Curriculum as colour and curves: a synthesis of Black theory,design and creativity realised as critical curriculum writing

This article looks to three inspirational Black women, bell hooks, Stacey McBride-Irby and Patricia Williams, in the pursuit of radical curriculum. While today curriculum is critiqued as racialised, gendered, sexualised and classed, the formats of curriculum documents such as text books, units of work and lesson plans have changed little. These documents are often conceived as linear sequences of steps leading to outcomes, and their voices are distanced and ‘neutral’. Drawing on a doctoral study of curriculum design in Australia, this article embraces a different approach by opening up a unit of work on girls’ popular culture to hooks’ invocations to teach to transgress, so that curriculum might be experienced as colour and curves, rather than a monochrome route to a pre-determined end point. Through this, along with hooks, I invite teachers to live pedagogy, rather than to deliver it.     

Self-fulfilling prophecy not: using cultural assets to beat the odds

In this study, the pedagogies of the home used by Latinos as they attend schools in the USA are highlighted. We hope to use the stories of Arturo and Ruben, successful Latinos, as a means to show that Latinos are developing strategies that can be shared through the telling of their stories and to claim the value of voicing the difficult realities of Latinos as they resist falling victim to anticipated self-fulfilling prophecies and move creatively through the educational pipeline to reach their best defined possible selves.     

Bodies as objects of pedagogic power relations

This paper is based on a study titled ‘Enacting Feminisms in Academia’, which engaged five feminist lecturers teaching English at five different multilingual universities in Southern Africa. The study explored: (1) the complexity of sociolinguistic and feminist identity construction in multilingual seascapes, and by extension (2) how feminist educators' interpretation and enactment of their personal world-view informs their language teaching in terms of what they teach, how they teach, and why they teach what they do. The participants who hail from a diverse range of ideological landscapes were identified either by themselves or others as feminist teachers. Through a suite of data sources which comprised autobiographical essays, interviews and lecture observations, this paper explores how the female teacher's educative and pedagogic expertise and interactions are framed in relation to her race, gender, and age. Accepting the fluidity and complexity of identity positionalities, the paper explores the identity constructions of the feminist teachers in their communities of practice.     

Complicated contradictions amid Black feminism and millennial Black women teachers creating curriculum for Black girls

ABSTRACT

Millennial Black women teachers wrestle with two simultaneous burdens: disrupting the racist and sexist status quo of schooling through curriculum, and employing tactics to survive school politics among their majority White women colleagues. This article describes how the Sisters of Promise (SOP) curriculum aligned with Black feminism and Black feminist pedagogy, and how it did not. This curriculum was created for Black girls within the margins of school by a millennial Black woman teacher and other Black women teachers. Analysis of the SOP curriculum revealed that even with the best of intentions, and even for relatively self-aware millennial Black women teachers, it is possible to present Black girl students with contradictory messages, due to a lack of exposure to Black feminism, Black feminist pedagogy, and the work of Black women educational scholars, in their curriculum studies. Included are implications and recommendations for millennial Black women teachers creating curriculum for Black girls.     

Colleges in the making of manhood and masculinity: gendered perspectives on African American males

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this paper explores the ways in which colleges become sites that socialise African American men as gendered beings. Twenty-four African American men enrolled in 12 colleges and universities across the 19 southern and border states of America participated in this study. The purpose is to illustrate how constructions of manhood and masculinity among this group potentially influence collegiate efforts to serve African American college men academically, socially, and developmentally. The following themes of manhood construction emerged: (1) self-expectations; (2) relationships and responsibilities to family; and (3) worldviews and life philosophies. Respondents reported differences in the ways in which they were treated and engaged in historically black and white institutions, also reinforcing various manhood constructs. The paper is a resource to advance the field’s thinking about this group’s college experiences, retention, and identities.     

Blinded to science: gender differences in the effects of race,ethnicity, and socioeconomic status on academic and science attitudes among sixth graders

Little research has examined whether the effects of race or socioeconomic status (SES) on educational attitudes differ by gender, limiting knowledge of unique vulnerabilities occurring at the intersection of multiple social statuses. Using data from 182 sixth-graders, interactions between gender, race/ethnicity, and SES in predicting educational aspirations, persistence, views of science, and educational self-efficacy are examined. African American and Latino boys express more negative attitudes relative to (1) higher-SES boys, (2) White boys, and (3) girls of any race/ethnicity or level of SES. The intersection of multiple inequalities in education across the early life course is discussed.     

Super-Girl: strength and sadness in Black girlhood

This paper complicates notions of Black girlhood by examining the dual experiences of gendered racism that result in both strength and sadness in Black girls’ educational experiences. I highlight the need for a curriculum of liberation to combat historical and current social conditions negatively impacting school-aged Black girls, such as harsh disciplinary practices, low academic expectations, and sexual objectification. The Super-Girl phenomenon serves as a metaphor illustrating the balance and imbalance of multiple social constructs. Utilising constructivist grounded theory [Charmaz, K. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory. London: Sage], the key concepts in the research derived directly from the voices of 18 school-aged girls (8–13) as well as my observations, interpretations, and related experiences. Data collection utilising observation notes, interviews, written responses, and activity products provided from monthly sessions over the course of two years, offer critical insight into some of the complexities of Black girlhood. The most striking common themes abstracted from their voices were concepts related to ‘strength’ and ‘sadness’ in their lives. Thematic narratives were found to be most relevant to (1) negative teacher–student relationships, as well as, (2) policed bodies and sexual objectification. This work offers specific recommendations for future girl empowerment programming, curriculum, and evidence-based intervention development that can aide in liberating Black girls.     

Black women’s bodies,ideology, and the public curriculum of the pro- and anti-choice movements in the US

This paper explores how opposite sides of the abortion debate employ a discourse of endangerment to mobilise political support for their ideologies about black women’s bodies. I examine the role of black women within that rhetorical strategy through various rhetorical artefacts. To analyse these artefacts, I employ the theoretical framework of ideological or ideographic criticism. This framework helps us see how the artefacts used by both pro and anti-choice movements ‘condition’ the audience not merely to adopt a set of ‘beliefs and behavior, but a vocabulary of concepts that function as guides, warrants, reasons, or excuses for behavior and belief’. Though the two sides of the abortion debate differ in their overt political views, they turn out to share an implicit ideology about black women. This ideology prevents the voices of black women from being heard and valued in a debate that is nonetheless focused on black women’s bodies.     

Success on the decks: working-class boys,education and turning the tables on perceptions of failure

Although working-class boys' disengagement with education continues to be a major public concern, the focus of educational research has been on anti-school, hyper-masculine so-called laddish masculinities and their salience within learner identities. What tend to be forgotten are the areas in which low-achieving boys actively engage and succeed in their learning and what these successes mean for their identity construction. This article shows how learning practices manifest themselves in extracurricular peer subcultures by presenting the findings of two related musical activities, DJ-ing and MC-ing. In this music-making, secondary school boys in the Northeast of England showed themselves to be capable of high levels of engagement, enthusiasm and success despite generally being considered low achieving and highly disaffected. This small case study based on semistructured interviews aimed to explore how boys aged 14–16 years enact their passion through creative agency and expressive cultural processes.     

Re/presenting intellectual subjectivity: gender and visual imagery in the field of higher education

Visual images of students and academics in the UK have traditionally featured men, reflecting the historical predominance of men in these positions. When women were represented, sexist imagery and traditional constructions of femininity were not uncommon. This article explores the ways in which students and academics are constructed in a selection of visual representations in two contemporary UK sources: in two videos aimed at potential students and in the Times Higher Education, a magazine for higher education professionals. Following a discussion of dominant constructions of intellectual subjectivity, I draw upon a feminist post-structuralist approach in the analysis of these visual images. Although women are now entering universities in greater numbers than ever before, I suggest that this visual iconography continues to inscribe culturally dominant constructions of femininity and masculinity, reaffirms a gender binary and reconstructs the serious intellectual subject as a masculine one.     

Accessions: researching,designing higher education

This brief viewpoint piece depicts educational (dis)engagements apparent in researching and (re)designing higher education in and through Accessions. Accessions, a collaborative research-design project, probed at how cultures, climates and conditions of higher education may be reproducing or reshaping social inequalities and divisions. Here, questions are asked about how these might be challenged within and potentially beyond the specific locale of one university campus. This research-design project hopes to enable a critical perspective on issues of ‘participation’, ‘impact’, ‘engagement’ and ‘internationalisation’, where regulations and measures may be resisted and disrupted.     

Hill girls,consumption practices,power, and city style: raced and classed production of femininities in a higher education setting

This study investigated the ways a diverse group of university women in the USA utilised racialised and classed discourses of femininity in the creation of subjectivities. Interview and focus group data were collected over a two‐year time period and focused on how women navigated the higher education setting. Two forms of femininity, ‘Hill girl’ and ‘City style’, were salient. Hill girl femininity was based on markers such as white skin that had been tanned, and consumption practices. City style femininity was also defined through consumption practices and identification as a woman of colour. Material markers like race and class both limited and expanded the discourses available to women. New subjectivities were created with particular rights, while simultaneously making them subject to policing. The women in this study used contrasting and, at times, contradictory discourses to explore various forms of femininity that were connected to institutional power and privilege.     

Special education and minority ethnic young people in England: continuing issues

ABSTRACT

In countries that have developed special education (SE) provision, whether in segregated settings or ‘included’ in mainstream, racial, ethnic and immigrant minorities continue to be disproportionately represented. Explanations for placement in SE programmes continue to centre round assumptions of deficiencies in student abilities to learn and ‘behave’, their family backgrounds and communities. Many policy-makers, politicians, schools and teachers ignore or are ignorant of the historical background and social contexts in which these students are expected to learn. The article overviews some of this history and policy responses concerned with SE, low attainment and troublesome school behaviour in England, including recent evidence and current explanations for the placement of the students. A premise here is that research, policy and literature are still separating what is happening in ‘special’ education from other areas of education. This cannot continue, as world-wide moves towards inclusive education have meant that mainstream schools and colleges now incorporate (or still exclude) a range of students regarded as having learning difficulties or disabilities, and all young people are now expected to acquire some kind of qualification or be prepared for independent living.     

Personalisation and the education commodity: a meta-ethnographic analysis

ABSTRACT

This article is based on a meta-ethnography of research about schools, school experiences and learning following the recent (post-market) introduction of personalisation policies in Swedish schools. It pays particular attention to issues of equity. Tensions between personalisation, privatisation and equity are discussed and it is noted that personalisation policies seem to have been unable to evade the pressures of commodification or overcome the difficulties of social reproduction in education.     

When bodies matter: significance of the body in gender constructions in physiotherapy education

This article examines which bodily performances indicate the significance of gender in the skills training of physiotherapy students. It is based on a qualitative study of first-year students' skills training in a Norwegian physiotherapy education programme. The study draws inspiration from Paechter's theory of the communities of masculinities and femininities, which argues that the material body is significant in gender construction. These findings indicate how, both historically and contemporarily, gender norms are strongly interwoven into students' bodily performances during their professional training. This bodily performance conforms to heteronormativity. Based on these findings, we argue that within critical educational studies of gender there is a need for theoretical frameworks that include a focus on the material body as a site of gender performance.     

Black male teachers,white education spaces: Troubling school practices of othering and surveillance

The absence of male teachers in primary schools has been an ongoing concern for policymakers and schools in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia, and as schools have become more ethnically diverse so have concerns that the teacher workforce should reflect the communities it serves. Pre-service teacher training plays a critical role in this aim, by identifying, recruiting, retaining and training those who demonstrate potential to become teachers in English primary schools. As one of a few studies to explore the racialised and gendered experiences of black male teachers in England, I adopt the use of critical race theory (CRT) to examine how black male teachers are characterised and constructed in white education spaces. Drawing on a larger study, this paper utilises counternarrative, a key precept of CRT, to draw attention to processes of exclusion, othering and surveillance through the experience of David (the main character). Interview and documentary data illuminate institutional processes of overt and covert racism, as well as racialised and gendered stereotyping. David’s story reveals how his voice is muted as it is woven into processes of othering, hyper-surveillance and disciplinary power.     

Gendered communities of practice and the construction of masculinities in Turkish physical education

This paper analyses the construction of masculinities in Turkish physical education through Carrie Paechter's conceptualisation of gendered communities of practice. According to Paechter, educational communities of practice operate as sites of gendered activity. Membership within these communities contributes to the construction of a gendered identity. We suggest that this model is useful for conceptualising how Turkish young men come to engage with physical education classes which can be considered as masculine communities of practice. In one Turkish secondary class, we found that football was the most valued practice, determining boundaries of participation and differentiating levels of participation in the learning community. Young men who were immersed and excelled in football took up ‘full’ learning trajectories and became accepted as ‘fully masculine’ while those who were uninterested or non‐competitive in football took up marginalised learning trajectories. We suggest that these diverse learning trajectories came to reflect differentiated versions of masculinity.     

Intersectional work and precarious positionings: Black middle-class parents and their encounters with schools in England

This paper reports on data drawn from a study exploring the educational strategies of 62 Black Caribbean heritage middle-class parents. In this paper, we consider the respective roles of race and class in the shaping of parents’ educational strategies, deploying an analysis that focuses on their intersection and seeks to hold both race and class in productive tension. Drawing on empirical data, we illustrate how parents’ classed and raced identities shape their interactions with school staff.     

Mapping the margins and searching for higher ground: examining the marginalisation of black female graduate students at PWIs

The number of Black females enrolled in colleges and universities has grown in recent years, particularly at predominately white institutions (PWIs). Currently, research on the rise of Black females at PWIs is limited and fails to adequately address the emotional, social, and mental well-being of these students. Recent studies also largely ignore the critical roles that natural and formal Black female faculty play in serving as a buffer between Black female graduate students (BFGS) and PWIs more broadly. From a critical perspective using counter-narrative, we address the limitations of the scholarly literature on BFGS and other challenges faced by BFGS. We come to the disappointing – albeit unsurprising – conclusion that PWIs should do more to make the academy a welcoming place for BFGS, however, the ways in which PWIs function make support for BFGS unlikely. We conclude with a discussion about the implications of continued marginalisation of BFGS at PWIs for individuals, families, communities, disciplines, and for PWIs across the nation.     

Class,Race, and Power: Interest Group Politics and Education

Literature review focuses on what theory and research primarily from political science and sociology of education have to say about families and communities working for change in education. Questions: (1) Do low-income minority families have the power to create positive and lasting change in school and/or district organization and policy? (2) Is such change possible and can it serve as a foundation for state and national education policy change? The families and communities in question are ‘the truly disadvantaged’ or ‘underclass’ in America’s urban centers. Largely black and Latino, the communities share the characteristics of developing nations: low economic development, high infant mortality rates, short life spans, and low levels of educational attainment. Social capital, collective action/social movement, and democracy theory are used. A typology of the policymaking process as described in the research is described. Local successes are treated laying the groundwork for answering the question about whether local successes can lead to state and federal reforms. Theories, typology, and stories of success are put into the context of school organization because the way that schools are organized may dictate what kinds of collective action are likely to succeed. Adriane Williams (M.Ed., The George Washington University) is affiliated with Department of Educational Policy Studies, University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI. Adriane Williams is a Ph.D. candidate studying how school organization facilitates or impedes the involvement of non-college graduate parents in educational decision making for their children.