An argument for new understandings and explanations of early school leaving that go beyond the conventional
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: London Review of Education Vol. 3, no. 2 (2005), p. 117-130
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- 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: C1
- Description: 2003001466
Modernizing the Australian education workplace : A case of failure to deliver for teachers of young disadvantaged adolescents
- Authors: Smyth, John
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Educational Review Vol. 57, no. 2 (2005), p. 221-233
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- 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: C1
- Description: 2003001467