Teachers in the middle : Reclaiming the wasteland of the adolescent years of schooling
- Authors: Smyth, John , McInerney, Peter
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Book
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Taking account of the issues of youth alienation and disengagement described in this study, the main intent of the present research was to explore the ways in which teachers and schools are reinventing themselves for young adolescents.
- Description: A1
- Description: 2003005594
Blurring the boundaries : From relational learning towards a critical pedagogy of engagement for disengaged disadvantaged young people
- Authors: Smyth, John , McInerney, Peter , Fish, Tim
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Pedagogy, Culture and Society Vol. 21, no. 2 (2013), p. 299-320
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP100100045
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper tackles what is arguably the most pervasive and pressing educational issue confronting affluent Western countries - the disengagement, disconnection and tragic displacement from schooling of increasing numbers of young people, mostly those from backgrounds of disadvantage. Despite enormous policy efforts, this 'problem' is proving impossible to dislodge from within the existing educational policy paradigm that appears to be exacerbating the problem. This paper explores theoretically and practically what alternative attempts might look like that start from within the lives and experiences of those most affected, young people as well as their teachers, and it explores what some research 'portraits' look like from 'inside' the existential realities of these complexities. Employing the heuristics of 'new mobilities', the paper looks at some alternative ways of locating 'new social spaces' from which to re-engage and re-connect these young people with learning, and with some effect. The paper is sanguine about the extensive work yet to be done, and in this regard it proffers some thoughts on the unfinished business of what it terms a 'critical pedagogy of engagement'. © 2013 Copyright Pedagogy, Culture & Society.
- Description: 2003011131
Sculpting a 'social space' for re-engaging disengaged 'disadvantaged' young people with learning
- Authors: Smyth, John , McInerney, Peter
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Educational Administration and History Vol. 44, no. 3 (2012), p. 187-201
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP100100045
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper examines the complex constellation of conditions that turn many young people into 'exiles' from schooling. From the vantage point of young people, the paper traces out a profile of the conditions that need to be brought into existence for these young people to find a way back into learning. The paper argues that current educational policies are deeply hostile to young people in the ways they position them as 'silent witnesses' and exclude them from having a voice in the important decisions about what they learn, how, with whom, and with what effects. In contrast, the paper explores six alternative programmes in Australia, warehoused from within the same systems that 'damaged' these young people. Paradoxically these programmes are seen as providing these damaged young people with the spaces in which they can become powerful 'active agents' in re-forming an educational identity for themselves. Where these alternatives depart from the damaging policy regime is in the highly context-sensitive way they enable young learners and local policy advocates who work with them, to effectively contest exclusionary and undemocratic neoliberal policies. © 2012 Taylor & Francis.
Doing research on student voice in Australia
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Management in Education Vol. 26, no. 3 (2012), p. 153-154
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The Australian school context has been something of a failed test case of trying to organise schooling around the tenets of the market as a regulating mechanism. The result has been an intensification of social stratification as the already 'disadvantaged' miss out yet again in education. This short paper argues that what is needed to interrupt and puncture this unfortunate policy trajectory, is to begin to include the desires, wishes, lives and experiences of young people - and the way to do this is through the promotion of policy approaches that are informed by and celebrate 'student voice'. © 2012 British Educational Leadership, Management & Administration Society (BELMAS).