Swimming against the tide: boys, literacies, and schooling - an Australian story

Abstract

This article focuses on issues related to boys, literacies, and schooling as played out in the Australian context. It reflects on the swathe of populist discourse centring on boys, and on literacy, that drives a potentially divisive education agenda. In providing more nuanced analyses of the debates surrounding the disputed territory of boys, literacies, and schooling, the article offers examples of disaggregated literacy test data to demonstrate the importance of adopting a “which boys” and “which girls” approach to the issues. The article also provides brief coverage of the Success for Boys program, introduced in Australia in 2006, that encourages teachers to swim against the tide of populism by embracing the agenda in all of its complexity.