Towards a disruptive pedagogy: Creating spaces for student and teacher resistance to social injustice

The impetus for this paper lies in a desire to identify students and teachers as active agents who can and do make a difference in challenging socially unjust practices within their schools. This paper examines the politicised disruptive activity of students in one Australian state secondary school. These students sought to implement social justice processes within their school. Their actions were facilitated by the existing political context in which the state education system supports social justice initiatives within schools. However, more importantly for the success of the students' actions in this study was the role played by teachers in assisting students to create spaces through which discourses of resistance could be heard. It is the relationship between students and teachers in creating these spaces which lies at the heart of the disruptive pedagogy considered here.