There is a profound and deepening crisis afflicting secondary schools in most parts of the
world - but at its essence it is a crisis of a very different kind from the one portrayed by
the media the business community politicians and policy makers. Just what constitutes the
crisis is highly problematic. What is being constructed for us through a concerted
«conservative assault» and a «new authoritarianism» is one of failure by young people their
schools and their teachers. But as with any moral panic there are undisclosed interests and
agenda operating and they are not those of the people most directly affected in this case
young people. This book tackles those myths head-on. Through a multi-layered portrait analysis
of young lives adult lives and school lives this book shows how schools teachers and young
people are re-inventing themselves against the damaging prevailing educational policy
discourses. Teachers are «in the middle» in all kinds of ways - they are a group who are
continually being disparaged pilloried and denigrated by politicians and the media they are
caught in the shifting tectonic plates of capitalism as schools are increasingly required to do
economic work and they are continually mediating the emotional social and intellectual
intersections between schools society classrooms and young lives. Teachers in the Middle
provides a critique as well as hope and possibility as schools engage pedagogically with the
maelstrom in which they find themselves.
