This book aims to help teachers and those who support them to re-imagine the work of teaching, learning and leading. In particular, it shows how transformations of educational practice depend on complementary transformations in classroom-school- and system-level organisational cultures, resourcing and politics. It argues that transforming education requires more than professional development to transform teachers; it also calls for fundamental changes in learning and leading practices, which in turn means reshaping organisations that support teachers and teaching – organisational cultures, the resources organisations provide and distribute, and the relationships that connect people with one another in organisations. The book is based on findings from new research being conducted by the authors – the research team for the (2010-2012) Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project Leading and Learning: Developing Ecologies of Educational Practice.

Plantation Pedagogy originates from an Afro-Caribbean primary school teacher's experience. It provides a discourse which extends and illuminates the limitations of current neo-liberal and global rationalizations of the challenges posed to a teacher's practice. Plantation pedagogy is distinguished from critical pedagogy by its historical presence and its double-faced manifestations as simultaneously oppressive and subversive. Plantation pedagogy privileges and relocates educational transformation within the cultural arena, so that culture and history become the vehicles for teaching, educational research, and social transformation. It returns the work of education to the community; promotes an interconnection among the personal stories of the teacher, the historical narratives and memories of the community of teaching, and the professional advocacy of the teaching community; and advances an incomplete decolonization project of public political education.