Barry Down

Bruce Johnson

Rosie Le Cornu

Judy Peters

Anna Sullivan

Jane Pearce

Janet Hunter

This book addresses one of the most persistent issues confronting governments, educations systems and schools today: the attraction, preparation, and retention of early career teachers. It draws on the stories of sixty graduate teachers from Australia to identify the key barriers, interferences and obstacles to teacher resilience and what might be done about it. Based on these stories, five interrelated themes - policies and practices, school culture, teacher identity, teachers’ work, and relationships – provide a framework for dialogue around what kinds of conditions need to be created and sustained in order to promote early career teacher resilience. The book provides a set of resources – stories, discussion, comments, reflective questions and insights from the literature – to promote conversations among stakeholders rather than providing yet another ‘how to do’ list for improving the daily lives of early career teachers. Teaching is a complex, fragile and uncertain profession. It operates in an environment of unprecedented educational reforms designed to control, manage and manipulate pedagogical judgements. Teacher resilience must take account of both the context and circumstances of individual schools (especially those in economically disadvantaged communities) and the diversity of backgrounds and talents of early career teachers themselves. The book acknowledges that the substantial level of change required– cultural, structural, pedagogical and relational – to improve early career teacher resilience demands a great deal of cooperation and support from governments, education systems, schools, universities and communities: teachers cannot do it alone. This book is written to generate conversations amongst early career teachers, teacher colleagues, school leaders, education administrators, academics and community leaders about the kinds of pedagogical and relational conditions required to promote early career teacher resilience and wellbeing.

Stories of Resilience

Early Career Teachers

John Smyth

Peter McInerney

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 upon four decades of intensive writing and researching of young lives. This work presents an alternative to the damaging school reform in which schools are made to serve the interests of the economy, education systems, the military, corporate or national interests. Readers will discover the hallmarks of socially just schools: - They educationally engage young people regardless of class, race, family or neighbourhood location and they engage them around their own educational aspirations. - They regard all young people as being morally entitled to a rewarding and satisfying experience of school, not only those whose backgrounds happen to fit with the values of schools. - They treat young people as having strengths and being ‘at promise’ rather than being ‘at risk’ and with ‘deficits’ or as ‘bundles of pathologies’ to be remedied or ‘fixed’. - They are ‘active listeners’ to the lives and cultures of their students and communities and they construct learning experiences that are embedded in young lives. This highly readable book will appeal to students and scholars in education and sociology, as well as to teachers and school administrators with an interest in social justice.

Making Space for Youth to Speak Back

The Socially Just School

Shirley R. Steinberg

This extensive Handbook will bring together different aspects of critical pedagogy with the aim of opening up a clear international conversation on the subject, as well as pushing the boundaries of current understanding by extending the notion of a pedagogy to multiple pedagogies and perspectives. Bringing together a group of contributing authors from around the globe, the chapters will provide a unique approach and insight to the discipline by crossing a range of disciplines and articulating both philosophical and social common themes. The chapters will be organised across three volumes and twelve core thematic sections. The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies is planned to be an essential benchmark publication for advanced students, researchers and practitioners across a wide range of disciplines including education, health, sociology, anthropology and development studies

The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies

Lawrence Angus

Activist and Socially Critical School and Community Renewal comes about at an incredibly important point in history, and it offers a genuinely new paradigm. This book attempts what few others have tried—to bring together knowledge and literature around school reform and community renewal through authentic ethnographic stories of real schools and communities.

Social Justice in Exploitative Times

Activist and Socially Critical School and Community Renewal

Barry Down

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