Description:
It is no coincidence, that disengagement from school by young adolescents has intensified at precisely the same time as there has been a hardening of educational policy regimes that have made schools less hospitable places for students and teachers. This paper argues that producing the circumstances necessary to turn this situation around requires invoking a radically different kind of ethos and educational leadership-one that encourages and promotes the speaking into existence of authentic forms of student voice.
Description:
Understanding and exploring complex and protracted social questions requires sophisticated investigative approaches. In this article we intend looking at a research approach capable of providing a better understanding of what is going on in schools, students and communities in "exceptionally challenging contexts" (Harris et al., 2006)-code for schools and communities that have as a result of wider social forces, been historically placed in situations of disadvantage.
Description:
Understanding and exploring complex and protracted social questions requires sophisticated investigative approaches. In this article we intend looking at a research approach capable of providing a better understanding of what is going on in schools, students and communities in "exceptionally challenging contexts" (Harris et al., 2006)-code for schools and communities that have as a result of wider social forces, been historically placed in situations of disadvantage.
Description:
This special issue focuses on a controversial topic that has been kept off the official agenda for far too long in educational circles. The question of how to pursue forms of leadership that listen to and attend to the voices of the most informed, yet marginalized witnesses of schooling, young people, has to be the most urgent issue of our times.
Description:
The educational landscape is changing dramatically and profoundly for schools and communities across Australia and other western countries. It is no longer the case that children automatically do not attend their local neighbourhood school, nor can it be assumed that within public schools that there is a heterogenous social mix. What we have is an increasingly segregated, stratified and residualised system of education in Australia as neo-liberal policies of so-called 'choice' do their pock-marking with those who can afford it 'opting out' to private education, leaving behind those without the resources to exercise choice.
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.
Description:
This paper is a modest exercise in theory building from a cultural sociological perspective, around the notion of capacity building as it relates to a group of schools and their community experiencing complex intergenerational difficulties around poverty, ill health, housing problems, student disengagement, disaffection, low levels of school completion, and high levels of withdrawal from school. Central to what I want to explore is the notion of capacity building, which is a term that has its origins in development economics, and is currently experiencing celebrity status as a kind of buzz word to refer to multi-fronted approaches to school and community improvement.
Description:
This paper argues that we are currently experiencing a debilitating overload of political interference and media hyperbole in respect of teaching and teacher education, and that much of this blitzkrieg amounts to a 'political spectacle' and blatant neo-liberal ideology dressed up as rational analysis. The politics of disparagement being unleashed on public education, and by association teacher education, is intended to laminate over the real issue, which is a cultural war over what is officially allowed to constitute teaching and learning.
Description:
This paper presents an argument around the need to rethink the issue of early school leaving from the vantage point of students and teachers, and the conditions and pathways that need to be constructed and brought into existence within schooling, if such conditions do not already exist. The attempt is to move discussions outside of the well-meaning but ultimately unhelpful literatures of 'at risk' categories that end up blaming students, their families or backgrounds. The claim being advanced is that the focus needs to be on relationships, school cultures, and pedagogical arrangements that make schools more attractive and educationally engaging places.
Description:
This article has at its centre the project, discourses and practices of modernization and what these mean practically and existentially for schools. The author argues that schools are, at their core, relational organizations, therefore they are primarily concerned with creating the set of relational resources and conditions that enable learning to take place, among students as well as teachers. When this does not happen, for whatever reasons, schools are very dysfunctional, deeply disturbed and unhappy places. An instance is described of an Australian government school that courageously, and in a politically prudent way, created the space within which to construct a viable relationally-affirming alternative. It is a story about how a school found ways of working against the damaging and prevailing managerialist ethos, and devised ways of uniquely re-inventing and reforming itself against/in spite of the external dominant official reform agenda.
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:
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:
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’.