Resisting Educational Inequality examines poverty, social exclusion and vulnerability in educational contexts at a time of rising inequality and when policy research suggests that such issues are being ignored or distorted within neoliberal logics. In this volume, leading scholars from Australia and across the UK examine these issues through three main focus areas: Mapping the damage: what are our explanations for the persistent nature of educational inequality? Resources for hope: what do we know about how educational engagement and success can be improved in schools serving vulnerable communities? Sustaining hope: how might we reframe research, policy and practice in the future? Using a range of theories and methodologies, including empirical and theory-building work as well as policy critique, this book opens innovative areas of thinking about the social issues surrounding educational practice and policy. By exploring different explanations and approaches to school change and considering how research, policy and practice might be reframed, this book moves systematically and insightfully through damage towards hope. In combining pedagogy, policy and experience, Resisting Educational Inequality will be a valuable resource for all researchers and students, policymakers and education practitioners.

Resisting Educational Inequality examines poverty, social exclusion and vulnerability in educational contexts at a time of rising inequality and when policy research suggests that such issues are being ignored or distorted within neoliberal logics. In this volume, leading scholars from Australia and across the UK examine these issues through three main focus areas: Mapping the damage: what are our explanations for the persistent nature of educational inequality? Resources for hope: what do we know about how educational engagement and success can be improved in schools serving vulnerable communities? Sustaining hope: how might we reframe research, policy and practice in the future? Using a range of theories and methodologies, including empirical and theory-building work as well as policy critique, this book opens innovative areas of thinking about the social issues surrounding educational practice and policy. By exploring different explanations and approaches to school change and considering how research, policy and practice might be reframed, this book moves systematically and insightfully through damage towards hope. In combining pedagogy, policy and experience, Resisting Educational Inequality will be a valuable resource for all researchers and students, policymakers and education practitioners.

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.

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.

How might educational leaders and teachers improve literacy achievement in schools serving communities experiencing high levels of poverty? This question is the focus of this book. Drawing on long-term case studies of four primary schools located in these communities, this book describes the difference between what is commonly practiced and those practices that have a greater chance of supporting young people's literacy learning. In this multi-layered analysis of the effects of policy on practice, the authors: discuss global concerns with literacy policy and testing in view of the growing gaps between rich and poor; examine the effects of the intensification of inequality and entrenched poverty, and the implications for schools; illustrate how deficit discourses pertaining to communities living in poverty are contested in schools; and describe the complexities of sustaining pedagogical and curriculum change to address the problem of unequal educational outcomes in literacy. This book grapples with some of the most debated questions regarding educational disadvantage, school change, leadership and literacy pedagogy that face educational researchers, policy-makers and practitioners internationally. As well as providing a critique of the risks of current policy rationales, it conveys some hopeful accounts of practice that provide leads for further development.

This state-of-the-art, comprehensive Handbook is the first of its kind to fully explore the interconnections between social justice and education for citizenship on an international scale. Various educational policies and practices are predicated on notions of social justice, yet each of these are explicitly or implicitly shaped by, and in turn themselves shape, particular notions of citizenship/education for citizenship. Showcasing current research and theories from a diverse range of perspectives and including chapters from internationally renowned scholars, this Handbook seeks to examine the philosophical, psychological, social, political, and cultural backgrounds, factors and contexts that are constitutive of contemporary research on education for citizenship and social justice and aims to analyse the transformative role of education regarding social justice issues. Split into two sections, the first contains chapters that explore central issues relating to social justice and their interconnections to education for citizenship whilst the second contains chapters that explore issues of education for citizenship and social justice within the contexts of particular nations from around the world. Global in its perspective and definitive in content, this one-stop volume will be an indispensable reference resource for a wide range of academics, students and researchers in the fields of Education, Sociology, Social Policy, Citizenship Studies and Political Science.

Reconciliation is one of the most significant contemporary challenges in the world today. In this innovative new volume, educational academics and practitioners across a range of cultural and political contexts examine the links between reconciliation and critical pedagogy, putting forward the notion that reconciliation projects should be regarded as public pedagogical interventions, with much to offer to wider theories of learning. While ideas about reconciliation are proliferating, few scholarly accounts have focused on its pedagogies. This book seeks to develop a generative theory that properly maps reconciliation processes and works out the pedagogical dimensions of new modes of narrating and listening, and effecting social change. The contributors build conceptual bridges between the scholarship of reconciliation studies and existing education and pedagogical literature, bringing together the concepts of reconciliation and pedagogy into a dialogical encounter and evaluating how each might be of mutual benefit to the other, theoretically and practically. This study covers a broad range of territory including ethnographic accounts of reconciliation efforts, practical implications of reconciliation matters for curricula and pedagogy in schools and universities and theoretical and philosophical considerations of reconciliation/pedagogy. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of peace and reconciliation studies, educational studies and international relations.

How might educational leaders and teachers improve literacy achievement in schools serving communities experiencing high levels of poverty? This question is the focus of this book. Drawing on long-term case studies of four primary schools located in these communities, this book describes the difference between what is commonly practiced and those practices that have a greater chance of supporting young people's literacy learning. In this multi-layered analysis of the effects of policy on practice, the authors: discuss global concerns with literacy policy and testing in view of the growing gaps between rich and poor; examine the effects of the intensification of inequality and entrenched poverty, and the implications for schools; illustrate how deficit discourses pertaining to communities living in poverty are contested in schools; and describe the complexities of sustaining pedagogical and curriculum change to address the problem of unequal educational outcomes in literacy. This book grapples with some of the most debated questions regarding educational disadvantage, school change, leadership and literacy pedagogy that face educational researchers, policy-makers and practitioners internationally. As well as providing a critique of the risks of current policy rationales, it conveys some hopeful accounts of practice that provide leads for further development.

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.

Reconciliation is one of the most significant contemporary challenges in the world today. In this innovative new volume, educational academics and practitioners across a range of cultural and political contexts examine the links between reconciliation and critical pedagogy, putting forward the notion that reconciliation projects should be regarded as public pedagogical interventions, with much to offer to wider theories of learning. While ideas about reconciliation are proliferating, few scholarly accounts have focused on its pedagogies. This book seeks to develop a generative theory that properly maps reconciliation processes and works out the pedagogical dimensions of new modes of narrating and listening, and effecting social change. The contributors build conceptual bridges between the scholarship of reconciliation studies and existing education and pedagogical literature, bringing together the concepts of reconciliation and pedagogy into a dialogical encounter and evaluating how each might be of mutual benefit to the other, theoretically and practically. This study covers a broad range of territory including ethnographic accounts of reconciliation efforts, practical implications of reconciliation matters for curricula and pedagogy in schools and universities and theoretical and philosophical considerations of reconciliation/pedagogy. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of peace and reconciliation studies, educational studies and international relations.