'Voiced' research as a sociology for understanding 'dropping out' of school
- Authors: Smyth, John , Hattam, Robert
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 22, no. 3 (Spetember 2001 2001), p. 402-415
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- Description: How people obtain more complex understandings of the phenomenon of 'dropping out' of school is one of the most urgent policy and practice issues facing educational practitioners, policy-makers and sociological researchers at the moment. Smyth and Hattam argue that a different 'sociological imagination' is required--one that is simultaneously more attentive to the lifeworlds of young people and more reflexive of its own agenda.
A culture of teaching under 'new management'
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The performing school : managing, teaching, and learning in a performance culture p. 118-136
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Critical politics of teachers' work: An Australian perspective
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Book
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Managing the myth of the self-managing school as an international education reform
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Taking education really seriously: Four years' hard labour p. 238-253
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The self-managing school and social justice: Are they on the same planet?
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2001
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: School Field Vol. 12, no. 3 (2001), p. 71-90
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- Description: The self-managing school is an educational reform that seems to have developed the status of reform 'we had to have'. Regardless of whether it was in the educational interests of schools or not, this reform has been foisted onto schools worldwide, and in many instances, with quite devastating effects. Yet, despite its pervasiveness, there is precious little evidence to show that this reform improves learning. On the contrary, for vast numbers of students, especially those who are already least advantaged, this reform is coming to be seen as being extremely damaging. The paper poses a number of questions about the undisclosed intention of this reform, how it works, for whom, and its corroding effects on large numbers of students and teachers.
'Geographies of exclusion' in the policy reform of teachers' work
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Discourse Vol. 23, no. 3 (2002), p. 357-363
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Critical scholar: Exploring a 'critical politics of teachers' work'
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The mission of the scholar: Research and practice. A tribute to Nelson Haggerson p. 65-74
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Early school leaving and the cultural geography of high schools
- Authors: Smyth, John , Hattam, Robert
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: British Educational Research Journal Vol. 28, no. 3 (June 2002), p. 375-397
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- Description: Early school leaving is one of the most protracted educational problems around the world, but one of the least understood. Central to the issue itself, is the failure by the educational policy community to have ways of adequately ‘naming’ the problem. The study reported in this paper examines early school leaving from the position of 209 young Australians who had left school or who were at imminent risk of doing so. While acknowledging the considerable complexity of the decision making processes that lie behind this problem, this article provides a tentative theorising that traverses aspects of what we call the ‘cultural geography of the high school’ as a partial explanation of what is occurring. The question being pursued was how the culture of the school contributed to or interfered with early school leaving.
Unmasking teachers' subjectivities in local school management
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2002
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Education Policy Vol. 17, no. 4 (2002), p. 463-482
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- Description: Relatively little is known about how teachers are affected by reforms that have moved schools increasingly in the direction of becoming self-managing schools. While there has been much hype about the alleged benefits that flow from more flexible decision making processes shifted closer to the point of learning, the cutting of bureaucratic red tape, and the notion that schools are made more accountable to parents and students - relatively little is known about how this impacts on the way teachers think or act in relation to their work. This paper takes a particular instance of an Australian primary school and examines how teachers' subjectivities are worked on and how teachers' pedagogical selves are being disrupted and fundamentally recast as a consequence of local school management.
'Not everyone has a perfect life' : Becoming somebody without school
- Authors: Robert, Hattam , Smyth, John
- Date: 2003
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Pedagogy, Culture & Society Vol. 11, no. 3 (2003), p. 379-398
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- Description: This article draws on the Students Completing Schooling Project, conducted in Australia, which has developed an account of early school leaving though listening to how 209 young people made sense of their experiences of leaving school. In this study, we were keen to understand the way young people deliberate upon how schooling fits into their plans for living a life: for 'becoming somebody'. We propose understanding early school leaving as a tactical manoeuvre and part of the complex process of identity formation. Our interview material indicates that a powerful 'interactive trouble' contributes to the non-completion of school and involves underestimating the demands of private life, especially for those living in poverty.
- Description: 2003003524
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
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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
Engaging the education sector: A policy orientation to stop damaging our schools
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2003
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Learning Communities Vol. , no. 1 (2003), p. 22-40
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- Description: In this paper the author makes a passionate 'plea for discontent', arguing that there is something fundamentally wrong with the overall direction of education policy as it is being applied to schools, and that new ways of re-engaging with it must be found. The author commences by arguing for a proposition, presenting some evidence from some research, and using that as a basis for suggesting a fundamental re-think in the way educational policy operates in relation to schools. In doing this, he underscores the centrality and significance of social capital as the basis for this re-engagement. The underlying question concerns how educational policy making is to be engaged so that it is central to institutional building. With the threat of losing schools as social institutions under the current regime of educational policy, the author argues that new ways of re-engaging educational policy beyond parallel discourses are needed. The underlying proposition is that schools that succeed are ones that have trusting relationships between school systems, teachers, parents and students. Trust between those making educational policy and schools, produces better outcomes for all, and trust is given expression through meaningful partnerships, authentic accountability, and distributed (or enabling) leadership. Social capital is central to any educational policy re-engagement with schools. The underlying argument of this paper is that schools have a social responsibility as places that 'manufacture hope' often in situations of increasing 'despair' and adversity.
Tackling school leaving at its Source: A case of reform in the middle years of schooling
- Authors: Smyth, John , McInerney, Peter , Hattam, Robert
- Date: 2003
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: British journal of sociology of education Vol. 24, no. 2 (2003), p. 177-193
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- Description: One of the most pervasive educational issues confronting Australia, and other countries, at the moment is the declining completion rates in high schools. While a period of success was experienced after the Second World War, there is now a pressing need to reform high schools in the ways they connect with young lives. In this paper, we present a 'sociology of the high school' as a way of encapsulating the high school as an institution that: is still largely stuck in a 'continuity of practice' (Elmore, 1987); has an 'attachment to familiar pedagogical routines' (Eisner, 1992); fails to listen to students; is hierarchically structured; treats students in immature ways; is hung up with passing on content; and seems more concerned with insulating itself from, rather connecting with or appropriating, young lives into the curriculum. As an alternative, we examine the notion of middle schooling that requires a version of whole school reform that engages with structures, cultures and changing pedagogy in ways more resonant with, and respectful of, young lives. We examine the tensions and dilemmas experienced at Investigator [1] High School in Australia, and conclude that the centerpiece has to be breaking the mold of the 'scripted' teacher and its replacement by the 'teacher-as-improviser'.
The making of young lives with/against the school credential
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2003
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Education and Work Vol. 16, no. 2 (2003), p. 127-146
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- Description: This article provides argument and 'voiced' evidence from an Australian study (Smyth et al., 2000) of 209 young people who had chosen not to complete their secondary schooling. It reports on how they made these complex decisions, particularly around the credentialling process. There is support here for Wyn and Dwyer's (2000) thesis that some young people are not propelled through schooling by the lure of a credential, and quite to the contrary, they have a high level of agency in constructing alternative biographies for themselves that undermine the policy trajectory. Far from being victims who 'drop out', these young people presented in individualistic ways that amounted to accommodation and resistance to the impediments of a policy credential for university entrance which they labelled as irrelevant, despite its declared intention to be inclusive of all.
Undamaging 'damaged' teachers: an antidote to the 'Self-Managing School
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2003
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Delta: Policy and Practice in Education Vol. 55, no. 1/2 (2003), p. 3-30
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"Dropping out," drifting off, being excluded : becoming somebody without school
- Authors: Smyth, John , Hattam, Robert
- Date: 2004
- Type: Text , Book
- Full Text: false
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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
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- 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
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- 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
Social capital and the "Socially just school"
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2004
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 25, no. 1 (2004), p. 19-33
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- Description: This paper argues that growing inequalities make it imperative that schools reinvent themselves around the issue of social justice. Through a case study of an Australian primary school, teacher-based forms of social capital are explored revealing progressive pedagogies to be an important precursor to the ‘socially just school’.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003000755
Taking flight : School reform through actively listening to the voices of early school leavers (and their teachers)
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2004
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: English in Aotearoa Vol. 54, no. (2004), p. 13-28
- Full Text: false
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- Description: C1
- Description: 2003000757