Comparative measures of educational achievement (e.g. PISA, TIMSS, NAPLAN) demonstrate that although Australia is broadly understood to offer quality education, this masks stark and persistent inequalities. Wider disparities are evident between students from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds than in many other OECD countries. These inequities start before children enter schools. Children experiencing economic and social adversity are underrepresented in preschool and overrepresented in population level measures of ‘developmental vulnerability’ prior to school commencement. Young people from Indigenous backgrounds, rural/remote areas, and lower socio-economic backgrounds suffer significant achievement gaps across all measures, and the gap widens as they progress through their education. Some young people are being left behind as their more advantaged peers outpace them, with life-long consequences. Although public discourse encourages us to see educational failure as the fault of individuals, there is wide agreement that these inequities result from policy failures in Australian education.

The overarching message of the second edition of Understanding Sociological Theory for Educational Practices is that teachers can and do make a difference to the lives of young people and, through them, to the broader community. However, it is clear that this is most powerful and positive when they develop nuanced understandings of the complex socio-cultural contexts within which teaching and learning take place. This requires sophisticated understandings of educational sites as institutions where power circulates, where it is produced and contested and where certain ways of being in the world are made possible while others may be precluded. Therefore, education can be understood as producing particular subjects with specific needs, aspirations and desires that are inflected in complex ways by location, class, language background, belief systems, indigeneity, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, mobility, dis/ability, family structures and histories and other factors. These insights are just as relevant to the teaching and learning that occur in informal or flexible sites of education, including volunteer and community locations, as they are in more familiar and formal sites, such as schools and universities.

Classrooms, playgrounds and other diverse sites of learning are the everyday material spaces within which our diverse subjectivities come into collision, where we express and learn about difference and are shaped and influenced by others with their own constellations of differences. At worst, as Connell, Ashenden, Kessler and Dowsett pointed out in their groundbreaking sociological study of Australian schooling, Making the Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division (1982), they can be sites that actively produce and exacerbate disadvantage for many students, and that shore up social advantage for others. More productively, educational sites are where we learn to create community, and begin to understand and contribute to democracy.

Creating equitable educational spaces does not mean naïvely treating everyone the same, repeating normative practices and reproducing oppressive ways of thinking and behaving. Rather, promoting an equity agenda means that, as educators, we learn to recognise, to name and to disrupt oppressions, particularly where that means catching ourselves out in moments or habits of thinking that may be unjust to some of our students or their families or communities. It means developing pedagogical practices that are nuanced by complex understandings of cultural, social and linguistic diversity. It means that we must be committed to equitable outcomes for all children and young people.

The overarching message of Understanding Sociological Theory for Educational Practices is that teachers can and do make a difference to the lives of young people, and through them, to the broader community. However, it is clear that this is most powerful and positive when they develop nuanced understandings of the complex socio-cultural contexts within which teaching and learning take place. This requires sophisticated understandings of educational sites as institutions where power circulates, where it is produced and contested and where certain ways of being in the world are made possible while others may be precluded. Therefore, education can be understood as producing particular subjects with speciic needs, aspirations and desires that are inlected in complex ways by location, class, language background, belief systems, indigeneity, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, mobility, dis/ability, family structures and histories and other factors. These insights are just as relevant to the teaching and learning that occurs in informal or lexible sites of education, including volunteer and community locations, as they are in more familiar and formal sites such as schools and universities.

Classrooms, playgrounds and other diverse sites of learning are the everyday material spaces within which our diverse subjectivities come into collision, where we express and learn about difference and are shaped and inluenced by others with their own constellations of differences.