Living on the Edge: Rethinking Poverty, Class and Schooling

by John Smyth, Terry Wrigley

Living on the Rethinking Poverty, Class and Schooling, Second Edition confronts one of the most enduring and controversial issues in education―the nexus between poverty and underachievement. This topic stubbornly remains a key contemporary battleground in the struggle to raise standards. Living on the Edge maps and compares a number of competing explanations, critiques inadequate and deficit accounts and offers a more convincing and useful theory. The authors challenge the view that problems can be fixed by discrete initiatives, which in many instances are deeply rooted in deficit views of youth, families and communities. The book systematically interrogates a range of explanations based outside as well as inside schools. It draws upon positive examples of schools which are succeeding in engaging marginalized young people, providing worthwhile forms of learning and improving young lives. This second edition contains two expansive case studies that exemplify, explain and illustrate the themes coursing through the book. Living on the Edge's second edition remains a "must read" for anyone concerned about or implicated in the struggle for more socially just forms of education.

239 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2013

About the author

Research professor of education at the University of Ballarat. He is author/editor of fifteen books including, most recently, Teachers in the Middle: Reclaiming the Wasteland of the Adolescent
Years of Schooling (with Peter McInerney, Peter Lang Publishing, 2007) and “Dropping Out” Drifting Off, Being Excluded: Becoming Somebody Without School (with Robert Hattam and others, Peter Lang Publishing, 2004). His research interests include policy ethnographies of schooling, issues of social justice, community renewal, and
policy sociology of students’ lives and teachers’ work