Teaching Against the Grain as an Act of Love: Disrupting White Eurocentric Masculinist Frameworks Within Teacher Education

What is radical love in teaching? How can radical love incite change and transformation within teacher education? What does radical love entail to prepare critically minded teachers for urban schools? In this conceptual paper, we respond to these questions through our individual and collective experiences as social justice oriented teacher educators preparing students to teach in urban schools. We engage with our womanist ways of knowing (Walker in In search of our mothers’ gardens: womanist prose, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2004) and “theory in flesh” (Moraga and Anzaldúa in This bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color, 2nd edn, Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, New York, 1983) to collaboratively reflect and analyze our conversations, reflective journaling, meetings, and other telling moments about what it means to practice radical love in teaching. More specifically, we identify three central concepts of what love as an act of resistance or teaching against the grain entails: (1) vulnerability, (2) collective support and healing, and (3) critique. Through these concepts we offer a framework from which to practice radical love in teaching and work in solidarity with others to transform oppressive systems in urban (teacher) education.     

Skiing accidents in the past 15 years

For the last 15 years a statistical analysis of distances skied and of alpine skiing accidents has been performed in the Davos-Klosters skiing area, a 'closed' skiing area, where every skier has to return from the top to the bottom station. Distance skied is measured by vertical drop in 10(6) km determined by calculations from frequency surveys by lift-operators. About 2.5 million km per season have been skied during the past years, a number remaining constant for the last 15 years. In the same time the requirement for rescue-transports in this area has shown a decline of 46% to 288 transports per season due to a decrease of the number of injuries with initial immobilization. Therefore the so-called transport-quotient (one rescue-transport per 10(4) km of vertical drop skied) has decreased from its initial value of 4 to 1 per 10(4) km. During the same time all winter sport injuries were analysed at the hospital of Davos. About 90% are injuries caused by alpine skiing resulting in a total of 17,246 alpine skiing injuries for the last 15 years. There is a great decline in the incidence of lower leg fractures with a contrary development of knee injuries. Today half of the lower leg injuries are knee injuries (280 knee injuries out of a total of 1250 alpine skiing accidents per season). There is a gradual increase of upper extremity injuries from 17% of all skiing injuries in 1972 to 35% in 1976. A Swiss multicentre study on skiing safety shows comparable injury patterns in other skiing areas. The average injury-severity measured by several parameters is declining.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Consequences and outcomes of policies governing medium-stakes large-scale exit exams

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability - Large-scale externally mandated exit exams are common in many education systems. Exit exams are considered medium stakes when exam scores are...     

An Examination of Coursera as an Information Environment: Does Coursera Fulfill its Mission to Provide Open Education to All?

In terms of international education, the concept of online education seems to be a growing trend. Edxonline.org, Minervaproject.com, and Udacity.com are all new massive online open courses (MOOCs)—education websites similar to Coursera offering students the ability to receive the best education from elite universities entirely online. The most tantalizing promise of a company like Coursera is the role it might play in improving education for the world's have-nots: high school dropouts, the global poor, and those less able to self-teach.