Exemplary Teachers of Students in Poverty

Education and poverty exist in a highly contested relationship even in the developed world. On the one hand, educational outcomes seem solidly attached to socio-economic status. On the other hand, education is often cited as a way out of poverty. Moreover, poverty itself manifests differently in different contexts the inner city, rural environments, urban and suburban housing estates, Indigenous communities, multi-cultural communities, working class and underclass communities each face different issues of disadvantage. The issues connecting education and poverty are complex but the question of the successful engagement of students from poor backgrounds is often laid by politicians at the feet of the teacher rather than at larger structural factors. Success at de-coupling poverty from educational outcomes varies across the developed world, such as in the OECD, but some countries are better at it than others. This book does not shy away from the complexity of the factors that influence educational engagement for poor students, but it does take seriously the notion that teachers can make a difference for those students. Locating itself in international debates about education and poverty and reports on the Priority Schools Program project conducted in Australia into the work of a number of teachers who were successful at engaging students from poor backgrounds, the book aims to: share the successful classroom practices of the teachers as a way of offering hope to educators, teachers and the wider international community that opportunities can be opened for students to become engaged and benefit academically and socially from their schooling consider and analyse the diversity and complexity of life in schools serving disadvantaged communities and so encourage readers to appreciate the great contrast in teaching contexts across low SES communities and gain a deeper understanding of the different issues, constraints and teaching perspectives across these contexts explore the ways that these exemplary teachers construct classroom relationships to cater for their diverse groups of students and therefore highlight the contextually different ways that teachers work productively with persistent classroom challenges present a generalised picture of the qualities of exemplary teachers of students in poverty and a set of common pedagogical qualities across all the teachers as well as others sets of qualities relevant to different contexts and groups of students emphasise the complexity of authentic pedagogy under these circumstances and to appreciate the myriad solutions that, nonetheless, have a shared feature in terms of the teachers' extraordinary commitment to matters of equity and social justice.