Abstract:
The first of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers addresses the import of knowing students and how they learn. While more broadly, the Standards themselves are concerned with the professional identity-work of educators. Clearly, identity matters, and we know that it matters. However, on the rise are concerns with student attendance and retention, mental health, and the apparent lowering of academic achievements. As for teachers, many are leaving the profession within the initial few years, while staff satisfaction and retention across the sector are equally worrying. Will more of the same practices, policies, and ambitions that currently dominate the sector lead to better or different outcomes for students or teachers?
Despite its maligned and misunderstood representation, the collaborative, communal, and curative threads of punk culture – in terms of thinking, being, and doing - have much to offer. From the outset, punk offered critiques and alternative ways of conceptualizing the world and ways of worlding that are potentially not as harmful or constraining as those encountered in the dominant milieu of life. With a view to this, I will outline the role that punk sensibilities may offer educators with the sort of curricular and pedagogical chutzpah that enables them to engage with learners in ways that may improve schooling experiences for many. It is an approach to nourish the identity-work of both students and teachers, and it does so by encouraging social practices that generate cultural resources to critique dominant culture while concurrently creating worlds in which notions of active and informed citizenship are reinvigorated.
Despite its maligned and misunderstood representation, the collaborative, communal, and curative threads of punk culture – in terms of thinking, being, and doing - have much to offer. From the outset, punk offered critiques and alternative ways of conceptualizing the world and ways of worlding that are potentially not as harmful or constraining as those encountered in the dominant milieu of life. With a view to this, I will outline the role that punk sensibilities may offer educators with the sort of curricular and pedagogical chutzpah that enables them to engage with learners in ways that may improve schooling experiences for many. It is an approach to nourish the identity-work of both students and teachers, and it does so by encouraging social practices that generate cultural resources to critique dominant culture while concurrently creating worlds in which notions of active and informed citizenship are reinvigorated.