Amanda Keddie

This book explores the social justice implications of school autonomy reform within the context of public education in Australia. It is situated within and framed by global concerns about how public schools are navigating their ‘autonomy’ within increasingly marketised education systems.Drawing on extensive interviews with stakeholders and five in depth case study schools, the book calls attention to the ways in which the intentions of school autonomy reform to offer schools more freedom to make their own decisions and manage their own responsibilities have become increasingly contained by the market imperatives of economic e?ciency, competition and public accountability driving state and national education systems. We build on and enrich existing research in this area that highlights how market imperatives continue to exacerbate inequality within and between schools and their systems.An essential read for researchers and policymakers worldwide, the book provides insight into how education systems can better support public schools to mobilise their autonomy in socially just ways.

This book explores the social justice implications of school autonomy reform within the context of public education in Australia. It is situated within and framed by global concerns about how public schools are navigating their ‘autonomy’ within increasingly marketised education systems.Drawing on extensive interviews with stakeholders and five in depth case study schools, the book calls attention to the ways in which the intentions of school autonomy reform to offer schools more freedom to make their own decisions and manage their own responsibilities have become increasingly contained by the market imperatives of economic e?ciency, competition and public accountability driving state and national education systems. We build on and enrich existing research in this area that highlights how market imperatives continue to exacerbate inequality within and between schools and their systems.An essential read for researchers and policymakers worldwide, the book provides insight into how education systems can better support public schools to mobilise their autonomy in socially just ways.

Identity, power, and positionality play crucial roles in designing and implementing research critically and ethically across marginalized cultures and communities. Through four unique case studies, this book highlights the dilemmas faced by researchers in the field of education, demonstrating how they grapple with the ethics of research and with their role in the process.Re-searching Margins: Ethics, Social Justice and Education attends to research in four specific marginalized communities, whilst also engaging in a wider dialogue about the complex theories, methodologies and practices of ethical research in communities of difference. This book examines ethical research with cultures and communities as an exchange in which both the researcher and the researched bring complex contextual and biographical factors shaped by their histories, identities, and experiences.Drawing on the lives and research of four renowned scholars, this book will be of interest to researchers and policy makers in education who seek to engage ethically and justly with marginalized communities.

This book tells a story of masculinity through the experiences of one boy, ‘Adam’. From four different studies and time periods, it tracks moments of significance in his life over a period of 20 years. These moments highlight the ways in which Adam is both drawn towards and away from a hegemonic masculinity of physical toughness, domination, competition and an opposition to ‘the feminine’. The book is set against the backdrop of a long history of contentious gender politics in Australia and globally but particularly responds to the renewed attention to the social construction of masculinities in the current #MeToo climate. Against this backdrop, nuanced and longitudinal accounts of boys’ and men’s experiences of masculinity are significant because they can offer insight into the complex bodily, social, economic, and historical forces that configure masculinities. Such understandings are important in our endeavours as those who educate, support and work with boys and men to transformgender inequalities.

Identity, power, and positionality play crucial roles in designing and implementing research critically and ethically across marginalized cultures and communities. Through four unique case studies, this book highlights the dilemmas faced by researchers in the field of education, demonstrating how they grapple with the ethics of research and with their role in the process.Re-searching Margins: Ethics, Social Justice and Education attends to research in four specific marginalized communities, whilst also engaging in a wider dialogue about the complex theories, methodologies and practices of ethical research in communities of difference. This book examines ethical research with cultures and communities as an exchange in which both the researcher and the researched bring complex contextual and biographical factors shaped by their histories, identities, and experiences.Drawing on the lives and research of four renowned scholars, this book will be of interest to researchers and policy makers in education who seek to engage ethically and justly with marginalized communities.

This book draws on the stories of female educators and young Muslim women to explore issues of identity, justice and education. Situated against a backdrop of unprecedented Islamophobia and new articulations of ‘White-lash’, this book draws on case study research conducted over a ten-year period and provides insight into the diverse worlds of young Muslim women from education and community contexts in Australia and England. Keddie discusses the ways in which these young women find spaces of agency and empowerment within these contexts and how their passionate and committed educators support them in this endeavour. Useful for researchers and educators who are concerned about Islamophobia and its devastating impacts on Muslim women and girls, this book positions responsibility for changing the oppressions of Islamophobia and gendered Islamophobia with all of us. Such change begins with education. The stories in this book hope to contribute to the change process.

Autonomy, Accountability and Social Justice provides an account of recent developments in English state education, with a particular focus on the ‘academisation’ of schooling. It examines how head teachers, teachers and others working in diverse education settings navigate the current policy environment. The authors provide readers with insight into the complex decision-making processes that shape school responses to current educational agendas and examine the social justice implications of these responses.The book draws on Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework and her theorising of neoliberalism to explore current tensions associated with moves towards both greater autonomy for and accountability of state schooling. These tensions are presented through four case studies that centre upon 1) a group of local authority primary schools, 2) an academy ‘chain’, 3) a co-operative secondary school and 4) an alternative education setting. The book identifies the ‘emancipatory’ possibilities of these approaches amid the complex demands of autonomy and accountability seizing English schools. Informed by a consideration of market parameters and social protectionist ideals, this examination provides rich insights into how English schools have emancipatory capacity. Autonomy, Accountability and Social Justice makes a major theoretical contribution to understandings of how the market is working alongside the regulation of schooling and the implications of this for social justice. By drawing on the experiences of those working in schools, it demonstrates that the tensions associated with autonomy and accountability within the current education policy environment can be both productive and unproductive for social justice.

Autonomy, Accountability and Social Justice provides an account of recent developments in English state education, with a particular focus on the ‘academisation’ of schooling. It examines how head teachers, teachers and others working in diverse education settings navigate the current policy environment. The authors provide readers with insight into the complex decision-making processes that shape school responses to current educational agendas and examine the social justice implications of these responses.The book draws on Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework and her theorising of neoliberalism to explore current tensions associated with moves towards both greater autonomy for and accountability of state schooling. These tensions are presented through four case studies that centre upon 1) a group of local authority primary schools, 2) an academy ‘chain’, 3) a co-operative secondary school and 4) an alternative education setting. The book identifies the ‘emancipatory’ possibilities of these approaches amid the complex demands of autonomy and accountability seizing English schools. Informed by a consideration of market parameters and social protectionist ideals, this examination provides rich insights into how English schools have emancipatory capacity. Autonomy, Accountability and Social Justice makes a major theoretical contribution to understandings of how the market is working alongside the regulation of schooling and the implications of this for social justice. By drawing on the experiences of those working in schools, it demonstrates that the tensions associated with autonomy and accountability within the current education policy environment can be both productive and unproductive for social justice.

In many English-speaking countries, teachers are encouraged to differentiate their classrooms, and in some cases, through various policy mechanisms. This encouragement is often accompanied by threats and sanctions for not making the grade. By exploring the ways in which one education system in Australia has mandated differentiation through an audit of teacher practices, this book provides a timely engagement with the relationship between differentiated classrooms and social justice. It covers tensions, for instance, between providing culturally-appropriate classrooms, including constructing engaging and relevant curricula, and lowering expectations for students who have traditionally been marginalised by schooling. The data for this book has been collected from the same group of teachers over a period of three years, and offers detailed insights into how a particular politics of differentiation has played itself out in the context of a ‘global reform movement’ that has focused on improving student outcomes.

This book draws on the stories of female educators and young Muslim women to explore issues of identity, justice and education. Situated against a backdrop of unprecedented Islamophobia and new articulations of ‘White-lash’, this book draws on case study research conducted over a ten-year period and provides insight into the diverse worlds of young Muslim women from education and community contexts in Australia and England. Keddie discusses the ways in which these young women find spaces of agency and empowerment within these contexts and how their passionate and committed educators support them in this endeavour. Useful for researchers and educators who are concerned about Islamophobia and its devastating impacts on Muslim women and girls, this book positions responsibility for changing the oppressions of Islamophobia and gendered Islamophobia with all of us. Such change begins with education. The stories in this book hope to contribute to the change process.

In many English-speaking countries, teachers are encouraged to differentiate their classrooms, and in some cases, through various policy mechanisms. This encouragement is often accompanied by threats and sanctions for not making the grade. By exploring the ways in which one education system in Australia has mandated differentiation through an audit of teacher practices, this book provides a timely engagement with the relationship between differentiated classrooms and social justice. It covers tensions, for instance, between providing culturally-appropriate classrooms, including constructing engaging and relevant curricula, and lowering expectations for students who have traditionally been marginalised by schooling. The data for this book has been collected from the same group of teachers over a period of three years, and offers detailed insights into how a particular politics of differentiation has played itself out in the context of a ‘global reform movement’ that has focused on improving student outcomes.

Issues of social justice and equity in the field of educational leadership have become more salient in recent years. The unprecedented diversity, uncertainty and rapid social change of the contemporary global era are generating new and unfamiliar equity questions and challenges for schools and their leaders. In order to understand the moral and ethical complexity of work undertaken in the name of social justice and equity in diverse contexts, this book uses a range of different theoretical tools from the work of Michel Foucault. Rather than a prescriptive, best practice approach to leadership and social justice, this book draws on Foucault’s four-fold ethical framework, and specifically, the notions of advocacy, truth-telling and counter-conduct to critically examine the leadership work undertaken in case studies in schools in Australia and England.Our approach makes transparent the ethical work that leaders in these contexts conduct on themselves towards creating schools that can address the equity challenges of the present climate. It illuminates and enables critical analysis of the moral imperatives shaping the equity work of school leaders and, in particular, the possibilities for transformative leadership that can work to create schools and school systems that are more socially just. Overall, the book’s key aims are to: Provide an innovative and comprehensive theorising of leadership for social justice in contemporary times; Explicate the utility of key elements of Foucault’s theorising of the ethical self to the domain of educational leadership; and Provide significant practical insight into the social justice possibilities of school leadership in contemporary times through two in depth case studies

Educating for Diversity and Social Justice foregrounds the personal stories of educators who are engaging the space of schooling as a site of possibility for realizing the goals of social justice. It is a book inspired by a vision of education as a practice of freedom where young people – especially those who are marginalized – can learn that they have a voice and the power to change their world for the better. Drawing on the work of US philosopher Nancy Fraser, the book examines issues of justice and schooling in relation to three dimensions: political, cultural and economic. While its focus is on research within three Australian case study schools, the book provides an international perspective of these dimensions of justice in western education contexts as they impact on the schooling performance of marginalized students. Towards greater equity for these students, the book presents a comprehensive scaffold for thinking about and addressing issues of schooling, diversity and social justice. Through practical examples from the case study research, the book illustrates the complexities and possibilities associated with schools providing inclusive environments where marginalized voices are heard (political justice), where marginalized culture is recognized and valued (cultural justice) and where marginalized students are supported to achieve academically towards accessing the material benefits of society (economic justice).

Educating for Diversity and Social Justice foregrounds the personal stories of educators who are engaging the space of schooling as a site of possibility for realizing the goals of social justice. It is a book inspired by a vision of education as a practice of freedom where young people – especially those who are marginalized – can learn that they have a voice and the power to change their world for the better. Drawing on the work of US philosopher Nancy Fraser, the book examines issues of justice and schooling in relation to three dimensions: political, cultural and economic. While its focus is on research within three Australian case study schools, the book provides an international perspective of these dimensions of justice in western education contexts as they impact on the schooling performance of marginalized students. Towards greater equity for these students, the book presents a comprehensive scaffold for thinking about and addressing issues of schooling, diversity and social justice. Through practical examples from the case study research, the book illustrates the complexities and possibilities associated with schools providing inclusive environments where marginalized voices are heard (political justice), where marginalized culture is recognized and valued (cultural justice) and where marginalized students are supported to achieve academically towards accessing the material benefits of society (economic justice).