring and surveillance designed to reign in teachers or other trial participants expressing divergence in uptake of New Basics, and to close down any negative critique of system performance. The ‘roll-out’ approach to policy production can also be interpreted as an obfuscation of responsibility by the system because in most cases it represented policy published after the fact (or policy on the run) and this meant that teachers not acting according to policy could be held responsible for any negative effects their actions may have on the uptake of reform. From a teacher’s perspective, I would view with suspicion any education system that cannot devise and construct the policy that indexes the reform context a priori, and which instead shifts the goalposts midway through the trial.

The success or failure of the New Basics trial cannot be determined by findings from this study alone. However, by critically analysing a group of salient textual artefacts associated with the trial enables some speculation about how the discursive construction of policy and curriculum can potentially affect the uptake of new educational discourses. In the case of New Basics, my results indicate that Education Queensland aimed for maximum political currency by designing innovative and comprehensive educational reforms and utilising the latest technology in the production and dissemination of information. However, the processes employed to implement these reforms and the expectation that four-year time span was adequate for measuring its efficacy, suggest that Education Queensland was also intent on minimizing the political risks associated with large-scale reform and any concomitant destabilizing of their authority. These conclusions are supported by Weiler’s (1989) research into why systemic educational reforms fail and the complex political dynamics involved with making and unmaking of key policy decisions. As he explains,

The very process of elaborately designing, studying, discussing and reviewing education reform plans seems to acquire a powerful symbolic presence in its own right, and to confer upon the state an added legitimacy that results from the appearance of seriously anticipating and coping with social change and its implications for education. Having thus established the image of an alert, reform-minded state, the actual failure of implementing the reforms can then be much more easily attributed to [external events/people].” (Weiler, 1989, p. 293)

Furthermore, Weiler (1989) suspects that conducting an experimental trial is problematic as there is considerable variance between political reform cycles and the time it takes for the experimental program to run its full course. Luke (2005b) also weighs into this argument suggesting that when state educational authorities implement large-scale change, they have twelve months to put reforms in place (get the unions onside etc) before they go into election mode, effectively reducing the policy cycle to 3-5 years. With these issues in mind, the New Basics trial can be interpreted (rather cynically) as a case of political point-scoring in the initial fanfare and rush to put innovative educational concepts into place. This was followed by refinements in policy that created ambiguity and uncertainty for trial participants whilst simultaneously transferring responsibility for reform to assessment and accountability measures that enabled an elision of authority for the reform process by Education Queensland.

In order to close this presentation on a more positive note, there is no doubt the New Basics Project created some new discursive spaces for educators to reconceptualise their roles and practices. This was made possible in part because new technologies facilitated innovative design, production and distribution features of the New Basics curriculum that demonstrated the potential of new modes for representing knowledge and control. As a futures-oriented curriculum, the New Basics heralds a whole new era in curriculum reform in Australia that demands rethinking analytical frameworks and toolkits for deconstructing curriculum texts. My research illustrates the necessity in adopting a transdisciplinary approach to analysing curriculum using constructs based in a poststructural perspective. The results of my research demonstrate that a critical multisemiotic approach to analysing curriculum can generate valid results for interpreting curriculum intent and facilitate a positive critique for future curriculum reform efforts. My research clearly indicates that teacher subjectivities need more careful consideration if curriculum policy is to have any effect on their perceptions as change agents. Furthermore, thoughtful discursive constructions that result in more realistic portrayals of educational change and teachers’ work may assist in improving the sustainability of large-scale systemic reform. Finally, the state must ensure that in maximizing its political currency through undertaking reforms of this magnitude, it upholds the principles of educational equity instead of allowing hegemonic neoliberal ideologies to infiltrate the reform process and reduce its potency. References Ainley, J. (2004b). Evaluation Report of the New Basics Research Program. 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Footnote 1. There are actually four policy booklets in the series. However, the fourth and final booklet, New Basics: The Research Program is not mandatory reading for teachers and is produced for a much broader educational audience.