Chapter 5: When Students “Speak Back”: Student Engagement Towards a Socially Just Society

This chapter explores theoretically and practically the rationale, approaches, possibilities, and effects of engaging with students in schools in ways that challenge injustices and that regard education as being for social justice. Examples and illustrations are drawn from research by the author in Australia from over 25 critical ethnographies of disadvantaged schools conducted over the past two decades. The central framing themes and ideas for the chapter focus on:

• student voice

• the relational school

• the pedagogically engaged school

• community organizing for activist reform

• community-voiced approaches to schooling

• “speaking the unpleasant” about poverty, education, and class

• beyond commodification, prescription, and consumption

• dismantling social hierarchies

• pursuing connectionist pedagogies

• creating spaces for dialogue, reflection and innovation

• “doing education” democratically

The chapter presents a number of ethnographic slices or portraits of students and schools that have created ways of “working against the grain” in the sense of foregrounding notions of social justice and challenging dominant, deforming, and damaging approaches to education and supplanting them with alternatives. The chapter explores what is possible when teachers, students, parents, and communities take seriously the opportunity to embrace a socially critical view of student engagement.