Activist and Socially Critical School and Community Renewal comes about at an incredibly important point in history, and it offers a genuinely new paradigm. This book attempts what few others have tried—to bring together knowledge and literature around school reform and community renewal through authentic ethnographic stories of real schools and communities.
This book - the finale in a trilogy by the authors - traces the way in which a number of disadvantaged schools and communities were able to move beyond deficit, victim-blaming and pathologizing approaches and access resources of trust, relationships, connectedness and hope. It describes how these Australian schools and communities were able to benefit from working with 'street-level' bureaucrats who had reinvented themselves around notions of socially just forms of capacity-building. The book provides a set of insights into what is possible from a critical engagement for school and community renewal perspective, by working with the resources that exist within disadvantaged contexts, even in damaging neoliberal policy times. Critically Engaged Learning breaks new and important ground across urgent and fractured boundaries.
We live in a time when those who wield unrestrained power believe they have the inalienable right to determine the destiny, nature and shape of social institutions like schools. Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice challenges this arrogance by showing how teachers, students, parents, communities, and researchers can develop narratives that amount to working with and for those who are increasingly being silenced, marginalized and excluded. John Smyth sets out to revisit critical pedagogy from a number of key leverage points. The overarching aim of this book is to unmask the deforming and distorting way power operates, while at the same time revealing how a commitment to a more socially just world can exist in the everyday lives and narratives of people who have a passion for transformative possibilities. His clear, concise, and persuasive book is ideal for those who are dissatisfied with the current turn in education and who are seeking an alternative set of views that emerge from the grounded experiences and practices ion schools struggling with the most disadvantaged circumstances.
This book explores schools and how they can function as social institutions that advance the interests and life chances of all young people, especially those who are already the most marginalized and at an educational disadvantage. Social justice is a key theme as the book examines the needs of youth, the concept of school culture, school/community relations, socially critical pedagogy, curriculum and leadership and a socially critical approach to work. The Socially Just School is based upon four decades of intensive writing and researching of young lives. This work presents an alternative to the damaging school reform in which schools are made to serve the interests of the economy, education systems, the military, corporate or national interests. Readers will discover the hallmarks of socially just schools: - They educationally engage young people regardless of class, race, family or neighbourhood location and they engage them around their own educational aspirations. - They regard all young people as being morally entitled to a rewarding and satisfying experience of school, not only those whose backgrounds happen to fit with the values of schools. - They treat young people as having strengths and being ‘at promise’ rather than being ‘at risk’ and with ‘deficits’ or as ‘bundles of pathologies’ to be remedied or ‘fixed’. - They are ‘active listeners’ to the lives and cultures of their students and communities and they construct learning experiences that are embedded in young lives. This highly readable book will appeal to students and scholars in education and sociology, as well as to teachers and school administrators with an interest in social justice.
The School Leadership Survival Guide: What to Do When Things Go Wrong, How to Learn from Mistakes, and Why You Should Prepare for the Worst is intended as an uncommon guide for school leaders and a resource they can turn to when confronted with issues they might not normally face in typical practice. The book serves as a bridge between research and day-to-day school leadership, and is intended to help leaders and school communities improve in areas they routinely avoid. In this sense, the book is meant as a “go to” resource for principals, those who train and teach them, and scholars. Although authors recognize the complexity of issues raised in the book, each chapter has a “How to” “What to do” or “Why You Should” ethos in order to give the book a unifying structure and help provide a practical translation of research and theory into practice. Some of the issues addressed include: How to elevate student voice; How to navigate religious conflict in the school and community; How to improve support for LGBTIQ students; Why You Should develop a natural disaster plan; How to work against racism in the school and community; How to practice inclusion in the school; How to make a vision and mission come to life; How to manage relationships with difficult people; What to do when there is racial tension in the community; How to learn the history of your school and community—and why that matters; How to guide and support a leadership team, and; What to do in a school with low trust.
This book brings a unique, innovative and refreshing perspective to one of the most protracted issues affecting young lives - disengagement from schooling. Rather than continuing to blame young people, as most educational policies do, this book examines disengagement from the vantage point of the lives, experiences, interests and aspirations of the communities from which young people come, and within which they are embedded. It uses a narrative and representational approach that gives detailed insights into the wider context of poverty, class, power, relationships and identity. A major and defining hallmark of the book is the emphasis it places upon a number of 'doings', - including community voice, identity formation, critical work education and education policy - all of which provide a very different set of scripts with which to reinvent the institution of high school.
We live in dangerous times when educational policies and practices are debated largely in terms of how they fit with the needs of the free market. This volume is a collection of writing by teacher-educators that draws on their unique biographies, experiences and perspectives to denounce these misguided norms. It explores what it means—practically and intellectually—to teach for social justice in conservative times. In a globalised world where the power of capital holds sway, the purposes of social institutions such as universities and schools is being refashioned in ways that are markedly instrumental and technicist in nature. The consequence is that teachers’ work is increasingly constrained by regimes of control such as standardised testing, accountability, transparency, and national curricula. In the meantime, large numbers of students and teachers are disengaging physically, emotionally and intellectually from learning. The contributors to this edited volume present both a powerful critique of these developments and a counter-hegemonic vision of teacher education founded on the principles and values of social justice, democracy and critical inquiry. Teacher education, they argue, involves a commitment to critical intellectual work that subjects some deeply entrenched assumptions, beliefs, habits, routines and practices to closer scrutiny. The contributing authors expose how ideology and power operate in seemingly blameless, rational ways to perpetuate social hierarchies based on class, gender, sexuality, race and culture.
The late Joe Kincheloe once wrote that ‘... the amazing Deakin Mafia provided innovative and unprecedented critical scholarship on education for a few short years’. Informed by various theoretical perspectives (eg., critical theory, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist, critical literacy, Bourdieuian, Foucauldian) key Deakin University scholars pursued their commitments to social justice though education. A certain criticality characterised their work. Individually and collectively they created a national and international reputation for critical scholarship in education. Since that time (the 1980s and 90s), however, most of the Deakin ‘mafia’ have moved to senior academic posts elsewhere in Australian and internationally and their influence in educational research and discourse now continues as members of the ‘Deakin diaspora’. This collection is an account of the stories of many of these scholars. It will provide valuable reading for any scholar of education who is particularly interested in critical pedagogy and the critical project in education more generally. It also provides insights into what makes a faculty of education successful at a particular point in time.
This unique book brings together scholarship and analysis from some of the most influential scholars on education to provide a comprehensive mapping of research evidence and policy strategies about education and poverty in affluent countries.
This volume will be a valuable resource to instructors who teach in the fields of teacher education, social studies, educational leadership, social work, social, cultural and philosophical foundations of education, sociology, political science, and global studies as well as their students. Due to the volume’s international focus, we also expect that it will purchased by a large number of university libraries, researchers, educators and others in a number of countries.
