Critical Education

(Un)learning Aesethetics

Derek R. Ford — 2024-01-23

Materialist approaches to aesthetics historicize our sensuous capacities, orientations, and objects by attending to their ongoing production. This article begins by articulating capital not as an “economic” system but as a broader perceptual ecology that produces particular correspondences between subjects and the world. In response to the clear limits of ideology critique we argue that not only is capitalist ideology reproduced educationally but that pedagogical challenges to capital need to generate experiences with alternative collective perceptual realities that exist in the present. In our current conjuncture, such experiences are political insofar as they help rejuvenate the belief in the possibility and reality of revolutionary transformation. We offer the pedagogy of unlearning as one potential educational philosophy and practice that interrupts our inauguration into capital’s sensuous regime. Moreover, we read Marx’s Capital as a text that is guided by an aesthetic pedagogy to help us understand capital as a totality in shifting and partial ways and that, more importantly, produces a gap in the reader between our presumed sensuous certainty and other possible perceptual configurations.

Imagining Spaces Created for Queer Métis Youth

Lucy Fowler — 2024-01-23

Educational spaces, both formal and informal, are not always welcoming to queer Métis youth, especially to those youth who connect more to hip-hop cultures than those activities like jigging and beading which are often espoused as pillars in Métis culture. This article draws on conversations with youth, conducted as part of doctoral research using a visiting approach to data collection and analyzed using the voice-centered relational method. Through these frameworks, I created guideposts for developing educational spaces which are not just inclusive of but designed for queer Métis youth. These guideposts will be used in future development of Métis-focused hip-hop pedagogies and research with and for queer Métis youth.

Anti-Zionism is not Antisemitism

Laura Jaffee — 2024-01-23

In recent years, a distorted definition of antisemitism that conflates anti-Jewish prejudice with criticism of Israel has increasingly been adopted in U.S. state and federal legislation. The intended effect of such legislation is to silence activists, students, teachers, and workers who speak out against Israeli apartheid and for Palestinian freedom. This article takes a historical approach to disentangle actual antisemitism from legitimate critiques of a nation-state both by analyzing actual antisemitism as intimately linked to ableism and white supremacy and through examining the long history of Jewish resistance to Zionism. Understanding that legislation conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel is part of an effort to silence teaching about Palestine is illustrative for making sense of broader attacks on decolonial, anti-racist, and gender and sexuality-affirming education. Refusing the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is critical to promoting anti-oppressive education and resisting the present attack on the policing of permissible knowledge in schools.

High School Social Studies Teachers and their Tactics for Justice

Cathryn van Kessel — 2024-01-23

What tactics are high school educators using to teach about socio-political changes in the past and present? Five educators in the province of Alberta (two female, three male; four urban, one rural; four white, one Arab; four without visible religious garb, one Muslim in hijab) explored content they considered to be “radical” and how they teach about (and for) significant socio-political changes toward making society hurt less. Coming from a perspective of symbolic evil, radical love, and radical imagination as inherent to beneficial social movements, the researchers used process and dramaturgical coding to analyze participant insights about decolonial and antiracist education as well as teaching for gender and sexual justice. Participants shared insights about the role of school context and teacher positionality, what might shape an educator to teach for radical change, as well as several tactics: operationalizing positionality, supplementing curriculum, challenging assumptions, subverting school rules, and addressing emotionality.

Quantitative Criticalism in Education Research

Jason C. Garvey — 2024-01-23

The purpose of this manuscript is to educate scholars about emerging approaches to critical quantitative research. We begin by providing our positionalities as scholars to situate ourselves within this content. Next, we overview quantitative criticalism and explore tensions inherent within this approach. Following, we discuss quantitative criticalism examples in education research to highlight specific quantitative methods and critical theories and to overview opportunities for using quantitative criticalism. We close by providing implications for our intended audiences, primarily directing our recommendations to scholars who employ quantitative methods and/or critical perspectives in education research.

Prison For Children

Roger Saul — 2024-01-23

Un Monde, a 2021 feature film, depicts the fictional story of Nora, a child first entering school. In the film viewers are perceptually thrust into the center of Nora’s experiences – all its imagery tightly frames her against blurred school backgrounds – a harrowing exercise that compels us to encounter the traumas of her school life as she does. Drawing on Foucault’s ‘prison form,’ this review essay explores how Un Monde innovates in imagining, from the subject-position of a child, how any young person can come to be systematically severed from the relationships that matter most to them, stripped of their dignity, and rendered isolated as an unwitting prisoner of a school’s normative values and functions. It suggests that Un Monde can add to our critical vocabularies of public education by offering insights into many of the masked principles – social division, secrecy, shame, dishonesty, distrust, bystanderdism, self-preservation – that can structure relationships there.