Barry Down

This article reports on a comparative policy analysis which examined education policy guiding the use of exclusionary discipline practices across four Australian states (Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, and Queensland). Exclusionary practices, such as suspensions and exclusions, are commonly used to respond to problematic student behaviour, yet their effectiveness as a behaviour management strategy remains unsupported by research. Through a comparative analysis of current policy in four Australian states, we find commonalities and differences in both the purpose and practice of exclusions, with their use warranted for disruptive and disobedient behaviours, as well as those considered abusive or violent. With little consideration given to the conditions that contribute towards student behaviour, the policies frame individual students as the problem, largely ignoring the powerful influence on student behaviour of complex home lives, poverty, culture, poor pedagogy, irrelevant curricula and repressive discipline regimes in compromising student-teacher relationships. In prioritising the needs of the school over the individual, exclusionary policies perpetuate the disengagement and isolation of children and young people who struggle to adapt to the rules and regulations within the school environment, exacerbating the disadvantage already experienced by vulnerable groups of students.

When Susan invited me to contribute to this collection of essays, I was in the process of navigating my transition to ‘retirement’ after 30 years working as a teacher educator-researcher grappling with the changing nature of teachers’ work, student dis/re/engagement, educational inequality, and social justice. The opportunity to reflect on my own intellectual journey was both timely and challenging as I tried to make sense of what it means to be an activist educator in the context of the ideas animating this book – hope, courage, and wisdom. I want to begin by referring to Postman and Weingartner’s classic book Teaching as a subversive activity. My motivation is threefold, firstly, it was one of the few books that excited me as a student teacher back in the 1970s, secondly, it offered a critique of the problems and impediments facing education, and thirdly, it proposed an alternative vision for teaching. The book resonated with me for many reasons – the playfulness of language, the provocations, the metaphors, the social imaginary, the spirit of rebellion and the courage to question the way things are. In essence, Postman and Weingartner were railing against the “essential mindlessness” of the “burgeoning bureaucracy” captured in the motto “Carry on regardless” (p. 24). They argued that bureaucracies, like schools, “rarely ask themselves ‘Why?’ but only ‘How?’ questions” (p. 24)…

This article reports on a critical policy analysis of discourses related to school exclusions. The management of problematic student behaviour is one of the intractable problems facing education systems today. Despite being ineffective, school suspensions and exclusions are commonly used in many countries as a discipline strategy to manage student behaviour. We adopted a critical policy analysis approach in a case in Australia to examine what is missing from policy discourses about school discipline. We identified nine silences in the policy discourses. The aim is to better understand the ways in which common-sense policy discourses construct the problem of disaffected students and in the process make invisible the deep-rooted causes of student exclusions and their effects. These key silences open up new foci for policy discourses, which would enhance a deeper understanding of what is involved in addressing complex social problems like school suspensions and exclusions.

While tidying up e-mail archives in 2019, the authors stumbled across correspondence from their research participants that captured their attention. They had interviewed thirty-two high school students as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project over a three-year period while these young people were transitioning from school to the world of work. Even though the project had finished in 2013, the authors deliberately maintained contact with them electronically to understand what was happening in their lives. Not all young people responded in 2014; however, the fact that some did was quite remarkable, and their responses unearthed ‘thick descriptions’ and powerful narratives that the authors reflect on throughout the chapter. Participants’ stories advance theoretical and methodological insights capable of informing social action, bringing to the fore ‘modalities of time and space’ as they continue to ‘echo’; demanding our reflexive attention as we enter the ‘field’ once again to engage, connect and listen to their narratives; ‘with them’. Weaving together student narratives, researcher fieldnotes and supporting theoretical frameworks, this chapter culminates in sharing experiences and memories that ‘haunt’ even when consciously attempting to ‘let participants go’ (from a field of choice). We learn from and acknowledge the haunting echoes of our participants because they never really ‘exit’ but ‘tag along’ as we continue to create democratic spaces, places and directions in future educational research.

This article critically examines the everyday practices of streaming working-class students into vocational education and training pathways in public high schools in Western Australia. It challenges existing beliefs, assumptions and practices underpinning the ways in which students are artificially divided into academic and non-academic forms of school knowledge at a young age. In a country that prides itself on the myth of egalitarianism, we argue that streaming functions to legitimate existing power relations, social hierarchies, and educational inequalities. Drawing on the tradition of critical ethnography, the article examines the post school reflections of five young adults, now studying at Tertiary and Further Education (TAFE) institutions, as they reflect on their experience of high school and the processes around their decision to enrol in a vocational education and training programme at school and with what effects. The article identifies five emergent key themes organised around the narrative of each student.

Digital Youth Subcultures is a collection of essays draws on ethnographic case studies across multiple geographic locations and contexts to investigate the ways in young people engage in transgressive activities in digital social spaces (DSS) including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The book underscores the pervasiveness and unprecedented extent to which young peoples’ lives and identities are constituted in and through social media spaces. The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars to provide a rich body of evidence, largely from the point of view of young people themselves, to understand how subcultures arise online, how they are constructed and experienced, and why it matters to them.

Approaches to learning and teaching cast under the designation of "relational pedagogy" provide the focus of this chapter. We argue that democratic education is most apparent in the moment of encounter between students and teachers. When deliberative negotiation of learning occurs and recognition is given to the mutuality of the pedagogical encounter, moves toward a democratic education are established. For this pedagogic deliberation to occur, the formation of meaningful relationships between students and teachers is fundamental. By meaningfully coming into relation and setting about the task of negotiating how learning should proceed, teachers and students give credence to the immediacy of the moment-to the immediacy of the pedagogical encounter-and the effects exerted by the context within which this relationship is activated. This chapter asserts that it is in these terms that relational pedagogies actively resist the normalising effects of dominant expressions of schooling typical of this present moment-approaches to schooling that preface reductive, decontextualised, "one size fits all" logics-to instead provoke recognition of the idiosyncratic, in-the-moment character of learning. It is in these moments that deliberation and negotiation become crucial to learning and expose formations of a democratic education that positions the relational at its core.

Sharing the lived experience of academic casualisation is challenging, based on a power imbalance with many oppositional points, including cost savings versus fair wages, precarity versus security. As researcher/participant, Jennifer initially struggled with sharing experiences emotionally and academically without stripping humanity and affect from her writing. Drawing on the tradition of critical autoethnography, this article uses letter writing as a means of investigating personal-professional experience through critical self-reflection. These letters are written to a fictional colleague (Q) for the purpose of ‘wondering aloud’ about her experience of casualised labour and the difficulties of constructing a personal-professional identity within the context of the Australian neoliberal university.

This article considers Participatory Arts and sociocultural understandings of justice and praxis through the example of Big hART, an Australian multi-award winning provider where both artists and participants – often disenfranchised and marginalised young people – co-create the work (Matarasso, 2018). Enacting social justice principles, Big hART works alongside young people to improve their life outcomes through arts practice strengthening young people’s critical capabilities by inducting them as both makers and responders to their own lives and the world around them. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research across three sites in rural and regional Australia we highlight how multidimensional and multi-modal arts-based projects contribute to young people’s lives through theorising the attributes and dimensions of twenty productive conditions and practices identified as essential for social change. These possibilities are important as when these conditions are purposefully enacted, the power of the arts for sense-making and identity development is revealed in non-formal learning spaces. Theoretically unpacking these conditions and practices and linking them with research outcomes helps build understanding of the generative power of Participatory Arts through the ways Big hART builds bridges between young people and their communities and the developmental trajectories they may take through being ‘at-promise’ rather than ‘at-risk’.