In today’s world, there is considerable population mobility across both national and state borders and from one continent to another. As Danaher, Moriarty and Danaher (2009) have pointed out, mobilities receive a wide range of responses, ranging from an appreciation of the glamour of those who ‘jet set’ internationally to the reproach of refugees and the homeless. In light of “unresolved uncertainties” about mobility and fixed residence (Henderson & Danaher, in press) and evidence that many families with school-aged children move locations in many parts of the world – including England (Bhopal & Myers, 2009), Spain (Souto-Otero, 2009), Ireland (Kenny & Binchy, 2009), the US (Gouwens, 2001) and Australia (Henderson, 2009) – it seems timely to consider mobility and school pedagogies in relation to social justice. This is particularly important because schooling tends to be predicated on the assumption that students will have a fixed place of residence.

Currently, accountability seems to permeate everything educational. Many countries and organisations (e.g. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) have participated in the accountability agenda through standardised testing of students and considerations about how to raise the quality of learning and teaching in schools. Although calls for improved standards are usually accompanied by arguments for social justice and equity, evidence suggests that mobile students are often invisible to educators and to policy makers (Gouwens, 2009; Henderson, 2009; Kenny & Danaher, 2009) and that many do not achieve the academic levels of their non-mobile peers (e.g. see Office for Standards in Education, 2003). 

This paper examines the nexus of student mobility, pedagogy and social justice in schools. It addresses three questions: How do teachers socially and discursively ‘make sense’ of children who change schools regularly as a result of the occupational mobility of their parents? How are teachers’ constructions of the children linked to their classroom pedagogies? And what does this mean for socially just education? Using the learning of English literacy as an example, the paper concludes with a discussion of how pedagogies might be reconsidered, in order to ensure high quality as well as high equity schooling.

This paper draws on an Australian study that investigated how teachers tried to make sense of the literacy learning of children with transient lifestyles and of the effects of occupational mobility on the children’s schooling more generally. By considering the learning of ‘school’ literacy as a social and cultural practice, the study examines teachers’ social and discursive constructions of students whose parents were unskilled farm workers and traveled large distances to work summer and winter harvesting seasons. The families had migrated to Australia from many regions of the world, including Europe, Asia and the Pacific Islands and had found employment as unskilled farm labourers. The paper investigates the impact of mobility as a cultural change that has ramifications for social justice in school contexts.  

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