Educational engagement among students of refugee background continues to be shaped by deficit-oriented discourses that frame these young people through lenses of vulnerability, risk, and remediation. While often justified through institutional imperatives of inclusion and safeguarding, such framings can obscure students’ strengths, silence their voices, and reproduce inequitable schooling practices. This paper presents a research proposal for a Critical Engaging Participatory Action Research (CEPAR) study conducted with second-generation African-Australian students attending a secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. The study seeks to foreground students’ lived experiences of engagement and disengagement in schooling and to explore how dialogic and participatory processes can foster more critical and transformative forms of educational engagement.

The overarching objective of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to develop an understanding of the multifaceted factors that constrain and enable African-Australian students’ engagement in schooling from their own perspectives. Second, it seeks to co-create, with students, communicative spaces for reflection and action that can inform more just and responsive educational practices. In contrast to top-down approaches that define students’ needs through externally imposed prescriptions, this study positions students as epistemic and political agents capable of articulating their own experiences, priorities, and aspirations (Noddings, 2005; Veck, 2013). The paper is guided by two interconnected research questions: From the perspectives of second-generation African-Australian students, what practice architectures help and hinder their engagement in schooling? How can communicative spaces for reflection and co-creation contribute to critical and transformative engagement for this group of students?

Conceptually, the paper is informed by Nancy Fraser’s (Fraser) theory of social justice, which conceptualises injustice across three analytically distinct yet interconnected dimensions: redistribution (economic), recognition (United Nations Educational & Organization), and representation (political). This framework provides a macro-level lens for theorising educational engagement and disengagement as socially and politically situated phenomena rather than as individual deficits. For African-Australian students, cultural injustices often emerge through dominant discourses and hierarchical patterns of value that contribute to misrecognition, including experiences of othering, stereotyping, and systemic racism within schools (Abur, 2012; Baak, 2019; Edgeworth, 2015). Economic injustices are linked to the maldistribution of resources within neoliberal education systems, while political injustices arise when students and their families are denied parity of participation and meaningful voice in decision-making processes, leading to misrepresentation or misframing (Fraser, 2008; Keddie, 2012). More recent research on student engagement suggests that, although these macro-levels of engagement are considered in educational studies, the political nature of this phenomenon is often overlooked (Vallee, 2017).

The paper also draws on the Theory of Practice Architectures (TPA) (Kemmis, McTaggart, & Nixon, 2014) as a complementary analytical and transformative framework. TPA conceptualises educational practices as constituted by interconnected sayings, doings, and relatings, which are enabled and constrained by site-specific cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements. In this study, TPA is used to analyse how everyday schooling practices shape students’ trajectories of engagement and disengagement, and to identify how these practices may appear unreasonable, unproductive, or unjust in encounters with African-Australian students and their communities (Wilkinson & Kaukko, 2020).

Building on this justice-oriented lens, the study conceptualises student engagement as a critical and transformative practice. Engagement is understood not as compliance or participation within existing structures, but as a dialogic process through which students critically reflect on their conditions, name experiences of injustice, and participate in transforming them (Freire, 1998). Fostering communicative spaces for students’ engagement provided an opportunity to encounter, in face-to-face spaces, participants’ voices and find those common concerns and issues that could guide ways forward in terms of their engagement in schooling.

The long-standing dominance of traditional Western research methodologies has contributed to the silencing of marginalised communities and the reproduction of deficit-oriented narratives that frame young people from refugee backgrounds primarily in terms of challenges and shortcomings (Kaukko, 2015; Yaghmai, 2015). In response, this study is underpinned by a critical–ideological research paradigm, with an explicitly transformative aim of challenging dominant systems of knowledge production and co-creating practices oriented towards social justice (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1987). Given the unequal power relations shaping the educational experiences of Second-generation African-Australian students, a participatory methodology was necessary. The study adopts a Critical Emancipatory Participatory Action Research (CEPAR) approach grounded in four key premises: researching with rather than on participants; co-producing knowledge through dialogic engagement; challenging and disrupting the status quo; and engaging in ongoing reflexivity in relation to intersecting identities and power relations. CEPAR is particularly suited to research with young people as it foregrounds social justice, relationality, and the pursuit of parity of participation. CEPAR in this study was operationalised through three interrelated methodological principles: (1) critical reflection on participants’ intersecting social identities; (2) iterative cycles of reflection and action aimed at addressing injustices in schooling practices; and (3) a pedagogical intervention informed by critical pedagogies, including problem-posing and heart-storming activities. This approach was designed to foreground the political and relational dimensions of educational engagement and to create communicative spaces for critical and transformative alternatives. Data were generated through activity-based focus groups and reflective artefacts produced during communicative encounters with 21 students aged 13–17 years at a secondary school in Melbourne. Three forms of data were collected: (1) researcher journal entries, (2) student-generated artefacts, and (3) transcripts of activity- focus group discussions. The intervention consisted of two phases. The first phase focused on identifying and recognising educational engagement practices by examining the practice architectures that enabled and constrained students’ engagement in schooling. This involved analysing students’ sayings (discourses and language), doings (activities and material conditions), and relatings (relationships and power dynamics). The second phase involved a cyclical process of transformative engagement in which students and the researcher collaboratively heart-stormed, co-created, and enacted alternative practices for educational change.

This study demonstrates that the praxis of creating communicative spaces for student engagement through CEPAR made visible a range of schooling practices that shaped the engagement experiences of second-generation African-Australian (SGAA) students. From students’ perspectives, experiences of misrepresentation—manifested through the exclusion of their voices from their educational journeys (Pillay & Asadi, 2018)—alongside misrecognition in the form of disrespect, stigmatisation, and racism (Bloch & Hirsch, 2017; Hirsch, 2019; Martin, Horgan, O'Riordan, & Maier, 2023), and maldistribution of resources operated as critical practice architectures of exclusion. These conditions limited students’ opportunities for meaningful participation and contributed to reduced engagement in schooling. Conversely, within the dynamic interaction between educational practices and the arrangements that enable or constrain them, the study found that the cultivation of meaningful and trusting relationships was central to supporting positive engagement. Practices that affirmed students’ potential, encouraged high aspirations, and built trust through consistent and equitable treatment were particularly influential. Moreover, the creation of relational spaces characterised by familiarity, reciprocity, and genuine support enabled collaborative student–teacher partnerships. Such partnering practices played a key role in fostering more inclusive and engaging schooling experiences for SGAA students. The implementation of Phase 1 and Phase 2, SGAA students played a pivotal role in curriculum decision-making processes, challenging hegemonic structures and oppressive relationships (McMahon & Portelli, 2004). Participants worked in partnership with the school staff, and me, as the researcher, challenging the oppressive relationships they experience. An example of that was the intercultural expo. This aligns with the critical/transformative approach to students and school engagement that focuses on the individuals and the community’s potential transformational process (McMahon & Portelli, 2004).

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