Recently public and policy discussions about gender equity have become strongly concerned with boys. This article discusses some aspects of the form, the context and the implications of these developments in Australia (and notes some points of similarity and difference with developments in the UK). It focuses on three main areas: the ways examination and other 'indicators' have been used in public policy constructions of gender inequality; secondly the issue of what types of reforms constitute gender equity as a project; and thirdly, the issue of research agendas and the entry of masculinity to gender research.

RVST The story they want to tell, and the visual story as evidence: young people, research authority and research purposes in the education and health domainsYoung people and research in education and health LYN YATESThe decision to use participatory visual methods with young people in education, health or public policy research is linked to a desire to allow them to have some greater voice in the research and the professional activities that impact on their lives. But how that 'voice' is produced, whose voice it represents, and how the product of that research is used and interpreted are all contentious issues for researchers. This article analyses some of these conceptual, methodological, political and pragmatic issues from the perspective of a current Australian Research Council-funded project working with young people across education and health domains. It is argued that allowing or not allowing visual accounts to speak for themselves is not simply a political decision but one related to epistemological understandings about meaning, and also to different purposes of different visual projects, in particular their relative emphasis on voice as a window to the world of the young people, compared with voice as a window to 'who I am'. The project discussed is one which aims to give greater authority and centrality to the visual accounts and voices of young people, but also one where researchers understand both the visual and voice as constructed rather than given. Case studies from the project are used to illustrate the way in which these commitments frame decisions about technology and methodology, and also to show and argue for an approach which treats the meaning of the visual evidence as something to be constructed ethnographically and reflexively over time.

This article draws on a study of Australian curriculum shifts between 1975 and 2005 to take up two themes of this special issue: the question about what conceptions of knowledge are now at work; and the consideration of global influences and national specificities in the reformulations of curriculum. It discusses two important approaches to curriculum in Australia in recent times, the ‘Statements and Profiles’ activity of the early 1990s, and the ‘Essential Learnings’ formulations of the past decade. The global tendencies we see at work in these two major approaches are, first, an increasing emphasis on externally managing and auditing student progress as a key driver of how curriculum policies are being constructed; and, secondly, a growing emphasis on approaching curriculum aims in terms of what students should be able to do rather than what they should know. We argue that in the contexts we discuss here, these approaches offered a way of marrying 1970s progressive views on child development and knowledge‐as‐process (views widely held by influential curriculum professionals in Australia) with late 20th century technologies of micro‐management and instrumental agendas favoured by politicians — but that many questions about knowledge were left off the agenda.

A stream of debate (including a previous special issue of this journal (25(1) 2014)) has made claims not just for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ as the framing underpinning of the school curriculum, but that subjects associated with disciplinary and disciplined knowledge forms have a particular power and that these characteristics are important to preserve in curriculum frameworks. This paper draws on a major Australian research project studying school and university physics in the context of these arguments to revisit the issue of the ‘discipline’ of physics and the curriculum logics for physics. Given that disciplines are social in origin and changing and expanding over time, can school curriculum be logically derived from the discipline to which they relate? Are questions about student engagement only questions about pedagogy and not curriculum? Does a focus on disciplinary knowledge mean that the role of school in forming identities and values is avoidable as a significant feature of what the curriculum does? The findings from the project are used both to illustrate and test these questions, and to challenge some over‐simple assumptions about the verticality of this form of knowledge for education purposes.

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This article discusses students' comments about the experience of shifting from primary to secondary schooling, and of their first year of secondary school. The material was gathered from research carried out in three Victorian primary schools and four Victorian secondary schools in 1993 and 1994. This article discusses the meanings students give to their experience of transition against earlier research and policy documents which use different methodologies and which talk of different cultures of primary and secondary schools. It argues that student reactions are more complex than are indicated by methodologies which take comments at face value and that their concerns challenge some common assumptions about the problem of disruption in the break between primary and secondary. The article also notes widespread changes in students' lunchtime activities compared with primary school and discusses ways students assess the new curriculum and teaching styles of the secondary school.

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