E Wayne Ross – Critical Theories in Education

Anti-Palestinian Racism Has No Place on Campus

APR-on-Campus is a self-reporting platform initiated by post-secondary students to document Anti-Palestinian Racism (APR) at Canadian educational institutions. Our objective is to expose the rise of APR, which fuels systemic marginalization, restricts academic freedom, and perpetuates injustice.

APR justifies and upholds systems of oppression by silencing voices, excluding perspectives, erasing narratives, and defamation – targeting Palestinians, those perceived as Palestinian, and non-Palestinians who support Palestinian rights. It manifests in both overt and subtle ways, including physical violence, harassment, smearing, dehumanization, exclusion, micro-aggressions, biased policies, and emotional violence. APR threatens both individuals and the integrity of academic spaces. We’re holding our universities accountable — we will not tolerate racism on campus.

“Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives. Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms including: denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians; failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine; erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians; excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians and their allies; defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer or opposed to democratic values.”

Demand the Immediate Release of Palestinian Student Activist Mahmoud Khalil from DHS detention

On March 8, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent graduate student at Columbia University, at his place of residence, an apartment building owned by the university.

The DHS agents said that the U.S. Department of State had revoked Khalil’s green card.

At approximately 8:30 p.m. ET, Khalil and his wife, a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant, had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents forced their way in behind them. The agents initially refused to identify themselves, instead asking Khalil to confirm his identity before detaining him without explanation. The agents proceeded to threaten his wife, telling her that if she remained by his side, they would arrest her too.

Later, the DHS agents stated that the U.S. Department of State had revoked Khalil’s student visa, despite the fact that he has no student visa and is a lawful permanent resident. An agent showed Khalil what he claimed was a warrant on his phone. Khalil’s wife went into their apartment to retrieve his green card while the agents remained with Khalil downstairs. When she returned, advising them of Khalil’s legal status and presenting them with Khalil’s green card, one agent was visibly confused and said on the phone, “He has a green card.” However, after a moment, the DHS agents stated that the State Department had “revoked that too.” When Khalil’s attorney attempted to intervene over the phone, the DHS agent hung up the phone.

Khalil is currently being detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at 26 Federal Plaza pending an appearance before an immigration judge.

This significant deviation from normal immigration proceedings comes in the wake of increased and abnormal scrutiny concerning the actions of students alleged to hold pro-Palestine views. Axios recently reported that the State Department, Department of Justice, and DHS were launching a “Catch and Revoke” effort to identify alleged pro-Palestinian activists based on artificial intelligence screening of social media.

Khalil has been specifically and discriminatorily targeted by Columbia University for his Palestinian identity and outspoken activism on multiple occasions over the last 17 months. He served as a lead negotiator during the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last spring. He has frequently appeared in media interviews and press conferences. The university suspended him while he was on a student visa and reversed it within the same day.

Columbia University has published guidance on how best to collaborate with federal enforcement, including advising faculty and staff “not to interfere” with ICE agents even if those agents are unable to present a warrant. Over the last few days, there have been several reports of ICE agents approaching pedestrians and students in the neighborhood surrounding Columbia University’s Morningside campus, creating unsafe environments for students (particularly students of color), regardless of their immigration status.

Columbia’s continued acquiescence to federal agencies and outside partisan institutions has made this situation possible. A Palestinian student and member of the community has been abducted and detained without the physical demonstration of a warrant or officially filed charges. Like many other Arab and Muslim students, Khalil has been the target of various zionist harassment campaigns, fueled by doxxing websites like Canary Mission. This racist targeting serves to instill fear in pro-Palestine activists as well as a warning to others.

An activist familiar with Khalil’s solidarity work said, “Mahmoud is foundational to our community. The state has escalated its repression of students for opposing the U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine, in which all American universities are complicit. However, the students will continue to rally for Palestine and against state violence.”

Detaining students for their activism violates the first amendment and is a threat to all people of conscience. ICE must immediately release Mahmoud Khalil from detention.

Sign the petition below to demand the immediate release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil from DHS detention.

Open Letter: UBC Protects War Criminals and Terrorizes Community

Via UBC Staff for Palestine:

On February 14th, while “israeli” occupation forces were swimming in the Aquatic Centre, UBC staff member and alum Nathan Herrington was abducted by armed RCMP state agents, handcuffed, searched, and locked in the back of a van for 30+ minutes.

Nathan was doing his job.
He was wearing a keffiyeh.
And he was “detained for mischief.”

It could have been you. It could have been anyone. Without action, it will be.

These incidents are only getting more common in university communities.

The UBC administration has refused join faculty, staff, and students who have called for an end to UBC’s complicity in “israeli” war crimes. Instead, faculty are removed from teaching assignments, staff members are kidnapped, student spaces are abused for militarized surveillance, armed officers demand that students violate their journalism ethics, and anti-discrimination educational resources are removed from the internet. Where will it end? Any UBC administration that permits or encourages these behaviours is a danger to our community.

Please sign and share the open letter “UBC Protects War Criminals and Terrorizes Community” in solidarity with Nathan and the UBC community.

And, if you have not yet signed the petition for UBC to Divest from Corporations Fueling Genocide and Occupation, we urge you to do so!

In Solidarity,
UBC Staff for Palestine

Universities should not invest in genocide and occupation

UBC is currently invested in at least 30 corporations that fuel genocide, occupation, and systemic human rights violations. These include 17 weapons and military technology companies and 13 corporations listed in the UN Database of Enterprises Involved in Illegal Israeli Settlements.

What’s at Stake?

In Palestine and Lebanon: Over 44,000 Palestinians and 3,500 Lebanese civilians have been killed since October 2023 by the Israeli Occupation Forces. Thousands face

starvation and disease due to blockades and relentless attacks.

Beyond the region: The same corporations profit from wars worldwide, the militarization of borders, forced family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, and countless other atrocities.

As students, faculty, and community members, we have the power to demand change. By signing the petition, you are urging UBC to take responsibility for its investments.

We demand that UBC:

Commits to divesting from these companies

Establishes ethical investment policies that uphold justice and human rights

Visit UBCDivest.org to learn more, read the petition, and sign as a student, alumni, faculty, staff, donor, family member who supported a student, or other community member with financial ties to the university.

Sign the petition now and add your voice to the growing call for divestment!

We also encourage you to share this petition with your networks. Together, we can hold UBC accountable and push for a future free from investments in war and occupation.

Thank you for your support,

UBCDivest

Stephen C. Fleury 1953-2025

NCSS Washington DC (Rouge Forum) 2006

I found out this past Saturday that my long time friend and colleague Steve Fleury passed away last night in New York.

Steve was a first rate intellectual, a farmer, talented musician, a community and educational activist, storyteller and a droll comic. He studied with Jack Mallan (author of No G.O.D.s in the Classroom) at Syracuse University and was an education professor at SUNY Oswego and Le Moyne College in Syracuse where he was also a long serving department head.

I met Steve soon after I arrived in New York in 1986. I was the newbie at meetings of group of studies education profs called the NYS Social Studies Education Consortium, the group met monthly at Syracuse University, Steve’s old stomping grounds.

We hit it off and by 1989 we had guest edited a journal issue critiquing the influence of the cultural right on social studies education. By 1990, Steve and I were co-editors of Social Science Record journal and working lots of conference papers and getting to be not just colleagues but good friends.

I clocked quite a few miles on the NYS Thurway to meet up in Syracuse or his place north of the city. Sometimes we met at a little diner half-way between Albany and Syracuse to work on journal submissions. We would have breakfast, drink gallons of coffee, have serious conversations about education issues, politics, social theory, as well as music, telling stories, laughing and generally having a great time.

Steve was one of the smartest, most well-read humans I have ever known. He was a “social studies guy” but he was also scholar of philosophy, cognitive psychology and the sciences (Steve wrote a tremendous chapter for The Social Studies Curriculum book on reclaiming science for social knowledge).

He also really liked to read Lewis Lapham’s work and I too was a great admirer of him, thus we had many conversations about Lapham and the work he published in Harper’s Magazine.

Steve was a key player in the foundation of The Rouge Forum and was there in Detroit when the RF emerged from a group of social studies, literacy, and inclusive education folks and he supported the RF in very many ways, giving papers, writing articles, organizing RF meetings. We was also very involved in the political battles inside College and University Faculty Assembly – CUFA/NCSS in the 1990s-2000s.

Steve always presented as farmer first, not professor. He was always fun to be with, a self-deprecating humorist. Steve was always interested in exploring ideas. He was a great thinker, writer, and teacher. No matter the topic I always came away from our conversations with new understandings of things. We agreed on most things, but at times Steve also offered subtle, understated critiques of my perspectives or positions that pulled the rug out from under me (in a good way), opening my eyes to things had not seen before … he was engaged in pedagogical work all the time (and always loving it).

Steve was a great friend to me. He was my best man when Sandra and I got married. A few months after Colin died in 2017, he and his wife Liz came to be with us in Vancouver. Their loving and caring for us was a very important moment at a difficult and tragic time.

In the summer of 2023 we had a great holiday with Steve and Liz in Quebec City, where with their many personal connections to Quebec they gave us “the grand tour.”

Love you buddy. Thanks for everything. See you on the other side.

Tell the UBC Administration to Keep the Israeli Occupation Forces Off UBC Campus!

Review of The Social Studies Curriculum (5th Ed.) by Peter M. Nelson

I am happy to share a review of The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (5th Ed.) by Peter M. Nelson (UBC) that was published in Theory and Research in Social Education on January 31, 2025.

While the focus of the review is on the fifth edition, Nelson puts the latest edition of the book in conversation with previous editions that were published in 1997, 2001, 2006 and 2014.

Taking stock of the field: Complicated conversations in social studies curriculum
Book Review by Peter M. Nelson

The social studies curriculum: Purposes, problems, and possibilities (5th edition), by Ross, E. W. (Ed.) Statue University of New York Press, 2024, 430 pp., $99.00 (hardcover), $36.95 (paperback). ISBN (hardcover) 9781438499024, ISBN (paperback) 9781438499031

With the fifth edition of The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (TSSC), editor E. Wayne Ross and the book’s contributors deliver a vital, timely addition to the influential TSSC series. Across 17 chapters—14 of which are new to this edition—the boundaries of the social studies curriculum are relentlessly complicated and contested, and the book’s authors offer critical, compelling visions for how social studies teaching and learning can attend to a range of contemporary issues and topics.

Contextualizing the book

The fifth edition of TSSC arrives at a time when efforts to “capture,” or tame, social studies curriculum are ubiquitous and well-funded. To put it another way, if TSSC offers visions of the social studies curriculum as inherently wild terrain—even feral in its disorderly commitments to real-world action, to understanding that “social studies curriculum and teaching is by its very nature a political undertaking” (p. 381), to its critical attention to the complicated contexts in which education actually occurs—then the capture of social studies begins with its reduction. Phenomena like uncertainty, ambivalence, unpredictability, and spontaneity, while embedded in human experience (and presumably entangled with the project of education as well), are viewed by policy makers, administrators, ideologues, and politicians as problems to eradicate, let alone the more explicit socio-political potentialities that are part and parcel of any meaningful social studies education. To be sure, attempts to capture social studies curriculum, or to reduce its radical potential to foment sociopolitical change, are not new; what Evans (2004) called the social studies wars have been waged since the advent of the field in the early twentieth century. My point, here, is that the fifth edition of TSSC provides an updated glimpse of current contestations around numerous issues, and one of the book’s most valuable, and unique, contributions is how Ross and other chapter authors manage to frame a wide range of sociopolitical issues as readily available for social studies teachers and students to explore and attend to in meaningful ways. …

To continue reading the review see the link below or download the review here.

Peter M. Nelson (31 Jan 2025): Taking stock of the field: Complicated conversations in social studies curriculum, Theory & Research in Social Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2025.2459031

Critical Education 16(1), Feb 2025: With special section on Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education

New issue of Critical Education published today. Critical Education, 16(1), includes a special section on “Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education” edited by Lana Parker (U of WIndsor).

Contesting Concepts, Imagining New Possibilities: David Graeber, Democracy, and Social Studies Curriculum
Peter M Nelson

Applying Critical Race Theory to Enhance the Racial Inclusivity of Teachers in Canada: A Review of the Literature and Facilitative Programming
Lucas Skelton

Critical Making Workshops: Sparking Meta-Discussions for Critical Thinking in Vocational Education
Regina Sipos, Alexander Kutschera, Janina Klose

Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education (Lana Parker, Section Editor)

A Window into Public Education: Documenting Neoliberal Capitalism’s Harms, Advocating for Alternatives
Lana Parker

Critical Geography and Teaching Against Neoliberal Racial Capitalism in New York City Elementary Schools
Debbie Sonu, Karen Zaino, Robert J. Helfenbein

The Allure of Professionalism: Teacher Candidate Subjectivity and Resistance in Neoliberal Times
Adam Kaszuba

University Bureaucracies as the Death of Play: The 1968 Strax Affair and the Arts of Discombobulation
Harrison Dressler, Noah Pleshet; Daniel Tubb

“I Need This Person’s Support to Have a Career”: The Material and Emotional Impacts of Neoliberalism on Trans Collegians’ Classroom Experiences at a Public University
Justin Gutzwa, Robert Marx

Towards an Ideal Model of Education for Critical Citizenship

Thanks to Noelia Pérez‐Rodríguez for the opportunity to work with her and colleagues Elisa Navarro‐Medina and Nicolás De‐Alba‐Fernández – all in the Department of Didactics of Experimental and Social Sciences at University of Seville – on an article analyzing social science curriculum in Spain and working towards an ideal model of critical citizenship.

Abstract:

In this study, we analysed the presence of citizenship education in the new Spanish social sciences curriculum, focusing on both the primary and secondary education stages. The relevance of the study stems from the need to adapt to a new reality, in which it is crucial to develop in children and young people the skills to understand, interpret and make critical decisions. Considering the model outlined as ideal, and being aware of the difficulty involved in achieving it, we took as a reference a possible model to analyse the Spanish curriculum, the ICCS study framework. The research presented is based on a review of policy documents and analyses the curricula of compulsory education stages through a content analysis technique. The results show that in the Spanish curriculum, under the logic of the ICCS framework, cognitive skills and citizen content are more prevalent than those based on attitudes and engagement. This issue prompts us to reflect on the future changes that should be made to approach the model we consider relevant.

Citation:

Navarro Medina, E , Ross, E. W., Pérez-Rodríguez, N., & De Alba Fernandez, N. (2025). Towards an ideal model of education for critical citizenship. An analysis of the Spanish curricular change in social sciences. European Journal of Education, 60(1), e70010. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.70010

We are currently working on making the article open access. If you’re interested in and don’t have access to the article please contact me, I’m happy to share.

NFJP Statement for the New Academic Semester

January 20, 2025

As we enter 2025, we are full of grief and rage at the US-funded ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. After more than 470 days of harrowing brutality that has targeted hospitals, schools, universities, and tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinians, the incoming Trump administration secured a ceasefire from the intransigent Netanyahu administration. Credible reports indicate that this ceasefire, which began on Sunday January 19, is contingent on a set of promises to the Israeli prime minister that include, above all, the annexation of the West Bank. The scope and breadth of the dispossession to come may well surpass these expectations.

Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters across North America will face many challenges in the days, weeks, and months to come. As we fight to keep our voices strong, and in solidarity with those of our student allies, we must follow the lead of Palestinian scholars in the Gaza Strip who have called on us to support their efforts to rebuild in the wake of scholasticide, a term Karma Nabulsi coined in 2009 to name Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian education.

Since October 2023, armed and abetted by the United States, Israeli forces have destroyed eighty percent of the schools and every single university in the Gaza Strip. These include: the Islamic University of Gaza, the University College of Applied Sciences, Al-Azhar University, Al-Aqsa University, Palestine Technical College, Al-Quds Open University, Gaza University and Al-Israa University. Since October 2023, armed and abetted by the United States, Israeli forces have also destroyed nearly every library, archive, and cultural center in the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Municipal Library, the Islamic Manuscript Library, and all municipal archives have been reduced to rubble: centuries of endowments, collections and documents are all gone.

As we wage our struggles in the ever-shrinking space available for speaking the truth about Palestine in the United States, here are some tools to center Palestine and Palestinian voices:

Scholars Against the War in Palestine toolkit: https://scholarsagainstwar.org/toolkit/
Librarians and Archivists with Palestine: https://librarianswithpalestine.org/gaza-report-2024/; especially their One Book, Many Communities events: https://librarianswithpalestine.org/campaigns-2/onebookcampaign/;
Institute for Palestine Studies articles and reports such as this one by Abdel Latif Zaki Abu Hashem: https://www.palestine-studies.org/ar/node/1655344;
the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University: https://right2edu.birzeit.edu/

FJP chapters across the United States now confront the torrent of repression and punishment of academic speech that the Trump administration has promised, likely intensifying the repression of the Biden administration. As we move into 2025, National FJP will work in coalition with other organizations committed to defending academic speech, including the Middle East Studies Association of North America, Palestine Legal, the Coalition to End Zionist Repression, AAUP and AAUP/AFT 6741, and the Center for Academic Freedom, among others. We know that standing up against scholasticide in Palestine is also an act of standing up for our own universities, where corporatization, securitization, and austerity politics are rapidly eroding higher education, academic freedom, and other basic rights. We know that taking ethical positions against genocide, no matter what our opponents call us, is the only way forward. We applaud the brave people who have made these positions possible through the work of local FJP chapters and at various academic associations and institutions.

And we listen to Palestinian scholars in the Gaza Strip who remind us: “We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.”

Steering Committee, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, National Network