(Download) "Hard Lines and Soft Scenes: Constituting Masculinities in the Prospectuses of All-Boys Elite Private Schools (Report)" by Australian Journal of Education * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Hard Lines and Soft Scenes: Constituting Masculinities in the Prospectuses of All-Boys Elite Private Schools (Report)
- Author : Australian Journal of Education
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 226 KB
Description
Introduction Just over ten years ago Symes (1998) drew attention to the aesthetic dimensions of school corporatisation, undertaking a semiotic analysis of school prospectuses as examples of school marketing. He argued that schools in the UK, USA and Australia were succumbing to neo-liberal market forces, which had caused them to become 'more conscious of the need to engage in stratagems such as advertising and promotion' as necessary to the perceived success of their status and reputation. In particular, Symes argued that school prospectuses were an important aspect of schools' impression management activities, and, far from being arbitrary, they were strategically and carefully constructed texts. In the decade after Symes's original paper, school marketing materials have become the subject of renewed concern about the ways that education providers communicate their ethos and ideals to potential clientele (Meadmore & Meadmore, 2004; Mills, 2004; Saltmarsh, 2007; Saltmarsh, 2008).An analysis of more recent private school prospectuses shows that schools' semiotic awareness is far from disappearing and that 'impression management' is still one of the main 'orthodox[ies] of the modern school' (Symes, 1998, p.133). In this paper, we draw insights from this body of literature to analyse the construction of masculinities in the prospectuses of six single-sex private boys' schools in the Sydney region.