John Smyth
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 290282 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | John Smyth |
| NOMBRES | John |
| APELLIDO | Smyth |
| FIRMA | SMYTH J |
| AFILIACIONES | Federation University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8124-1444 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 80 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 328 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 79 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1989 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Social and Genetic Relations in Neolithic Ireland
This paper re-evaluates recent kinship studies in Neolithic Ireland through a close analysis of biomolecular and fine-grained archaeological data. It outlines the rich possibilities these datasets offer when interwoven to enhance our understanding of diverse webs of social relationships. We synthesize a range of archaeological and scientific data to form a new model of kinship and its relationship to shifting traditions of megalith building and f…
The 'king' of Newgrange? A critical analysis of a Neolithic petrous fragment from the passage tomb chamber
Recent genomic analysis of a skull fragment from Newgrange, Ireland, revealed a rare case of incest. Together with a wider network of distantly related passage tomb interments, this has bolstered claims of a social elite in later Neolithic Ireland. Here, the authors evaluate this social evolutionary interpretation, drawing on insecurities in context and the relative rarity of engendered status or resource restrictions in the archaeological record…
Proteomic sexing of archaeological cattle remains at Neolithic Kilshane
Although proteomic techniques have been increasingly used to improve our understanding of the human past, few have focussed on the study of tooth enamel for sexing in archaeofaunal remains, despite initial studies over a decade ago investigating human teeth. Here we explore the use of LC-orbitrap-MS/MS for identifying the sex of archaeological domestic cattle remains from the Neolithic enclosure at Kilshane, Ireland (c. 3600 cal. BC), in addition…
Integrated approaches to understanding animal exploitation and dairying in the Central European Early Neolithic
Recent genetic studies point towards 6 th millennium BC central Europe as the core region for the emergence of the lactase persistence (LP) gene mutation -13,910 * T, making it important to understand the intensity of milk production and consumption among Linearbandkeramik (or LBK) farming groups. However, it is not known if milking was part of the LBK Neolithic “package” from the start, or if it displayed a discontinuous pattern in time and spac…
More than meat? Examining cattle slaughter, feasting and deposition in later 4th millennium BC Atlantic Europe
Cattle are widely recognised as having important economic, social, symbolic and religious roles in Neolithic communities. This high status appears strongly linked with feasting and commensality, events during which a great number of cattle are slaughtered and their carcasses purposefully deposited. This paper presents details of an unusually large assemblage of cattle remains recovered from the ditches of a later 4th millennium BC enclosure at Ki…
Food and Farming Systems in the Neolithic – an Impossible Vista
The management and utilisation of mostly novel plant and animal species for food and other products has long been recognised as a central component of the Neolithic. The period has frequently been characterised as marking a tipping point in food procurement activities, a shift that has had a fundamental impact on societies today. While there may be little difference between the modes and means of subsistence strategies (e.g. Ingold 1988) - from h…
Generation of Two New Radiocarbon Standards for Compound-Specific Radiocarbon Analyses of Fatty Acids From Bog Butter Finds
The analysis of processing standards alongside samples for quality assurance in radiocarbon ( 14 C) analyses is critical. Ideally, these standards should be similar both in nature and age to unknown samples. A new compound-specific approach was developed at the University of Bristol for dating pottery vessels using palmitic and stearic fatty acids extracted from within the clay matrix and isolated by preparative capillary gas chromatography. Obta…
Critical social science as a research methodology in universities in times of crisis
Purpose To consider what a criticalist qualitative research methodology might look like for universities in the context of the contemporary COVID-19 crisis. Design/methodology/approach This polemical paper explores the rationale for a dramatic recasting of the approach needed in qualitative research methodology to address the challenges of the crisis-ridden times we live in. Broadly conceived of as an “evolving criticality”, to borrow from Kinche…
The neoliberal toxic university
This article deploys critical sociology to examine institutions of higher learning, worldwide, within a context of a more utopian set of possibilities. The article contests the idea of universities as marketplaces – competition, commercialisation and vocationalisation; the synthetic values of docility, conformity, and image/impression management; the calibration and metrification of all facets of university activity; and the containment of univer…
Education and Working-Class Youth
This book provides an inclusive and incisive analysis of the experiences of working-class young people in education. While there is an established literature on education and the working class stretching back decades, comparatively there has been something of a neglect of class-based inequality – with questions of gender, ‘race’ and other forms of identity attracting significant attention. However, events including Britain's 2016 decision to leav…
Shaking up’ neoliberal policy in schools
Our research is driven by a strong belief that the stories of young people gathered through ethnographic interviews can generate awareness not only of the complexities, uncertainties and possibilities of young people’s lives but also the ways in which their identities and life chances are shaped by broader structural, institutional and historical forces beyond their control. In this article, we introduce Jacinta, a young person who describes the …
The Toxic University
Problematising vocational education and training in schools
In Australia, like many western countries, there has been a convergence of education policy around a set of utilitarian and economistic approaches to vocational education and training in schools. Such approaches are based on the assumption that there is a direct relationship between national economic growth, productivity and human capital development resulting in the persuasive political argument that schools should be more closely aligned to the…
From the inside out
The investigation of organic residues associated with archaeological pottery using modern analytical chemical methods began in the 1970s. It was recognised early on that the analysis of lipids (i.e. fats, waxes and resins) preserved in surface residues or the fabric of single potsherds, representative of single vessels, was a powerful method for ascertaining pottery use, with a high degree of specificity. Subsequent developments saw a significant…
Youth insecurity in schools
Young people from working-class backgrounds are feeling increasingly insecure in school, and for good reasons. The institution of schooling is being converted into an instrument of neoliberal control. In this paper, I discuss how schools are becoming increasingly insecure places for working-class young people, and how they are responding, and I do this in four parts; first, through the construction of a particular kind of classed learning identit…
Crisis of youth or youth in crisis? Education, employment and legitimation crisis
This paper uses the Habermasian concept of legitimation crisis to critique the relationship between post-compulsory education and training and the chronic levels of youth unemployment and under-employment which now characterise post-industrial Western economies, such as the UK. It draws on data from an ethnographic study of the lives of young people classified as NEET (not in education, employment or training), or at risk of becoming so to challe…
Education and the working class’
This paper is both a careful analysis of a seminal piece of work in the sociology of education, as well as a passionate plea to revisit with renewed urgency, the way in which education continues to fail unacceptably large numbers of working-class children. Through closely examining the work of Dennis Marsden (with his colleague Brian Jackson) in Education and the working class, the paper argues that this pioneering work done in working-class Hudd…
Affective Topologies of Rural Youth Embodiment
This article explores the affective, embodied dimensions of young rural people's relationship with space and place. Relationship with space and place has been recognised as a significant dimension of rural youths' subjectivities but it has been primarily understood through representational perspectives which focus on young people's perceptions, images, or discursive constructions of their local places. In contrast, this article draws on non-repre…
Breaking away
Characterising the Neolithic in Britain and Ireland has always been a lively pursuit. Following the referendums on Scottish independence and Brexit, and the consequent shifts in modern cultural and political identities, research into the first farming communities of these islands and their tangled traditions assumes particular resonance. The two volumes under review explore Neolithic identities in Scotland: the first, a festschrift for Gordon Bar…
Moral Distinctions and Structural Inequality
This paper explores the construction and contestation of moral distinctions as a dimension of contemporary structural inequality through a focus on the subjectivities constructed by young people who have experienced homelessness. Empirical material from two research projects shows that in young people's narratives of homelessness, material insecurity intertwines with the moral economies at work in neoliberal capitalist societies to construct home…
Widespread exploitation of the honeybee by early Neolithic farmers
Sent out’ and Stepping Back In
This paper invokes the voices of young people who had been separated from mainstream schooling because they were positioned as 'disengaged' and 'at risk of failing'. The authors argue that streaming students out of schooling needs serious questioning as an escalating number of young people are framed as non-performers within a globally competitive educational market. Throughout the paper we use critical ethnographic slices to expose the experienc…
Puncturing notions of precarity through critical educational research on young lives in Australia
This papers deals in a polemical fashion with what is arguably one of the most contentious issues in education – the disengagement of increasing numbers of young people from schooling. It makes the argument that what is occurring is that global forces are conspiring to position young people as a form of ‘social waste’ and that allowing them to be unproblematically portrayed as constituting a precariat is an over-simplification if not a misreprese…
Milking the megafauna
In Europe, the shift to agriculture starts around cal 7000 BC, spreading across the continent over several thousand years. The island of Ireland lies geographically and chronologically at the end of this trajectory, in the centuries around cal 4000 BC. Molecular and stable carbon isotope analyses undertaken of ca. 450 pottery vessels from a range of Irish Neolithic sites firmly establishes that dairying is one of the very earliest farming practic…
Education and social mobility
Kate Hoskins and Bernard Barker cut to the chase in this book by demonstrating how one of the major conundrums in education is being carefully, wilfully and deliberately constructed for political e
Contracting for Services in a Decentralized System
Public management is changing rapidly due to the extensive privatization of public services through government contracting with private organizations and the devolution of the funding and administration of government programs to states and localities. These trends are spurred by a belief in the salutary effects of market competition and local decision making on public services. This article presents research on contracting for substance abuse ser…
Whose side are you on? Advocacy ethnography
This paper is primarily interested in opening up a strategy to counter the increasing silencing of perspectives resulting from the press towards “evidence-based” forms of research. We argue that all researchers have interests, declared or otherwise. What we advance in the paper is an approach to ethnography that is inclusive of the lives, perspective, experiences, and viewpoints of the least powerful. Methodologically we demonstrate something of …
From the inside out
The investigation of organic residues associated with archaeological pottery using modern analytical chemical methods began in the 1970s. It was recognised early on that the analysis of lipids (i.e. fats, waxes and resins) preserved in surface residues or the fabric of single potsherds, representative of single vessels, was a powerful method for ascertaining pottery use, with a high degree of specificity. Subsequent developments saw a significant…
Teachers’ Work and the Politics of Reflection
There has been a plethora of material written in recent times on reflective approaches to teaching and teacher education, but a dearth of material that looks behind these studies or asks why these reflective approaches are enjoying such popularity. This article tackles what has really become a major policy issue in the literature in four ways. First, it argues that the rhetoric of devolution and practitioner forms of knowledge may not be entirely…
Teachers' Work in a Globalizing Economy
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 ac…
The disaster of the ‘self‐managing school’ – genesis, trajectory, undisclosed agenda, and effects
Sometimes an educational idea is inexplicably adopted around the world with remarkable speed and consistency and in the absence of a proper evidence base or with little regard or respect for teachers, students or learning. This paper examines what has arguably been the most contentious and virulent educational reform of the past half‐century. Variously labelled, in what amounts to the self‐managing school, what this reform has done is virtually d…
Developing and Sustaining Critical Reflection in Teacher Education
Smyth provides background informa tion on the emergence of reflectivity as a conceptual thrust in teacher education. He also discusses some of the impedi ments to empowerment that teachers and teacher educators confront as they attempt to implement critical reflection in their curricula. Smyth concludes that if teachers (and teacher educators) are going to uncover the forces that inhibit and constrain them, they need to en gage in four forms of a…
Affective Topologies of Rural Youth Embodiment
This article explores the affective, embodied dimensions of young rural people's relationship with space and place. Relationship with space and place has been recognised as a significant dimension of rural youths' subjectivities but it has been primarily understood through representational perspectives which focus on young people's perceptions, images, or discursive constructions of their local places. In contrast, this article draws on non-repre…
Emplacing young people in an Australian rural community
This paper explores the identities of young people in an Australian rural town in relation to contemporary discussions of place and social change. The paper responds to dominant narratives in youth studies which position individualised, reflexive subjectivities at the centre of a homogeneous, placeless modernity with an emplaced analysis of contemporary youth identities. Young people's narratives reveal an attachment to place created in community…
Rural young people in late modernity
This article draws together arguments for an interdisciplinary 'spatial turn' within sociology to analyse the subjectivities and biographical imaginings of Australian rural youth. It draws on a theoretical dialogue between theories of social change, and developments in socio-spatial theory in order to analyse the spatial contours of young people's narratives, making a case for the significance of an 'extraverted' and porous sense of place for und…
Australia's great disengagement with public education and social justice in educational leadership
Australia has been one of the countries to most enthusiastically embrace the neo‐liberal conditions conducive to the dismantling of equitably provided public schooling. The article argues that part of the explanation for the absence of any effective challenge to this trajectory lies in the contradictory nature of the Australian identity. The ensemble of policies that have been officially promoted to produce this situation, include: an official pr…
Voiced' Research as a Sociology for Understanding 'Dropping Out' of School
How people obtain more complex understandings of the phenomenon of 'dropping out' of school is one of the most urgent policy and practice issues facing educational practitioners, policy-makers and sociological researchers at the moment. Smyth and Hattam argue that a different 'sociological imagination' is required--one that is simultaneously more attentive to the lifeworlds of young people and more reflexive of its own agenda
Milking the megafauna
In Europe, the shift to agriculture starts around cal 7000 BC, spreading across the continent over several thousand years. The island of Ireland lies geographically and chronologically at the end of this trajectory, in the centuries around cal 4000 BC. Molecular and stable carbon isotope analyses undertaken of ca. 450 pottery vessels from a range of Irish Neolithic sites firmly establishes that dairying is one of the very earliest farming practic…
It's our turn – young people ‘tilting’ the neoliberal turn
Education is an important and defining element in young people's lives. When conceived properly, it has the potential to transform opportunities and life chances. It hardly comes as news that in recent times the authors have witnessed the inappropriate intrusion into education of notions of school reform that while they might arguably be in the national economic interest, are highly questionable from the vantage point of young people. In this pap…
Making ‘space’
Young people who disengage or disconnect from school are often demonised within the media and the wider public imagination, from a largely individualized and pathological positioning. Policy explanations and responses are often unhelpful in their focus on a range of ‘deficit’ attributes – poverty, poor parenting, dysfunctional families, low familial achievement, aspiration and motivation, and other ‘at risk’ categories. This paper offers a differ…
Speaking back to educational policy
The Labor government in Australia has recently embarked on an extremely ambitious program of social inclusion for the most marginalized groups in society. Drawing upon the approach of policy scholarship this paper examines some federal government ‘policy texts’ to describe what has occurred and asks questions about what is meant by the social inclusion policy orientation in the context of educational disadvantage. It challenges the efficacy of un…
Schooling and enterprise culture
This paper claims that current preoccupations with ‘enterprise culture’ in the policy and practice of schooling deflect attention from crucially important problems such as deindustrialization and the changing nature of work, the creation of meaningful work opportunities for the young, social justice, and moral and social regeneration. It is also claimed that ‘enterprise culture’ draws upon a social pathology, which locates problems in individuals…
The socially just school and critical pedagogies in communities put at a disadvantage
Public schools around the world have been hijacked and deformed beyond recognition by the forces of the economy over the past three decades. This paper provides an analysis and a way out of this miasma around the notion of the socially just school. While not another prescription, this orientation is argued to be the most hopeful possibility for those parts of the community that have lost the most through the spot-welding of schools onto the econo…
Where has class gone? The pervasiveness of class in girls' physical activity in a rural town
This paper seeks to animate discussion around how social class operates with adolescent girls from low socio-economic status backgrounds to shape and inform their decisions about participation in physical activity (PA) inside and outside of school. Examining the instance of girls in a single secondary school in an Australian regional town, the paper questions the impact of class and how the girls experience the obstacles, impediments and interfer…
The role of the house in early Neolithic Ireland
The focus of this article is the use and abandonment of the rectangular timber buildings of the Irish early Neolithic, a period that corresponds roughly with the first half of the fourth millennium cal BC. While they do not represent the only remains of occupation at this time, the fact that they display a striking degree of homogeneity of size, shape and materials makes them an especially interesting part of settlement activity on the island. On…
Social capital and the ‘socially just school’
This paper argues that growing inequalities make it imperative that schools reinvent themselves around the issue of social justice. Through a case study of an Australian primary school, teacher-based forms of social capital are explored revealing progressive pedagogies to be an important precursor to the ‘socially just school’
What's Wrong with Outcomes? Spotter planes, action plans, and steerage of the educational workplace
Educational outcomes have descended on schools with a ferocity unimaginable a few years ago. We have reached the point where outcomes rhetoric is so deeply embedded in the official discourses of schooling that it appears to be ‘the only game in town’. This paper outlines the economic rationalist origins of outcomes orientations, and uses an Australian background to expose the pervasive myth about the relationship of outcomes to aspects of teachin…
Unmasking teachers' subjectivities in local school management
Relatively little is known about how teachers are affected by reforms that have moved schools increasingly in the direction of becoming self-managing schools. While there has been much hype about the alleged benefits that flow from more flexible decision making processes shifted closer to the point of learning, the cutting of bureaucratic red tape, and the notion that schools are made more accountable to parents and students - relatively little i…
Early School Leaving and the Cultural Geography of High Schools [1]
Early school leaving is one of the most protracted educational problems around the world, but one of the least understood. Central to the issue itself, is the failure by the educational policy community to have ways of adequately ‘naming’ the problem. The study reported in this paper examines early school leaving from the position of 209 young Australians who had left school or who were at imminent risk of doing so. While acknowledging the consid…
Intellectual as Hustler
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 aut…
Supervision‐as‐school reform
The study reported upon in this paper examines the data from interviews with 200 American teachers from the State of Pennsylvania who had been subjected to a particular form of in‐class supervision known as the Madeline Hunter Model. Broadly representative of a range of intrusive surveillance schemes allegedly aimed at checking on efficiency and effectiveness, this process seems to have gained some pseudo‐legitimacy from the recommendations of a …
Developing and Sustaining Critical Reflection in Teacher Education
Smyth provides background informa tion on the emergence of reflectivity as a conceptual thrust in teacher education. He also discusses some of the impedi ments to empowerment that teachers and teacher educators confront as they attempt to implement critical reflection in their curricula. Smyth concludes that if teachers (and teacher educators) are going to uncover the forces that inhibit and constrain them, they need to en gage in four forms of a…
Problematising Teaching Through a 'Critical' Approach to Clinical Supervision
Problematising Teaching Through a ‘Critical’ Approach to Clinical Supervision
In this article I present four interrelated arguments: first, that there is a general case to be made for having teachers themselves (rather than administrators) view their teaching problematically and as a form of inquiry, as distinct from a form of prescription; second, that a compelling case can be made for the restoration of an appropriate version of clinical supervision capable of problematising teaching, and which is markedly different from…
International Perspectives on Teacher Collegiality
Broadly defined as teachers conferring and collaborating with other teachers, collegiality is becoming something of a new orthodoxy so far as educational policy makers are concerned. The implicit presumption behind such schemes as those of the ‘lead teacher’ programmes in the USA (and its derivatives in other countries) is that the team concept has the potential to unleash the kind of teacher creativity necessary to produce the kinds of educated …
Theories of the State and Recent Policy Reforms in Australian Higher Education
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn Smyth∗∗I express appreciation to Bob Lingard of University of Queensland and Pat O'Malley of LaTrobe University for helpful comments on the draft of this paper. ∗We wish to acknowledge our indebtedness to Eva Cox, Fran Hausfield and Sue Wills whose original paper “Taking the Queen's Shilling: Accepting Social Research Consultancies in the 1970's”, was the source of inspiration for reflection on the …
Teachers' Work and the Politics of Reflection
There has been a plethora of material written in recent times on reflective approaches to teaching and teacher education, but a dearth of material that looks behind these studies or asks why these reflective approaches are enjoying such popularity. This article tackles what has really become a major policy issue in the literature in four ways. First, it argues that the rhetoric of devolution and practitioner forms of knowledge may not be entirely…
Teachers’ Work and the Politics of Reflection
There has been a plethora of material written in recent times on reflective approaches to teaching and teacher education, but a dearth of material that looks behind these studies or asks why these reflective approaches are enjoying such popularity. This article tackles what has really become a major policy issue in the literature in four ways. First, it argues that the rhetoric of devolution and practitioner forms of knowledge may not be entirely…
Evaluation of teacher performance
There is a good deal of intrinsic appeal and widespread support for the notion of teacher evaluation for development and growth, as distinct from conformity, compliance and control. Phrases like 'collaboration', continuous learning cultures ''partnerships', 'collegiality' and 'teachers‐as‐learners' roll easily off the lips, but we are beginning to discover that these supposedly more enlightened approaches have their own quite serious shortcomings…
Critical Discourses on Teacher Development
Perceptions of teachers' working methods and their professional development is a major educational issue. As economies around the world are subject to major restructuring, schools and teachers are also affected. This book discusses this situation
Contracting for Services in a Decentralized System
Public management is changing rapidly due to the extensive privatization of public services through government contracting with private organizations and the devolution of the funding and administration of government programs to states and localities. These trends are spurred by a belief in the salutary effects of market competition and local decision making on public services. This article presents research on contracting for substance abuse ser…
The politics and context of calls for cross‐sectoral collaborative research
This paper focuses on the contemporary trend towards cross‐sectoral education research as a policy issue. It looks at the basis of the claims for collaborative research and questions the genesis of the press for these moves, the efficacy of some of the claims, and the largely unexamined source of what is becoming a fashionable tendency. The attempt is to try and get ‘inside’ the concept in the sense of understanding what it is that is driving cal…
What's Wrong with Outcomes? Spotter planes, action plans, and steerage of the educational workplace
Educational outcomes have descended on schools with a ferocity unimaginable a few years ago. We have reached the point where outcomes rhetoric is so deeply embedded in the official discourses of schooling that it appears to be ‘the only game in town’. This paper outlines the economic rationalist origins of outcomes orientations, and uses an Australian background to expose the pervasive myth about the relationship of outcomes to aspects of teachin…
Schooling and enterprise culture
This paper claims that current preoccupations with ‘enterprise culture’ in the policy and practice of schooling deflect attention from crucially important problems such as deindustrialization and the changing nature of work, the creation of meaningful work opportunities for the young, social justice, and moral and social regeneration. It is also claimed that ‘enterprise culture’ draws upon a social pathology, which locates problems in individuals…
Doing Critical Cultural Studies
Teacher Education in Transition
(2000). Teacher Education in Transition: Re-forming professionalism. British Journal of Sociology of Education: Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 637-647
Intellectual as Hustler
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 aut…
Voiced' Research as a Sociology for Understanding 'Dropping Out' of School
How people obtain more complex understandings of the phenomenon of 'dropping out' of school is one of the most urgent policy and practice issues facing educational practitioners, policy-makers and sociological researchers at the moment. Smyth and Hattam argue that a different 'sociological imagination' is required--one that is simultaneously more attentive to the lifeworlds of young people and more reflexive of its own agenda
Unmasking teachers' subjectivities in local school management
Relatively little is known about how teachers are affected by reforms that have moved schools increasingly in the direction of becoming self-managing schools. While there has been much hype about the alleged benefits that flow from more flexible decision making processes shifted closer to the point of learning, the cutting of bureaucratic red tape, and the notion that schools are made more accountable to parents and students - relatively little i…
Early School Leaving and the Cultural Geography of High Schools [1]
Early school leaving is one of the most protracted educational problems around the world, but one of the least understood. Central to the issue itself, is the failure by the educational policy community to have ways of adequately ‘naming’ the problem. The study reported in this paper examines early school leaving from the position of 209 young Australians who had left school or who were at imminent risk of doing so. While acknowledging the consid…
Geographies of Exclusion' in the Policy Reform of Teachers' Work
(2002). 'Geographies of Exclusion' in the Policy Reform of Teachers' Work. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 357-363
Tackling School Leaving at its Source
One of the most pervasive educational issues confronting Australia, and other countries, at the moment is the declining completion rates in high schools. While a period of success was experienced after the Second World War, there is now a pressing need to reform high schools in the ways they connect with young lives. In this paper, we present a 'sociology of the high school' as a way of encapsulating the high school as an institution that: is sti…
Social capital and the ‘socially just school’
This paper argues that growing inequalities make it imperative that schools reinvent themselves around the issue of social justice. Through a case study of an Australian primary school, teacher-based forms of social capital are explored revealing progressive pedagogies to be an important precursor to the ‘socially just school’
Teachers' Work in a Globalizing Economy
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 ac…
Researching teachers working with young adolescents
Ethnography has the capacity to interrogate and unravel what Geertz called ‘webs of significance’ in respect of difficult and perplexing cultural issues. One arena that is especially troubling at the moment lies in the need to pose questions and explore more robust explanations as to how it is that some teachers of young adolescents seem to be able to reinvent themselves in ways that make a difference for this group of students. These are teacher…
Sociology (62 obras) · Political science (46 obras) · Law (36 obras) · Pedagogy (30 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Social science (23 obras) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (23 obras) · Education Systems and Policy (22 obras) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (21 obras) · Gender Studies (20 obras)