"Living on the edge" : A case of school reform working for disadvantaged adolescents
- Authors: Smyth, John , McInerney, Peter
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Teachers College Record Vol. 109, no. 5 (2007), p. 1123-1170
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP110102619
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The issue of why so many young adolescents around the world are disengaging from school and making the choice to drop out is one of the most intractable, vexed, perplexing, and controversial issues confronting educators. Tackling it requires courage and a radical rethinking of school reform around issues of power, ownership of learning, and the relevance of schooling and curriculum for young lives. This means a heightened institutional capacity to "listen." This article describes an instance of a disadvantaged urban Australian government school that realized it had little alternative but to try new approaches; "old ways" were not working. The article describes an ensemble of school reform practices, philosophies, and strategies that give young adolescents genuine ownership of their learning. This school stands out as a beacon that school reform is possible, even for young adolescents from the most difficult of circumstances. However, such approaches look markedly different from where mainstream educational reform is taking us at the moment. Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University.
- Description: 2003005576
The politics of derision, distrust and deficit : The damaging consequences for youth and communities put at a disadvantage
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Trust and Betrayal in Educational Administration and Leadership Chapter p.
- Full Text: false
Critical engagement for collaborative action research
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Collaborative Action Research: Developing Professional Learning Communities Chapter p. 58-76
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: 2003006440
Critically engaged community capacity building and the 'community organizing' approach in disadvantaged contexts
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Critical Studies in Education Vol. 50, no. 1 (2009), p. 9-22
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0665569
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper critiques the notion of community capacity building (CCB) and the way it is increasingly being invoked in social policy as a way of tackling disadvantage. The paper argues that CCB and a number if its derivative terms are not as straightforward as they appear. Superficially, CCB presents as a useful way of approaching school and community reform in contexts of disadvantage, but closer analysis reveals it to be pre-disposed to deployment as a cover under which to blame schools and communities, while handing over responsibility. What is posited as an alternative is a 'community organizing' approach that is more political, activist, and attuned to providing forms of analysis and leadership skills with which communities and schools can begin to tackle some of the underlying conditions producing the debilitating inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Critical Studies in Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
- Description: 2003007956
Toward the pedagogically engaged school : Listening to student voice as a positive response to disengagement and 'dropping out'?
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The International Handbook of Student Experience in Elementary and Secondary School Chapter 30 p. 635-658
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Chapter looks at young people's reasons for leaving school early, and how teachers of young adolescents were attempting to re-invent themselves in ways that engaged students. It presents a framework of school reform that has emerged out of the research.
- Description: B1
- Description: 2003005597
School leadership that is informed by students' and teachers' voices of hope : Reclaiming our lost ways from an Australian perspective
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of School Leadership Vol. 15, no. (2005), p. 130-142
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001468
Critically engaged learning : Connecting to young lives
- Authors: Smyth, John , Angus, Lawrence , Down, Barry , McInerney, Peter
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Book
- Relation: Adolescent cultures, school & society No. 42
- Full Text: false
- Description: This book - the finale in a trilogy by the authors - traces the way in which a number of disadvantaged schools and communities were able to move beyond deficit, victim-blaming and pathologizing approaches and access resources of trust, relationships, connectedness and hope. It describes how these Australian schools and communities were able to benefit from working with 'street-level' bureaucrats who had reinvented themselves around notions of socially just forms of capacity-building. The book provides a set of insights into what is possible from a critical engagement for school and community renewal perspective, by working with the resources that exist within disadvantaged contexts, even in damaging neoliberal policy times.
- Description: 2003006329
Climbing over the rocks in the road to student engagement and learning in a challenging high school in Australia
- Authors: Smyth, John , Fasoli, Lyn
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Educational Research Vol. 49, no. 3 (2007), p. 273-295
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0665569
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0208022
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Background There is increasing evidence that schools internationally are not meeting the needs of increasing numbers of young people, especially those at the secondary level, and whose backgrounds have placed them at disadvantage. The evidence is that significant numbers of young people are becoming disconnected from school. While the official term for this is 'disengagement', it seems that official educational policy responses to these tendencies, far from 'fixing' the problem, seem to be exacerbating it. Current policy preoccupations that emphasize accountability, greater parental choice of schools and a more prescriptive curriculum can present difficulties for young people, particularly those from challenging backgrounds. There may be a mismatch between formal educational policy, and the lived experiences at the level of the school and classroom for the most vulnerable young people. Purpose This paper reports on a single instance of a high school that embarked upon a process of reinventing itself in respect of the importance of relationships and 'relational power' for students over their learning. The paper examines what the teachers and students had to say about the efficacy of this school-based reform. Sample The case-study school was located in an area of extreme social disadvantage in which young people had diminished educational expectations. The research involved observations and interviews with a small sample of stakeholders and focus groups with students (13-16-year-olds). Design and method The study was an ethnographic case study of a single secondary school conducted over a five-week continuous period. It used 'embedded interviews' involving observation of in-class teaching prior to extensive 1-hour interviews with teachers and students' focus groups. All interviews were recorded. Detailed field notes were kept of classroom observations and other activities, including school assemblies, staff meetings and reflections on informal conversations held during teaching breaks in the staffroom. Results and conclusions Positive outcomes emerged from a context where fair boundaries were established and in which students could see school as a place where they could experience fun in their learning. The process was by no means complete, but the school felt that it had found a more efficacious way to move forward and the students made this clear in their statements about what the school was attempting to do with them. Key to these positive outcomes was a commitment to placing relationships between students, teachers and parents at the centre of everything the school did.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003005579
Schools and communities put at a disadvantage : Relational power, resistance, boundary work and capacity building in educational identity formation
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Learning communities Vol. 3, no. (2006), p. 7-39
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper is a modest exercise in theory building from a cultural sociological perspective, around the notion of capacity building as it relates to a group of schools and their community experiencing complex intergenerational difficulties around poverty, ill health, housing problems, student disengagement, disaffection, low levels of school completion, and high levels of withdrawal from school. Central to what I want to explore is the notion of capacity building, which is a term that has its origins in development economics, and is currently experiencing celebrity status as a kind of buzz word to refer to multi-fronted approaches to school and community improvement.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001886
The politics of reform of teachers' work and the consequences for schools : Some implications for teacher education
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 34, no. 3 (2006), p. 301-319
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper argues that we are currently experiencing a debilitating overload of political interference and media hyperbole in respect of teaching and teacher education, and that much of this blitzkrieg amounts to a 'political spectacle' and blatant neo-liberal ideology dressed up as rational analysis. The politics of disparagement being unleashed on public education, and by association teacher education, is intended to laminate over the real issue, which is a cultural war over what is officially allowed to constitute teaching and learning.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001902
Inclusive school leadership strategies based on student and community voice : Implications for Australian education policy
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Education and Poverty in Affluent Countries: Mapping the Terrain and Making the Links to Educational Policy Chapter p.
- Full Text: false
Educational leadership that fosters 'student voice'
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International journal of leadership in education: Theory and practice Vol. 9, no. 4 (2006), p. 279-284
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This special issue focuses on a controversial topic that has been kept off the official agenda for far too long in educational circles. The question of how to pursue forms of leadership that listen to and attend to the voices of the most informed, yet marginalized witnesses of schooling, young people, has to be the most urgent issue of our times.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001901
The profound effect and reach of Joe Kincheloe to the antipodes : His work, his ideas, and his influence as a person
- Authors: Smyth, John , Brown, Mike
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies Vol. 10, no. 5 (2010), p. 404-405
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
Teacher development against the policy reform grain : An argument for recapturing relationships in teaching and learning
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Teacher Development Vol. 11, no. 2 (2007), p. 221-236
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP0665569
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP0560339
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: As public schools in countries like the UK, USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand continue to suffer from the damaging effects of poorly conceptualized educational reforms, educators struggle to come up with alternatives with which to reclaim schools. While acknowledging the situational, contextual and temporal differences between these countries, this paper presents a rationale for reinserting the relational work of schools at the centre of a teacher development-led form of recovery. The central claim advanced herein is that teacher development in schools must have a central and demonstrable concern with the primacy of relationships in teaching and learning. Schools and teachers have the collective capacity to reclaim the ground that has been severely eroded by managerialist and marketizing agenda that have been allowed to intrude on schools and subjugate the importance of relational forms of knowing. Placing students at the centre is crucial to creating the direction necessary for re-establishing the relational complexity of schools.
- Description: 2003005582
A high school teacher's experience of local school management : A case of the 'system behaving badly towards teachers'
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2003
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Journal of Education Vol. 47, no. 3 (2003), p. 265-282
- Full Text: false
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- Description: The move to local school management (LSM) in its various formations is one of the most significant educational policy moves to occur in recent times in western countries. Although something is known about the effects on governance, budgeting and resource decision making, relatively little is known about the rhetorical and actual ways teachers' work is affected. Even the proponents admit this, albeit in terms of the little known relay effect on student learning. Drawing on the narrative biography of a single high school teacher, as part of a larger multi-sited ethnography, this study revealed the level of policy incoherence to be such that most of the worst excesses of accountability and marketisation accompanying LSM were minimised. Emerging from a deeply held set of pedagogical values and convictions, this instance confirmed a robust view of teacher identity as lying beyond those of victim construction.
- Description: 2003003527
Coming to critical engagement in disadvantaged contexts : An editorial introduction
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Critical Studies in Education Vol. 50, no. 1 (03 2009), p. 1-7
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The article discusses various papers published within the issue including one about the notion of community capacity building and another on the orthodoxy of psychological deficit notions of under-performing youth in disadvantaged contexts.
- Description: 2003007955
Critical perspectives on educational leadership in the context of the march of neoliberalism
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Ideologies in Educational Administration and Leadership p. 147-158
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
Beyond the divide : Individual institutional and community capacity building in a Western Australian regional context
- Authors: Smyth, John , Down, Barry
- Date: 2004
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Education in Rural Australia Vol. 14, no. 2 (2004), p. 54-68
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003000753
Policy research and 'damaged teachers' : Towards an epistemologically respectful paradigm
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2004
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Waikato Journal of Education Vol. 10, no. (2004), p. 263-281
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper canvasses one of the most debilitating issues currently disfiguring schools – the absent voices of teachers in the policy reform of schooling. This is a phenomenon that has afflicted schooling around the world for more than three decades, and it is not without effects. The escalating levels of student disaffection, alienation, violence, disengagement and ‘dropping out’ are not unconnected to the marginalisation of teachers and the disrespectful and distrustful ways in which they have been treated by policy makers, politicians and a largely hostile media. What is advanced in its place in this paper is a way of conducting research that restores trust through acknowledging and celebrating the distinctive repertoires of knowledge teachers and students possess, and points to the way in which a more respectful policy paradigm might be re-invented.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003000756
Researching teachers working with young adolescents : Implications for ethnographic research
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Ethnography and Education Vol. 1, no.1 (2006), p. 31-51
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper aims to explore theoretically and practically how to better understand how it is that teachers work successfully in schools and classrooms with young adolescents. I want to explore how to undertake research that: (1) listens to the voices of young people in schools and the teachers who work with them, and (2) better understand how it is that some teachers of young adolescents are sucessfully reinventing themselves, their pedagogies and school cultures.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003008113
- Description: 2003001896