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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.
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."
Living on the Edge: Rethinking Poverty, Class and Schooling, Second
Edition confronts one of the most enduring and controversial issues
in education-the nexus between poverty and underachievement. This
topic stubbornly remains a key contemporary battleground in the
struggle to raise standards. Living on the Edge maps and compares a
number of competing explanations, critiques inadequate and deficit
accounts and offers a more convincing and useful theory. The
authors challenge the view that problems can be fixed by discrete
initiatives, which in many instances are deeply rooted in deficit
views of youth, families and communities. The book systematically
interrogates a range of explanations based outside as well as
inside schools. It draws upon positive examples of schools which
are succeeding in engaging marginalized young people, providing
worthwhile forms of learning and improving young lives. This second
edition contains two expansive case studies that exemplify, explain
and illustrate the themes coursing through the book. Living on the
Edge's second edition remains a "must read" for anyone concerned
about or implicated in the struggle for more socially just forms of
education.
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.
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.
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.
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