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This paper examines the strategic arguments articulated in calls for the teaching and learning of Asia in schools. "Asia literacy" is currently framed as a necessary "solution" for Australian education, but acceptance of this "solution" into the mainstream educational policy agenda has been problematised as a neoliberal and neocolonial construct. Subsequent policy debate indicates the dominance of an economic rationale that is seemingly impossible to resist. This paper suggests that critical policy approaches can be used to identify alternatives to these dominant frameworks, which imagine Asia literacy in alternate ways. Re-imagining the "solution" offers three alternatives: working within an economic agenda; restructuring Asia literacy away from a distinct policy agenda; and treating policy gaps as spaces in which teachers can generate locally relevant possibilities.

This paper focuses on the 'problem' of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education represented in the Australian Curriculum's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority. Looking beyond particular curriculum content, we uncover the policy discourses that construct (and reconstruct) the cross-curriculum priority. In the years after the Australian Curriculum's creation, curriculum authors have moulded the priority from an initiative without a clear purpose into a purported solution to the 'Indigenous problem' of educational underachievement, student resistance and disengagement. As the cross-curriculum priority was created and subsequently reframed,the 'problem' of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education has thereby been manifested in policy; strategised as curriculum content and precipitated in the cross-curriculum priority. These policy problematisations perpetuate contemporary racialisation and actively construct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, histories and knowledges as deficient.

Policy implementation at school level is often recognised as transformative enactment. Positioning school leaders as gatekeepers in this enactment is limiting. This study of one Australian school explores the complex contextualised agency of school leaders showing that their role, far more than gatekeeping, can be enabling and transformative. Identifying the agency of school leaders in enacting policy imperatives to 'know Asia' creates space to imagine localised narrative possibilities that negotiate and potentially challenge policy agendas. Accounts of policy work by school leaders are heteroglossic and densely intertextual in their mobilisation and collocation of discourses. A metaphor of a frog in a well is taken up to translate policy in locally specific ways that make it much more than a template of externally devised policy. Deep contextual knowledge empowers school leaders to imagine policy in innovative ways; however it is paired with a cautionary note on risks inherent to shaping policy for 'like-minded' futures.

The refocussing of Australia–Asia relations is manifest in a combination of national policy moves in Australia. Parallel shifts have been made in Europe, the United States, Canada and New Zealand. In Australia, the curricular response to this shift has become known as “Asia literacy.” This study is drawn from a wider project that explores representations of Asia literacy in both espoused and enacted policy. Teachers in this study are welcoming of Asia literacy, however lack confidence in their ability to engage with it as “tricky sort of subject matter” that requires significant theoretical work to “know Asia,” and “Asian culture” in an “authentic” way. A seemingly insurmountable barrier is created by assumptions that knowledge of Asia can be discretely inserted into curriculum. Critical reflection on residual imperial notions that are evident in such assumptions can in turn open new possibilities to theorise curricular responses to Asia literacy.

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Within teacher education, professional standards across Australian jurisdictions consistently note the importance of developing the ability to "engage professionally" with a community (QCT, 2009; AITSL, 2012). Paralleling this however, are calls for more 'classroom' time (Australian Government, 2012