This is an incisive analysis of how Critical Pedagogy can be a force for positive change in schools around the world, helping the most disadvantaged students. 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, marginalised and excluded. John Smyth sets out to revisit critical pedagogy from a number of key leverage points. The overarching aim of the 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. This 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 in schools struggling with the most disadvantaged circumstances. Series blurb: Commemorating the 40th anniversary of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", the new series "Critical Pedagogy Today" provides a range of incisive overviews and applications of Critical Pedagogy across fields and disciplines. Building on the work of Paulo Freire, the series reinvigorates his legacy and provides educators with an array of tools for questioning contemporary practices and forging new pedagogical methods.

This book provides an inclusive and incisive analysis of the experiences of working-class young people in education. While there is an established literature on education and the working class stretching back decades, comparatively there has been something of a neglect of class-based inequality - with questions of gender, 'race' and other forms of identity attracting significant attention. However, events including Britain's 2016 decision to leave the European Union, have thrown social class into sharp focus, both in the UK and elsewhere. Featuring leading thinkers in the sociology of education, this book examines the different ways in which young people relate to various parts of the education system, including different forms of schooling, post-compulsory and university education. They maintain that the issue of social class goes beyond the walls of specific institutions to affect young people in a variety of ways: not only in the UK, but across the globe. This book will be of great value and interest to students and scholars of the sociology of education, working-class youth, and equality of opportunity.

This book draws on the stories of thirty-two young Australians to identify the barriers and obstacles they face in 'getting a job' in precarious times and from their vantage point. It maps the kinds of educational policies and practices that need to be created and more widely sustained to assist their career aspirations and life chances. It is timely in terms of contributing to an alternative set of possibilities based on a commitment to the principles and values of social justice, respect, trust, care, democracy and citizenship. In constructing an alternative vision and practice for education and training it advocates the right of all young people to have a say in these broader public debates. In pursuing this agenda, it deliberately sets out to listen to what young people themselves have to say with a view to interrupting the way things are. In other words, the book seeks to identify and explain the dreams, desires and aspirations of young people with a view to creating a new imaginary and socially just future.

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.

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."

John Smyth's remarkable body of writing, research and scholarship has spanned four decades, and the urgency of our times makes it imperative to look in some depth at the breadth of his research and its trajectory, in order to see how we can connect, extend, build and enrich our understandings from it. Possibly the single most unique aspect to Smyth's version of critical research is his passion for living and 'doing' what it means to be a critical pedagogue. For him, 'doing' is a verb that gives expression to what he believes it means to be a critical scholar. This necessitates actively listening to lives; taking on an advocacy position with informant groups; displaying a commitment to praxis; and being activist in celebrating 'local responses' to global issues. Smyth's research is pursued with vigour through the lives he researches, as he interrupts and punctures 'bad' theory, supplanting it with more democratic alternatives, which, by his own admission, makes his research (and all research), political.

Becoming Educated examines the education of young people, especially those from the most 'disadvantaged' contexts. The book argues that because the focus has been obdurately and willfully on the wrong things - blaming students; measuring, testing and comparing them; and treating families and communities in demeaning ways that convert them into mere 'consumers' - that the resulting misdiagnoses have produced a damaging ensemble of faulty 'solutions.' By shifting the emphasis to looking at what is going on 'inside' young lives and communities, this book shifts the focus to matters such as taking social class into consideration, puncturing notions of poverty and disadvantage, understanding neighborhoods as places of hope and creating spaces within which to listen to young peoples' aspirations. These are a radically different set of constructs from the worn-out ones that continue to be trotted out, and, if understood and seriously attended to, they have the potential to make a real difference in young lives. This is a book that ought to be read by all who claim to know what is in the best interests of young people who are becoming educated.

Although they are typically viewed as silent witnesses in schools during the worldwide infatuation with school reform, this book, in fact, reveals young people to be active agents with something worthwhile to say about their schooling and what might be done to make learning more exciting and relevant to their lives and aspirations. The authors foreground the stories of some 100 young informants from low socioeconomic backgrounds who had been repelled by school, but found their way back in to learning through alternative education programs that offered them a sense of direction, hope, and purpose - although they also presented them with some tensions and dilemmas. At a time when educational policies are bearing down heavily on schools through national testing regimes, accountability standards, and other repressive measures, it is refreshing to hear from young people about ways that schools can be made more humane and educationally rewarding places.

This books deals with one of the most urgent, damaging, and complex issues affecting young lives and contemporary society in general -- the escalating high school dropout rate. Though against the wishes of teachers and school administrators, young people's decision to leave school is usually made under circumstances that provide little time or space for discussion. This book provides a disturbing account of how students' voices are over-ridden -- lost in the imposition of curriculum and the rush to impose testing, accountability, and management regimes on schools. 'Dropping Out, ' Drifting Off, Being Excluded reveals the complex stories that surround identity formation in young lives and the « interactive trouble as young people struggle to be heard within inhospitable schools and an equally unhelpful education system.

This study locates what is happening to teachers work in the global economy. Within the dramatically changed circumstances of globalization, schools are being required to act as if they were private businesses driven by the quest for efficiency and operating in a supposed atmosphere of marketization and competition with each other for resources, students, reputation, and public support for their continued existence. Meanwhile, this ideology of schools as cost centres has become so pervasive that there has been little public debate on its desirability or its alternatives. This book seeks to addresses this imbalance and provides a major renovation of labour process theory in an educational context. Two case studies provide a tangible working expression of the labour process of teaching, showing how teachers are simultaneously experiencing significant changes to their work, as well as responding in ways that actively shape these processes.

Extended critical case studies provide a tangible working expression of the labour process of teaching, showing how teachers are simultaneously experiencing significant changes to their work, as well as responding in ways that actively shape these processes. For teachers and researchers, this book shows what processes are at work in the global economy which impact on, and sometimes control, the role of the teacher. It also reveals how teachers accommodate, resist or redefine their working circumstances, and explores methods researchers might employ in order to increase our understanding and knowledge of the effect of globalization on teaching.

This book brings together a collection of case studies and readings on the subject of doing research in education. It differs from other texts in taking a personal view of the experience of doing research. Each author presents a reflexive account of the issues and dilemmas as they have lived through them during the undertaking of educational research. The collection fills the space so often referred to in critical research as the phenomenon of the 'missing researcher'. Coming from the researcher's own perspectives, their positions are revealed within a wider space that can be personal, political, social and refLexive. With this approach, many issues such as ethics, gender, race, validity, reciprocity, sexuality, class, voice, empowerment, authorship and readership are given a much needed airing.

Dramatic, profound and far-reaching changes are being visited on schools worldwide that have their genesis a long way from the classroom but which impact heavily on teachers and their work. Most of this reform has been achieved with little or no involvement of teachers themselves. This book sets out to survey the contemporary context of what is happening to the work of teaching, and focuses on Advanced Skills Teachers. It shows how teachers are 'speaking' the changes that are occuring to their work in protracted economically rationalist times. Arguing against the discourses of economy as the major shaping force, the authors present a persuasive case for focusing on the discourses of teaching itself as the only feasible and adequate basis on which to make sense of teaching. And by presenting a range of voices of practising teachers - allowing them to speak for themselves about the difficulty of trying to translate policy-makers' intentions into words and actions - the book graphically illustrates the devastating long-term consequences for the future of schools of poorly-conceptualised reform policies.

This book brings together a collection of case studies and readings on the subject of doing research in education. It differs from other texts in taking a personal view of the experience of doing research. Each author presents a reflexive account of the issues and dilemmas as they have lived through them during the undertaking of educational research. The collection fills the space often referred to in critical research as the phenomenon of the 'missing researcher'. Coming from the researcher's own perspectives, their positions are revealed within a wider space that can be personal, political, social and reflexive. With this approach, many issues such as ethics, gender, race, validity, reciprocity, sexuality, class, voice, empowerment, authorship and readership are given a much needed airing.