Critical Race Theory and the Meaning of “Community” in District Partnerships

This article uses a critical race theory lens to explore how members of one community-district partnership understand “community.” Engaging the community through full service schools (Dryfoos & Maguire, 2002), parent engagement programs (Comer & Emmons, 2006), lab schools through universities (Goldring & Sims, 2005), and other partnerships have become a major strand of reform in schools and districts. However, there is a dearth of critical scholarship that explores the contested meanings and implications of evoking community-laden terminology and approaches (Sanders, 2003; Warren, 2005). Using a grounded theory approach, this case study draws from a combination of ethnographic observations of governance meetings, committee meetings, and events over a year and a half; semi-structured interviews with 11 governance council members from the school district and other partners; and document analysis. Iterative rounds of coding identified ten concepts that were organized into three key categories: geographical and sociocultural conceptualizations of community, “community” as a euphemism, and structuring constraints and empowerment through advisory roles. These findings have broad implications for how we engage in community development and district partnership work in ways that are constructive, effective, and socially just.     

“Re-acculturation” through Community-Based Religious Education

Reflective engagement in reciprocal community partnerships holds tremendous potential for guiding members of congregations through the process of “re-acculturation.” One of the “best practices” named in research about community-engaged learning for undergraduates is “re-acculturation”—an ongoing process of critical reflection about one's own cultural formation and the cultural realities of people one encounters through community partnerships. Only through this kind of honest critical reflection can people develop friendships of true mutuality and reciprocity. Religious education should include biblical, ethical, and theological reflection, combined with historical and cultural research about ethnic, economic, and religious diversity in relation to particular congregation–community partnerships.     

Visual Culture and Critical Pedagogy in “Terrorist Times”

Instant access to visual images and emotional accounts of terrorism have secured them a vivid place in our memory and reinforced the idea that “we” have been targeted and are under immediate threat. Fear and the sense of belonging to an innocent, victimized, and threatened group, under attack from irrational, malevolent, and uncontrollable “others”, is a significant feature of “terrorist times” in Western nations. These identities and feelings are reinforced though visual images and the circulation of recurrent statements, polemics, rationalities, and representations. This article explores a discourse analytic approach to critical pedagogy. Such an approach engages with multiple forms of visuality to explore the discourses though which identities and truths about ourselves and others are established, challenged, and resisted. Discourse analysis exposes how knowledges and understandings come to be taken up as history, politics, justice, and the “truth”, while a critical approach to pedagogy highlights the hegemonic role of ideology and discourses in furthering dominant interests and knowledges. One might expect the new literacies approach undertaken in “multiliteracies” to assist in this task, this article identifies several key limitations, including the focus on design-based pedagogy.     

THE PRIVATIZED PUBLIC: ANTAGONISM FOR A RADICAL DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IN SCHOOLS?

In an extended era of privatization initiatives, when accountability principles and competitive business logics pervade school discourse and practice, what is left of the “public” part of public schooling? When market rationality privileges individualism and competition and provides much of the justification for the aims of U.S. schools, how is the notion of the public good evidenced? In this essay Deron Boyles makes the claim that public schools inordinately function as private markets—as places where a unidirectional narrative of “givens” reinforce individualism, competition, and corporatization under the guise of merit, testing, and school‐business partnerships.     

Pedagogies of being with: Witnessing,testimonio, and critical love in everyday social movement

This conceptual article explores education and the relational in everyday social movement. I highlight a single, local community event—a Speak Out—and travel with scholarship on public pedagogy, witnessing, and Latina feminist theories of coalition to articulate pedagogies of ‘being with’ in community activism for racial justice. My interpretive vignettes of the Speak Out are part of a larger ethnographic study focusing on a segment of a rural/small city community that moved with intention to teach and learn racial justice. While larger concrete goals were crucial and at the center of the community’s curriculum for justice, the various sites and forms of race-conscious pedagogy in public life—community forums, vigils, celebrations, mural projects—were also enactments of a profound commitment to the relational, to finding common ground in difficult solidarities. With a focus on the testimonios of three women of Color participants in the Speak Out, I show how witnessing and testimonio were at the center of pedagogies of ‘being with.’ In this work of education, the women (1) redefined community, accountability, and ally work, (2) exposed the fissures in social justice organizing across difference, describing commitment to social action with rather than for those most affected by institutional violence, and (3) affirmed the knowledge, histories, and self-determination of people of Color while challenging self-defeating stereotypes. Critical love sustained an ethics of openness to difference and facilitated the intentional work of creating race-conscious learning communities.     

From a Language to a Theory of Resistance: Critical Pedagogy,the Limits of “Framing,” and Social Change

In this article, Rebecca Tarlau attempts to build a more robust theory of the relationship between education and social change by drawing on the conceptual tools offered in the critical pedagogy and social movement literatures. Tarlau argues that while critical pedagogy has been largely disconnected from its roots in political organizing, social movement literature has shifted away from a theory of educational processes within movement building. Specifically, she suggests that the currently dominant “framing perspective” in the social movement literature is incredibly limited in its ability to analyze the pedagogical aspects of organizing. Conversely, while scholars of critical pedagogy are extremely convincing when critiquing U.S. schooling, the field is weaker when theorizing about how teachers using critical pedagogy can link to larger movements for social transformation. Critical pedagogues need more organizational thinking and social movement scholars need a more pedagogical focus. Tarlau suggests three conceptual frameworks for moving forward in this direction: the notion of social movements as pedagogical spaces, the role of informal educational projects in facilitating the emergence and strength of social movements, and the role of public schools as terrains of contestation that hold the possibility of linking to larger struggles for social justice.     

Moving beyond collusion: clinical faculty and university/public school partnership

Drawing on interviews with clinical and university-based teacher educators and administrators, the authors explore the challenges of building and sustaining collaborative university/school partnerships. Using the concept of “communities of practice” (Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1998), the authors describe how clinical and university-based teacher educators share a set of assumptions about their respective roles—described as a form of “collusion”—that confirms status differences as well as the value of transmissive models of teaching. These assumptions undermine the goal of collaboration. The authors argue that the process involved in forming university/school partnerships needs to be understood less as an administrative and motivational problem than a question of identity formation and of relationship building.     

Racial sedimentation and the common sense of racialized violence: The case of black church burnings

I theorize how the common sense of racialized violence, manifest in public discourse, is engendered by the rhetorical process of racial sedimentation. This meaning-making process fashions a seemingly legitimate text from a reservoir of historically deposited fragments that congeal in response to racial crises as a means of explaining away the threat to the racial status quo and burying critical counterdiscourses. I demonstrate this sedimentation process by analyzing both the dominant and vernacular discourses that emerged in response to eight black churches that were burned in a ten-day period following the June 2015 AME church massacre. I also consider how these vernacular rhetorics mobilize fugitive fragments from what Karma Chávez calls the “undercommonsense” to form a survival discourse and what possibilities those radical (from Latin radix, “root”) meaning-making practices may hold. This essay advances communication studies scholarship by connecting discursive approaches to race and racism with rhetorical scholarship on fragmentation, ideology, and public memory. It offers a vocabulary for confronting civil society’s material rhetorics that mask the material realities of racism and racial oppression, and calls for rhetoricians to take seriously the common-sense racism that perpetuates these dynamics and how it might be revised or contested.     

以社会主义核心价值观阐释民法典基本原则——对民法学教育“课程思政”的思考

将思想政治教育的元素和功能渗透入教学每一环节,以“课程思政”为目标的全方位课堂教学改革,成为大学教师的重要教学目标,也是培养新时代接班人、教书育人的重要环节。教育首先应该是教育学生做人的基本道理,这就是所有课程“思政”的着眼点。民法典是民事活动所要遵循的基本规范,而其基本原则是一切民事法律规范和民事法律制度的指导性内容,是道德自律性和法律他律性的结合,体现了和谐社会的价值追求,其平等、自愿、诚信、公序良俗和绿色环保等基本原则,从不同层面体现了社会主义核心价值观的基本内涵。而社会主义核心价值观中的“公正”“平等”“自由”等内容则直接体现了民法典的基本价值取向,二者相互呼应,体现了价值目标的一致性。在教学活动中将二者融会贯通有效结合,将会达到教书育人的良好效果。     

Advancing alternate tools: why science education needs CRP and CRT

Ridgeway and Yerrick’s paper, Whose banner are we waving?: exploring STEM partnerships for marginalized urban youth, unearthed the tensions that existed between a local community “expert” and a group of students and their facilitator in an afterschool program. Those of us who work with youth who are traditionally marginalized, understand the importance of teaching in culturally relevant ways, but far too often—as Ridgeway and Yerrick shared—community partners have beliefs, motives, and ideologies that are incompatible to the program’s mission and goals. Nevertheless, we often enter partnerships assuming that the other party understands the needs of the students or community; understands how in U.S. society White is normative while all others are deficient; and understands how to engage with students in culturally relevant ways. This forum addresses the underlying assumption, described in the Ridgeway and Yerrick article, that educators—despite their background and experiences—are able to teach in culturally relevant ways. Additionally, I assert based on the finding in the article that just as Ladson-Billings and Tate (Teach Coll Rec 97(1):47–68, 1995) asserted, race in the U.S. society, as a scholarly pursuit, was under theorized. The same is true of science education; race in science education is under theorized and the use of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory as a pedagogical model and analytical tool, respectively, in science education is minimal. The increased use of both would impact our understanding of who does science, and how to broaden participation among people of color.     

U.S.-Mexico Border Studies Online Collaboration: Transformative Learning Across Power and Privilege

In response to the national conversation about the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration in recent years, we created an online partnership between students in concurrent border studies courses at our two campuses: a public Hispanic-serving institution in South Texas and a private, small liberal arts college in Michigan. We explored whether and how the tensions between privileged and disadvantaged students documented in the traditional classroom would manifest online, and how we could use virtual technologies most effectively to structure transformative learning, defined as recognition and articulation of the structural and cultural systems that frame individual experience and meaning-making, across difference. As we document in this essay, tensions around racial, class, and educational inequality did occur in our partnership. Yet these tensions were crucial in creating the conditions for transformative learning because they generated “disorienting dilemmas” that challenged students’ assumptions and knowledge. Our intentional integration of critical multiculturalist curriculum and pedagogical practices (especially embodied, facilitated online interactions) capitalized upon those conditions. By the end of the partnership, both groups of students experienced significant—but distinctive—trajectories of transformative learning that unsettled not only their individual understandings, but also the dynamics of power that characterize the higher education landscape. Given the polarization wrought by border and immigration discourse and educational policies that will likely produce increasingly segregated campuses in years to come, such online partnerships show promise for critical multiculturalist educators seeking to create opportunities for learning across difference and inequality.     

A Nonviolent Approach to Social Justice Education

This article advocates a nonviolent approach to social justice education. First, social justice education literature is reviewed, and two contrasting and influential approaches—critical theory and poststructural theory—are the focus of critical analysis. A nonviolent approach is proposed as an alternative. Second, the notion of social justice is reexamined to reveal its tie with the notion of the individual, and the concept of nonviolence in its emphasis on relationality is discussed. Three facets of nonviolence are further elaborated: relational dynamics, inner peace, and nonviolent means. Third, these facets are translated into important aspects of a pedagogy of nonviolence: Integrating the inner and the outer work; shifting the struggles of opposites to the interdependence of differences; using and improvising nonviolent teaching strategies. To enrich theoretical understandings and inspire practical insights, this article also interweaves international wisdom traditions (including African ubuntu, Buddist nonduality, and Taoist dynamics), my teaching experiences, and the formulation of a nonviolent social justice pedagogy in teacher education.     

Liberatory Public Education: A Framework for Centering Community and Democracy in Public Education

In this conceptual article, the authors argue that diversity is an invitation to educators, youth, families, and community members to work together—a goal accomplished only by centering the local community rather than the local school—to educate youth and create a more just society. Based upon liberatory and emancipatory education, liberatory public education, an intersectional conceptual framework, brings together recent and current justice-oriented scholarship focused on youth development, curriculum and pedagogy, schooling, and community liberation, making a parallel case for justice-oriented family engagement in public schooling. The authors conclude with implications for teacher education, education policy, and family engagement scholarship.     

SHOULD JEWISH SUPPLEMENTARY RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS BE LIKE THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS?

Whether the Jewish supplementary school should be operated as if it were a public school depends on the goals of Jewish education. “In terms of ultimate goals, however, Jewish education is now at a crossroads.”¹ While all Jewish educators would probably agree with Harold Schulweis' statement that “it is our sacred task to create Jews,”² educators are not in agreement over what type of Jews we are to create and how we are to create them. Jewish educators can be divided into two groups. One group wants to create “educated, thinking Jews” — goal #1—while the other desires to shape children into “feeling Jews” —goal #2.     

The classroom as a stage and the teacher's role

Teaching is a profession in which teachers are accustomed to being in the spotlight. In this paper we meet “Tina”¹—a newly employed teacher at a Norwegian public junior high school—who is engaged on an hourly basis to teach Arts and Crafts, including a seventh-grade class which has been called “challenging” by other members of the staff. Enthusiastic, committed, and focused educators who can serve as role models for their students are much in demand at this school. Her own challenge is to find a good balance between the many cultural roles she has to perform in an inclusive education—one that works toward a goal of servicing an integrated student body—as manager, administrator of materials, initiator, facilitator, reflection partner, and mentor. In this paper we describe how she shapes a learning environment characterized by clear and unambiguous signals about what is acceptable behavior, while at the same time insisting on creativity and originality in art work. The guiding question is: How does the teacher achieve the double task of keeping order and maintaining creativity?The study is based on ethnographic field work conducted over several months in the Arts and Crafts class of “Berge” school. We describe how the children try to sabotage the tasks, and analyze critical episodes using sociocultural theory. With its emphasis on cultural and creative activities, the Arts and Crafts subject provides a special opportunity for what sociocultural theory calls using mediating artefacts or elements (mediated action²). What makes the subject particularly interesting is that it is not only a matter of using linguistic mediation, but rather also mediation based on external factors, such as the use of specific objects or model learning.     

ERIC

Three focus groups consisting of 42 board of trustee members, community college presidents, senior administrators, and faculty members developed critical issues facing community colleges with respect to instructional planning and services; planning, governance, finance; and workforce development. Thereafter, the delegation of more than 200 voted upon the overall top critical issues. “Ask customers what they want and give it to them—create for the future,” “the first rule of business is the same as the first rule of life: adapt or die;” and “hire the right people, get them on the right seat on the bus, and keep them there” were the top three critical issues overall.     

SURVEY OF JEWISH EDUCATION IN NEW YORK CITY

This case study examines the contours of culturally relevant pedagogy in an undergraduate preservice teacher education program for Jewish women. The case describes how the assigned reading of Albarelli’s (2000) narrative of teaching in a Hasidic Jewish school, Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva, disrupts the classroom community, diminishes student engagement with the course, and undermines student confidence in the instructor. This research explores what happens when “respect for” challenges “reflection about.” The study finds that differential cultural understandings surrounding the concept of “respect” mediate the discourse. The author raises questions about the ethics of social justice in religious teacher education, probes the poverty of educational reform in a landscape of nondiscussables, and offers strategies for navigating this tender terrain.     

Authoring Data Stories in a Media Makerspace: Adolescents Developing Critical Data Literacies

This article centers sociocultural and sociopolitical considerations of how young people understand, represent, and use data by presenting findings from a social design research study about how students in a public urban high school authored “data stories” using personal data they curated, collected, and visualized. The study contributes to theoretical understandings of critical data literacies by considering the experiences and practices of adolescents enrolled in a required media arts class as they produced data visualizations drawn from their everyday lives. Findings center on two aspects of critical data literacies youth developed—understanding themselves as people capable of using data for multiple purposes and understanding data as socially situated resources for meaning-making. This study foregrounds the importance of positioning youth as authors and architects of data, making central youth perspectives in understanding the role of data in young people’s digitally connected lives and highlighting the importance of expanding what “counts” as data. It also suggests the importance of creating infrastructure to support the development of culturally relevant data practices that highlight the social, cultural, and political uses of data and its racialized dimensions.     

Revisioning Philosophy of Education Instruction in Competency-Based B. Ed. Programs

This article concerns the relationship between classroom assessments that are aligned with “competencies-based” teaching in Teacher Education programs on the one hand, and on the other hand, the challenge of offering authentic “philosophy of education,” “education theory,” or “education foundations” courses for student–teachers who are enrolled in a professional degree and on the way towards certification. Briefly, administrative and accreditation concerns with developing and demonstrating core “competencies” when teaching is considered strictly as a “profession” do not align with more ancient understandings of teaching as a “way of life”—especially when that life is led in some relation to philosophy, or “the pursuit of wisdom.” This article examines the disjunction between these two conceptualizations of teaching; it encourages readers to think about how this disjunction problematizes their pedagogy as “philosophers of education.”