Resisting Educational Inequality: Reframing Policy and Practice in Schools Serving Vulnerable Communities

Resisting Educational Inequality examines poverty, social exclusion and vulnerability in educational contexts at a time of rising inequality and when policy research suggests that such issues are being ignored or distorted within neoliberal logics. In this volume, leading scholars from Australia and across the UK examine these issues through three main focus areas: Mapping the damage: what are our explanations for the persistent nature of educational inequality? Resources for hope: what do we know about how educational engagement and success can be improved in schools serving vulnerable communities? Sustaining hope: how might we reframe research, policy and practice in the future? Using a range of theories and methodologies, including empirical and theory-building work as well as policy critique, this book opens innovative areas of thinking about the social issues surrounding educational practice and policy. By exploring different explanations and approaches to school change and considering how research, policy and practice might be reframed, this book moves systematically and insightfully through damage towards hope. In combining pedagogy, policy and experience, Resisting Educational Inequality will be a valuable resource for all researchers and students, policymakers and education practitioners.

Table of Contents:
1 Researching educational sites serving ‘disadvantaged’ (sub)urban communities: reframing policy and practice Susanne Gannon, Robert Hattam and Wayne Sawyer FOCUS AREA 1 Mapping the damage 2 Resisting educational inequity and the ‘bracketing out’ of disadvantage in contemporary schooling Stewart Riddle 3 Beyond ‘naïve possibilitarianism’ in urban schools in England Lori Beckett 4 Moving beyond the academic and vocational divide in Australian schools Barry Down 5 Beginning teacher subjectivity and pedagogical encounters in low SES schools Susanne Gannon 6 Challenging beginning teachers’ misconceptions of the effects of poverty on educational attainment in an initial teacher education programme in England Ian Thompson 7 Circling a conflicted policy landscape: child poverty and education in Northern Ireland Tony Gallagher, Ruth Leitch and Joanne Hughes 8 Mapping possible futures: funds of aspiration and educational desire Susanne Gannon, Mohamed Moustakim, Dorian Stoilescu and David Wright FOCUS AREA 2 Resources for hope 9 Effective pedagogies for enhancing preschoolers’ engagement with learning in disadvantaged communities Leonie Arthur and Christine Woodrow 10 Creating space for a shared repertoire: re-imagining pedagogies to cultivate transcultural and translingual competencies Jacqueline D’warte 11 Teacher development through collaborative research in low SES contexts: a tale of two schools Katina Zammit and Wayne Sawyer 12 Poverty and school processes: from equality of opportunity to relational justice Karen Laing, Laura Mazzoli Smith and Liz Todd 13 Hope, spaces, and possible selves: processes of becoming socially critical teachers Alison Wrench 14 Quality teaching discourses: a contested terrain Jo Lampert, Bruce Burnett, Barbara Comber, Angela Ferguson and Naomi Barnes 15 Realigning young peoples’ aspirations: triggers and processes Katrina Barker and Margaret Vickers 16 Ideas of community: assembling new governance in early childhood education Anne Power, Christine Woodrow and Joanne Orlando 17 ‘Dumping grounds’ and ‘rubbish tips’: challenging metaphors for alternative education provision Martin Mills, Richard Waters, Peter Renshaw and Lew Zipin FOCUS AREA 3 How might we reframe research, policy and practice in the future? 18 Ethnographies in education: misunderstandings and new developments Debra Hayes and Meghan Stacey 19 Researching the ‘North’: educational ethnographies of a (sub)urban region Robert Hattam 20 Educational exclusion? It’s what we do and it’s always been thus Roger Slee 21 Shifting paradigms: can education compensate for society? David Egan 22 Transforming the curriculum frame: working knowledge around problems that matter Lew Zipin and Marie Brennan 23 Schools as sites of advanced capitalism: reading radical inequality radically Margaret Somerville 24 Poor children need rich teaching, not deficit labelling Terry Wrigley 25 Writing as bodywork: poverty, literacy and unspoken pain in ex-mining south Wales valleys communities Gabrielle Ivinson and Emma Renold 26 Reclaiming educational equality: towards a manifesto Robert Hattam, Wayne Sawyer and Susanne Gannon