When students "speak back": Student engagement towards a socially just society
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Student engagement in urban schools: Beyond neoliberal discourses p. 73-90
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- Description: This chapter explores theoretically and practically the rationale, approaches, possibilities, and cffecL or engaging with students in schools in ways that challenge injustices and that regard education as beingforsocialjustice. Examples and illustrations arc drawn from research by the author in Australia from over 2!'i critical cthnographics of disadvantaged schools conducted over the past two decades. The central framing themes and ideas for the chapter focus on: • student voice • the relational school • the pedagogically engaged school • community organizing for activist reform • community-voiced approaches lo schooling • "speaking the unpleasant" about poverty, education, and class • beyond commodification, prescription, and consumption The chapter presents a number of ethnographic slices or portraits of students and schools that have created ways of "working against the grain" in the sense of foregrounding notions of social justice and challenging dominant, deforming, and damaging approaches to education and supplanting them with alternatives. The chapter explores what is possible when teachers, students, parents, and communities take seriously the opportunity to embrace a socially critical view of student engagement.
Where has class gone? The pervasiveness of class in girls' physical activity in a rural town
- Authors: Smyth, John , Mooney, Amanda , Casey, Meghan
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sport, Education and Society Vol. 19, no. 1 (January 2014 2014), p. 1-18
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP0990206
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- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper seeks to animate discussion around how social class operates with adolescent girls from low socio-economic status backgrounds to shape and inform their decisions about participation in physical activity (PA) inside and outside of school. Examining the instance of girls in a single secondary school in an Australian regional town, the paper questions the impact of class and how the girls experience the obstacles, impediments and interferences to participation in PA. These girls are portrayed as living multiple, complex and embodied subjectivities that shape and are informed by the relational geographies in which they are located, as they interact ‘with’, ‘to’ and ‘between’ the social, emotional and classed hierarchies that require them to access familial and other resources in making decisions about participation in PA.
Where is class in the analysis of working-class education?
- Authors: Smyth, John , Simmons, Robin
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Education and Working-Class Youth: Reshaping the Politics of Inclusion Chapter 1 p. 1-28
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- Description: This chapter provides the backdrop and sets the tone for the book. It begins by scoping out some of the challenges and injustices facing working-class youth, and by highlighting some of the mismatches between the structures and processes of education and the lives of many working-class young people. It then goes on to develop an alternative agenda which, it is argued, is necessary to engage working-class youth in relevant and meaningful ways, and to challenge the dominant structures of schooling and education which systematically disadvantage so many young people. The chapter finishes by proving a brief overview of the chapters which follow, and by highlighting some of the key themes explored in the rest of the book.`
Whose side are you on? Advocacy ethnography : Some methodological aspects of narrative portraits of disadvantaged young people, in socially critical research
- Authors: Smyth, John , McInerney, Peter
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 26, no. 1 (2013), p. 1-20
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- Description: This paper is primarily interested in opening up a strategy to counter the increasing silencing of perspectives resulting from the press towards "evidence-based" forms of research. We argue that all researchers have interests, declared or otherwise. What we advance in the paper is an approach to ethnography that is inclusive of the lives, perspective, experiences, and viewpoints of the least powerful. Methodologically we demonstrate something of how we have explored the intellectual craft and possibilities of portraiture as a way of advancing the notion of advocacy ethnography. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
Young people speaking back from the margins
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Education Canada Vol. 50, no. 5 (2010), p.
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP100100045
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- Description: The young people the author has worked with are predominantly from backgrounds where they, their families, and their communities have been put at a disadvantage through the effects of social, economic, and political forces and by the flow-on effects of globalization that have effectively devastated their communities and lives. He wants to explore what is happening when young people from contexts of disadvantage adopt a position of making choices against the institution of schooling that appear to be against their own long term economic interests and that may have the effect of further exacerbating their apparent marginalization. These young people -- who are ignored, silenced, and marginalized, whose lives are ridden over, and who either self-exile themselves from schools or are propelled out of them -- are the same young people who have some extremely perceptive views on the very different conditions that can and need to be created for them to learn.
Young people speaking back from the margins
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Youth, education, and marginality : Local and global expressions (SickKids community and mental health series) Chapter 2 p. 43-58
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The line I want to take in this chapter is that the way we position young people has a profound bearing on how we deal with them, both in terms of policy and practicality. In taking this line, I want to draw upon some of the issues that have emerged from my own research with young people in Australia over the past two decades or so. The young people I have worked with are predominantly from backgrounds where they, their families, and their communities have been put at a disadvantage through the effects of social, economic, and political forces and by the flow-on effects of globalization that have effectively devastated their communities and lives. Their diminished educational opportunities and subsequent life chances have been dramatic, even to the point of being catastrophic. Having said that, these young people are not hapless victims nor are they passive recipients of deficit categories such as 'at-riskness,' which are placed upon them by the media, politicians, agencies, and some academics. Rather they are active agents exercising choices and making decisions about their lives in situations that amount to 'speaking back.'