Category Archives: Education theory & research

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.

In conversation: Professor E Wayne Ross and Professor Alpesh Maisuria

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.

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Critical Education v15 n4 – Just published

New issue of Critical Education just published. Critical Education15(4): https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/index

Table of Contents

Hope Kitts

Maiyoua Vang

Lilia Monzo, Elena Marquez

Molly Wiant Cummins

Call for submission: Heed the Call of the Dreamers! Imagination and the Frontiers of Critical Scholarship

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?

  • What would it mean to embody a rhetoric of the future?
  • How can the avant-garde animate scholarship in new imaginative directions?
  • Do historical or cultural myths possess a generative moment that can inform social theory in fundamentally new ways?
  • What happens when social theory engages with the imagination? What kind of transformations are possible?
  • How can the imagination inform political organizing in fundamentally new ways?
  • What happens with social theory when it embodies the fictional worlds of a social imagination?
  • What become the limits of inquiry when the imagination is activated?
  • What would it mean to decolonize the future? How do indigenous ways of knowing inform our futures?
  • What kind of alternative futures emerge when we utilize an imaginative lens?
  • What are some examples of indigenous or non-Western forms of imagination that are instructive or visionary?
  • What do specific genres of fiction (horror, science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, romance) offer the critical scholarly project?
  • How can fiction and creative writing inform social and critical theories?

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.

Research seminar at UWE Education and Childhood Research Group

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.

Call for manuscript reviewers – Critical Education

Critical Education 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

New issue of Critical Education (15.3) just published

New issue of Critical Education (Vol 15, No 3) just published.
Table of Contents:

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.

New online cohort M.Ed. in Social Studies Education at UBC: Curriculum, Historical inquiry, & Pedagogy (CHiP)

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.

This program is offered by the Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia

Start Date: July 2025
Length: 2.5 years | Part-Time
Format: Online

Objectives

Through the program, students will consider theories, principles, and practices in social studies education related to:

  • Critical analysis of dominant and alternative theories of learning, teaching, and assessment in Social Studies,
  • Improvement of practice through the study of educational theory, philosophy, and practice in Social Studies,
  • Analysis of different approaches to curriculum development and implementation and their impact on social studies teaching and learning,
  • The place of curriculum and pedagogy for social studies education in historical context, understanding the social, political, economic, and cultural factors that direct past, present, and future decision making, and
  • Using an inquiry stance toward your professional practice as an educator in a variety of settings.

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.

More information here.

Video Interview: “Desafios e possibilidades para a educação histórica em um mundo neoliberal” / “Challenges and possibilities for history education in a neoliberal world”

In November 2022, I had the honour giving the keynote address at the National Meeting of Researchers in History Teaching (XIII Encontro Nacional de Pesquisadores do Ensino de História – XIII-ENPEH) organized by the Brazilian Association of History Teaching (Associação de Ensino de História – ABEH).

Subsequently, the talk — “Desafios e possibilidades para a educação histórica em um mundo neoliberal” / “Challenges and possibilities for historical education in a neoliberal world” — was published as a chapter in the book Os presentes do Ensino de História: (re)construções em novas bases  / The gifts of History Teaching: (re)constructions on new bases,  edited by Luis Cerri (State University of Ponta Grossa) and Juliana Alves Andrade (Federal University of Pernambuco).

Below is a a link to a video interview that was conducted last month with my Brazilian colleagues including professors Cerri and Andrade and the president of ABEH, Prof. Maria Lima (Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul). The interview covers quite a bit of territory including the politics of  history and social studies education and their role in construction of a more democratic society, critical teaching and the dangers it entails, plus organizing and action for educational and social change.

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