The politics of Safe Schools: opportunities for intervention in the English classroom

The furore has recently dissipated, however the ‘Safe Schools’ behemoth, generated and perpetuated by Australian parliamentarians, looms still as one of the most significant education debates in past years. The following paper draws on 18,000 words spoken about ‘Safe Schools’ in the Australian Federal Parliament from November 2015 to August 2016. This dataset was interrogated with discourse analysis strategies to examine the ways in which Australian parliamentarians constructed narratives about ‘Safe Schools’, its teaching resources and its intentions and capacities. The analysis produced a range of prominent discourse ‘themes’ which aligned with three of Gee’s ‘Building Tasks of Language’ (2011): Identity, Politics (the distribution of social goods) and Connections. This paper argues that the political rhetoric around Safe Schools serves as an example of the potency of language in building and shaping perceptions around teaching content. It offers possibilities for English teachers to take up some of Safe Schools’ intended work by interrogating heteronormativity through text study and framing the work of English teaching as activism.