Researching for social justice: contextual, conceptual and methodological challenges

Abstract

Reforming schooling to enable engagement and success for those typically marginalised and failed by schools is a necessary task for educational researchers and activists concerned with injustice. However, it is a difficult pursuit, with a long history of failed attempts. This paper outlines the rationale of an Australian partnership research project, Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN), which took on such an effort in public secondary schooling contexts that, in current times, are beset with ‘crisis’ conditions and constrained by policy rationales that make it difficult to pursue issues of justice. Within the project, university investigators and teachers collaborated in action research that drew on a range of conceptual resources for redesigning curriculum and pedagogies, including: funds of knowledge, vernacular or local literacies; place-based education; the ‘productive pedagogies’ and the ‘unofficial curriculum’ of popular culture and out-of-school learning settings. In bringing these resources together with the aim of interrupting the reproduction of inequality, the project developed a methodo-logic which builds on Bourdieuian insights.

Keywords:

• pedagogical innovation
• educational disadvantage
• research methodology
• funds of knowledge
• professional learning community

Notes

1. RPiN was funded by the Australian Research Council as a Linkage grant (LP0454869), formally titled ‘Reinvigorating middle years pedagogy in “rustbelt” secondary schools’, with the following Chief Investigators from the University of South Australia: Robert Hattam, Barbara Comber, Marie Brennan, Lew Zipin, Phillip Cormack, Helen Nixon, Alan Reid, Kathy Paige, David Lloyd, Faye McCallum, and Bill Lucas; with assistance from Brenton Prosser, Sam Sellar, Kathy Brady, Andrew Bills and Philippa Milroy. Industry partners in the project were: the Centre for Studies of Literacy, Policy and Learning Culture at University of South Australia; the Northern Adelaide Secondary School Principals’ Network; the SA government's Social Inclusion Unit; and the Australian Education Union (SA Branch).

2. See Australian National Schools Network website for Connecting Lives and Learning: http://www.ansn.edu.au/