Reimagining Just Education (Counterpoints)

In this edited book we argue that we are now involved in a struggle over the soul of educators and that means resisting the neoliberalizing policy regime that mostly governs through asserting a narrow, technicist, and individualistic definition of what it means to be a good teacher. The book represents the recent scholarship of the Pedagogies for Justice Research Group at the University of South Australia. The research reported is framed up by a critical sensibility that we understand in these terms: a skepticism toward common-sense and official knowledge; a sensitivity toward how power works on and through knowing and subjectivity; and a commitment to more socially just societies. The book focuses on three key ideas: (1) responding to the educational disengagement; (2) providing hopeful alternative accounts of socially critical pedagogies in a range of different sites; and (3) rethinking curriculum and pedagogy across the curriculum.