Mapping the discursive formations of ‘effective’ school governance and the role of parents

Abstract

Discourses concerned with responsibilisation and expertise have seen the ascendency and fall in who is positioned to do ‘effective’ school governance and what that ‘doing’ is. Using the four phases of the moon as a metaphor I map the discursive formations of ‘effective’ school governance and the relational structuring of parents. This mapping exercise, through a simple metaphor, has produced a heuristic construct through which questions can be asked of the field of school governance and an analytical construct to use in our thinking about school governance across other cases. By thinking with Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, to interpret this mapping of discourse strands, I have revealed the interrelationship between discourse strands and the increasing invisibility of parents in a context of corporatised school governance and the waning of democratic structures in school governance.