This chapter will develop your understanding of the role of widening participation in Australia, specifically the pedagogical approaches outlined throughout the chapter which can be enacted to support learners from all backgrounds. These critical teaching approaches have the power to disrupt the reproduction of existing structural inequalities to enhance the educational success of learners from all sectors of Australian society.

This Introduction configures Messiaen’s life and works, and the culture, aesthetics, and legacy of his art in terms of various kinds of images. In particular, this chapter focuses on the complexity and construction of these images, which are sometimes surprising and contradictory, to reveal the ‘contexts’ that inform this book.

This is the fourth edition of Making Sense of Mass Education. It continues the process of covering more issues than each preceding versions of the book: it updates aspects of the data, it discusses more recent research, it offers more nuanced assessment of specific problems and it does all this within a parallel digital environment ߝ one that provides additional ideas, activities and ways of seeing and understanding. While all these elements are significant, they do not really constitute the most important reason for writing a further edition of the book.

Changes to the field of education have not slowed since the publication of the third edition, which introduced new important discussions of Gonski and school funding equity, the debates over NAPLAN and school ranking tables, arguments over the Australian curriculum, the rise in interest in alternative forms of education and global concerns over the ethics of big data use. Of course, this edition offers an updated contemporary assessment of all these topics; however it also provides an extensive discussion of the important and rapidly changing area of schooling and sexuality, as well as a discussion of the field of children’s rights and the increasing marketisation of schools and its relationship with the professional life of teachers.

Learning about grammar is learning about how language works in a range of contexts and this informs the choices we make when speaking and writing. For many of us, language itself is not often the focus of the many events and encounters that make up our daily lives, as most often our exchanges, even our text messages, which are written versions of oral language, are exchanged in a familiar context with others whom we know well. Anyone speaking any language, dialect, creole or pidgin has learnt how to use the grammar of that language… and that includes you! However, for teachers it is not enough to just use the building blocks of language, the grammar, we need to be able to reflect on and talk about how language works and to help learners to do the same.

This chapter explores some of the possibilities and complexities of recognising the important communicative repertoires and resources that learners bring to the classroom, while supporting them to develop expertise in the literate practices that are embedded within schooling and other contexts. It provides an understanding of some of the perspectives, ideas and factors that may impact upon literacies learning, and that allow teachers to engage meaningfully with different options for literacies instruction and make informed decisions about their own teaching approaches. It is important to remember that there is no one way to think about literacies education and that different contexts may foreground different approaches (Freebody, 2007; Luke, 2000). In considering some of the possibilities and complexities of literacies learning, this chapter also refers to some of the related theories and approaches. This discussion is also intended to be read in connection with the other chapters of the book, which provide ideas about potential ways to implement different approaches to classroom instruction.

Democratic politics is a collective enterprise, not simply because individual votes are counted to determine the winner of an election, but more fundamentally because the individual exercise of democratic citizenship is an interdependent undertaking. Citizens disagree, they argue with one another, they inform one another, and they arrive at political choices and decisions through processes of social interaction and deliberation.

Different relational dynamics make relationships evolve within entourages. They are here mainly explored from the Caen panel, whose longitudinal dimension allows it to capture detailed movements over time. The diagram of relational dynamics identified in Chapter 3 is taken up again by detailing the main movements articulating relations, contexts and networks: polyvalence/specialization, singularization/embedding, and connection/dissociation. The ways in which these dynamics appear, their frequency, and their evolution over the time of the relationship, and over biographical time, are highlighted here.

The authors begin by describing the theoretical framework on which they have based their analysis of the processes they present in this and subsequent chapters. It seeks to account for the interactions between circles, relationships, and networks and to keep in mind that one does not exist without the others. Three main types of contexts for the emergence of relationships are then successively explored: their construction within a social circle; interactions around shared issues; and the extension of the network by the introduction of people through shared relationships. Once constructed, relationships acquire a certain autonomy regarding their context of emergence, which can be captured by the way respondents designate them. Finally, this chapter ends with a review of how social differences (age, gender, level of education, occupation) are perceived (and partly elaborated) in the processes of relationship construction.

Relates Borges’s works to several contexts, revealing the existence of a systematic model of context in ’Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’.