Chapter 8: Thinking the Unthinkable: Teachers Who Engage Students in Poverty “In this class you can imagine...”

This chapter draws on research into student engagement in low SES communities in Australia. The research has been designed to give hope to poor urban and rural communities that they might “think the unthinkable”: that there are teachers who can strongly contribute to the improvement of the educational and life circumstances of their children and so positively contribute to their community’s well-being. Drawing on research frameworks around student engagement developed in the Fair Go Project (Munns, 2007), the current study undertakes intensive case study research into the classroom pedagogies of 30 teachers, exploring the causal impact of their work on the social and academic outcomes of their students. The classroom stories of two teachers will be told in this chapter. Against a theoretical backdrop that shows how students are positioned within discourses of power, it will provide a clearer picture of how teachers might engage students in poverty and so help them negotiate hitherto tenuous pathways towards educational success.