I am a Professor of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Originally from the Carolinas, I taught pre-school, high school, and university in North Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, New York, and Kentucky prior to joining the faculty at UBC.
As a social studies educator my interests focus on the influence of social and institutional contexts on teachers’ work as well as the role of curriculum and teaching in building a democratic society. In recent years, I have examined the influence of neoliberalism and the global education reform movement on curriculum and teaching in an effort to develop both a radical critique capitalist schooling and means by which teachers, students, and other stakeholders might resist its conforming, anti-democratic, anti-collective, and oppressive potentialities, practices I describe as dangerous citizenship.
I teach and write about the politics of curriculum, critical pedagogy, social studies education, and academic labor. I have written and edited more than 25 books on social studies, critical pedagogy, and social justice education, including The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems and Possibilities (SUNY Press), Social Studies Education in Latin America, with Sebastián Plá (Routledge), and Rethinking Social Studies: Critical Pedagogy and the Pursuit of Dangerous Citizenship (Information Age Press). Four of my books have won the Critics Choice Book Award from American Education Studies Association.
My articles have appeared in Theory & Research in Social Education; Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies; Journal for Critical Educational Policy Studies; Educational Studies; Journal of Teacher Education; Works & Days and many others.
In addition to my scholarly work, I have written extensively for newspapers and magazines on education and social issues and contributed to radio and television outlets across Canada, United States, and Europe. My education activism includes playing a key role in the creation of The Rouge Forum, a group of educators, parents, and students working a democratic society through dialogue and direct action.
I am co-founder and co-director of the Institute for Critical Education Studies and the lead editor of the Institute’s flagship, open access journals Critical Education and Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. I am also co-editor of Cultural Logic , which has been on-line since 1997, and is an open access, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal publishing essays, interviews, poetry, and reviews by writers working within the Marxist tradition.
I completed my undergraduate and masters degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and my PhD at The Ohio State University.
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I am a secondary school English teacher who is concerned about the vast variation in grades between schools, distance learning and off shore B.C. accredited schools. Now that the English 12 provincial exam is beginning it’s final year teachers that I speak to are concerned that if they continue to use the existing writing standards they will be penalizing their students. They are concerned that their students’ grades will be lower than other schools. I have welcomed many students from DL or other schools who have entered my classroom with completely inflated grades. Last year, an international student came to me with a 78% in English 11 and received a provincial exam mark of less than 30%. She could not write a sentence without an error. Another English teacher and I would like to hear from universities as to how we can continue to uphold our written expectations without jeopardizing student entrance and scholarships. Can you give me any insight into this? Is this a topic at the university level?