Description:
In this article, the author presents a review of his extended research engagement with disadvantaged young people and their education. He challenges the dominant neoliberal model of school reform based on business values and the ‘managerial school’ as alien to educational values. He introduces various stages of research he and his colleagues have undertaken over the past two decades, showing the importance of an authentic engagement with young people’s lives, the characteristics of schools which reach out to disadvantaged students and the importance of transformative pedagogy and community involvement.
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.