Chapter 7: Transformative Student Engagement—An Empowering Pedagogy: An Australian Experience in the Classroom¹

This chapter re-examines student engagement especially in disadvantaged communities and explores possibilities for transformative education beyond compensation through an exemplary program, ruMAD (Are You Making a Difference). The complexity of issues relating to student engagement (and early school leaving) cannot be fitted neatly into decontextualized accounts of youth experience, school interaction, and socio-environmental factors that in the first instance create student disempowerment and disengagement with school. An engaging pedagogy ensures that what teachers and students do is based on pedagogical reciprocity through what I have termed CORE (Connecting, Owning, Responding, and Empowering) pedagogy. In order to enhance student engagement we need to be linking curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment to identity, politics, and social justice where teachers become “elegantly subversive” and promote a student engagement that is empowering, developing a sense of entitlement, belonging and identification, so that teachers create pedagogical practices that engage students providing them with ways of knowing that enhance their capacity to live fully and deeply.