This paper recognises the important continuing contributions that the 'sociology of pedagogy' can make within current theoretical and empirical work into productive classroom pedagogies. It reports on research into student engagement in a primary school in Sydney's South West. The research foregrounds the voices of both students and teachers as they explore the discourses and pedagogic spaces of their classroom experiences. In particular this research looks keenly to the insights provided by students to construct clearer solutions to the challenge of providing engaging pedagogies.

The pedagogic spaces of classrooms are "messy spaces". That is, when students and teachers respond to each other culturally in continual negotiations over the terms, conditions and results of the learning environment there are few neatly anticipated or realized lines of engagement. This paper builds on arguments previously raised about how students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds might be encouraged to take up offers of educational success, and, more critically, remain committed over time to these offers (see, McFadden & Munns, 2002). The central issues of the paper then represent a theoretical and empirical search for the pedagogical conditions that are able to create a learner consciousness and identity consistent with a genuine and enduring engagement with schooling and education.

The theory and research discussed in this paper have their origins in the 'sociology of pedagogy'. Drawing in particular on the work of Bernstein (see 1996 for overview) and Willis (1977, 1981, 1983), we earlier drew attention to the long-term tensions between student resistance and acceptance of school (McFadden & Munns, 2002). The argument is that no matter how well-intentioned or theoretically sound teachers' pedagogical practices are, there is no guarantee that students will "buy them". This will not surprise educators familiar with educationally disadvantaged contexts where resistances to school practices doggedly persist despite considerable enterprise and energy over long periods of time. Our suggestion is that if students are to engage with school and education, there needs to be a consideration of how this is made possible within the discourses and pedagogic spaces on both sides of the teacher/student classroom relationship. Such a possibility needs an underlying recognition that pedagogies are not "productive" only in terms of teacher intent but rather in their playing out.

This playing out is the messy space that interests us in this paper. The proposal is that when students are allowed to be active participants in classrooms and involved in interruptions to the discourses of power, there are real chances that they will develop a consciousness that "school is for me", rather than one of defeat, struggle and giving up.

These theoretical ideas are being taken up in research in a primary school in Sydney's South-West. The school, Carramar Primary School, is in a culturally diverse and poor community. The majority of the 290 students come from Non-English Speaking Backgrounds. These students make up 85% of the school and represent over 30 languages. Vietnamese, Chinese and Arabic speakers are the largest groups. People live in a mixture of public and private housing (high density flats and mainly older-style houses, many of which are fibro). The school receives funds from the Priority Schools Program.

The research is being conducted as part of the Fair Go Fair Share Fair Say Fair Content Project (hereafter Fair Go Project or FGP), a joint enterprise between the Priority Schools Funding Program and the School of Education and Early Childhood Studies (University of Western Sydney). Employing a co-researching ethnographic methodology, the project brings together university researchers, educational consultants, school teachers and community members. The project's theoretical underpinnings derive from important research into 'authentic' (Newmann & Associates, 1996) and 'productive' pedagogy (School Reform Longitudinal Study: Hayes, Lingard and Mills, 2000) and the project has also developed its own strategic theoretical frameworks.

As discussed above, the research challenge at Carramar School is to define, investigate and describe the classroom pedagogical conditions that foster student engagement. Here a critical question is whether or not engagement is a key centralising factor in the successful implementation of empowering classroom pedagogies. The force of this question is determined by an understanding of what student engagement means.

Both the theoretical frames described earlier and the imperative of the research had encouraged us to look for definitions of student engagement beyond narrow ideas of students being on task and complying with teachers' wishes. When the aim is for students to develop a real and powerful sense that "school is for me", engagement is then seen to be a longer-term commitment to school and education. The Fair Go Project had formerly distinguished between procedural (that is, complying with teacher tasks and instructions) and substantive (that is, having a psychological investment when task, learning and satisfaction are interdependent) engagement. The project had coined phrases "on-task" or "in-task" to capture these distinctions. These ideas were extended (McFadden & Munns, 2002) using the concept of "big 'E' Engagement", signifying an emotional attachment and commitment to education. Drawing on ideas from the critical literacy literature we offered the following definitions that we believe capture this more significant concept of student engagement:

Our argument is that it is this level of engagement in and commitment to schooling that is rejected in large numbers by educationally disadvantaged students (McFadden and Munns, 2002).

The argument, however, begs a crucial question without which we would find ourselves bedevilled again by pessimistic and deterministic reproductive views of the role of education in society where disadvantage is seemingly locked in by a system that purports to offer disadvantaged students a way forward. The question is, what is the pedagogical wedge to be driven between rejection and engagement?

In attempting to answer this question we turned to Bernstein who had compellingly urged educators to see that pedagogic discourse could be both villain and champion for the educationally disadvantaged. It could either disenfranchise and exclude (Brooker, 2000) or offer empowerment and inclusion. From a research point of view the undertaking for us was to conceptualise the critical elements of "messy" classroom spaces that had the potential to include and involve students in "big 'E'" terms. Consistent with our definitions of engagement as emotional attachment and commitment to education we proposed the following framework:

judgement & feedback

performance & self-

regulation of learning)

productive pedagogies, rich tasks, visible pedagogies

The proposed framework has a number of key interconnected elements that we are arguing are critical sites for pedagogical change.

• Underpinning the Fair Go Insider Classroom framework are the employment of dimensions and elements of "productive pedagogies" and associated "rich tasks" (Hayes, Lingard, Mills, 2000). It is arguably the case that for students to be strongly engaged in their learning then their classroom should be characterised by purposeful experiences in a supportive classroom environment offering intellectual quality, relevance and recognition of learner difference.
• A second over-arching element is that there is a "visible pedagogy". We argue that if students are to be insiders in their classrooms then they should be privy to and actively involved in making decisions about their classroom experiences. A critical aspect of the research at Carramar is that the discussions that the researchers have about classroom pedagogies become part of the teachers' and students' classroom discourses.
• Within the framework teacher talk is central. As the arbiter of knowledge, power and control, teacher talk is a most significant ruler on learner consciousness. It regulates behaviour, confers decisions about learning, promotes thinking and provides opportunities for students to talk and interact with each other. It is the continual thread through which the fabric of classroom relationships and learner identity are woven. It can share or deny power. The research has considered different ways that teachers can talk with students. Cazden's (2001) work on classroom discourse has been critical to our thinking about what this might look like. As she so cogently says, "... teachers are being asked to deliberately give up relying heavily on the traditional three-part pattern of classroom lessons - Initiation/Response/Evaluation (IRE) ... they are being asked to add nontraditional discussions that serve better to stimulate and support "higher-order thinking" (Cazden, 2001, p.5).
• Teacher talk also drastically impacts on student talk. In the same way as the research thought about the different conversations that teachers could have with students, there was an attempt to encourage students to talk differently with and to each other in the classroom. Again, Cazden was crucial here, pointing to the potentialities of classroom discourse for student learning and suggesting that "we have to pay careful attention to who speaks and who receives thoughtful responses" (Cazden, 2001, p.5). As well as teacher talk, we considered student self-assessment (see below) to be a considerable catalyst in bringing forward opportunities for students to enter into meaningful conversations with each other about their learning.
• In all its forms (oral, written, symbolic) we see teacher feedback as a crucial element in the insider classroom. The relationship between students' views of themselves as learners and classroom achievement also deserves special attention. Hattie (2002, p.18) has pointed out how "self is part of the mediation of learning" and that there is a consequent need to focus feedback on the task (talking explicitly about achievement and what students have done that is right or wrong), processes (helping students acquire processes and better ways of doing tasks) and self-regulation (encouraging effort and confidence and helping students to stay on the task). Hattie's argument is that the focus of teacher feedback should be on the self-strategies of learning rather than on generalised and unrelated feedback about the students' moral and cognitive worth (for example, "you're a great kid" or "what a terrific student"). Hattie (2002, p.8) warns us that

• Previously, we have pointed to the importance of student voice in analysing issues of engagement. Indeed we speculated that perhaps it was only "the students themselves who will be able to tell us that they are engaged and who will say whether education is working for them in a culturally sensitive and relevant way" (McFadden & Munns, 2002, p.364 ). At Carramar School our research has maintained a particular focus on this intersection of student engagement and student self-assessment. We are currently interested in ways we can support students in processes of reflection and evaluation of their own learning. This support is concentrating on self-assessment probes that bring together affective and cognitive reflections and increasing intellectual challenges. The suggestion here is that student engagement is most likely to be found when there are high levels of both feeling and thinking. The work of Biggs (1995) has been helpful in this aspect of the research. His Solo Taxonomy is being adapted for our research for the development of frames for student self-assessment scaffolds. The Solo Taxonomy is a systematic way of increasing the structural complexity of learning and assessment tasks through unistructural, multistructural, relational and abstract sequences. When applied to student self-assessment, the idea is that it promotes deeper reflections about learning and works against the compliant and routine nature of self-assessments that have been observed among many students.

The research into the "messy space" and the "insider classroom" is still in its early stages. It suggests, even at this early stage, however, that a critical element of an engaging classroom is that the teacher is willing to share power with the students in the production and transmission of knowledge. And while this may not seem startling or radically new, we believe that by utilising theoretical ideas from the sociology of pedagogy the research will help us better understand the practicalities of how teachers and students might share, rather than struggle over, classroom space and time and the pacing and sequencing of curriculum.

As Bernstein said, whoever controls the pedagogic device controls the ruler for consciousness. The consciousness so created can be an enabling one that allows students to see school as worth something and leading somewhere, or it can be constructed in such a way that students feel left out and excluded culturally, linguistically and socially. In this kind of educational lockout some students fight openly or subversively (particularly in groups) to reclaim the classroom as their own territory. But as Willis (1977) pointed out so incisively, in doing so they forego the offers to knowledge and advancement that education offers.

We believe that the frameworks and elements suggested here: student talk; teacher talk; student self assessment; and explicit teacher feedback, taken together help us to think more clearly about what kinds of classrooms teachers need to offer students if they are to actualise the kind of emotional attachment and commitment to education that we would like to associate with the term "engagement".