Barry Down

This book provides a unique insiders account of the work of Big hART, one of Australia’s leading participatory arts organisations. Founded on the values of social justice, creativity and transformation Big hART seeks to mobilise a range of community resources including young people, elders, artists, and community activists to produce high quality public performances of merit and social worth. Located in diverse geographic, social and cultural settings across Australia’s vast landscape, these creative works generate intergenerational understandings of the cultural processes of individual and collective transformation strengthening capabilities, identity, and connected belonging. This book documents a series of powerful stories that illuminate the ideological, artistic and cultural pathways and learnings gifted by the generosity of participants themselves.

This extensive Handbook will bring together different aspects of critical pedagogy with the aim of opening up a clear international conversation on the subject, as well as pushing the boundaries of current understanding by extending the notion of a pedagogy to multiple pedagogies and perspectives. Bringing together a group of contributing authors from around the globe, the chapters will provide a unique approach and insight to the discipline by crossing a range of disciplines and articulating both philosophical and social common themes. The chapters will be organised across three volumes and twelve core thematic sections. The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies is planned to be an essential benchmark publication for advanced students, researchers and practitioners across a wide range of disciplines including education, health, sociology, anthropology and development studies.

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.

In Promoting Early Career Teacher Resilience the stories of 60 graduate teachers are documented as they grapple with some of the most persistent and protracted personal and professional struggles facing teachers today. Narratives emerge detailing feelings of frustration, disillusionment and even outrage as they struggle with the complexity, intensity and immediacy of life in schools. Other stories also surface to show exhilarating experiences, documenting the wonder, joy and excitement of working with young people for the first time. This book makes sense of these experiences in ways that can assist education systems, schools, and faculties of teacher education, as well as early career teachers themselves to develop more powerful forms of critical teacher resilience. Rejecting psychological explanations of teacher resilience, it endorses an alternative socio-cultural and critical approach to understanding teacher resilience. The book crosses physical borders and represents experiences of teachers in similar circumstances across the globe, providing researchers and teachers with real-life examples of resilience promoting policies and practices. This book is not written as an account of the failures of an education system, but rather as a provocation to help generate ideas, policies and practices capable of illuminating the experiences of early career teachers in more critical and socially just ways at an international and national level.

This book addresses one of the most persistent issues confronting governments, educations systems and schools today: the attraction, preparation, and retention of early career teachers. It draws on the stories of sixty graduate teachers from Australia to identify the key barriers, interferences and obstacles to teacher resilience and what might be done about it. Based on these stories, five interrelated themes - policies and practices, school culture, teacher identity, teachers’ work, and relationships – provide a framework for dialogue around what kinds of conditions need to be created and sustained in order to promote early career teacher resilience. The book provides a set of resources – stories, discussion, comments, reflective questions and insights from the literature – to promote conversations among stakeholders rather than providing yet another ‘how to do’ list for improving the daily lives of early career teachers. Teaching is a complex, fragile and uncertain profession. It operates in an environment of unprecedented educational reforms designed to control, manage and manipulate pedagogical judgements. Teacher resilience must take account of both the context and circumstances of individual schools (especially those in economically disadvantaged communities) and the diversity of backgrounds and talents of early career teachers themselves. The book acknowledges that the substantial level of change required– cultural, structural, pedagogical and relational – to improve early career teacher resilience demands a great deal of cooperation and support from governments, education systems, schools, universities and communities: teachers cannot do it alone. This book is written to generate conversations amongst early career teachers, teacher colleagues, school leaders, education administrators, academics and community leaders about the kinds of pedagogical and relational conditions required to promote early career teacher resilience and wellbeing.

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.

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.

Synopsis - 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.

Synopsis - 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. The book describes and analyzes a courageous struggle for a more socially just world, around notions of relational solidarity that speak back to ideas that continue to privilege the already advantaged. This book provides some desperately needed new storylines as a basis for school and community renewal for the most excluded groups in society. It provides a new social imagination for 'doing school' in contexts that stand to benefit from school and community voiced approaches.