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 ...

What is education, what is it for and what are its fundamental values? How do we understand knowledge and learning? What is our image of the child and the school? How does the ever more pressing need to develop a more just, creative and sustainable democratic society affect our responses to these questions?Addressing these fundamental issues, Fielding and Moss contest the current mainstream dominated by markets and competition, instrumentality and standardisation, managerialism and...

From climate change to GM foods, we are increasingly confronted with complex, interconnected social and environmental problems that span disciplines, knowledge bases and value systems. This book offers a transdisciplinary, open approach for those working towards resolving these 'wicked' problems and highlights the crucial role of this 'transdisciplinary imagination' in addressing the shift to sustainable futures. Tackling Wicked Problems provides readers with a framework and practical exam...

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...

The widespread use of the measurement of educational outcomes in order to compare the performance of education within and across countries seems to express a real concern for the quality of education. This book argues that the focus on the measurement of educational outcomes has actually displaced questions about educational purpose. Biesta explores why the question as to what constitutes good education has become so much more difficult to ask and shows why this has been detrimental for th...

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...

′What makes this book stand out in the crowd is the engaging approach the authors have taken to present their argument and the novel treatment they offer of diversity and diversity management…a must-read for anyone in a leadership position or interested in investigating education leadership and diversity′ - Gender and Education′The authors should be congratulated for tackling the crucial topic of diversity within educational leadership….the book makes a ma...

Doing Educational Research in Rural Settings is a much-needed guidefor educational researchers whose research interests are located outside metropolitan areas in places that are generically considered to be rural. This book is both timely and important as it takes up the key question of how to conduct educational research within and for rural communities. It explores the impact of educational research in such contexts in terms of the lasting good of research and also those being r...

Transforming Social Work Practice shows that postmodern theory offers new strategies for social workers concerned with political action and social justice. It explores ways of developing practice frameworks, paradigms and principles which take advantage of the perspectives offered by postmodern theory without totally abandoning the values of modernity and the Enlightenment project of human emancipation. Case studies demonstrate how these perspectives can be applied to practice.