Policy matters: de/re/territorialising spaces of learning in Victorian government schools

This article seeks to augment an emerging interest in education policy research in enactment theorising, to explicitly consider the role and contribution of materiality in this theorising. Guided by the notion of policy matters, the article takes as its empirical context a major policy initiative, the Building the Education Revolution infrastructure programme, which commenced in Australia in 2009 and saw funding distributed to schools to develop new learning spaces and facilities. Deploying a sociomaterial approach to researching policy, and bringing selected Deleuzian concepts to bear, this programme is traced as it is playing out presently in Victorian government schools. The argument is made that understanding policy objects such as these ‘open’ and ‘flexible’ learning spaces as being in a perpetual state of ‘becoming’ is especially useful in the context of education policy where rationalistic approaches tend to prevail. It opens a space for re-imagining education policy and the politics of this policy by crediting the idea that materialising processes such as architecture and facilities matter in education policy. They are performative agents with interventionist possibilities regarding schools’ curricular and pedagogic outcomes and goals.