Terry Locke

Resisting Qualifications Reforms in New Zealand: the English Study Design As Constructive Dissent Terry Locke

New Zealand has been a veritable "laboratory" for a range of social experiments in the last twenty years, including an arranged marriage with neo-liberal economic policies during the late 80s and 90s. These experiments extended to education, where students, teachers, teacher educators and researchers have experienced wide-ranging "reforms" in administration, curriculum and qualifications. The most contentious of these have been a series of untrialled and radical qualifications reforms. This book offers a critical examination of these reforms from the perspective of a group of educators who resisted them by doing the unthinkable: devising their own national qualification and making it work. Terry Locke is currently Chairperson of the Arts and Language Education Department of the School of Education, University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research interests include curriculum and assessment reform, teacher professionalism, constructions of English as a subject, literacy and ICT and the teaching of argument. He is currently engaged in a major research project on the teaching of literature in multicultural classrooms. He is coordinating editor of the journal English Teaching: Practice and Critique. His most recent book is Critical Discourse Analysis (Continuum: 2004).