Promoting pedagogies of engagement in secondary schools: Possibilities for pedagogical reform

Abstract

In this chapter we report on a research project that examined the potential for secondary school teachers to redesign pedagogy in schools serving low socioeconomically disadvantaged communities in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. The project assumed that unless we fix the pedagogy problem all other efforts at reconstruction will be in vain and students will continue to disengage from schooling. Rather than the forms of decontextualised knowledge that now dominate policy regimes, we argue instead for localised, contextualised accounts of what happens in schools to enable us to think about pedagogy as practice that arises from local conditions. Therefore we need thoughtful analyses of localised school-level logics, or rationalities, that give rise to pedagogical practices that engage students in meaningful learning. As such, in this chapter we propose the idea of the school as a ‘logic machine’ as a theoretical frame for such analysis. This provides a way for schools to move beyond focusing on ‘managing’ student behaviour to promoting pedagogies of engagement.