Indeterminacy,Incipiency, and Attitudes: Materialist Oscillation in the 2012 Chicago Teachers’ Strike

Teachers unions face a unique set of double-binds when defending their interests as workers and as advocates for students. In this essay, I argue that materialist approaches beginning from a concern for labor position deny potential to those laborers—teachers among them—who occupy an indeterminate relationship to capitalism. To describe these workers’ potential for agency, this essay examines the oscillatory movement that occurs between the conceptions of labor position theorized by Ronald Walter Greene and Dana Cloud. In shifting between these positions, I argue, educators can cultivate an incipient potential that nimbly negotiates double-binds while exacerbating the contradictions of neoliberal reform. I advance this argument through an analysis of three oscillations in the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012: between conceptions of labor as part of a general or restricted economy; between projects of demystifying and upholding meritocracy; and between competing spatial configurations of the school and society. During these oscillations, I assert, the Chicago Teachers Union's labor action and rhetoric maintained its coherence through the formation of an attitudinal unity experienced in the immanent coalescence of contradictory movements.     

Making learning interesting and its application to the science classroom

Generations of students are graduating from secondary school disinterested in post-secondary study of science or pursuing careers in science-related fields beyond formal education. We propose that destabilising such disinterest among future students requires science educators to begin listening to secondary school students regarding their views of how science learning is made interesting within the science classroom. Studies on students’ interest in response to instructional strategies applied in the classroom communicate the opinions (i.e. the ‘voice’) of students about the strategies they believe make their classroom learning interesting. To this end, this scoping study (1) collects empirical studies that present from various science and non-science academic domains students’ views about how to make classroom learning interesting; (2) identifies common instructional strategies across these domains that make learning interesting; and (3) forwards an instructional framework called TEDI ([T]ransdisciplinary Connections; Mediated [E]ngagement; Meaningful [D]iscovery; and Self-determined [I]nquiry), which may provide secondary school science teachers with a practical instructional approach for making learning science genuinely interesting among their students within the secondary school science classroom context.     

Political depression,cruel optimism and pedagogies of reparation: questions of criticality and affect in human rights education

This article argues that there is an urgent need to engage with a deeper analysis of the contemporary culture of ‘political depression’ and its affective implications in human rights education (HRE). In particular, the article focuses on the following questions: How might a theorization of political depression be relevant to efforts that aim to renew criticality in HRE? In which ways can a ‘critical’ HRE turn our attention to important ethical, political and affective questions on human rights? Can the negativity of political depression become a site for HRE pedagogies that are ‘reparative’? The article makes an attempt to articulate some of the content and strategies of pedagogies of reparation and their significance in what is currently being formulated in the literature as ‘critical human rights education’. Reparative pedagogies invite in the classroom the challenge of how students can learn from unimaginable traumatic histories, while acknowledging the affective politics of histories of violence, oppression and social injustice, without falling into the trap of sentimentality, but rather engaging in social justice-oriented action and activism.