Critical Education

Contesting Concepts, Imagining New Possibilities

Peter M Nelson — 2025-01-31

This essay places David Graeber’s consistent focus on imagination and possibilities into conversation with social studies education. In a sociopolitical climate characterized by neoliberalism, militarized borders, and political censorship of social studies teaching and learning in P-12 schools, it is crucial that social studies teachers and teacher educators in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere continue to engage in pedagogies that are critical and responsive, providing students with representations of the past and present that, rather than reproducing the status quo, playfully imagine alternative futures that are more equitable, just, and free. Building from Graeber’s work in direct civic action, this essay offers ideas for how standardized social studies concepts can be reconfigured in affecting, life-giving ways.

Applying Critical Race Theory to Enhance the Racial Inclusivity of Teachers in Canada

Lucas Skelton — 2025-01-31

This review of the literature draws on critical race theory to examine the lack of racial diversity among the teaching force in Canada. Several barriers including systemic racism, non-diverse hiring policies, and arduous certification requirements for immigrant teachers inhibit the racial diversity of the teaching force in several provinces. Manitoba is profiled because one of the province’s leading universities overhauled its Bachelor of Education admissions protocols to admit an increase in BIPOC applicants. Another leading university in the province has implemented policies to increase the number of Indigenous faculty members and pre-service teacher candidates. Understanding the effectiveness of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) policies in Manitoba could result in a more comprehensive understanding of the validity of EDI policies in general. Through a scoping review, this analysis unearthed 34 articles and documents published around the intersection of race, racial diversity, BIPOC educators, and White teachers. This article presents the findings of the literature review by exploring the merits and drawbacks of using critical race theory to elucidate potential barriers and opportunities for affirming linguistic, ethnic, cultural, and racial diversity in the Canadian school system.

Critical Making Workshops

Regina Sipos — 2025-01-31

This article explores how critical making - or a combination of critical thinking and making - could enhance and future-proof technical and vocational education and training (TVET). The article reports from a series of multi-stakeholder participatory workshops with educators, caretakers, pupils and makers. The workshops themselves represent an example of critical making, hereby providing the participants with an immediate understanding of the concept. Through discussions, the stakeholders mapped the viability, challenges and opportunities for a successful implementation of critical making into German curricula. The paper ends with reflections on the general difficulties of updating a curriculum and proposes a workaround: complementing the technical approach of the existing TVET curriculum with maker tools to foster digital skills and meta-level discussions to foster critical thinking.

A Window into Public Education

Lana Parker — 2025-01-31

Decades of neoliberal capitalism have had a corrosive effect on public education, with implications for both the fiscal realities of education systems and the ideological values guiding curriculum and pedagogy. While the culture of neoliberalism has often been studied, it is equally important to expand analyses of the shifting material conditions of how capital moves through education systems, reshapes power, and exacerbates inequality. It is also, I argue, vitally important to document—to be mindful—of how the affordances of the present, once eroded, diminish the imaginings of what is possible in the future. To that end, in this special issue, we highlight the twin realities of neoliberalism. We also make the argument for public education, imperfect though its current iterations may be, as a valuable inheritance of public good.

Critical Geography and Teaching Against Neoliberal Racial Capitalism in New York City Elementary Schools

Debbie Sonu — 2025-01-31

What might an anti-capitalist education look like? To address this question, we examine the curricular visions of 56 elementary school teachers in New York City, who were asked to design one lesson on the issue of social class and economic inequality. Grounded in neoliberal racial capitalism and critical geography, our analysis finds that teachers who emphasize specific places -- whether schools, city environments, the national context, or global landscapes – are better able to orient their teaching toward explicitly critical and systemic analyses of economic inequality and its constitutive links to race, gender, and other socio-political hierarchies. Their lessons demonstrate how teaching can disrupt the neoliberal over-reliance on the individual consumer typically found in financial literacy schemes. A presentation of their lessons, seldom found in the existing literature, is followed by a discussion of what a multi-scalar approach to economic inequality can offer to the field of research, teacher education, and teaching.

The Allure of Professionalism

Adam Kaszuba — 2025-01-31

Multiple discourses circulate in society which construct a vision of what professionalism looks like for teachers. When these discourses are put into practice in initial teacher education programs, teacher candidates feel compelled to integrate them without critically examining their underlying assumptions. Based on a Foucauldian framework, this study explores how teacher candidates in an Ontario Faculty of Education interacted with the language of dominant discourses as they constructed a collective identity and practice while participating in voluntary, emergent learning communities. Three discourses of professionalism emerged in the practices of the candidates: the discourse of passion, of mental health and well-being, and of safety. Through notions such as best practices and ‘truth acts’, I discuss how the discourses shape the candidates’ subjectivity, and in doing so, limit possibilities for resistance.

University Bureaucracies as the Death of Play

Harrison Dressler — 2025-01-31

The bureaucratic precepts engendered by modern universities produce a slew of negative effects inimical to educational justice. Drawing on historiographical evidence from the 1968 Strax Affair, a little-known protest held at the University of New Brunswick, we identify the arts of discombobulation as a novel approach to challenge the intellectual constraints imposed by university bureaucracies. By theorizing the arts of discombobulation, we aim to counteract bureaucracy’s most alienating affective residues, equipping scholars with an administrative arsenal capable of transforming the corporate academy into a playful, joyful environment. Inspired by cultural historian Johan Huizinga’s theory of the “play-function,” we introduce five interrelated tactics—burlesque versions of both formal and informal administrative practices—that amplify the contradictions inherent to the corporate academy’s contemporary bureaucratic structure: personalization, befuddlement, signal jamming, mapping, and abeyance. Even during moments of Kafkaesque bureaucratic defeat, discombobulation can generate a sense of heightened play necessary to fuel democratic resistance.

“I Need This Person’s Support to Have a Career”:

Justin Gutzwa — 2025-01-31

Neoliberal capitalism has undoubtedly impacted every sphere of public education in the United States. With an increased push towards identity-neutral modalities of instruction, students who identify as transgender, non-binary, or other expansive gender identities (trans) are forced to reckon with implicit and explicit power dynamics in classrooms that prioritize white, cisheteropatriarchal modes of knowledge production in nuanced ways. This qualitative study explores the ways neoliberal capitalism impacts the curricular experiences of trans students by centering the power dynamics they encounter through interactions with their professors and their peers. Findings underscore the pernicious nature of the neoliberalization of higher education in advancing trans exclusion from collegiate classrooms as a hindrance towards equity in public postsecondary education. Implications for transforming curricular instruction and policy to subvert the tensions of neoliberalism are also provided.