Activist dispositions for social justice in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling

This article advances current conceptions of teacher activism through an exploration of the social justice dispositions of teachers in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling. We interrogate the practices of teachers in a government school, with a high proportion of refugee students and students from low socio-economic backgrounds, in a high-fees, multi-campus independent school, and in a disadvantaged Systemic Catholic school to illustrate how Bourdieu’s notion of dispositions (which are constitutive of the habitus) and Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative justice are together productive of four types of teacher activism. Specifically, we show that activist dispositions can be characterised as either affirmative or transformative in stance and as either internally or externally focused in relation to the education field. We argue that the social, cultural and material conditions of schools are linked to teachers’ activist dispositions and conclude with the challenge for redressing educational inequalities by fostering a transformative activism in teachers’ practices.     

#Eduresistance: a critical analysis of the role of digital media in collective struggles for public education in the USA

From Facebook-coordinated high-school walkouts to compelling Internet-based protest art that has accompanied recent teacher strikes, grassroots education activism in the USA has gone digital. Despite the proliferation of research on the mediatisation of education policy, few studies have explored the ways in which activists for public education engage with Web 2.0 technologies. This paper makes a contribution to this under-researched area by exploring selected activist accounts including Parents Across America, United Opt Out National, and the PS 2013 campaign in New York City. I draw on critical, feminist, and cultural studies theories of education and social movement media to analyse activist media practices in a policy and political milieu dominated by corporate media and neoliberal governance structures. The analysis reveals that progressive education activists strategically deploy digital media to amplify voice, build collective identity, and disseminate alternative knowledge to enable direct action. A situated analysis also reveals significant differences in activist media practice which are shaped by particular political histories and geographies. The paper concludes with a discussion about future lines of inquiry into the role of digital media in collective struggles for public education.     

Educational leadership and social activism: a call for action

The purpose of this article is to argue for a social activist stance in educational leadership that fundamentally addresses social change and human emancipation. This call for social activism is framed within neoliberal, neoconservative, and authoritarian populist discourses in the USA, which to social justice educators and leaders had devastating effects on education. Empirical data from an activist high school principal, activist university professor, and activist priest reflects their development of political clarity, political capacity, political collaboration, and an ethic of risk. It is suggested that the work of socially active educational leaders needs to be broadened to include such things as public policy advocacy, networking, organising, community development, and scholarship. Finally, the article concludes with a variety of ways educational leaders can demonstrate their social, moral, and political activism as they challenge the status quo, fight for social justice, and come to understand the politicised notion of leadership.     

# tellPearson: the activist ‘public education’ network

This paper investigates the contemporary nature of education activism in the context of the Global Education Industry (GEI). Theorising around contentious politics, the activist teaching profession, and notions of ‘connective’ action, suggests that educational activists are now using social media to oppose the increasing commercialisation of education. This paper focuses on the ‘#tellPearson’ campaign to explore how Twitter was leveraged as a social space to promote a campaign against the activities of Pearson plc. Analysis of this Twitter network shows how new social structures are being used to frame issues, mobilise resources and promote stakeholder action. While it is difficult to offer definitive conclusions about the success of this campaign, it is possible to reflect on the strategies now being used to hold those in positions of power and influence in the GEI to account.     

Developing Reflexive identities through collaborative,interdisciplinary and precarious work: the experience of early career researchers

This paper explores the experiences of 24 Early Career Researchers working in interdisciplinary and precarious employment conditions in which they are managing collaborations with multiple partners beyond the university as part of the AHRC’s ‘Connected Communities’ Programme. These conditions emerge from conflicting sources – from critical and emancipatory moves in knowledge production as well as from globalising neoliberal education policies. The paper draws on Archer’s concept of reflexive identity to identify four different reflexive orientations developed by ECRs in these conditions: the disciplinarian, the freelancer, the worker bee and the social activist.     

The Steward Street School experiment: a critical case study of possibilities

This article presents a critical case study of an inner city state school that for a decade (1940s–1950s) attracted the interest of a wide contingency of educationalists, policy makers, researchers, artists and various press and film media. It has been argued that if we are to progress ‘social alternatives’ in education, researchers need to construct ‘critical case studies of possibilities’ drawing inspiration from traces of experimental and utopian practice in schools from the past as well as the present. The article demonstrates how this might be achieved through research that questions dominant narratives, goes beyond the public accounts of particular sites of experimentation and explores multiple‐narratives embedded in the records of past practice. The authors argue that such situated counter‐currents in the history of education are necessary both to inform our collective notions of past experience and enrich our regard for future possibilities.     

儿童媒介教育:历史的考察与现实的追问

大众媒介在给儿童带来新鲜与便利时,也制造着前所未有的麻烦和困扰,如何保障儿童在媒介社会中健康成长是我国儿童教育的一个重要议题。本文从媒介本身出发,分析媒介的本质含义,考察儿童媒介教育的历史进程,借鉴国际媒介教育的先进经验,对我国儿童媒介教育中的现实问题进行了分析和阐释。     

Authoring Data Stories in a Media Makerspace: Adolescents Developing Critical Data Literacies

This article centers sociocultural and sociopolitical considerations of how young people understand, represent, and use data by presenting findings from a social design research study about how students in a public urban high school authored “data stories” using personal data they curated, collected, and visualized. The study contributes to theoretical understandings of critical data literacies by considering the experiences and practices of adolescents enrolled in a required media arts class as they produced data visualizations drawn from their everyday lives. Findings center on two aspects of critical data literacies youth developed—understanding themselves as people capable of using data for multiple purposes and understanding data as socially situated resources for meaning-making. This study foregrounds the importance of positioning youth as authors and architects of data, making central youth perspectives in understanding the role of data in young people’s digitally connected lives and highlighting the importance of expanding what “counts” as data. It also suggests the importance of creating infrastructure to support the development of culturally relevant data practices that highlight the social, cultural, and political uses of data and its racialized dimensions.     

Social violence and the trivialising effects of youth in school bullying: Extended listening to South Australian young people on bullying and violence

School bullying attracts significant research and resources globally, yet critical questions are being raised about the long-term impact of these efforts. There is a disconnect between young people's perspectives and the long-established psychology-based technical definitions of school bullying dominating practice and policy in Australia. This dominant paradigm has recently been described as the first paradigm of school bullying. In contrast, this paper explores the potential for reorienting school bullying research towards the concerns of young people and away from adult-derived technical definitions. Borrowing from paradigm two, which emphasises the social, cultural and philosophical (among others) elements of school bullying, in this paper, I approach bullying under the broad banner of ‘social violence’. This approach addresses some of the inherent limitations of the first paradigm to conceptualise social and cultural dynamics. I argue that a ‘social violence’ approach reveals that the exclusionary effects of the social phenomenon of youth continue to be overlooked. Furthermore, the term ‘violence’ in bullying research could benefit from integrating contemporary sociological insights on this phenomenon. This paper draws on qualitative insights from a small group of young people in secondary schooling in South Australia gained through prolonged listening to peer conversations in a series of focus groups. In addition, 1:1 interviews were conducted pre and post the focus group series. I argue that these participants' insights reveal the exclusionary effects of youth and the employment of bullying to trivialise young people's experiences and concern for harm. There is a need to reprioritise young people's knowledge in school bullying research and the exclusionary effects of youth alongside other social forces.     

Taking on Bourdieu’s ‘destiny effect’: theorising the development and sustainability of a socially just second-chance schooling initiative using a Bourdieusian framework

This article aims to theorise a storyline account of a collaborative three-year action research project into schooling re-engagement using a Bourdieusian framework. In the article we discuss how we (two teachers and a social worker) developed an alternative senior secondary school that re-engaged a sizable minority of marginalised young people back into formalised learning and consider how this school became a significant and sustainable educational alternative. Our work during this developmental period drew us into community-based activism enacting socially just curricular and pedagogical experiments. Through networked political action for schooling justice in concert with critical friends (our university partners), the marginalised young people we worked with and supportive regional youth stakeholders, we reconstructed our professional habitus as professionals into a more enabling rendering and strived to proffer through our relational, pedagogical and curricular work with students more of a transformative habitus. Our curricular and activist work inside the community extended the field of schooling relations into a more socially just orientation. This more enabling community field merged with our schooling field and enabled us to source political capital engendering secure, recurrent school funding and a purpose-built schooling facility. We claim that the market logics of schooling significantly influenced our beginning enrolment growth trajectory, and discuss how these logics compromised our ability to break through Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘destiny effect’. Since its inception in 2003, the Second Chance Community College has offered a comprehensive senior secondary schooling programme for more than 1000 young people. Throughout its 12-year history, the majority of students have gone on to secure work, apprenticeships and tertiary study but only 10% of students have successfully completed their final year of schooling.     

Eco-Transactional Influences on Sociopolitical Youth Development Work

An emerging and growing body of research has clearly established the importance of youth building sociopolitical consciousness in order to be more democratically engaged citizens. An overwhelming amount of sociopolitical youth development work occurs outside of school. Much of the research on this work has focused on youth outcomes, and we know little about sociopolitical youth workers, the types of experiences and influences from which they draw, and how those experiences and influences emerge in their work. To attempt to fill this void, the author uses life history methodology to showcase two sociopolitical youth workers (“activist mentors”). Using Watts, Williams, and Jager's eco-transactional model of sociopolitical development as an analytic tool, the author explains and uncovers ways in which an amalgamation of past events, relationships, and environmental influences inform and emerge in activist mentors' work with youth activists. Findings indicate that activist mentors' ecological and transactional influences shape the ways in which they discuss their development of collective identities with their mentees, developmental spaces, and healing approaches to their work. This study points to a need for further research to understand what informs the work of sociopolitical youth workers, how their work is influenced, and the role of critical self-reflection in sociopolitical youth development work.     

A gaggle of raging grannies: the empowerment of older Canadian women through social activism

This article explores a particular expression of social activism by older Canadian women to consider its implications for later life learning. ‘Older women’, despite their heterogeneity, have tended to be pathologized as a part of the ‘problem’ of ageing and languishing welfare societies—i.e. stereotyped as passive recipients of welfare and healthcare services. Yet, they can also be seen as part of the ‘answer’ to the challenges societies like Canada face. Given the combination of a greying population and the growing tide of citizens' participatory democracy, it is timely and important to shed light on older women's social activism. Based on document analysis and fieldwork with the Raging Grannies in Canada, this qualitative case study examines the influence of activism on women's later life learning and development from an interdisciplinary perspective including adult development, critical gerontology, women's studies and psychodrama. Analysis focuses on the Grannies' motivations, the strategies they employ in their activities and the process of learning and changes they say they undergo. Themes emerging from document analysis, interviews and participant observation of 15 Grannies in Ontario are divided into three categories: (1) ‘Raging Grannies’ as a self‐defined social role; (2) the Grannies' dual‐layered mask strategies; and (3) their collective identity and sense of empowerment. These do much to explain the successes of Raging Grannies' activism as a social movement, which fosters older women's creative energy, critical awareness and self‐assurance despite their physical and psychological problems in later life. Implications of the Raging Grannies' movement help us reconsider current trends in later life learning, which tend overlook the needs and abilities of women in the third age.     

Environmental Education Researchers as Environmental Activists

This article is a reflective account of a researcher's journey whilst embarking on a study which was political in its intentions and participatory in its orientation. Learning from feminist writings, where researchers have shared stories and explored notions of insider/outside, academic/activist, the central argument of the article is the development of an activist approach to environmental education research. The article draws on a doctoral research study which was a critical ethnography of a school and community engaged in a socially critical approach to environmental education.     

Educators and youth activists: A negotiation over enhancing students’ role in school life

Recent attention to youth activism for school reform reveals positive student outcomes. Yet educators may object to the use of social actions in schools, diminishing opportunities for these benefits to accrue. This paper analyzes educators’ conceptions about the proper exercise of student voice within schools and how these coincide with activists’ tactics for school reform. The qualitative investigation rests on interviews with principals, teachers, community organizers, and students—all touched by a community-based program that encourages urban youth to organize and transform their schools. The paper seeks to bridge the perspectives of educators and activists in ways that enhance acceptance of a more robust role for students in school life.     

Actions for sociopolitical consciousness in a high school science class: A case study of ninth grade class with predominantly indigenous students

This case study explores how a group of Grade 9 students engaged in sociopolitical discourses and actions in a science class in a mostly indigenous student school in Nepal. The study used sociopolitical consciousness (SPC) as a framework to document and understand indigenous students’ SPC-oriented science interactions and subsequent social change actions. We used ethnographic methods of data collection over 6 months. The study focused on the actions of 4 girls and 2 boys belonging to the indigenous Tharu group. Data were analyzed using iterative qualitative methods. The study findings show that students are capable of engaging in critical thinking, critical reflecting, and taking actions for social change. Additionally, students are competent to link their experiences with social, structural, and political discrimination to the relevant science content they learn. The study presents four thematic findings related to SPC and science teaching and learning: Fostering social justice awareness in science class, fostering structural understanding of inequities in sickle cell disease, fostering sociopolitical actions for sickle cell disease, and the teacher's activist pedagogy for SPC in science learning. Implications of the study are that culturally relevant pedagogy helps indigenous students to become sociopolitically more aware of the links between science and social change. Adding aspects of critical pedagogies in science teaching could encourage students to become more sociopolitically reflective about science learning.     

From Digital Consumption to Digital Invention: Toward a New Critical Theory and Practice of Multiliteracies

The teaching of media and digital literacies has gained increased attention in the 20 years following the New London Group’s landmark publication. From approaches urging the study of popular culture to calls for youth led social media revolution, there is no shortage of approaches. Yet scant attention is offered toward articulating a new and comprehensive theory of pedagogy and production that acknowledges the changing tools and technologies at young people’s disposal, conceptualizes young people as media producers, and applies these developments to today’s complex classroom context. We aim to articulate a new critical theory of multiliteracies that encompasses 4 types of digital engagement: (a) critical digital consumption, (b) critical digital production, (c) critical distribution, and (d) critical digital invention. We make the argument that a new critical theory of multiliteracies needs to account for each of these types of digital engagement but that, ultimately, we must move beyond theorizing our youth as passive consumers or even critical users of digital technologies toward the project of facilitating youth communities of digital innovation.     

‘It gets narrower’: creative strategies for re-broadening queer peer education

Using collaborative performance ethnography in community- and school-based settings, sex education has the potential to challenge at-risk narratives for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) youth. This paper problematises the youth-led drama project Epic Queer to test the ‘queer’ potential of youth-driven initiatives at the school and community level, and to reject the singularity of victimised and ‘at-risk’ narratives so pervasive in sex education internationally about queer youth. By drawing on the It Gets Better Project as an example of widespread but narrowing social media texts encouraging normativity, deferred pleasure and a happiness narrative, this paper argues for the potential of performance-based arts engagement for re-expanding queer youth subjectivities.     

Embracing Urban Youth Culture in the Context of Education

The rise of post industrial urban centers and global communication technologies has created a distinctive Urban Youth Culture (UYC) with roots in Black history and social activism. In the discourse on education and Black youth, UYC is rarely seen as a positive force promoting academic achievement and self esteem. Drawing on the voices of Black urban youth in an all-male high school mentoring program, this article offers an affirming view on the significance and pragmatism of UYC to a group of young men at an East Coast high school. Findings reveal that the young men related to and relied on UYC to help them negotiate school and establish positive academic and social identities for themselves.     

阿普尔批判教育研究的批判逻辑

作为美国新马克思主义教育哲学的创立者和最早在北美倡导批判教育运动的领军人物之一,阿普尔对由右翼保守势力主导的市场化和私有化的教育改革已经进行了长达四十多年的批判研究。在批判立场上,阿普尔表现出对社会草根群体的现实关怀;在批判方法上,阿普尔采取了情境化的关系分析进路;在批判旨趣上,阿普尔致力于民主社会的教育重建,其实践策略包括将批判性反思、学校变革、民主实践的捍卫与对教育改革中赤裸裸的经济逻辑的抵制相结合的"非改革主义的改革",将教师、社区和社会活动家等众多教育利益相关者动员起来积极参与学校教育变革的"厚民主"的教育,以及旨在实现教育领域的知识分子从单纯以知识生产为目的的"学者"转变为能够基于自己所发现的知识在政治和教育层面上为追求经济、社会和教育的平等与民主开展行动的"活动家"的身份重塑。     

Stories of self,stories of practice: enacting a vision of socially just pedagogy for Latino youth

This narrative inquiry examines how one Latina novice teacher articulates and implements a vision of teaching for social justice within the contexts of her teacher education program and her practice as a bilingual resource teacher. Informed by Latino/a critical race (LatCrit) theory, the analysis traces connections between stories of self and practice, focusing on her development of an innovative middle school literacy course for Spanish speakers. This article highlights the ways in which she recruits her experiences as a member of a marginalized group and brings them to bear on practice in the crafting of a critical pedagogy that takes learners’ interests and concerns as central while encouraging social action. Findings are discussed in light of the following themes: critical questioning and resistance; analysis of systems of oppression and positioning; and encouraging social action and practicing democracy. This study has implications for teacher preparation committed to socially just pedagogies for all children, but especially for Latino/a youth.