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Inside Teaching : June 2010
Inside Teaching | June 2010 RESEARCH 38 damaged, or never established, young lives suffer dramatically as a consequence. This is, then, a book that highlights some big themes: • the importance of investing in relational power • the crucial need for student and community voice • engaging with 'poverty of opportunity' in disadvantaged schools, and • conceiving of schools as places committed to being critically reflective of themselves and the wider society of which they are a part. We've called the book 'Hanging in with kids' in Tough Times because: (a) of the crucial need for imaginative ways in which to re-engage (or re-enchant?) disengaged young people with learning despite the difficulties, impediments and obstacles; (b) this kind of language reflects the street level vernacular that young people themselves, along with their teachers, often use to cut though complex issues to get to the nub of the matter; and (c) it conveys, albeit in coded form, something about the importance of the harsh contextual conditions that operate to shape lives, and in turn speak back to those conditions. The kind of research questions animating us, and that have drawn us into this area in the first place, are questions like: • How are young people that are deemed to be disengaged envisaged by the policy process? • Who forms these views, how have such views come to be, and what is holding them in place? • Whose interests are advanced by continuing to present the prevailing view of educational disengagement, and whose are excluded? • Are the policy responses to educational disengagement ones that foreground the lives and interests of young people themselves, or is there some other agenda at work? • What might an approach look like that attempts to listen deeply, seeks to be inclusive, and that responds appropriately to what is going on? • What is the basis for a more courageous approach to educational engagement that stands up to and contests dominant perspectives? Empirical research informing this book involved a cluster of four senior secondary schools in a regional part of Australia. With student numbers ranging from 800 to 1,000, the four government schools offered a comprehensive curriculum for students in Years 8 to 12. Notwithstanding the prosperity generated by manufacturing, mining and tourism, the region was characterised by high levels of unemployment and welfare dependency. With the cooperation of regional education authorities and the municipal council, we set speed with which the tectonic plates of capitalism are moving unpredictably at the moment, and with no signs of that abating any time soon, economic and social disadvantage in affluent countries can only be expected to substantially worsen before it shows any signs of improving. In all likelihood, more and more young people in schools will come from challenging backgrounds, and schools, communities and the public policy process will need to be much more significantly attuned along the empirical, discursive and activist lines discussed in this book. Schools operating most effectively in the most disadvantaging contexts are fundamentally committed to issues that suture together 'relational power.' That is to say, they regard structures, governance, resourcing issues, organisation, management and leadership as being important, but only to the extent that they contribute to the valued social end of improving the life chances of the least advantaged. The fundamental point, totally absent from the neo- liberal human capital view of schooling, is that relationships are of paramount importance -- between young people and adults, between schools and communities, among young people themselves, and most importantly, in the connectedness to the big ideas that define their lives and the wider world they live in. When these relationships are missing,