Alternative Educational Programmes, Schools and Social Justice

Alternative education caters and cares for students whose regular schools have failed and excluded them. Fifty years of international research reports that alternative settings are characterised by close and powerful staff-student relationships, a curriculum which is relevant, engaging and meaningful, and the strong sense of agency afforded young people by the opportunity to make decisions. Together, these three practices produce increased life chances for alternative education participants.

However, despite these apparent successes, alternative education seems to have had little impact on mainstream schools. This collection of papers, addresses the important question - what might regular schools and teachers learn about socially just pedagogies from alternative education practices? In providing answers to this question, authors interrogate the taken-for-granted wisdom about alternative education while also taking account of ongoing policy shifts, differing locations and populations and persistent and intersecting patterns of raced, classed and gendered inequalities. They draw on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to interrogate the ways in which alternative schools and alternative education both challenge and legitimate the kinds of schooling most of us expect for our own and other people's children. This volume was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.

Glenda McGregor is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of School (Academic) in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Australia. She teaches in the areas of globalisation and education, youth studies and history curriculum. Her research interests include sociology of youth, democratic and alternative forms of education, curriculum, and social justice and education.

Martin Mills is Head of School in the School of Education at The University of Queensland, Australia. He is a Fellow of Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) and the immediate Past President of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). Martin's research interests include the sociology of education, social justice in education, alternative schooling, gender and education, school reform and new pedagogies.

Pat Thomson is Professor of Education at The University of Nottingham, UK. Her work centres on the ways in which educational practices can be made more equitable; her research currently focuses on arts and cultural education in schools, communities, galleries and museums. She is a former school leader of alternative and disadvantaged schools.

Jodie Pennacchia is a Researcher at the Learning and Work Institute and a doctoral candidate at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Nottingham, UK. Her research focuses on the ways education and training policies affect disadvantaged groups and the institutions that work with them.