Living on the Edge: Rethinking Poverty, Class and Schooling, Second Edition confronts one of the most enduring and controversial issues in education—the nexus between poverty and underachievement. This topic stubbornly remains a key contemporary battleground in the struggle to raise standards. Living on the Edge maps and compares a number of competing explanations, critiques inadequate and deficit accounts and offers a more convincing and useful theory. The authors challe...

Becoming Educated examines the education of young people, especially those from the most ‘disadvantaged’ contexts. The book argues that because the focus has been obdurately and willfully on the wrong things – blaming students; measuring, testing and comparing them; and treating families and communities in demeaning ways that convert them into mere ‘consumers’ – that the resulting misdiagnoses have produced a damaging ensemble of faulty ‘solutions.’ By shifting the emphasis to loo...

This book explores schools and how they can function as social institutions that advance the interests and life chances of all young people, especially those who are already the most marginalized and at an educational disadvantage. Social justice is a key theme as the book examines the needs of youth, the concept of school culture, school/community relations, socially critical pedagogy, curriculum and leadership and a socially critical approach to work. The Socially Just School is based up...

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 ...

Outlining sociology’s distinctive contribution to childhood studies and our understanding of contemporary children and childhood, The Sociology of Children, Childhood and Generation provides a thought provoking and comprehensive account of the connections between the macro worlds of childhood and the micro worlds of children’s everyday lives.Examining children’s involvement in areas such as the labour market, family life, education, play and leisure, the book provi...

We live in a time when those who wield unrestrained power believe they have the inalienable right to determine the destiny, nature and shape of social institutions like schools. Critical Pedagogy for Social Justice challenges this arrogance by showing how teachers, students, parents, communities, and researchers can develop narratives that amount to working with and for those who are increasingly being silenced, marginalized and excluded.John Smyth sets out to revisit crit...

It has always been recognised that the practice of social work raises ethical questions and dilemmas. Recently, however, traditional ways of addressing ethical issues in social work have come to seem inadequate, as a result of developments both in philosophy and in social work theory and practice. This collection of thought-provoking essays explores the ethics of social work practice on the light of these changes.Ethical Issues in Social Work provides up to date critical an...

Education, Globalisation and New Times comprises a selection of the most influential papers published over the twenty-one years of the Journal of Education Policy. Written by many of the leading scholars in the field, these seminal papers cover a variety of subjects, sectors and levels of education, focused around the following major themes:education, globalisation and new timespolicy theory and methodpolicy and equity.Comp...

The homeless person is thought to be different. Whereas we get to determine our difference or sameness, the homeless person’s difference is imposed upon them and assumed to be known because of their homelessness. Exclusion from housing – either a commodity that should be accessed from the market or social provision – signifies the homeless person’s incapacities and failure to function in what are presented as unproblematic social systems.Drawing on a program of research spanning te...

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 accommodate, resist or redefine their working ...

Over the last 20 years there has been a flourishing of work on feminist care ethics. This collection makes a unique contribution to this body of work. The international contributors demonstrate the significance of care ethics as a transformative way of thinking across diverse geographical, policy and interpersonal contexts. From Tronto’s analysis of global responsibilities, to Fudge Schormans’ re-imagining of care from the perspective of people with learning disabilities, chapters highligh...

This text provides a discussion of the meaning of teacher professionalism and how it can be improved.