Ideas, Spaces, and Promises in Postwar Radical and Progressive Education in Australia

• In Event: 46.029 - State Policy and the Education of the Masses: International Perspectives

Abstract

This paper examines philosophies of progressive and radical education in Australia following the 1960s expansion of secondary schooling. It explores the rise of community schooling during the 1970s, addressing the ideas of teachers and educators at that time, as well as collective and individual memory now of those ideas and experiments. Against a range of educational initiatives, it examines different directions in community school philosophies and aspirations, with a common concern to remake school spaces in the project of shaping new subjectivities and educational possibilities. Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia, it analyses the ambivalent relation of community schools to the mainstream, in which alternative spaces promised to be school but not school, and were both unsettling and normative.

Author

• Julie E. McLeod, University of Melbourne