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
Making 'space' : young people put at a disadvantage re-engaging with learning
- Authors: Smyth, John , McInerney, Peter
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 34, no. 1 (2013), p. 39-55
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP100100045
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Young people who disengage or disconnect from school are often demonised within the media and the wider public imagination, from a largely individualized and pathological positioning. Policy explanations and responses are often unhelpful in their focus on a range of 'deficit' attributes - poverty, poor parenting, dysfunctional families, low familial achievement, aspiration and motivation, and other 'at risk' categories. This paper offers a different explanatory framework that foregrounds the experiences of some young people who had disengaged from school and resumed learning under a very different set of conditions to the ones that had exiled them from schools in the first place. Using a socio-spatial framework, the paper explores the notion of 'relational space' as it was appropriated and reclaimed by these young people, in explaining how they saw themselves as constructing viable and sustainable learning identities for themselves. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
- Description: 2003010681
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).