Who Speaks for Education? One newspaper's reporting of a review of the Queensland school curriculum

This paper is a case study of a series of newspaper reports on education. It is part of a larger project, which examines the public debate on education, where the media is identified as the means of presenting the debate to the public. The case study presents an analysis, which is concerned with the definition of the situation in the print media's discourses on education, especially with the generation of meaning through particular representations within these discourses. It focuses on the identification and representation of the people considered by the paper to be of importance to the educational initiative and on their positioning within the social relations of the discourse. In particular, the analysis explores the authority the news reports give to these participants to speak on education. As such, it highlights the contcstation and negotiation that is always a part of any politics of representation. This analysis emphasises the role of discursive practices in the construction of ideological understandings of reality. Such an emphasis necessitates the adoption of a critical discourse analysis in order to identify the ideological dimensions of the debate on education in the public arena. The paper now turns to a discussion of critical discourse analysis before presenting the analysis of the news reports.