The local matters: Working with teachers to rethink the poverty and achievement gap discourse

This paper is concerned with the current achievement gap policy agenda and associated material discursive power that shape teachers’ work in schools high child poverty rates. More specifically, it explores how a university/school research collaboration – Local Matters can disturb such forms of subjectivation by enabling educators to resist agendas/discourses drawing on locally contextualized knowledge place-based evidence. Based fieldwork undertaken over past three years at forty eighty-four teachers across five Authority regions Northern England, we provide critical discourse analysis series semi structured interviews focus group activities those who participated project. an interdiscursive linguistic data show wrestle tensions between attempting enact social justice, collaborative democratic pedagogic approach dealing requirements problem ‘what works’ solution. Through enactment program educators, activist researchers, develop principled resistance shake up unsettle dominant practice discourses schools.