Robert Hattam

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.

Unsettling Deficit Views of Students and their Communities

In this paper we explore the possibilities for redesigning pedagogy in the middle years of schooling. We think that the middle schooling movement in Australia is unfinished because the pedagogical reforms promised have been patchy, not well researched and difficult to sustain. As well, middle schooling is a little exhausted because it has failed to respond to changing demographies and youth identities. As a response we argue for school change projects linked to mainstream curriculum change. From a range of conceptual resources we discuss the potential of using a “funds of knowledge” approach and a narrative approach to youth identity work.

Not Everyone Has a Perfect Life: Becoming Somebody without School.

Abstract This article draws on the Students Completing Schooling Project, conducted in Australia, which has developed an account of early school leaving though listening to how 209 young people made sense of their experiences of leaving school. In this study, we were keen to understand the way young people deliberate upon how schooling fits into their plans for living a life: for ‘becoming somebody’. We propose understanding early school leaving as a tactical manoeuvre and part of the complex process of identity formation. Our interview material indicates that a powerful ‘interactive trouble’ contributes to the non-completion of school and involves underestimating the demands of private life, especially for those living in poverty.

Teaching in fractured classrooms: refugee education, public culture, community and ethics

During the last decade or so, schooling policy has had to increasingly grapple with processes that have a global reach. One significant aspect of globalisation has been the global flows of asylum seekers and refugees. Although Australia has a long history of accepting asylum seekers and refugees, in recent times, concerns about national security have fuelled community disquiet about refugees and asylum seekers. As such the ‘refugee problem’ is a crucial site for research by those interested in the relationships between a vibrant and socially just society and educational policy and practice. This paper draws on Roses genealogy of ‘community’ (that is community now a site for governmentality); and Baumans meditation on ‘elusive community’ (how can we have both freedom and security?) as a means to think through an appropriate ethico‐politics for educators grappling with the refugee problem in Australia.

Revolution or backlash? The mediatisation of education policy in Australia

Recent scholarship has identified the emergence of a new modality of policy work: the mediatisation of policy. This paper provides an Australian case study which reports on the tactics of an Australian Federal Minister of Education and a media commentator who both engaged in public pedagogical work for the purpose of spinning education policy. In particular, we argue that this example of the mediatisation of education policy has worked to stifle pedagogical innovation as advocates of middle schooling reform struggle against what appears to be a backlash to the social-democratic reforms of the post-World War II era. Such backlash politics is understood in terms of a struggle to maintain the role of teachers as curriculum designers and not be merely technicians; to sustain critically reflective learning communities of colleagues and friends; and not succumb to pedagogies of resentment that are driven by a logic of deficit views of students and their communities.

Intellectual as Hustler: researching against the grain of the market

In many respects, universities around the world are living through a period of quite extraordinary turmoil as their role and purposes are under serious challenge. In this paper we explore the latest attempt in Australia to push universities even further in the direction of becoming marketised, and we examine what this means in terms of the loss of public space for academics as public intellectuals. In this, we draw some fragments from our own autobiographical experiences in trying to assert what a ‘counter public’ might look like around university research. We find the notion of ‘hustler’ to be a sufficiently playful metaphor around which to begin to frame what happens to knowledge as it is increasingly treated as another commodity.

Teacher Learning: The Way Out of the School Restructuring Miasma.

The rightful role of teachers in the current wave of educational restructuring around the world reveals that teachers have had less than a prominent role in that. This paper argues that teachers exercise important pedagogical leadership in schools through the way they shape, enact and live the vision and culture of their schools. A particular instance in Australia is described in which sustaining a culture of debate around teaching and learning, and the indigenous structures that support a more politicized view of teacher learning, constitute a crucial expression of how teachers live out an entitlement to speak.

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

Reconciliation as a Frame for Rethinking Racism in Australia

This paper begins with a brief reading of Australias ‘signature racism’ and ponders the question of what we might do about it. As a novel way to this problematic, the paper considers the national reconciliation process, exemplified by the work as of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR), as a ‘good movement’ in Derridas terms and as a site for investigating antiracist work in Australia. The CAR provides conceptual resources for considering the pedagogical challenge for a cultural politics of antiracism. Importantly the challenge is understood in terms of a terrain of affect in which in which anger is simultaneously silenced, repressed and denied. The paper concludes by contemplating the possibility of a post-indignation pedagogy.