摘要:This paper engages with the central theme of this special issue, “From the
Margins to the Centre,” as a particular kind of narrative that occupies the imagination of
literacy educators in the academy, particularly those who are located in the “centre,” but
whose experience ironically finds them “pinned to the margins” (Stevenson & Kokkin,
2007) of mainstream teaching and learning. Writing primarily from an Australian
perspective as an educator experienced in attempting to embed authentic literacy
education into the curriculum (from the centre) (Skillen, Merten, Trivett, & Percy, 1999),
as a researcher attempting to make sense of the nature of change agency this requires
(Percy, 2011a, 2011b), and as an academic leader developing policy at the institutional
level in an attempt to legislate embedded practices into existence (Percy & Taylor, 2015),
in this paper I briefly explore the seduction and frustration of the “margins to centre”
narrative and provide an overview of a selection of literature that illustrates the ways in
which we have imagined this trajectory. I then discuss how these narratives can be seen to
be bracketed within an era where the discourses of standards and skills became privileged
over other ways of thinking about education, and on the one hand created a space for the
literacy educator to emerge, but on the other hand tended to derail our more progressive
desires by their capacity to invoke their twin discourses of decline and transparency. The
paper ends by providing one brief and new example of how we are attempting to put the
discourses of standards and skills to work through policy and course review procedures at
one Australian university.