Knowing Asia: creative policy translation in an Australian school setting

Policy implementation at school level is often recognised as transformative enactment. Positioning school leaders as gatekeepers in this enactment is limiting. This study of one Australian school explores the complex contextualised agency of school leaders showing that their role, far more than gatekeeping, can be enabling and transformative. Identifying the agency of school leaders in enacting policy imperatives to ‘know Asia’ creates space to imagine localised narrative possibilities that negotiate and potentially challenge policy agendas. Accounts of policy work by school leaders are heteroglossic and densely intertextual in their mobilisation and collocation of discourses. A metaphor of a frog in a well is taken up to translate policy in locally specific ways that make it much more than a template of externally devised policy. Deep contextual knowledge empowers school leaders to imagine policy in innovative ways; however, it is paired with a cautionary note on risks inherent to shaping policy for ‘like-minded’ futures.