Critically engaged learning: Connecting to young lives.
Fitzgerald, Tanya
Critically engaged learning: Connecting to young lives John Smyth,
Lawrence Angus, Barry Down and Peter McInerney New York: Peter Lang,
2008. 206 pp. ISBN: 978 1 4331 0155 7.
Increasingly, young people are becoming alienated and disconnected
from schooling. Too often the focus of policy-makers, researchers and
teachers has been the naming of youth as the problem rather than asking
more serious questions about the extent to which schools disengage
youth. Nominating young people as the 'problem' due to their
behaviour, socioeconomic status, familial background, truancy and so
forth locates the problem as one that can be resolved through
intervention, mediation and, more seriously, through the judicial
system. This 'problem' is frequently complicated when parents,
and especially the sole parent, are included in stereotypical
assumptions about why young people are disconnected from schooling.
In this refreshing new book, the authors begin by crafting an
understanding as to why young people are frequently the objects of
policy and educational reform and seldom actively and authentically
involved in decisions that affect their educative lives. In taking as a
starting point the lives, histories and experiences of those who have
been excluded, marginalised and left behind, the authors offer a
critical perspective on how students can become purposefully and
productively engaged in their learning and ways in which their
communities, and the community of the school itself, can build capacity
that is both meaningful and sustainable. How educators, activists,
communities and educational policy and practice might re-energise,
re-enthuse and re-engage young people is the central focus of this text.
The authors do not offer a rehearsal of debates surrounding issues
of social justice, exclusion, marginalisation and disadvantage but
rather raise serious questions about how advantage and privilege are
derived and how their effects might be mediated. Empirical data from two
disparate Australian sites is presented to demonstrate how critically
engaged learning that connects to young lives (p. 230) is possible. A
key strength of this text is the use of notion of space and geographies
of exclusion to theorise 'community', 'social
action' and 'activism'. We should not be surprised at the
theoretical turn of the authors; each is well known for the critical
voice that he has raised about teachers' lives and work,
leadership, educational activism and the experiences of young people in
contemporary educational systems.
This text is shaped around six chapters that present the reader
with a persuasive argument as to how critically engaged learning might
be established and fostered, and the role of community (individually and
collectively) plays. Drawing attention away from debates surrounding
oppression, control or domination, the authors centre their theoretical
and empirical attention on actively engaging young people, their voices
and their community. Accordingly, the reader is left with a very vivid
impression that young people have been actively involved in the
retelling of their stories and that the authors have resisted any
attempt to translate their perspectives into an adult voice.
This book does not offer a recipe or checklist for policy-makers,
school leaders, teachers or community. To do this would place this text
on a bookshelf that is already far too crammed with accounts that label
'disadvantage' as a condition that can be ameliorated. Sadly,
it is frequently these 'quick-fix' texts that are selected as
reference points because they too easily provide an answer rather than
offering serious questions about the nature of justice as well as
injustice. Schools can make a difference in the lives of young people
but only if they are prepared to listen to their constituents. The
notion of school and community as a constituency, not a consumer
product, permeates this book. The authors have taken seriously their
mandate to critically engage youth and community and this is the real
pleasure that emerges from this text; a text that should not languish on
bookshelves but should be read and reread.
Tanya Fitzgerald
La Trobe University
