Anticipating Controversy: What’s the Problem Represented to Be in Australian Policies for the Selection of Learning Resources?

Abstract

Teachers’ decision-making about resource selection is made more complex when resources are appraised for their potential to raise controversial issues or cause offence to others within school communities. Debates around the use of trigger warnings, freedom of speech and the impact of exclusionary practices further complicate these processes. In this article, Bacchi’s (Bacchi, 2012; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016) What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach is applied to the critical policy analysis of five Australian policy texts that deal with resource selection and controversial issues in schools. By comparing the ways these policies represent certain kinds of ‘problems’, it highlights the tendency of government departments to problematise this as a process that must be managed for the purpose of mitigating contestation. An examination of dominant and alternative policy constructions also prompts reflection on the discursive effects of policy and why resource selection should be re-problematised as a pedagogical opportunity and inclusionary practice.

Keywords

Resource evaluation controversial issues critical policy analysis trigger warnings outrage culture inclusive education

Introduction

Teachers across all settings and subject areas make daily decisions about the nature and potential impact of the resources they use to develop teaching and learning activities. Far from being a mundane element of their practice, resource selection and evaluation occurs in dynamic socio-cultural contexts where curricular considerations intertwine with important considerations relating to social cohesion, religious freedoms, representation and inclusion. In response to diversifying school communities – where polarised or competing worldviews and beliefs are commonplace – teachers are required to critically reflect on resource selection and anticipate materials and topics that may potentially be considered controversial or cause offence. Public debate around freedom of speech, trigger warnings and ‘outrage culture’ has further intensified the politicisation and media attention given to these processes. The policies detailing guidelines for the selection of resources for teaching and learning provided by most education departments in Australia are therefore key documents for providing advice to schools and teachers about this important element of curriculum decision-making and require scrutiny.

The critical policy analysis reported on in this article considers the policy responses of Australian education departments and examines resource selection through the lens of Carol Bacchi’s (Bacchi, 2012; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016) What’s the Problem Represented to be? (WPR). It proceeds by mapping the policy context in which teachers are making decisions about resources and texts. The use of the WPR approach to data collection and analysis is then outlined, followed by an analysis of the problem representations across five Australian policies. The article concludes with some reflections on the way these policy problematisations implicate teachers and students as certain types of subjects (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). Its goal is not to address every element of these individual policy constructions or their origins but rather to examine the broader discursive patterns they collectively represent to prompt further reflection on the possibilities for rethinking these problematisations.

The resource selection policy context

The days when most teaching resources and texts were kept in filing-cabinets and on bookshelves are long gone. Digitisation has facilitated the sharing of resources on a new scale within an ever-expanding curriculum resource marketplace. Materials are created and shared via a multitude of sources; digital texts from across the globe are instantly at the fingertips of students and teachers. Although text selection controversies have featured in national education debates for decades (see Watson et al., 2022), the online learning necessitated by the pandemic has accelerated the growth and accessibility of learning resources, and the need to critique policies about their use (Rice & Ortiz, 2021).

The term learning resource is an umbrella term often used but not always defined in education policy documents. UNESCO (2023) describes learning resources as:

Any resource – including print and non-print materials and online/open-access resources – which supports and enhances, directly or indirectly, learning and teaching. Typically the use of a learning resource in the classroom is subject to a process of evaluation and approval at the school, local or national level. Evaluation criteria may include relevance to the curriculum and expectations for learning, social considerations, and age or developmental appropriateness (para. 1).

This definition underscores evaluation as a key process of resource selection, though such criteria are not always made explicit. The selection of appropriate learning resources is foregrounded in the Australian Teacher Professional Standards – see Standard 3.4: Select and use resources (Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL], 2022, p. 14) – and is understood to involve choosing the materials used to ‘engage students in their learning’ (AITSL, 2022. p. 14). Within this policy construction, resources are implicitly assumed to be value-neutral, which contrasts to the policy ‘problems’ identified below.

Shifting socio-political conditions have intensified public discourse around resource selection and controversial issues, providing impetus for research that considers how teachers navigate this policy landscape. Like many nations, public debate in Australia has escalated around issues such as racism, climate change and gender and sexual diversity, which increases the public attention given to related controversies in schools and shapes the discursive positions available to teachers, students and parents (see Mayes & Hartup, 2022; McPherson et al., 2022). Recent debate around trigger warnings and ‘outrage culture’ also influences attitudes towards what is deemed controversial within education systems. Emerging from the internet and American colleges, trigger warnings aim to forewarn people about sensitive material or topics within texts or courses that may heighten conditions caused by past trauma (Spencer & Kulbaga, 2018).

In 2017, the Victorian Student Representative Council – the body representing school-aged students in Victoria – raised the need for trigger warnings on senior secondary school English texts and highlighted the depressing themes of many texts (Cook, 2017). However, trigger warnings were not formally introduced. While they have been embraced by some tertiary educators for their capacity to open up respectful discussions and give students time to manage their responses (Willis, 2016), Rosewarne (2017) questions their efficacy for Australian English classrooms owing to a lack of evidence concerning their effectiveness. As yet, there is little published research on the use of trigger warnings in schools or on the implications of ‘outrage culture’ for teaching (e.g. Dickman-Burnett & Geaman, 2019), despite the attention given by media commentary.

Conservative reactions to this perceived ‘wokeness’ and ‘political correctness’ varies across contexts. Headlines like these from Britain – ‘School head warns of “righteous generation” of children entrenched in culture of outrage’ (Cole, 2021) and ‘Cancel culture has made me terrified of teaching’ (O’Sullivan, 2021) – promote simplistic binaries between so-called ‘woke’ activist students and teachers fearful of being called out or ‘cancelled’ for saying or doing the wrong thing. In an opinion piece for Quadrant, Lopez (2021) contends cancel culture ‘can be seen in what is not seen, the topics and issues not discussed, the books that are not on the reading lists, especially the intellectually enriching classics from the canon of great Western literature’ (p. 14). Such claims are consistent with the ‘legacy of Western civilisation’ discourse that pervades conservative commentary on Australian education (see Cairns, 2018), though appear relatively mild in contrast to new legislation in the United States banning race-related education and reference to Critical Race Theory (CRT) across 16 states (see Hamilton, 2021).

The research context is also informed by literature on the teaching of controversial issues. Writing 40 years ago, Dearden (1981) highlights an enduring conundrum: ‘Is it educationally desirable that controversial issues should be included in the curriculum?’ (p. 40). To not cover controversial issues, says Dearden (1981), would be to ignore matters of significance and misrepresent subjects as monolithic and ahistorical. More recent scholars agree on the value of engaging students with controversial issues for the purpose of enhancing civic and democratic engagement and developing critical thinking skills (e.g. Hess, 2009; Misco & Tseng, 2018). However, as Khan (2019) highlights, teachers need to take care to open up space for critically reflecting on polarising debates in ways that ensure a balance of perspectives are provided and marginalised voices are not silenced. Correspondingly, Jones (2022) argues that text selection can perpetuate racialised trauma through the use of outdated texts but sees the potential of critical text selection that humanises and liberates when ‘educators can make room for new texts, new critical interpretations, and pedagogies’ (2022, p. 5).

The bulk of research on the teaching of controversial issues focuses on teacher practice in relation to controversial issues in the teaching of social studies and humanities subjects, where controversial topics naturally arise (e.g. Cohen, 2020; Hung, 2020; Misco & Tseng, 2018). Text selection – often regarding film and literary texts in the teaching of English and Literature – is another area that has similar concerns (e.g. Jones, 2022; Watson et al., 2022). In contrast to the approaches taken in the research literature, this article examines the extent to which the notion of the controversial is represented in policy constructions that relate to resource selection across all aspects of schooling. Two recent Australian studies indicate policy analysis is an emerging interest within this area. In an analysis of Victorian curriculum policy guidelines about diversity and inclusion in relation to prescribed senior secondary English text lists, Bliss and Bacalja (2021) conclude vague language did not aid inclusive text selection and not all policy aims were met. McPherson et al.’s (2022) case study of a History teacher’s enactment of the Controversial Issues in Schools (New South Wales Department of Education, 2017) policy is also germane. They argue that, by spotlighting teacher misconduct, the policy fails to support teachers to make deliberative judgements within this highly politicised space (McPherson et al., 2022). Both of these studies extend the warrant for education policy research that does not assume the meaning of policy is ‘taken for granted and/or defined superficially as an attempt to “solve a problem”’ (Ball et al., 2012).

What’s the problem represented to be?

This article focuses on Australian policy texts and utilises Bacchi’s WPR approach to interrogate how ‘policy is complexly encoded’ (Ball et al., 2012, p. 3). Bacchi (2012) best sums up the approach: ‘The task in a WPR analysis is to read policies with an eye to discerning how the “problem” is represented within them and to subject this problem representation to critical scrutiny’ (p. 21). In short, WPR utilises poststructural policy analysis to make the politics of policy visible (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). As ‘there is no recipe for doing policy analysis in education’ (Lingard, 2009, p. 227), WPR provides an incisive framework.

WPR guided the analysis of the ways five government policies have problematised the selection of teaching and learning resources as ‘a particular kind of problem’ (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 17). As Bacchi argues, ‘the subsequent claim is that we are governed through these constituted “problems,” meaning that governing takes place through problematizations’ (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 17). This prompts us to consider how teachers and principals are governed by these particular problem representations but also how other policy actors are positioned and/or overlooked and the types of subject positions available to them.

The following policies were collected and analysed:

• New South Wales (NSW): Controversial Issues in Schools: Direction for the management of controversial issues in schools (New South Wales Department of Education, 2017)

• Northern Territory (NT): Suitable text and media resources in schools–guidelines (Northern Territory Department of Education, 2022);

• South Australia (SA): Selecting and using resources for educational purposes guideline (South Australia Department of Education, 2020);

• Victoria (VIC): Teaching and Learning Resources–Selecting Appropriate Materials (Victorian Department of Education and Training, 2020);

• Western Australia (WA): Use of Texts in Educational Settings (Western Australia Department of Education, 2018).

The departments of education in the Australian Capital Territory, Queensland and Tasmania do not publish similar policies so were not included. As the legislative requirements around films and computer games classifications are determined by the National Classification Code (Australian Government, 2005) and are consistent across the policies, they were not included. It should also be noted that, as publications of state/territory government education departments, these policies are only applicable to government schools. In 2021, 65.1% of the 4,030,717 students enrolled in Australian schools were enrolled in government schools (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022). While Australian curriculum authorities also have specific policies and guidelines that address the selection of prescribed texts, these are unable to be considered within the scope of this article.

The initial data analysis utilised the questions outlined by the WPR application and was documented in NVivo (release 1.7.1). As Bacchi and Goodwin (2016) note, ‘since the seven modes of analysis necessarily involve overlap and some repetition, their listing as separate “steps” serves a heuristic function’ (p. 20). The following seven questions guided data analysis:

What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach to policy analysis

1. What’s the problem (e.g. of ‘gender inequality’, ‘drug use/abuse’, ‘economic development’, ‘global warming’, ‘childhood obesity’ and ‘irregular migration’) represented to be in a specific policy or policies?

2. What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’ (problem representation)?

3. How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about?

4. What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be conceptualised differently?

5. What effects (discursive, subjectification, lived) are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?

6. How and where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? How has it been and/or how can it be disrupted and replaced?

7. Apply this list of questions to your own problem (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 20).

Due to the space available and the advice above concerning their heuristic purpose, this article does not address each question. Furthermore, as there can be more than one problem representation in each policy text, they cannot all be elucidated.

This article therefore compares how each jurisdiction constitutes the ‘problem’ of resource or text selection as a particular type of problematisation and the sorts of policy ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ that are constituted by each policy. The WPR approach understands subjectification to describe the ways subjects get made by policy as ‘specific kinds of subjects’ (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 70) and examines how concepts ‘come to be spoken of as “objects”’ (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 84).

New South Wales

Controversial Issues in Schools: Direction for the management of controversial issues in schools (New South Wales Department of Education, 2017) is oriented towards controversial issues, rather than resources. The New South Wales Department of Education (2022) also provides a succinct one-page Resource Evaluation Tool but as it is not a policy as such, the former is analysed. As the fundamental policy object, ‘controversial issues’ are constructed through the emphasis placed on the processes and practices that give them shape (New South Wales Department of Education, 2017). ‘Controversial issues’ are problematised as being a societal problem, exogenous to schools. This is illustrated by their formation in relation to ‘changing attitudes, world events and social values’ (p. 4), ‘events outside the school’ and the ‘diverse views held by parents and the community about what is suitable to study’ (p. 4). A broad definition of controversial issues is offered but as no specific examples are provided, the policy presupposes an implicit understanding that they are recognisable. This ambiguity is reinforced by prompts that redirect the reader to the ‘the values of public education’ (p. 4) as an assumed moral framework, detailed in another policy (New South Wales Department of Education, 2020).

Schools are configured as both subjects and places. They assume the role of protector – ‘supporting students’ (p. 4) and ‘protect[ing] students from foreseeable risk of harm arising from school related activities’ (p. 4), especially from those seeking ‘to proselytise’ or ‘advance political platforms’ (p. 4). Schools act as the mediators of controversial issues, the study of which ‘must be consistent with curriculum objectives’ (p. 4). As ‘places where students are preparing for informed and reasoned involvement in community life by the study of social issues’ (p. 4; emphasis added), schools are sites for the formation of students as nascent participants in community life and social issues. The section, Management of controversial issues (pp. 4–7), further positions students and teachers as policy subjects to be managed by schools and self-managed through their capacity to anticipate controversy. Student-organised activities are recognised; however, if an activity is likely to include controversial issues, parental consent must be given, which assumes students are prudent enough to predict what their peers and their peers’ parents will perceive as controversial.

An emphasis on the risk of teacher partiality positions them as an implicit part of the ‘problem’. As they are ‘in a privileged position to influence students’ (p. 5), their ‘personal views should not impact on teaching a subject’ (p. 5). Thus ‘teachers are required to ensure that all views and evidence are presented impartially in all discussions of controversial issues’ (p. 5), thereby solving this through their supposed neutrality. This draws attention to potential power imbalances between teachers and students but offers binaristic subject positions: ‘politically subversive teacher’ verses ‘politically neutral teacher’.

Northern Territory

First published in 2017, the current iteration of Suitable text and media resources in schools guidelines (Northern Territory Department of Education, 2022) is a truncated version of the previous one. This policy sets an authoritative tone by foregrounding the roles and responsibilities of teachers and principals in relation to ‘controversial resources that may cause objections’ (p. 2). The effect is an immediate responsibilisation of teachers and principals as the policy subjects (see Done & Murphy, 2018). A smaller section of the policy provides guidelines, including the definition of resources as ‘spoken, written or visual text and media’ (p. 4).

The paragraph on controversial themes or topics acknowledges that ‘controversial topics will often be appropriate and important subjects of study’ (p. 2). The ‘cultural sensitivities’ of Aboriginal communities are also acknowledged in relation to a teacher’s responsibility to consult with ‘Aboriginal staff and educators, about the appropriateness of resources’ (p. 2). Other than saying ‘resources likely to be regarded as offensive by the school community must not be used’ (p. 3), this document provides limited guidance in helping teacher anticipate how or why resources have ‘potential for parental objection’ (p. 3) and it no longer provides advice on resolving objections. Despite the title of the policy, it does little to explicate the key policy object – ‘the suitable text’. A second document, Suitable text and media resources in schools decision-making guide is referred to but this is not publicly available to the wider school community. Lastly, students are considerably silenced in this problematisation. Referred to mostly as ‘learners’, they are assumed to be the objectors within this problem representation.

South Australia

At 13 pages in length, Selecting and using resources for educational purposes guidelines (South Australia Department of Education, 2020) is a comprehensive policy. This somewhat alternative problematisation operationalises a discourse of human rights. The policy ‘establishes the expectations that those involved in selecting and using educational resources are critical and purposeful in the selection processes’ (p. 1), including students. This is reinforced by the positioning of children and young people as relatively agentic policy subjects throughout the document, collectively supported by ‘department staff’ (as opposed to just principals and teachers) in this ‘shared responsibility’ (p. 7).

The rights discourse is evident in the cross-referencing of the guiding principles with the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 (South Australia Department of Education, 2020, p. 1). The first guiding principle, ‘The right to freedom of expression’ (p. 1) is based on a child’s ‘right to engage with information and ideas from many sources’ (p. 1) and to express their ideas ‘as long as they respect the rights and welfare of others’ (p. 1). The second principle, ‘Duty of care’ shifts the emphasis from student agency to student protection. The next principle, ‘Involvement of parents and carers’ relies on the generalisation that ‘parents and carers make thoughtful choices about educational resources their children and young people use’ (p. 2). The ‘Inclusivity and social inclusion principle’ emphasises ‘the diversity of all young people and children’ (p. 2) by explicitly listing a range of inclusive categorisations (e.g. students who are Aboriginal, have a disability, are same sex attracted, gender diverse or of diverse backgrounds). The recommendation that ‘a range of positive alternatives to promote social inclusion by challenging stereotypical representations of people and circumstances’ (p. 2) is noteworthy due to the absence of similar aspirations in the other policies. Student agency is reinforced by encouraging ‘all involved’ to ‘help children and young people to develop critical frameworks’ (p. 7) to ‘independently select appropriate resources for educational recreational use–both now and later in life’ (p. 7). Another consideration relates to ‘Using resources relating to Aboriginal cultures’ (p. 8). By recommending ‘it’s best to check with the relevant community about what’s acceptable’ (p. 8) and by placing emphasis on ‘consulting with community’, Aboriginal communities are offered a subject position beyond that of objectors.

The controversial issues discourse is not operationalised in this policy until the final section of further considerations. The statement, ‘if objections can be anticipated’ (p. 8, emphasis added) juxtaposes with the other policies that assume objections can and will be anticipated.

Victoria

Teaching and Learning Resources – Selecting Appropriate Materials¹ (Victorian Department of Education and Training, 2020) sees resource selection as a ‘problem’ about providing stimulating learning while mitigating offence, as well as a ‘problem’ of principal and teacher compliance. This is encapsulated by the first summary point: ‘Schools must ensure teaching and learning resources provide challenging and engaging learning programs for students but do not offend students or the wider school community due to their obscene, offensive or controversial nature’ (p. 2). Compared to the other policies, it underscores the importance of curricular contextualisation and justification for resource selection, with multiple references to the Victorian Curriculum and the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA).

Similar to the NSW document, this policy is fundamentally concerned with anticipating and managing controversial topics. However, it is unique in that it formulates appropriate and inappropriate resources as key policy objects in greater detail than the above policies, and these are implicitly organised on a spectrum, ranging from ‘suitable’ to ‘offensive and obscene’ (p. 4). Examples of controversial contexts that ‘can be anticipated’ (p. 4) are listed:

• themes related to magic or fantasy;

• racial and religious themes;

• sexual activity, nudity and related themes;

• drug misuse or addiction;

• crime, violence or cruelty;

• suicide and excessively bleak scenarios;

• the depiction of revolting or abhorrent phenomena;

• satirical or comparative perspectives on race, religion or gender (p. 11).

Unlike SA, this policy does not see representation around inclusivity and diversity as an issue to be anticipated. While this could be read as a policy response that is somewhat sensitive to the diverse perspectives of secular school communities in a pluralistic society, the cautious tone of the policy – avoiding offence by ‘anticipating’ it – points to an implicit wariness. Furthermore, the message that principals and teachers should and can foresee which materials will offend implicates teachers and principals as prescient policy subjects and positions them in opposition to the offended policy subjects – students and parents.

Western Australia

Use of Texts in Educational Settings (Western Australia Department of Education, 2018), constructs texts as the central policy object in relation to their use by students and teachers. Text choice is essentially seen as a problem of student learning and teachers’ duty of care. This problematisation positions students as both policy subjects – having the capacity to ‘comprehend’ and ‘compose’ (p. 1) texts themselves – and policy objects, for whom teachers have a ‘duty of care’ to consider if a text is ‘likely impact on students’ (p. 2). Like the SA policy, the problematisation takes the diversity of students’ ‘ethnic, religious, social and cultural backgrounds’ (p. 2) as a given.

Unlike the other policies, this policy problematisation takes for granted that ‘teachers use their professional judgment when selecting texts’ (p. 1), which represents a certain level of trust in teacher autonomy. To support this, the policy offers some guidance to help teachers assess ‘the sensitivities and values of the school community’ (p. 2) in the form of eight bullet-points. Some ‘policy borrowing’ (Phillips & Ochs, 2003, p. 451) from Victoria is also evident in the reuse of the same list of ‘content that may generate objections’ (p. 2) listed above. However, unlike Victoria which has a detailed process for dealing with ‘objectors’ (Victorian Department of Education and Training, 2020, p. 12), this policy recognises ‘students, parents or guardians […] have a right to object to the use of a particular text’ (p. 3), which positions them as somewhat more agentic policy subjects.

Implications of the problem representations

This WPR analysis, with its focus on the representation of key policy objects and subjects, demonstrates that while there are some significant commonalities, Australian states and territories have different ways of representing the ‘problem’ of resource/text selection and ‘managing’ controversial issues. In the New South Wales policy, schools are rendered mediatory spaces in which the controversial issues that infiltrate schools are ‘managed’ as learning experiences and students are protected from proselytisation and politicisation. The Victorian policy is similarly concerned with controversial issues but constructs these as more tangible policy objects that can be scaled according to their potentiality for causing offence, thereby allowing controversy and offence to be pre-empted by vigilant teachers and principals. The Northern Territory policy also compels teachers to comply with directives by stressing the topics or themes that do offend. Western Australia foregrounds duty of care ahead of controversial topics, and like Victoria and the Northern Territory, this policy makes texts the key policy objects. When viewed in combination, however, the dominant problem representations encode the message that, although there is educational value in engaging with controversial materials, their potential to endanger or distress students and their families means they are ultimately problematised negatively. In contrast, the South Australian approach looks somewhat counter-discursive. As a more student-centred problematisation, this rights-based approach represents resource selection as an opportunity for empowerment and inclusion, which is seen as a shared responsibility among department staff, school communities and students. This is juxtaposed with the documents in which policy is done to rather than by or with students. Although this article does not argue South Australia’s is the better policy, by framing resource evaluation as an inclusive, educative and dialogic process, this sort of problematisation prompts us to reflect on resource selection as an everyday curricular and pedagogical practice rather than one bound by conflict. This is reinforced when the discursive effects the more negative and precautional problem representations could have on teachers’ practice are considered.

Through the WPR analysis ‘it becomes possible to reflect on the limits imposed on what can be thought or said about the issues under consideration’ (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 37). Although this article does not examine policy enactment, it is possible to discern the ways teachers and their curricular decision-making are potentially governed by their subjectification within these documents. Implying classrooms or schools are inherently value-neutral spaces into which potentially controversial material enter from the outside world overlooks the pre-existing socio-cultural complexities and challenges within them and education’s innately political nature, thereby setting up a simplistic binary between the assumed neutrality/volatility of these inner/outer spaces. As the so-called arbiters of the issues and texts engaged with in classrooms, teachers are constructed by these policies as ‘both the problem and the solution’ (Done & Murphy, 2018, p. 152), positioning them as cultural gatekeepers who must maintain personal impartiality and making them responsible for ‘fixing’ complex structural issues. Even if education departments purport to educationally valorise controversial issues, paradoxically teachers may become less inclined to draw on diverse perspectives and challenging topics due to the heightened sense of risk and anxiety about the social expectations placed on them. This is encapsulated by McPherson et al. (2022) who argue that scrutiny of teacher conduct, particularly in the context of amplified media and public discourse, produces ‘a regulatory effect on teachers and school leaders; namely, to ensure schools remain “neutral spaces” where teachers avoid engaging with certain hot-button issues out of a sense of self-preservation and often fear’ (pp. 10–11).

As an unintended consequence, problem representations that encourage hyper-vigilant curricular decision-making from school leaders and teachers are more likely to exclude students from these conversations and may perpetuate decision-making based on assumptions. Even though these policies are seeking to be proactive, by framing resource selection as an imminent problem and providing ambiguous criteria or no criteria for evaluating or guiding text selection, they task teachers with the responsibility of anticipating controversy. Research has found that some teachers, particularly those not from minority backgrounds, may be susceptible to overlooking religious, cultural and racial complexities when selecting resources (Jones, 2022; Khan, 2019; McPherson et al., 2022). Yet as policy subjects, they are expected to make assumptions about the worldviews and experiences of others according to their own worldviews and generalisations. Drawing on what Foucault calls ‘dividing practices’, Bacchi and Goodwin (2016) point out that an effect of subjectification can be the separation of groups from one another. In most of these problem representations teachers are assumed to represent normative stances for the interpretation of issues and texts, whereas individuals and groups in the school community are ‘Othered’ or marginalised as objectors. While the policies consider students’ socio-cultural backgrounds and identities, those of teachers are left unproblematic, which again presupposes teachers’ neutrality. Although the South Australian policy did not explicitly address teacher subjectivity per se, its framing of resource selection as a shared responsibility potentially offers a way of addressing dividing practices. Indeed, if schools and school systems seek to open spaces for authentic conversations and create safe spaces for silent and silenced voices within the discussion of contentious issues, a shift from accountability to responsibility may be needed (Khan, 2019).

Lastly, there was no evidence of the trigger warning discourse being taken up in these policies. Notwithstanding that trigger warnings are primarily concerned with the effects of prior trauma, the policy expectations around teachers’ capacity to protect students from harm are not dissimilar to the aims of trigger warnings. The emerging literature around trigger warnings may therefore offer some insights for thinking about the way that conversations around resource selection might be flipped, as we can see with the South Australian example. Spencer and Kulbaga (2018) suggest that flipping the question to ‘how can we create radically respectful and socially just classrooms?’ (p. 112) might help educators to construct more inclusive classrooms in which students are more directly engaged in their education. They argue: ‘For students without histories of trauma, trigger warnings can serve a pedagogical function as well, by modelling how to engage respectfully with a diverse population of individuals’ (Spencer & Kulbaga, 2018, p. 113). While this article is not arguing that trigger warnings should be introduced, policymakers and policy actors could consider how resource selection and controversial issues might be re-problematised as a pedagogical opportunity for schools to develop interpersonal awareness and dialogue between all members of the school community, rather than problematised as an implicitly exclusionary practice.

In closing

This article has sought to show how ‘the WPR approach uses texts as “levers” to open up reflections on the forms of governing, and associated effects, instituted through a particular way of constituting a “problem”’ (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016, p. 18). Applied to the analysis of five state and territory government policies concerning resource selection and controversial issues, this approach makes visible the way public policy seeks ‘to impose order on social life’ (Savage, 2021, p. 1) despite it being perpetually disorderly. Rather than constituting the selection of learning resources as a problem that recognises school communities as the messy social spaces that they are, such policy imperatives frame teachers as gatekeepers, who can supposedly regulate the flow of contested and contentious content and ideas into schools. Although further policy enactment research is needed to comprehensively examine the lived effects of these sorts of problematisations, the negativity engendered by the dominant approach is more likely to disempower teachers and marginalise other policy actors in the school community. The interruption of such problem representations would require a rethinking of resource selection as a pedagogical opportunity and practice of inclusion for all policy actors rather than an issue fixated on teacher compliance.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rebecca Cairns

Note

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