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This paper considers the implications of the current landscape of education policy reform in Australian schooling. We argue that the decontextualisation of education policy enactments and the eschewing of concerns relevant at the local level of the school over the past two decades have prompted various reform agendas to fail. We contend that recognition of the deep contextualisation of schools is paramount in any attempt at renewal. Therefore, it is at the local school-level that reform agendas can and should be directed by the pedagogical and innovative work of educators. We focus on 'relational pedagogy' because it offers opportunities to enact school-wide reform and enhance the professional capacities of educators as pedagogical innovators. Contemporary education reform agendas are best situated and registered within school sites and relational pedagogy stands as a deeply contextualised provocation for enacting school renewal.

In Australia, like many western countries, there has been a convergence of education policy around a set of utilitarian and economistic approaches to vocational education and training in schools. Such approaches are based on the assumption that there is a direct relationship between national economic growth, productivity and human capital development resulting in the persuasive political argument that schools should be more closely aligned to the needs of the economy to better prepare 'job ready' workers. These common sense views resonate strongly in school communities where the problem of youth unemployment is most acute and students are deemed to be 'at risk', 'disadvantaged' or 'disengaged'. This article starts from a different place by rejecting the fatalism and determinism of neoliberal ideology based on the assumption that students must simply 'adapt' to a precarious labour market. Whilst schools have a responsibility to prepare students for the world of work there is also a moral and political obligation to educate them extraordinarily well as democratic citizens. In conclusion, we draw on the experiences of young people themselves to identify a range of pedagogical conditions that need to be created and more widely sustained to support their career aspirations and life chances.

Our research is driven by a strong belief that the stories of young people gathered through ethnographic interviews can generate awareness not only of the complexities, uncertainties and possibilities of young people's lives but also the ways in which their identities and life chances are shaped by broader structural, institutional and historical forces beyond their control. In this article, we introduce Jacinta, a young person who describes the events and conditions which serve to hinder and/or support her journey in school and beyond. We have used Jacinta's story from a larger research project, to speak back to the impact the broader neoliberalising agenda is having on young lives with a view to reimagining democratic alternatives in education.

This paper invokes the voices of young people who had been separated from mainstream schooling because they were positioned as "disengaged" and "at risk of failing". The authors argue that streaming students out of schooling needs serious questioning as an escalating number of young people are framed as non-performers within a globally competitive educational market. Throughout the paper we use critical ethnographic slices to expose the experiences of the 24 young people interviewed who together with mentors shared personal insights whilst attending a re-engagement programme in Australia in the year 2010. Their responses unearth a "wickedness" and a preoccupation during their schooling with performance and school improvement. In response, we privilege student interpretations of their own marginalisation as an activist form of "speaking back" to the social and economic conditions and limitations dominating their lives.

This paper tackles what is arguably one of the most pressing and intractable educational issues confronting western democracies--the disengagement and disconnection from schooling of alarming numbers of young people. The paper looks at the policy response in Victoria, Australia, and through ethnographic interviews with a small number of young people; it finds a significant mismatch between the policy intent of re-engagement programmes, and the experiences of young people themselves. It seems that this is an instance of what might be termed policy deafness, a situation that will likely produce devastating consequences unless corrected.

This paper traces insights into the challenges and dilemmas experienced whilst researching students' interpretations and understandings of the Behaviour Management in Schools policy in Western Australia. Journal records, supported by student transcripts, are woven together in a reflexive ethnographic journey--from the beginning phase of searching formal approval; gaining access to the participants; and finally the challenge of "letting go" of student voices. It is the reflexive process itself that illustrates and provides understanding, thereby creating spaces to not only confront but also work through to resolve research dilemmas. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to provide experiential insight and understanding of ethical deliberations when engaging in reflexivity that allow one to move forward in this form of research.

In neo-liberal times educational policy and practice is being realigned more closely to the shifting imperatives of the market with damaging effects on the lives of young people. Whilst the rhetoric suggests that schools are safe, welcoming and caring environments for the benefit of all, the veracity is very different for significant numbers of marginalised students who face fragile, uncertain and unpredictable futures. This paper draws on a number of research projects in Australia to investigate the lived reality of students who are struggling to make sense of school and their transition to "getting a job". The research is neither impartial nor neutral. It draws on the tradition of critical policy ethnography to identify, describe and map the kinds of conditions that both constrain and enable the aspirations, dreams and hopes of young people for productive and rewarding lives. The intent is to unsettle commonsense and deficit understandings of school life that serve to oppress and marginalise the least advantaged students.

In revisiting the very first ethnographic research the author ever completed has 'unearthed' a significant project that speaks to policy makers, educators and teachers with a greater impact than it did when written and shelved over a decade ago. This insider's journey in reclaiming teaching, conducted within a public high school in Australia, captures the author's experiences of daily events and is intertwined with the narratives of other teachers interviewed. This ethnography occurred during the implementation of a 'School Development Plan' that was sweeping swiftly though the institution. The execution of this plan was unreservedly implemented with little, if any, consultation, explanation or collaboration with the teachers on site. Even though it had been anticipated, and indeed encouraged to publish from this nascent thesis, it did not happen. In reaching for it once again off the shelf, dusty and neglected, was the discovery of a 'lost thing'. This was a recommendation 'found' on the final pages of the thesis; that if one should choose to partake in a similar journey in reclaiming teaching, then they would be wise to garner the support of significant 'others'. Throughout this chapter, the author finds her own silenced voice (no longer a nom de plume) and the voices of her neglected colleagues to 'speak back' to neoliberal policy practice with renewed confidence and clarity. It is the teachers' voices within their collective 'present' that this ethnography unifies and provides transforming nexus points and dialogic spaces to discover, and also maintain hope, possibility, trust, respect and relationships in teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is an important and defining element in young people's lives. When conceived properly, it has the potential to transform opportunities and life chances. It hardly comes as news that in recent times the authors have witnessed the inappropriate intrusion into education of notions of school reform that while they might arguably be in the national economic interest, are highly questionable from the vantage point of young people. In this paper, the authors present some counter-narratives from a group of young Australians who have ‘disengaged’ or been ‘shoved’ out of school and who resumed learning under a very different set of conditions to those that exiled them. Through the comments from young people, the authors construct an account of how they came to be categorised as ‘at-risk’ in the first place, what this pathologising meant to them, and how an alternative approach that invested them with power enabled a more positive identity formation to occur. Notwithstanding its altruistic intent and more humane approach, the authors remain unconvinced on the larger question of ‘re-engagement to where?’ for these young people, and whether the fundamentals have been sufficiently unsettled to enable them a different trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]