Critical Education

Designing Curriculum for Critical Consciousness

Allarie Coleman — 2024-11-02

This manuscript describes a white teacher’s experience of teaching texts authored by writers from historically marginalized cultural groups in a high school classroom. I wrote this self-study as theoretical guidance for teachers who also want to contextualize conversations about race. The scholarship of bell hooks motivated me to adopt the pedagogy of teaching for critical consciousness. I begin by introducing the theory of critical consciousness, the prevalence of white teachers, and the need for teachers to begin identifying white culture with their students. Then, classroom work is connected to conceptual approaches of centering race to demonstrate how to address whiteness. I connected concepts from scholarship on racial relationships to my own reflections to explain the qualities of a pedagogy that aimed to challenge the status quo of teaching while white.

“Maybe Tightening the Collar is the Way to Do It”

Hope Kitts — 2024-11-02

As part of a larger study, through this research I examined the ideological foundations of public school teachers’ interpretations of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Through this research I discovered that White teachers in this study talked about oppression in ways that implied it was a natural part of life, and even in some cases necessary for learning. Here I ask: What does teachers’ acceptance and naturalization of oppression mean for student learning and educational outcomes more broadly? Using a Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) framework I use ideological critique to present and critically examine metaphors of violence and control as voiced by two participants in the study, Janet and Pam. Further, I show how the one participant of color in the study challenged his colleagues’ assumptions about human nature and individuality, which Janet and Pam used to rationalize oppression. These findings have implications for teacher education and teacher professional development insofar as I urge teacher educators to examine how teachers think and talk about oppression and their role in sustaining or challenging the status quo through their teaching.

Playing Around

Juan F. Carrillo — 2024-11-02

Drawing primarily from critical pedagogy, decoloniality, and relevant research on “home,” we offer critical perspectives on how these areas of inquiry work in dialectical ways to inform our researcher/scholarly positionalities. Largely situated within autoethnographic methods, we link this work to basketball, and as players of the game, we bring in notions of desire, politics, and emancipatory visions of play as we make connections to research from a critical orientation. We conclude with the idea of Torn Nets as a poetic metaphor for imaging through the opportunities to engage in critical research that engages the incomplete and contradictory visuals, games, and courts within academia.

“I just can’t say ‘Fuck it, and walk away’”

Maiyoua Vang — 2024-11-02

The emergence of critical university studies in recent years has provided cogent analysis on neoliberalism's reach into public higher education. And while neoliberal encroachment into areas such as governance, funding/corporate partnerships, curriculum, and academic freedom are frequently discussed, less treatment is given as to how neoliberalism itself seduces and in turn is reified in the ways individual faculty perform and make sense of the work under the neoliberal gaze to hyper produce. Informed by Nishida's (2014, 2016) disability studies' (DS) critique of hyper productivity in the neoliberalizing academy, this “twin” study, with respect to subjects’ identical desires to be valued as scholars while socialized in different institutional environments, is a theoretical-empirical hybrid that blends two academic workers’ interview data with DS critique to articulate avenues of occupying the neoliberal project by occupying the classing, ranking, and degradation of academic work itself.

Literacies of the Heart and Antiracist Pedagogy

Lilia Monzo — 2024-11-02

Challenging structural violence is a major project of our time. The massive Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprisings of Summer 2020 brought greater awareness of the systemic racism of universities and a commitment to challenge it. A Marxist-humanist lens recognizes racism as foundational to the racial-colonial capitalist patriarchy and the university as deeply implicated in the development and maintenance of these structures. While all these interlocking oppressions must be eradicated, in the US, racism has historically galvanized more people to action. For this we need a populace with critical literacy to connect their daily oppressions to structural forces. Critical literacy also encourages us to listen to the Oppressed whose “Reason and force” may prove useful toward our liberation. A critical literacy of the heart, drawing of Paulo Freire, is one that challenges us to transform structures of oppression through humanizing antiracist pedagogy. The bulk of the paper is drawn from a duoethnography of two Latina instructors. The stories shared offer insights into the deep-seeded racist policies and practices in education and the complexity of challenging these. We argue that such complexity calls for an intentional antiracist pedagogy of “other doing” that goes against the “commonsense” of our society.

The Body in the Classroom after Covid-19

Molly Wiant Cummins — 2024-11-02

In this essay, I use autoethnography to investigate the multiple adaptations of the (instructor’s) performative body in the classroom, both online and in-person, due to Covid-19. Specifically, attuning to these adaptations makes space for reclamation of the (instructor’s) performative body in pedagogical spaces by re-engaging embodied pedagogy. Through autoethnography, I offer insights on dis/connection in online teaching, especially in an emergency, remote setting; the adaptation necessary to move back to in-person teaching during a pandemic; and a recommitment to acknowledging the identity of bodies that enter pedagogical spaces together. These lessons learned require focus on the power and privilege, both institutional and societal, that instructors and students must navigate in the classroom. Ultimately, through this exploration of the performative body’s adaptations, embodied pedagogy in this new stage of the pandemic highlights the possibilities of our classrooms to be places where pedagogical bodies can re-engage one another in critical love.

Using Virtual Learning Labs to (Re)Mediate Exclusionary Discipline Practices for Young Children of Color with Disabilities

Saili Kulkarni — 2024-11-02

Disabled children of color (ages 3-8) face multiple, intersecting oppressions in schools and are more likely to be excluded and/or harshly punished for minor behavioral issues compared to white and/or non-disabled peers. Approaches that center multiple stakeholders (families, teachers, and administrators) using a formative intervention called Learning Labs (LLs) have worked to reduce discipline disparities among secondary and upper-primary students of color with disabilities (Bal, 2016). Knowing that discipline disparities can start as early as preschool (Kulkarni et al., 2021), however, we examined how LLs (re)mediate exclusionary and harsh discipline practices for young children of color with disabilities. We present qualitative case studies of six California-based stakeholders (four teachers, a parent, and an administrator) who participated in LL sessions virtually from 2021-2022. We share findings and lessons learned from constructing virtual LL spaces to reduce exclusionary and harsh discipline for young children of color with disabilities.