Critical Theories in Education
I was delighted to conduct a seminar and reading group exploring critical social education in September 2024 at with the Education and and Childhood Research Group at University of the West of England. ECRG is lead by Professor Alpesh Maisuria and here is a short “in conversation” between Professor Maisuria and me.
UBC Middle East Studies invites you to attend a lecture by Prof. Muhannad Ayyash (Mount Royal University) titled:
Anti-Palestinian Racism and the Enablement of a Genocide
Date: Friday, Nov 8th
Time: 12-1:30pm
Location: In-person + Zoom (UBC Vancouver location TBC)
Registration required: https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9RGeYjRKn1N5I9g
Speaker Bio: Dr. Ayyash is Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Mount Royal University. His interdisciplinary research draws from anti-racist, decolonial, and critical hermeneutic approaches to social theory and analysis. Driven by questions about relations of power, justice, as well as political and social change, his research has largely focused on violence, settler colonial sovereignty, decolonial sovereignties, as well as social movements, focusing on the Palestinian struggle. His recent publications include Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine and numerous journal articles and op-eds in prominent outlets.
Heed the Call of the Dreamers! Imagination and the Frontiers of Critical Scholarship
Guest Editor
Abraham P. DeLeon
University of Texas at San Antonio
What happens when critical scholarship takes seriously, the potentials imbued within a collective social imagination? What occurs when radical ways of knowing and doing activate the imagination that points to a different kind of past, present, and future? These kinds of questions are what I hope will inspire the papers I am seeking for this special issue in Critical Education. The empiricism that dominates much of academic scholarship, especially within the social sciences and education in particular, casts aside the transformative potentials of the imagination. Concerned too much with measurement, validity, replicability, and fundable projects that reify a particular kind of reality, mainstream scholarship does not engage with an imaginary that animates humanity’s potentials that is radical, creative, imaginative, and weird. The imagination runs through our social body like connective tissue, capillaries of radical potentiality. Our history is imbued with the imaginary, crossing not only fictional works that appear in film or literature for just two examples, but also that have animated a utopian impulse of a radical kind of difference: a different future, a different world, a different way of being with each other.
The imagination cannot be reduced to simply cognition or a neuro-functionality that activates a purely Western, scientific understanding. A radical social imagination can begin from a place of nowhere (Ricoeur, 2024), a non-space that allows a new kind of freedom of form to materialize that exists beyond scientific discourses that try to ensure its capture. Like Sartre’s (1948) work that the imagination has the potentials for negation, freedom, and engagement with nowhere, this special issue wants to explore the limits and potentials for the imagination for a radical and different kind of social imaginary. This space of nowhere becomes a productive frontier for larger questions about the future, the potentials for social action, and the possibilities for new epistemological, ontological, and pedagogical encounters. This special issue is a call for us to begin a new kind of radical project that attempts to break free from the current shackles of this intellectual culture, what Foucault (1998) might have called “inventing a new body”, one that is “volatile” and “diffused” (p. 226-227). We heed the call of the dreamers and allow the imagination to burst furth in new scholarly directions.
Here are some possible provocations to guide a submission, but are just meant to act as creative sparks.
I welcome any submission with a creative and imaginative vision for the past, present, and future.
What have been past historical examples by a variety of political, creative, or other affinity groups animated by the imagination?
The editor is available for any inquiries or questions on ideas about potential manuscripts and encourages conversations around potential ideas. Please email him at abraham.deleon@utsa.edu.
Manuscripts will be due on May 1st, 2025. Please see the guidelines for submissions at Critical Education: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/about/submissions#authorGuidelines
References
Foucault, M. (1998). Aesthetics, method, and epistemology: Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 2. (R. Hurley and Others, ). The New Press.
Ricœur, P., Taylor, G. H., Sweeney, R. D., Amalric, J.-L., & Crosby, P. F. (2024). Lectures on imagination. The University of Chicago Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1948). The psychology of imagination. (B. Frechtman, Trans.). Philosophical Library.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to lead a research seminar with the Education and Childhood Research Group at the University of the West of England in Bristol this week.
The seminar was titled “Critical Social Education: Insurgent Pedagogies & Dangerous Citizenship” and explored how social studies education in the Americas is being used to contribute in significant ways to creating a society where individuals have the power and resources to realize their own potential and free themselves from the obstacles of classism, racism, sexism, and other inequalities often encouraged by schools, the state, and oppressive ideologies.
The seminar also framed the role and nature of social studies education in the Americas, with an emphasis on critical perspectives in the field, drawing on my recently published edited collection, The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (5th Edition, SUNY Press) as well other critical scholars including contributors to the book Insurgent Social Studies: Scholar-Educators Disrupting Erasure and Marginality (2022, Myers Education Press), edited by Natasha Hakimali Merchant, Sarah B. Shear and Wayne Au.
I also touched on related research on social studies in the Latin American context based on the book Social Studies Education in Latin America: Critical Perspectives from the Global South, which I edited with Sebastián Plá.
The ECRG is led by Alpesh Maisuria, Professor of Education Policy in Critical Education at UWE Bristol, who I thank for the opportunity.
I also want to thank UWE Bristol education Professor Jane Andrews for the chance to participate in their monthly reading group which discussed a recent chapter of mine titled “Society, Democracy, and Economics: Challenges for Social Studies and Citizenship Education in a Neoliberal World”. I enjoyed the lively and diverse discussion.
Critical E
ducation is a looking to expand its pool of manuscript reviewers.
If you are interested in contributing to the broad, multi-disciplinary field of critical education by participating in the peer review process, we encourage you to register with Critical Education as a reviewer.
We define critical education broadly as a field or approach that works theoretically and practically toward social change and addresses social injustices that result from various forms of oppression in globalized capitalist societies and under neoliberal governance.
We are looking for reviewers with expertise from across the broad range of education scholarship including but not limited to various: forms of research (e.g., empirical, theoretical, philosophical), contexts (e.g., early childhood, primary and secondary education, higher education, informal and popular education), conceptual orientations (e.g., critical pedagogy, anarchism, Marxism, critical postmodernism) and subfields (e.g., anti-racism, alternative education, critical and media literacy, disability studies, gender and sexuality, de/colonial and Indigenous education, leadership and policy studies, climate, outdoor, and place-based education, teacher education, solidarity and social movements, disciplinary subjects, etc.).
Critical Education uses a double-blind review process and follows the guidelines and practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics.
How do I sign up as a reviewer for Critical Education?
If you are already a registered user of the journal, sign in and from the drop-down menu below your username (top-right corner) choose View Profile > Role > check Reviewer box and list the key words that describe your areas of expertise. Before closing the profile window be sure to click the Save button on the bottom left of the page.
If you are not yet registered with Critical Education, use the Register link at the top of the journal home page and create an account. When creating your profile be sure to check the Reviewer role box and list the key words that describe your areas of expertise. Don’t forget to click the Save button.
Founded in 2010, Critical Education is an international, diamond open-access (no fees to read or publish), peer-reviewed journal, which publishes articles that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies and hosted by The University of British Columbia Library. Critical Education is indexed in a number of scholarly databases including Scopus, EBSCO, DOAJ, and ERIC and is a member of the Free Journal Network. For more about Critical Education see: https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/about
In the fall of 2023, I had the opportunity to give the keynote presentation and conduct workshops at Universidad Nacional Costa Rica as part of the VIII Symposium on Social Studies and Civic Education and III Congress of the Central American Network for Research and Teaching in Social Studies and Critical Citizenship. I also met with a class of social studies teacher candidates at University of Costa Rica-San Ramón to discuss teaching for social justice in social studies education.
This past spring three of the students followed up with me to conduct an interview on critical pedagogy in social studies education, which has just been published in Revista Perspectivas: Estudios Sociales y Educación Cívica.
Thanks to Karol Granados Gamboa (UNA), Anderson Granados Trejos (UCR), and Lady Pamela Rodríguez Víquez (UCR) for their interests and efforts to conduct the interview (and translation) and to Revista Perspectivas for publishing it.
Read the interview here (en español): https://www.revistas.una.ac.cr/index.php/perspectivas/article/view/20334/31440
Granados Gamboa, K., Granados Trejos, A., & Rodriguez Viquez, L. P. (2024). La pedagogía crítica no es una receta: Estrategias, desafíos y aportes en la enseñanza de los Estudios Sociales. Entrevista con el Dr. E. Wayne Ross. Revista Perspectivas: Estudios Sociales y Educación Cívica, 29 , 1-17. https://www.revistas.una.ac.cr/index.php/perspectivas/article/view/20334/31440
The Rouge Forum Archive is now available at RougeForum.com The RF Archive includes flyers, broadsides, conference programs, issues of our zine The Rouge Forum News, the Adam Renner Education for Social Justice Lectures, and more. And also check out RougeForum.org for additional information about RF activities.
We are concerned about questions like these:
We are both research and action oriented. We want to learn about equality, democracy, and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring into practice our present understanding of what these are.
We seek to build a caring inclusive community that understands an injury to one is an injury to all. At the same time, our caring community is going to need to deal decisively with an opposition that is sometimes ruthless.
Read about the origins and history of The Rouge Forum here.
The River Rouge runs throughout the Detroit area—where the Rouge Forum was founded in 1998. Once a beautiful river bounteous with fish and plant life, it supported wetlands throughout southeast Michigan. Before industrialization, it was one of three rivers running through what is now the metropolitan area. Today the Rouge meanders through some of the most industrially polluted areas in the United States, past some of the poorest and most segregated areas of North American, only to lead some tributaries to one of the richest cities in the U.S.: Birmingham. The Rouge cares nothing for boundaries. The other two Detroit rivers were paved, early in the life of the city, and now serve as enclosed running sewers. Of the three, the Rouge is the survivor.
The Ford Rouge Plant was built before and during World Way I. By 1920, it was the world’s largest industrial complex. Everything that went into a Ford car was manufactured at the Rouge. It was one of the work’s largest iron foundries and one of the top steel producers. Early on, Henry Ford sought to control every aspect of a worker’s life, mind and body, in the plant and out. Using a goon squad recruited from Michigan prisons led by the infamous Harry Bennet, Ford instituted a code of silence. He systematically divided workers along lines of national origin, sex, race, and language groupings–and set up segregated housing for the work force. Ford owned Dearborn and its politicians. He designed a sociology department, a group of social workers who demanded entry into workers’ homes to discover “appropriate” family relations and to ensure the people ate Ford-approved food, like soybeans, voted right, and went to church.
While Ford did introduce the “Five Dollar Day,” in fact only a small segment of the employees ever got it, and those who did saw their wages cut quickly when economic downturns, and the depression, eroded Ford profits.
The Rouge is the site that defined “Fordism.” Ford ran the line mercilessly. Fordism which centered on conveyor production, single- purpose machines, mass consumption, and mass marketing, seeks to heighten productivity via technique. The processes are designed to strip workers of potentially valuable faculties, like their expertise, to speed production, expand markets, and ultimately to drive down wages. These processes seek to make workers into replaceable machines themselves, but machines also capable of consumption. Contrary to trendy analysis focused on globalization and the technique of production, Ford was carrying on just-in-time practices at the Rouge in the early 1930’s. Ford was and is an international carmaker, in the mid 1970’s one of Europe’s largest sellers. In 1970, Ford recognized the need to shift to smaller cars, and built them, outside the U.S., importing the parts for assembly—early globalism.
Ford was a fascist. He contributed intellectually and materially to fascism. His anti-Semitic works inspired Hitler. Ford accepted the German equivalent of the Medal of Honor from Hitler, and his factories continued to operate in Germany, untouched by allied bombs, throughout WWII.
At its height, more than 100,000 workers held jobs at the Rouge. Nineteen trains ran on 85 miles of track, mostly in huge caverns under the plant. It was the nation’s largest computer center, the third largest producer of glass. It was also the worst polluter. The Environmental Protection agency, in 1970, charged the Rouge with nearly 150 violations.
Today there are 9,000 workers, most of them working in the now Japanese-owned iron foundry. Ford ruthlessly battled worker organizing at the Rouge. His Dearborn cops and goon squad killed hunger marchers during the depression, leading to massive street demonstrations. In the Battle of Overpass Ford unleashed his armed goons on UAW leaders, a maneuver which led to the battle for collective bargaining at Ford, and was the founding monument to what was once the largest UAW local in the world, Local 600, led by radical organizers for years.
On 1 February 1999, the boilers at the aging Rouge plant blew up, killing six workers. The plant, according to workers, had repeatedly failed safety inspections. UAW local president made a statement saying how sorry he was for the families of the deceased–and for William Clay Ford, “who is having one of the worst days of his life.” Papers and the electronic press presented the workers’ deaths as a tough day for the young Ford who inherited the presidency of the company after a stint as the top Ford manager in Europe. The steam went out of Local 600 long ago. The leaders now refer to themselves as “UAW-FORD,” proof that they have inherited the fascist views of the company founder.
When environmentalist volunteers tried to clean the rouge in June 1999, they were ordered out of the water. It was too polluted to clean. So, why the Rouge Forum? The Rouge is both nature and work. The Rouge has never quit; it moves with the resilience of the necessity for labor to rise out of nature itself. The river and the plant followed the path of industrial life throughout the world. The technological advances created at the Rouge, in some ways, led to better lives. In other ways, technology was used to forge the privilege of the few, at the expense of most–and the ecosystems, which brought it to life, The Rouge is a good place to consider a conversation, education, and social action. That is why.
The Logic of Ed-Tech: Three Critical Directions
Michael Mindzak, Rahul Kumar
“Relationship-building” and the Normalization of Police in Schools: The Emergence of School Resource Officer Programs in Canada
Alexandre Da Costa
Student Rent-Strikes: Hope Through Unplanned Critical Pedagogy
Lucy Wenham, Helen Young
“All of this is whitewashed, all of this is colonized: ”Exploring Impacts of Indigenous Young Adult Literature on Teacher Candidates Perceptions of Indigenous Peoples
Joaquin Muñoz
Visible and Invisible Difference: Negotiating Citizenship, Affect, and Resistance
Kerenina K. Dansholm, Joshua K. Dickstein, Heidi D. Stokmo
Review: Education as the Practice of Eco-Social-Cultural Change
Hossein Davari
Critical Education is a peer-reviewed, diamond open-access, international and multidisciplinary journal published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies (ICES). Critical Education is indexed in Scopus, ERIC, EBSCO, DOAJ, ASCI, and a member of the Free Journal Network.
Master of Education: Curriculum, Historical inquiry, & Pedagogy (CHiP)
Issues of equity, diversity, and social justice serve as foundational lenses for interrogating social studies curriculum and pedagogy.
This graduate program delves into key aspects of social studies curricula with connections to historical thinking, historical consciousness, visual culture, anti-oppressive and anti-racism education, gender studies, moral education, and the history and politics of curriculum.
The cohort-based model invites you to work through the program in a collaborative community of practice. Students in this program will construct strong, foundational knowledge about teaching and learning in social studies. Building on that base, you will investigate the ways in which inquiry, inter-culturalism, and 21st century teaching and learning are central to social studies education.
By the end of the 26-month program, students will have a wealth of knowledge to share. During the first semester of the program, incoming students will have a chance to learn from graduating students though a mini conference where they will share what they have learned and consider how it can help other Social Studies teachers in their contexts.
Start Date: July 2025
Length: 2.5 years | Part-Time
Format: Online
Through the program, students will consider theories, principles, and practices in social studies education related to:
Additionally, students will continually reflect on what they are learning and consider how it can help them understand the aims and purposes underlying social studies curricula in their contexts. This knowledge can then be used to inform new practices in their educational contexts.
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