ABSTRACT
Introduction This is a narrative analysis of Australian educational policy, with illustrations drawn from the context of Queensland state education. I begin from two key insights on educational policy since the 1980s philosophic work of Lyotard and Foucault: (1) that state policies and their critiques actually constitute a series of overlapping discourses and, moreover, (2) that policy interventions actually have strong narrative chains, ‘story grammars’ about specific domains of problems and their possible solutions, about material societal and institutional conditions, and about prospective social agents and scenarios of action (Luke 1997). At the same time, the format of this paper is itself a narrative, an attempt to capture one of the dilemmas facing Australian educational researchers and teachers: that of moving between and conjoining the discourses and life worlds of policy formation and educational research.
