Hattam, Robert, Brennan, Marie, Zipin, Lew and Comber, Barbara (2009) Researching for social justice: contextual, conceptual and methodological challenges. Discourse : Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30 (3). pp. 303-316. ISSN 0159-6306

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-ofschool learning settings. In bringing these resources together with the aim of interrupting the reproduction of inequality, the project developed a methodologic which builds on Bourdieuian insights.

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