As part of the Commonwealth’s drive to enhance Australia’s competitiveness in the global economy, Australia is five years from implementing ‘National Benchmarks’ to leverage measurable literacy outcomes from schools. This ‘back to basics’ agenda is in tension with another drive to foster advanced thinking skills in children. Teachers are being positioned as deskilled technicians on the one hand and model ‘new economy’ workers on the other, whilst working to meet the needs of diverse student populations. This article discusses the impact of these tensions on ‘Riverside Primary School’ located in a culturally diverse, socio-economically disadvantaged suburb of Adelaide. A case study of student–teacher interactions during a literacy lesson is used to illustrate how dominant educational and political discourses operate at a classroom level to construct children as ‘normal’, ‘gifted’ or ‘slow’.
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