School Leadership, Literacy and Social Justice: The Place of Local School Curriculum Planning and Reform

Abstract

Much of the North American debate over literacy and social justice has been dominated by the state and regional implementation of centralized curriculum programs via No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top legislation. Yet a decade into this approach to 'closing the gap' in linguistic/cultural minority and working class schools, there is ample evidence that centralized curriculum dictates and neoliberal accountability measures have had at best mixed results and indeed in many instances negative effects (e.g., Nichols & Berliner, 2007; Luke & Woods, 2009). The school reform literature paints a very different picture, showing that school leadership with a strong focus on curriculum and pedagogy can generate sustainable gains on conventional indicators by students from linguistic/cultural minority and working class backgrounds (e.g., Newmann, and Associates1996; Ladwig & Gore, 2005). This chapter reviews current work we are undertaking in Queensland, Australia, where some school communities are developing and implementing school-based whole school literacy programs. We document the response of one school community to test-driven accountability pressures. In the approach described here, teachers and researchers worked with the " four resources model " of literacy (Freebody & Luke, 1990), " multiliteracies " and digital and media arts pedagogies (New London Group, 1996), while building substantive links to community knowledge, locally relevant Indigenous knowledge and traditional school subject knowledge. School reform is a matter of both redistributive social justice and recognitive social justice. Following the work of philosopher Nancy Fraser (1997), we begin from a philosophical and political commitment to the more equitable redistribution of resources, knowledge, credentials and access to educational pathways for students from linguistic/cultural minority and working class backgrounds. The community we describe here is one where access, achievement and participation has historically been judged according to lower expectations than the system norms and benchmarks set for other students by middle class and dominant culture communities. At the same time, we argue that the recognition of these students and their communities' lifeworlds, values, knowledges and experiences in the curriculum, and in classroom teaching and learning relations is both a means and an end: a means towards improved achievement according to conventional measures, and an end goal for reform and revision of mainstream curriculum knowledge and what is made to count as valued knowledge and practice.