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.