- Title
- ‘Blame the student, blame the school or blame the system?’ : Educational policy and the dilemmas of student engagement and school retention—a Freirean perspective
- Creator
- McInerney, Peter
- Date
- 2006
- Type
- Text; Conference paper
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/31931
- Identifier
- vital:1472
- Identifier
- https://www.aare.edu.au/data/publications/2006/mci06168.pdf
- Abstract
- This paper explores the complex issues of student engagement and school retention from a critical/sociological perspective. Dominant discourses on youth alienation, estrangement and underachievement are generally couched in a language of blame and deficits with responsibility for the problems being sheeted home to (a) individual students, families, neighbourhoods and/or cultural groups (b) teachers and schools, and (c) public education systems. What is largely missing from these discourses is a lack of recognition of the structural inequalities which pervade society and sustain educational disadvantage. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s philosophy and pedagogy, I argue that an analysis of student engagement and disaffection must involve both a critique of the dehumanising forces that operate within and outside schools, and the development of a renewed project for a critical pedagogy that challenges the logic of instrumental reason and neoliberal approaches to education policy. With reference to recent ethnographic research, I discuss the tensions involved in implementing school-based responses in the current policy environment and highlight some of the innovative responses to concerns of educational disadvantage and student engagement in the secondary years of schooling.
- Publisher
- Adelaide : AARE
- Relation
- Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Annual Conference, Adelaide : 27th - 30th November
- Rights
- Open Access
- Rights
- Copyright Unknown
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
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