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Title: Reimagining Just Education

Reimagining Just Education

by Robert Hattam (Volume editor) Alison Wrench (Volume editor) Robyne Garrett (Volume editor)
©2026 Textbook XVIII, 356 Pages
Education
Series: Counterpoints, Volume 565

Summary

In this edited book we argue that we are now involved in a struggle over the soul of educators and that means resisting the neoliberalizing policy regime that mostly governs through asserting a narrow, technicist, and individualistic definition of what it means to be a good teacher. The book represents the recent scholarship of the Pedagogies for Justice Research Group at the University of South Australia. The research reported is framed up by a critical sensibility that we understand in these terms: a skepticism toward common-sense and official knowledge; a sensitivity toward how power works on and through knowing and subjectivity; and a commitment to more socially just societies. The book focuses on three key ideas: (1) responding to the educational disengagement; (2) providing hopeful alternative accounts of socially critical pedagogies in a range of different sites; and (3) rethinking curriculum and pedagogy across the curriculum.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication
  • Acknowledgment of Country
  • Contents
  • Figures and Tables
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction (Robert Hattam, Robyne Garrett, and Alison Wrench)
  • Introducing the Pedagogies for Justice Research Group
  • The Struggle Over What Constitutes Teacher Education in Australia
  • Researching in “the North”
  • Advocating Pedagogies of Justice
  • Bibliography
  • Part I Engaging Disenfranchised Learners
  • 1 “They’re Not Here to Just Teach You”: Practice Architectures and Student Connectedness (Lisa Smith)
  • Rethinking Practice with Students
  • Practice Architectures: Letting the Light in
  • Researching Turn-Back-Around Schools and Students
  • Introducing Unity High School
  • The Distinctive Project: “Building the Capacity of Community”
  • Creating Spaces of Relating and Resisting the Deficit
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 2 Exploring Affective Relations in Disadvantaged Education Contexts: How First-in-Family Students Become University Bound (Garth Stahl and Sarah McDonald)
  • Introducing the First-in-Family Project
  • Teacher–Student Relationships in Disadvantaged Contexts
  • The Affective Turn and Emotional Capital
  • Research Methodology
  • Exploring the Affective Dimension of Teacher–Student Relationships
  • The Teacher as an Affect Resource
  • The Contact Zone and Relational Affect
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 3 Pedagogical Justice for Muslim Learners (Dylan Chown, Nadeem A. Memon, Amaarah DeCuir, and Basma Elshayyal)
  • Introduction
  • Theoretical Lens: Advancing Pedagogical Justice
  • Politics
  • Policy
  • Pedagogy
  • Impact of Politics and Policy on Educators
  • Thin Equity and Limitations to Inclusion for Muslim Learners
  • The Four Ss: Surveillance, Securitization, Secularism, and Standardization
  • Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
  • Justice Claims
  • In Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 4 Educating Aboriginal Children After Massacre: Adorno in Australia (Lester-Irabinna Rigney)
  • The Black War in Tasmania, 1823–34
  • Education after Massacre
  • Toward A Demythologizing Pedagogy for the Australian Frontier Wars
  • Proposition 1. Knowledge Presented as Problematic and Socially Constructed
  • Proposition 2: Not Massacre but War
  • Proposition 3: Critical Place-Based Studies
  • Proposition 4: Reconceptualizing the Image of the Aboriginal Learner as Competent and Capable
  • Proposition 5: Culturally Responsive Pedagogies
  • Proposition 6: Solidarity for Change
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Bibliography
  • 5 Scaled Up “Safety-Net” Schooling and the “Wicked Problem” of Educational Exclusion in South Australia—Problem or Solution? (Andrew Bills, David Armstrong, and Nigel Howard)
  • Introduction
  • Wicked Problems
  • Early School Leaving
  • Flexible Learning Options in Australia
  • Research Scholarship About FLOs
  • Gaps in the FLO Research
  • Methodology
  • Understanding Low HSC Completion Rates in FLO
  • Discussion of FLO Policy “Wickedness”
  • Everything is Political
  • The Unintended Consequences of the FLO Response to Exclusion
  • Dilemmas of Inclusion
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 6 “I Always Wanted to Come to University”: Afghan-Australian Girls’ Pursuit of Higher Education (Snjezana Bilic)
  • Students from Refugee Backgrounds in Australia
  • Methodology: A Narrative Approach
  • Emerging Themes
  • Aspirations to Attend University
  • Experiences at University
  • A Way Forward: Enabling Pedagogies
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 7 (Dis)assembling the Twenty-First-Century Learner (Jill Colton)
  • The Twenty-First-Century Learner as Digitally Literate
  • The Twenty-First-Century Learner as a Neoliberal Subject
  • The Twenty-First-Century Learner as a Progressive Figure
  • Reassembling the Twenty-First-Century Learner
  • Bibliography
  • Part II Engaging in Different Sites
  • 8 Affect, Embodiment, and Critical Pedagogy (Robyne Garrett)
  • Introduction
  • Critical Approaches
  • Affect, Embodiment, and the Arts
  • Creative and Body-Based Learning
  • Mobilizing Critical Pedagogy Through CBL
  • Connecting to Students’ Life Worlds and Bodies
  • Addressing Issues of Power and Justice
  • Learning that is Dialogic and Multimodal
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 9 The Culturally Responsive Listener (Stephen Kelly)
  • Introduction
  • The Ethics of Listening
  • Connecting Listening to a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
  • The Action Research
  • Interpreting the Teachers’ Work
  • Observation: Speaking to What is Felt and Seen
  • Questioning: Speaking to Questions Posed
  • Interpretations: Speaking to What They Feel and Think
  • The Culturally Responsive Listener
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Bibliography
  • 10 Re-placing Aboriginal Voices in Policy Making and Practice in Remote Aboriginal Education (Sam Osborne)
  • Introduction
  • The Context of Indigenous Education Policy
  • The International Context of Indigenous Education
  • The Australian Context of Indigenous Education
  • Re-“placing” Family and Community in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education
  • Structuring Local Voices and Aspirations in Remote Education Provision
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 11 Recognition and Belonging in Enabling Education (Sarah Hattam)
  • Introduction
  • The “Widening Participation” Agenda
  • Pedagogical Problems in Higher Education
  • Advancing Research Designs
  • A Pedagogical Intervention
  • Student Voices of Misrecognition, Disconnection, Recognition, and Belonging
  • Lillian’s Story
  • Fatima’s Story
  • The Way Forward
  • Bibliography
  • 12 Advancing Social and Religious Equity in Super-Diverse Classrooms: Reflections for Initial Teacher Education (Hannah Soong, Dylan Chown, Nadeem A. Memon, and Mahmood Nathie)
  • Challenges for Initial Teacher Education: The Reality of Super-Diverse Classrooms
  • Australian Multiculturalism
  • Pre-service Educators’ Orientations Toward, and Impediments to, Inclusivity
  • Our Experience of “Diversity” Courses: The Importance of Religion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Bibliography
  • 13 Toward the Knowledge-Producing School (Robert Hattam)
  • Connecting Lives and Learning
  • Against Backlash Pedagogy
  • Toward Dialogic and Improvisational Pedagogies
  • Funds of Knowledge
  • Place-Based Studies
  • Local Literacies
  • Popular Culture
  • Toward the Knowledge-Producing School
  • Bibliography
  • Part III Rethinking Just Curriculum and Pedagogy
  • 14 Socially Critical Orientations and Pedagogies for Justice in Health and Physical Education (Alison Wrench and Robyne Garrett)
  • Introduction
  • Critical Pedagogies and HPE
  • Emotions, Affect, Structures of Feeling, and HPE
  • Just Pedagogies for HPE
  • Recognition
  • Redistribution
  • Representation
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 15 Eco-social Justice Education in the Anthropocene (Kathryn Paige, David Lloyd, and Richard Smith)
  • Introduction: Why Eco-socially Just Education?
  • Case Study: Transdisciplinary STEM: Eco-social Justice Education Principles in a Water Literacies Project
  • On Reflection: Water Literacy Case Study
  • Recommendations for Moving Forward
  • Bibliography
  • 16 Unsettling Settler Colonialism in Teacher Education (Jenni Carter)
  • Introduction
  • Settler Colonialism
  • The Pedagogical Process
  • The Book: The rabbits
  • The Pedagogical Experiences
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 17 Visualizing Curriculum: Arts, Film, and Critical Pedagogy (Dino Murtic)
  • Art, Cinema, and Critical Pedagogy
  • Using Film in a Classroom Setting: An Example
  • Lessons From Critical Pedagogy
  • Instead of a Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 18 Visual Arts Curriculum: A Pluralist and Embodied Perspective on Shifting Points of View (Bindi MacGill)
  • Introduction
  • A Pedagogy of Care
  • Communities of Practice Model as the Frame for a Pedagogy of Care
  • CBL Strategies: Deep Listening. Printmaking and the Watercolor Conversation
  • Navigating Pluralism in the Field of Visual Arts Through Embodied and Visual Thinking Strategies
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 19 Culturally Responsive Pedagogies of Discomfort: Engaging with the Difficult Knowledges of Racism (Melanie Baak and Robert Hattam)
  • Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
  • Pedagogies of Discomfort
  • Methodology
  • Amy: “CRP Can be a Tool to Navigate Difficult Content”
  • Understanding Amy’s Enactment of a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy of Discomfort
  • Teachers’ Discomfort in Teaching about Racism
  • Balancing CRP and Discomfort
  • Enabling Spaces for Speaking, Listening, and Hearing
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • 20 Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: Five Key Ideas (Abigail Diplock, Anne Morrison, Lester-Irabinna Rigney, and Robert Hattam)
  • Acknowledgment of Country
  • Introduction
  • The Project: Toward an Australian Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
  • Strongly Connect to Students’ Life Worlds
  • View Cultural Difference as an Asset for Learning
  • Offer High Challenge
  • Foster a Critically Conscious/Activist Orientation
  • Enable Students to Learn, and to Express Their Learning, Multimodally and Beyond the Classroom
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Bibliography
  • 21 Inclusive Pedagogies of Obscenity: Critical Literacy Takes on Offensive Language in the Classroom (Penelope Bateman)
  • A Prologue of Sorts
  • The Context: The North
  • Conceptual Framing
  • Offensive Language as Critical Literacy
  • Funds of Knowledge: From North America to South Australia
  • Pedagogies of Obscenity for Classroom Management
  • Inclusive Pedagogies in the English Classroom
  • Methodology
  • Context and Participants
  • Key Learning Moments and Data
  • Data Analysis and Findings
  • If Not at School Then Where?
  • Pedagogies that Matter
  • Bibliography
  • 22 Conclusion: Reimagining Pedagogies for Justice (Robert Hattam, Robyne Garrett, and Alison Wrench)
  • The Failure of Schooling Policy in Australia
  • Mapping the Damage
  • But Teaching is a Social Practice
  • Hopeful Alternatives
  • Culturally and Religiously Responsive Pedagogy
  • Embodied and Artistic Pedagogies
  • Eco-Justice Pedagogies
  • Enabling, Relational, and Affective Pedagogies
  • What To Do Now?
  • Bibliography
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Author Index
  • Subject Index

Figures and Tables

Figure 18.1: Watercolor Conversation Demonstration Example

Figure 18.2: Printmaking: Sustainability and Belonging Demonstration Example

Figure 18.3: 3D Model: Teaching Philosophy Demonstration Example

Table 11.1: School Cultural Geography Around Leaving School

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the work of our colleagues published here for their contribution over the past decade or so in sustaining the Pedagogies for Justice Research Group. This group provided a site for collaborative academic reading, co-construction of research designs, mentoring of early career researchers and doctoral students, collaborative conference presentations, access to schools for research, and negotiations for ethics with education jurisdictions. Perhaps more importantly this group provided a site for nurturing of critical educational sociology and academic friendships. As such the group contests the individualizing of academic work that is now rife across the university sector and instead is informed by the relational turn in the social sciences and a philosopher of the “good friend” (Aristotle).

This book publishes research accounts that have been funded by the Australian Research Council and these include the following:

Introduction

Robert Hattam, Robyne Garrett, and Alison Wrench

Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.

(FOUCAULT, 1972, P. 227)

That cause calls us to teach.

(PINAR, 2015, P. 138)

Introducing the Pedagogies for Justice Research Group

State and federal government policy now dumbs down schooling and teacher education through various means including “cruel accounting,” standards-driven codifications of good teaching, and curriculum frameworks that fail to foreground the key struggles of the age. Why isn’t capitalism a topic in the national curriculum, why isn’t living sustainably more prominent, and why is telling the story about Australian colonization so controversial? And in concert, governments rely heavily on the “school effectiveness” paradigm that pushes de-contextualized knowledge dressed up as a discourse of what-works best practice and over-inflated claims to provide the “right answer” for all manner of educational problems.

Australian education policy now preaches a one-size-fits-all solution for teachers and for educational leaders, assumes an unproblematic process of implementation, and then criticizes those working in so-called disadvantaged schools for failing to be “good.” In the name of policy compliance, teachers are increasingly being pushed toward highly scripted and ritualized pedagogies that just do not work, as they grapple with a dissonance between policy and reality. Consequently, teachers’ work is today being framed by a “dangerous incoherence” (Max-Neef, 1991, p. 109) between the language of power, the language that operates as a regime of truth, and the historical reality. The regime of truth in this case is produced by what Havel (1991) refers to as “evasive thinking,” or “an immobile system of intellectual and phraseological schemata which … without noticing it, separate[s] thought from its immediate contact with reality and thus cripples its capacity to intervene in that reality” (p. 11). For us, the most significant failure of policy is the intensifying of educational inequality, which is also the educational correlate of rising economic inequality (Piketty, 2022) that mostly goes un-noted or, worse, gets hidden in a culture war where those of us who raise the issues are seen to be pushing a politics of envy (Frye, 2016). This dangerous incoherence is felt most by students attending Australian public schools, who are increasingly becoming residualized.

In this edited book we argue that we are now involved in a struggle over the soul of educators and that means resisting the neoliberalizing policy regime that mostly governs through asserting a narrow, technicist, and individualistic definition of what it means to be a good teacher (Ball, 2016; Green et al., 2017). We are all now being rendered “autonomous and responsible” (Rose, 1999, p. 154) and for educators’ work that means intensification, proletarianization, de-professionalization (Smyth et al., 2000), and precariatization (Jenkins et al., 2017). But then we can resist through local forms of radical collegium (Fielding, 1999). The sort of collegium that has been the context for this edited collection is informed by Fielding’s (1999) critique of teacher collaboration and includes a suspicion of enforced or institutionalized collegiality designed to improve productivity and ensure policy compliance.

This edited collection takes up this possibility through reporting on the workings of the Pedagogies for Justice Research Group at the University of South Australia. This group is the latest iteration of a small group of socially critical educational researchers who collectively have an international reputation for both critical pedagogy studies, and critical practitioner research approaches. The book represents the recent development of our collective research program, which is focused on three key ideas: (1) responding to the educational disengagement of disenfranchised learners; (2) providing hopeful alternative accounts of socially critical pedagogies in different sites, including primary and secondary schools, teacher education programs, and foundation studies programs; and (3) rethinking curriculum and pedagogy across the curriculum.

This collection is novel in many ways. Perhaps most importantly, there are few attempts to bring together the research of a collection of scholars all working in one research group in a collective research program that is itself continually being co-constructed. The research reported is framed up by a critical sensibility that we understand in these terms: a skepticism toward common-sense and official knowledge; a sensitivity toward how power works on and through knowing and subjectivity; and a commitment to more socially just societies (Smyth et al., 2014, p. 68).

The book shares scholarship from senior researchers, mid-career, early career, and a few doctoral students. The chapters provide a place-based case study of research being conducted in one small Australian city, but also demonstrate how a collection of local qualitative studies connect to an international archive of critical educational research. Across this set of chapters, we argue for research that: (1) is committed to critical practitioner approaches and hence is conducted with students, teachers, and school leaders; and (2) argues for pedagogies that demand high intellectual challenge; are dialogic and improvisational (in the jazz sense); are committed to ensuring that classrooms are culturally safe; and develop critically literate active citizens.

The group originally formed in 2012, emerging out of a previous successful research group, the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures. The Pedagogies for Justice Research Group has met regularly since that time and has been affiliated with institutionally recognized research centers.1

This first chapter provides some context for this work by providing a brief reading of contemporary teacher education in Australia, theorizing a research group as a site for counter-conduct, locating research primarily in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, outlining a rationale, and briefly introducing the chapters. The rationale section makes the case for focusing on pedagogies for justice, which we understand to be code for our version of critical pedagogy studies, as well as a brief statement about how teacher education is being (mis)governed of late. The authors mostly work in teacher education studies, and hence a number of the chapters give an account of research that informs their own teaching but are also pertinent to others working in education, such as schoolteachers, early childhood educators, and policy actors who are willing to read outside of the very narrow archive that now informs the failing national education policy.

The Struggle Over What Constitutes Teacher Education in Australia

There have been over 100 reviews of initial teacher education (ITE) in Australia since the 1970s (Mayer, 2014). This intense evaluation of ITE suggests a deep mistrust of both the institution of ITE and teacher educators (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018). When ITE is framed by deficit discourses it is constructed as a policy problem requiring governmental solutions (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Levinsson et al., 2020; Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2019). At issue are tensions around control, purposes, and practices of education, as well as visions of “good” (Rowe & Skourdoumbis, 2019), “classroom-ready,” and “quality” teachers (Charteris & Dargusch, 2018; Hardy, 2018a, 2018b).

Details

Pages
XVIII, 356
Publication Year
2026
ISBN (PDF)
9783034359825
ISBN (ePUB)
9783034359832
ISBN (Softcover)
9783034359382
DOI
10.3726/b22980
Language
English
Publication date
2026 (June)
Keywords
Socially Just pedagogy policy sociology school reform neoliberal policy enabling pedagogy culturally responsive pedagogy [dis]engagement Australian schooling higher education critical pedagogy
Published
New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2026. XVIII, 356 pp., 3 color ill., 1 tables.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Robert Hattam (Volume editor) Alison Wrench (Volume editor) Robyne Garrett (Volume editor)

Robert Hattam is an Emeritus Professor for Educational Justice in Education Futures at the University of South Australia. His research has focused on teachers’ work, critical and culturally responsive pedagogies, policy critique, and socially just school reform. Robyne Garrett is an Associate Professor in Education at the University of South Australia. She teaches physical education, dance, pedagogy, and research methods. Her work explores gender, embodiment, critical and arts-based pedagogies. Current projects focus on creative learning, social justice, oracy, agency, and gender in movement. Alison Wrench is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Health and Physical Education (HPE) studies at the University of South Australia. Alison’s research focuses on socially-critical pedagogies in HPE, inclusion and just schooling outcomes. She also researches in-service and pre-service teacher practitioner inquiry and student led inquiry into localised health and physical activity issues ‘that matter’.

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