Abstract
Tarquam Mckenna, Marcelle Cacciattolo and Mark Vicars, Engaging the disengaged: Inclusive approaches to teaching the least advantaged, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2013; 241 pp.: ISBN 978-1-107-62798-7, £54.00 (pbk)
Championing its content as necessary for successful implementation of the new Australian Curriculum, the editors of Engaging the Disengaged: Inclusive Approaches to Teaching the Least Advantaged (ETD) also confidently assure its readers that the text ‘makes an important contribution to educational thinking and practice in Australia’ (p. i). To guarantee that outcome, the editors – Tarquam McKenna, Marcelle Cacciattolo and Mark Vicars – have constructed ETD with the scholarly and pedagogical perspectives of both themselves and 11 of their faculty colleagues from the School of Education at Victoria University, Australia: Roger Slee, Greg Neal, Nicola Yelland, Andrea Nolan, Colleen Vale, Sharyn Livy, Anthony Watt, Cathryn Carpenter, Peter Burridge, Davina B Woods, and Jeanne Carroll. With their combination of policy formulation and subject area expertise in fields such as the arts, mathematics, physical education, literacy, and ICT in education, these academic professionals offer such a compendium of provocative and strategic insights about inclusive thinking and teaching that ETD emerges as more than a localized Australian teaching resource. Rather, the text constitutes yet another distinctive voice in the polyphonic discourse about social justice in learning, its underlying premise being ‘the belief that everyone must do all that they can to reveal inequity and to act in the interest of social justice’ (p. 232) [emphasis theirs]. With this noble goal in mind, the editors have produced a forthright, practice-based text in which teachers are encouraged to probe deeply into whether their beliefs and practices are consonant with the global demands of 21st century teaching.
The incentive for such probing is provided from the beginning of ETD in both the Foreword entitled ‘Are the engaged really engaged?’ by Shirley R Steinberg and the Introduction entitled ‘Exclusion – a habit that’s hard to kick’ by Roger Slee. Steinberg is unambiguous: ‘we must interrogate our own practices of engagement’ if our work is to result in ‘learning that leads to knowing, which in turn leads to sustainable ways of being in the world’ (p. v). Slee is just as precise, but also disconcerting: teachers are ‘carriers of a condition of collective indifference’ (p. 3) and have been ‘given permission to disengage from a growing body of children who are being managed out of, or repositioned at the side of, classrooms and schools and, in turn, out of productive educational futures’ (p. 9). It is not difficult, therefore, to feel berated and undermined as a teacher at the beginning of ETD, where Slee also contends that ‘teachers have been encouraged to turn away from a growing group of students who will be managed and, perhaps, educated through other means’ (p. 9). Accordingly, given the emphasis in the new Australian Curriculum on ‘improved educational participation and inclusion of all Australian students’ (p. i), it is noteworthy that ETD devotes an entire chapter each to identifying pre-school/early childhood education as seminal for initiating engagement (Chapter 3), to establishing the benefits of collaborative partnerships (Chapter 8), to the exploration of sexual diversity (Chapter 10), and to ‘Indigenous Australia: Ontologies, Epistemologies and Pedagogies’ (Chapter 11). As Waitoller and Artiles (2013) have discovered, understanding inclusive education requires an understanding of locally situated forms of exclusion, a proposition with which ETD seems to concur given the lesson plan format of its chapters.
However, while the lesson plan format provides structural symmetry to the reading experience of the text, the design also appears highly ironical in light of Shirley R Steinberg’s assertion in the ‘Foreword’ that the book challenges educators, inter alia, ‘to go beyond the trite notion of lesson planning’ if the engagement of students is to be meaningful and productive. In fact, the editors would like educators to regard the book as ‘a useful and inspiring resource for teacher education students’ (p. i), a desire that is symbolized with the uneven row of 13 coloured pencils which form a horizontal fence of sorts on the lower front cover of the book. With their sharpened points, their variety of colours, and their unevenness of height, the image is as arty as the message is clear: this book is about perspicacity but not perplexity, continuity but not sameness; diversity rather than uniformity; creativity rather than mimicry. Collectively then, the pencils convey a sense of artful readiness for the work of action and reflection that the text scripts for teachers and teacher education students. Indeed, as Slee quips at the end of the introduction, ‘[p]reaching engagement in others presupposes our own activity and demeanour’ (p. 12), hence the appropriateness of the subtitle to the ‘Reflective Closure’ at the end of the dozen chapters in ETD, namely, ‘What does this mean for you as a practitioner, researcher or scholarly teacher?’
The chapters are grouped within four parts excluding Slee’s ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1–14) and McKenna’s ‘Conclusion’ (pp. 223–232). Part 1 is entitled ‘The Digital Divide as a Tool for Inclusion’ (p. 15), Part 2, ‘Engagement in the Early Years’ (p. 53), Part 3, ‘Curriculum-Based Engagement’ (p. 71), and Part 4, ‘Agents of Change and Student Wellbeing’ (p. 141). The title of Part 1 serves to underscore not only the fact that teachers and students are existing in a 21st century techno-cultural reality, but also that such reality requires teachers to make ‘qualitative changes in the way they think of their teaching processes’ (p. 231). These two perspectives are conflated in the chapters that comprise Part 1, namely, ‘Accommodating New Learning in Different School Cultures’ (Chapter 1) and ‘Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide’ (Chapter 2). With these chapters essentially providing context and setting for the remainder of the text; Parts 2 through 4 then chart a cradle-to-career sequence which implicitly parallels the progress of a student through the Australian school system, the culminating Chapter 12 emphasizing overall educational outcomes with the teacher’s actions, concerns, and reflections being central to the unity and emphasis of each chapter.
Overall then, ETD illustrates both in purpose and style that the terms ‘engaged’ and ‘disengaged’ are as applicable to teachers as they are to students. Consequently, its message to teachers is clear – Stay awake!