Lew Zipin

Dark funds of knowledge, deep funds of pedagogy: exploring boundaries between lifeworlds and schools

Among social justice efforts to make curriculum more engaging and achieving for ‘less advantaged’ learners, the Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach, as developed by Moll, Gonzalez and associates (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), offers sound conception and a track-record. The Redesigning Pedagogies in the North project (RPiN) significantly embraced this approach (with some methodological differences). In this paper I first outline how curriculum designed around funds of knowledge with use-value in learners’ lifeworlds challenges the exchange-value power by which competitive academic curriculum selectively privileges cultural capital embodied in elite social-structural positions. I then draw on both RPiN data and FoK literature to examine problematic tendencies to build curriculum around (1) light (i.e. positive) but not dark knowledge from learners’ lifeworlds; and (2) knowledge contents but not ways of knowing and transacting knowledge (funds of pedagogy). In exploring these problem spots, I analyse how systemic boundaries between lifeworlds and schools pose constraints for recontextualising funds of knowledge into school curriculum.

Educating for futures in marginalized regions: a sociological framework for rethinking and researching aspirations

Abstract ‘Raising aspirations’ for education among young people in low socioeconomic regions has become a widespread policy prescription for increasing human capital investment and economic competitiveness in so-called ‘knowledge economies’. However, policy tends not to address difficult social, cultural, economic and political conditions for aspiring, based in structural changes associated with globalization. Drawing conceptually on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Arjun Appadurai and authors in the Funds of Knowledge tradition, this article theorizes two logics for aspiring that are recognizable in research with young people and families: a doxic logic, grounded in populist–ideological mediations; and a habituated logic, grounded in biographic–historical legacies and embodied as habitus. A less tangible third ‘logic’ is also theorized: emergent senses of future potential, grounded in lived cultures, which hold possibility for imagining and pursuing alternative futures. The article offers a sociological framework for understanding aspirations as complex social–cultural phenomena, and for capacitating emergent and hopeful aspirations through school- and community-based research and dialogue.

Researching for Social Justice: Contextual, Conceptual and Methodological Challenges.

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary schooling contexts that, in current times, are beset with ‘crisis’ conditions and constrained by policy rationales that make it difficult to pursue issues of justice. Within the project, university investigators and teachers collaborated in action research that drew on a range of conceptual resources for redesigning curriculum and pedagogies, including: funds of knowledge, vernacular or local literacies; place-based education; the ‘productive pedagogies’ and the ‘unofficial curriculum’ of popular culture and out-of-school learning settings. In bringing these resources together with the aim of interrupting the reproduction of inequality, the project developed a methodo-logic which builds on Bourdieuian insights.

Countering and Exceeding "Capital": A "Funds of Knowledge" Approach to Re-Imagining Community.

This article discusses how the ‘funds of knowledge’ approach (FoK) offers a socially just alternative to the logics of capital, by drawing on knowledge assets from students’ family and community lifeworlds to build engaging and rigorous learning, supporting school–community interactions that build capacities. We explain how we applied FoK in an action research project – Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN) – to design curriculum and pedagogy in schools of a high-poverty region. With reference to RPiN, we also observe how high-poverty regions, and their schools, appear to be undergoing complex unsettlements, as effects of globalisation, which raise problematic questions about who/what is ‘the local community’. We argue that this calls for new thinking, both sociological and ethical, which can refine the FoK approach to take fuller account of the diverse and complex spaces of social-historical life in new times. We conclude by considering a pedagogical approach through which learners in such regions can re-imagine hopeful forms of community.

Can Social Realism do Social Justice? Debating the Warrants for Curriculum Knowledge Selection

ABSTRACTSocial realism (SR), as a movement that argues for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ to curriculum (Young 2008a), is significant globally, especially in South Africa. This article examines arguments from SR proponents that curriculum selection should privilege specialised disciplinary knowledge – as ‘powerful knowledge’ – over ‘everyday knowledge’, and how this is warranted through Durkheims distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ social bases for knowledge. The article asks how adequately curriculum based on SR warrants can do social justice. This inquiry stages debates between SR and three alternative approaches. The first is standpoint theories that knowledge – including that of scientific disciplines – is always positional and ‘partially objective’. The next is Vygotskian arguments for curriculum that, dialectically, joins systematising powers of scientific knowledge with rich funds of knowledge from learners’ everyday life-worlds. Third, SRs philosophical framing is contrasted with Nancy Fras...

Negotiating university ‘equity’ from Indigenous standpoints: a shaky bridge

Indigenous presence in the Australian university is a relatively recent phenomenon, initially framed by policies of equity that were, and continue to be, problematic in their assumptions – what they say and don’t say – about cultural difference, justice, sovereignty and more. From the lead author’s Aboriginal standpoint, the paper analyses the repercussions of ‘equity’ thinking that have intersected with Indigenous experiences of higher education activity in Australia, covering the range of aspects of university life and work: staffing, teaching, curriculum, governance, research and community engagement. The paper critiques how dominant notions of ‘equity’ subordinate or cannibalise possibilities for what higher education could mean for Indigenous peoples; and it gestures towards what might emerge from a standpoint of Indigenous agency to re-imagine the university.

Meeting Literacy Needs of Pre‐service Cohorts: Ethical dilemmas for socially just teacher educators

Australian teacher education, like the rest of the university sector in Australia, is under significant pressure and highly politicised. In this paper, we examine ethical dilemmas facing teacher educators who, in a context of difficult and eroding work conditions, grapple with literacy needs of pre‐service students. We focus particularly on building an analysis and a broad framework for improving university literacy work, encompassing ethical commitments to our students, our employing institutions and, most importantly, to children and youth from families less powerfully positioned in the social structure and in Australian schools. Our analysis is informed by the conceptual framework of Pierre Bourdieu and by critical literacy work, especially that of African‐American educator Lisa Delpit. The paper concludes with suggestions for framing literacy work within a teacher education programme designed explicitly around social justice ethics.

Towards pedagogical justice

The possibility of this symposium was raised by the Discourse editors after presentations at the Australian Association for Research in Education’s annual conference in Fremantle, Australia, 2007. Conference presenters from the Redesigning Pedagogies in the North project (RPiN) discussed how the project which had just completed three years of funded field work was grappling with conceptual and methodological issues of social justice-oriented research in secondary schools (with a focus on the middle years). Through action research, RPiN pursued curriculum and pedagogical innovation in public secondary schools serving communities in a ‘rustbelt’ urban fringe. Schools in these northern suburbs of Adelaide are in the front line of struggles to meet challenges of significant demographic and social change, including poverty, un(der)employment, and increased levels of cultural diversity and itinerancy. Difficult policy, media and practical contexts for schools in such Australian regions have intensified during the past decade, with the Australian federal government ideologically foregrounding issues of economic management whilst engaging in forms of backlash cultural politics (Gutierrez, Asato, Santos & Gotanda, 2002; Hattam, Prosser & Brady, 2009). Schools are key sites for such ‘realpolitik’, fought around issues including: authorising ‘the nation’s history’; moral panic about literacy/numeracy crisis; greater funding of private schools in the name of ‘choice’, and more. Significantly, the climate of policy rhetoric weakened both vocabularies and strategic possibilities for chasing social justice in education, instead covertly reinscribing reproductive functions of schooling through varied tactics including the normalising of privilege and blaming victims (Taylor & Singh, 2005). Against what Smyth, Dow, Hattam, Reid, and Shacklock (2000) note as trends toward ‘deliberate de-authorization of the significance of teachers in the reform process’, RPiN held that ‘teachers are the most important actors’ (p. 156), warranting recognition and support as designers of curriculum and pedagogy. RPiN effectively created, researched and supported a professional learning community of teachers undertaking action-research projects. In these projects, teachers collaborated with

Lost in production: the erasure of the teacher educator in Australian university job advertisements

This paper seeks to understand how persistent categories of written language in institutional texts support the cultural-historical production and re-production of teacher educators as kinds of academic workers in Australia. Fifty-seven job advertisements and allied materials produced by Australian universities were downloaded across a seven-month period. These texts were understood as key cultural artefacts not only for the recruitment process but in conveying what it means to be a teacher educator. A surprising finding was the almost complete absence of the ‘teacher educator’ within these texts. Analysis revealed, instead, textual distinctions between the advertisements (shown to be preoccupied with the image and positioning of institutional priorities and the supporting materials) which were characterised by the language of Human Resources. Ambivalence around the work of research within teacher education was another notable feature, which is interpreted in relation to institutional anxieties about the Australian government’s Education in Research for Australia initiative.

Uneasy alliances: University, workplace, industry and profession in the education doctorate

The phenomenon of Professional Doctorates in Australia has come at a time of great change in the higher education sector. Such change includes an intensified imperative for universities to establish ‘partnerships’ with industry and the professions. The Professional Doctorate is, in part, a consequence of such changes and is also helping to effect them. However, in its examination of the Education Doctorate, this paper problematises the notion of partnerships and indeed the various policy constructions of the parties involved. Through fictionalised accounts of standpoints of a higher education policy maker, an EdD student, an academic in an EdD program and a member of the education industry, it identifies some of the tensions involved within and between such categories. In so doing it suggests some matters that require research and pedagogical attention.