Category Archives: Education theory & research

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor archive project completed

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor founding editors—Kent Puckett and Marc Bousquet—published the first issue of the journal in the fall of 1998. Closely connected to activism emerging from the Graduate Student Caucus of the Modern Language Association, the journal’s mission was defined by Bousquet in his Foreword to the first issue, “The Institution as False Horizon”:

Workplace is a … journal that asks you to join with Graduate Student Caucus as the agent of a new dignity in academic work. This means that most of its contributors will try to convince you that becoming a Workplace activist is in your immediate and personal best interest, even by the narrowest construction of careerism.

Let me be clear about this. If you’re a graduate student, I’m saying that becoming an activist today will help you get a job in your interview tomorrow.

If you’re an undergraduate, or parent, or employer, I’m saying that a dignified academic WORKPLACE delivers better education.

By “dignified” I mean very simple things.

I mean a higher-education WORKPLACE in which first-year students—those most at risk for dropping out and those requiring the best-trained and most-expert attention—can expect as a matter of course that they have registered for classes taught by persons with experience, training, and the terminal degree in their field (usually a Ph.D.), an office for conferences, a salary that makes such meetings possible, a workload that enables continuing scholarship, a telephone and answering machine, reasonable access to photocopying, and financial support for professional activities.

Remove any one of these values, and education suffers. Who would ask their accountant to work without an office? Or a telephone? Or training and professional development?

Most of the teachers encountered by students in first-year classes have none of these things. No office. No pay for meetings outside of class. No degree. Little or no training. No experience to speak of.

Little wonder that nobody’s happy with the results.

The good news is that there’s plenty of work in higher education teaching for those who want to do it. The bad news is that all of that work no longer comes in the package of tenure, dignity, scholarship, and a living wage that we call “a job.”

The struggle for dignity in the academic workplace continues and 17 years later Workplace remains a journal focused on critical analysis of and activism within universities, colleges, and schools.

Throughout it’s existence Workplace been an open-access journal. Initially housed on servers at the University of Louisville, the journal moved to the University of British Columbia and transitioned from an html-based journal to the Open Journal Systems (OJS) a journal management and publishing system developed by the Public Knowledge Project. PKP is a multi-university initiative developing free open source software and conducting research to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing.

Workplace is now published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies at UBC and hosted, along with a number of other OJS journals, by the University of British Columbia Library.

The Workplace journal archive project, led by Stephen Petrina (co-director of the Institute for Critical Education Studies and Workplace co-editor), has been underway for several years and is now complete. Back issues #1-#12 are now reformatted and accessible through the journal Archives, bringing the journal up to date under a new unified numbering system and collecting the complete journal contents in one place for the first time since 2005.

This was a monumental task, facilitated by the impeccable editorial work of Graduate Assistants Maya Borhani and Michelle Gautreaux.

We encourage you to explore the very rich archives of the journal and to join us in promoting a new dignity in academic work. We welcome your submissions on issues of workplace activism and dialogue on all issues of academic labor.

Marketing Canadian Universities (New issue of Critical Education)

Critical Education has just published its latest issue at
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled.

Marketing Canadian Universities: The Sociology of Institutions Perspective
Joe Corrigan, University of Alberta

Abstract
This is a critical response to a Government of Canada study using the institutional-sociology notions of structuration, isomorphism and professionalization. The primary recommendation of three proposed in the DFAIT Study (2009) creates an international education marketing agency (IEMA) funded by the Government of Canada and international students who choose to study in Canada. This paper re-positions the primary recommendation of the DFAIT Study outside of the dominant narrative of global competition and into the sociology of institutions framework offered by DiMaggio and Powell. Using this alternative framework, major assumptions and the example of Country X from the original study are problematized. This will be of interest to critical educators, administrators and others who envision a direct international role for their institutions and Canadian universities in general.

Keywords
Institutional Sociology; Educational Policy; Internationalization

Published by the Institute for Critical Education studies at University of British Columbia, Critical Education is an international peer-reviewed journal, which seeks manuscripts that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is interested in theoretical and empirical research as well as articles that advance educational practices that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and informal education. Read more about the journal’s editorial policies and how to submit a manuscript for consideration here.

Teach for America and the Future of Education in the United States (Part 3: Altering TFA’s Trajectory)

Critical Education has just published its latest issue at
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled

Part 3 of our special series “Teach for America and the Future of Education in the United States”, focuses on altering the trajectory of TFA. Guest editors for the series are Philip E. Kovacs and Kathleen deMarrais.

Critical Education
Vol 4, No 13 (2013)
Table of Contents
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/182474

Teach for America and the Future of Education in the US
Part 3: Altering TFA’s Trajectory
——–

“I want to do Teach For America, not become a teacher.”
Mark Stern, D. Kay Johnston

An Issue of Equity: Assessing the Cultural Knowledge of Preservice Teachers
in Teach for America
Eric Ruiz Bybee

The Outsized Effects of Equating Teaching with Leadership: Implications of
Teach for America’s Vision for Engaging Teachers in Reform
Laura Gutmann

Problems, Politics, and Possibilities: Imagining a Teach For America that
really is for America
Erinn Brooks, Kathleen Greene

Education for Revolution special issue of Works & Days + Cultural Logic launched

Education for Revolution a special issue collaboration of the journals Works & Days and Cultural Logic has just been launched.

Check out the great cover image (Monument to Joe Louis in Detroit) and the equally great stuff on the inside. Hard copies of the issue available from worksanddays.net and Cultural Logic will be publishing and expanded online version of the issue in the coming months.

Rich and I want to thank David B. Downing and his staff at Works & Days for the fabulous work they did on this issue, which is the second collaboration between the two journals. Read Downing’s foreword to the issue here.

Works & Days + Cultural Logic
Special Issue: Education for Revolution
E. Wayne Ross & Rich Gibson (Editors)
Table of Contents

Barbarism Rising: Detroit, Michigan, and the International War of the Rich on the Poor
Rich Gibson, San Diego State University

Resisting Neoliberal Education Reform: Insurrectionist Pedagogies and the Pursuit of Dangerous Citizenship
E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia
Kevin D. Vinson, University of The West Indies

Reimaging Solidarity: Hip-Hop as Revolutionary Pedagogy
Julie Gorlewski, State University of New York, New Paltz
Brad Porfilio, Lewis University

Learning to be Fast Capitalists on a Flat World
Timothy Patrick Shannon, The Ohio State University
Patrick Shannon, Penn State University

Contesting Production: Youth Participatory Action Research in the Struggle to Produce Knowledge
Brian Lozenski, Zachary A. Casey, Shannon K. McManimon, University of Minnesota

Schooling for Capitalism or Education for Twenty-First Century Socialism?
Mike Cole, University of East London

Class Consciousness and Teacher Education: The Socialist Challenge and The Historical Context
Curry Stephenson Malott, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

The Pedagogy of Excess
Deborah P. Kelsh, The College of Saint Rose

Undermining Capitalist Pedagogy: Takiji Kobayashi’s Tōseikatsusha and the Ideology of the World Literature Paradigm
John Maerhofer, Roger Williams University

Marxist Sociology of Education and the Problem of Naturalism: An Historical Sketch
Grant Banfield, Flinders University of South Australia

The Illegitimacy of Student Debt
David Blacker, University of Delaware

Hacking Away at the Corporate Octopus
Alan J. Singer, Hofstra University

A Tale of Two Cities ¬– and States
Richard Brosio, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

SDS, The 1960s, and Education for Revolution
Alan J. Spector, Purdue University, Calumet

Call for Papers: NETWORKED REALMS AND HOPED-FOR FUTURES: a trans-generational dialogue

CALL FOR PAPERS
NETWORKED REALMS AND HOPED-FOR FUTURES:
a trans-generational dialogue

During the past decades, people from all walks of life – educators, information scientists, geeks, writers, film makers etc. – envisioned various futures for the relationships between education and technologies. Step by step, the logic of technological and social development has cherry-picked the most viable options and dumped others deep into the waste bin of history. Yesterday, our present was just one of many possible futures – today, it is our only reality.

This Special Issue of the journal E-Learning and Digital Media (www.wwwords.co.uk/ELEA) invites authors to step back from the never-ending quest for new concepts and ideas and to revisit past insights into the relationships between education and technologies – including, but not limited to, the formal process of schooling. Based on analyses of historical ideas, we invite authors to reflect on the relationships between past, present and future.

What is viable today might not have been viable yesterday: history of human thought is packed with excellent ideas that once failed to make an impact because of wrong placement, timing or simply bad luck. Therefore, we are particularly interested in identification and examination of ignored/abandoned/neglected/forgotten concepts and ideas that might shed new light to our current reality and/or (re)open new and/or abandoned strands of research.
Working at the intersection of technology, psychology, sociology, history, politics, philosophy, arts, and science fiction, we welcome contributions from wide range of disciplines and inter-, trans- and anti-disciplinary research methodologies.

SUBMISSIONS
All contributions should be original and should not be under consideration elsewhere. Authors should be aware that they are writing for an international audience and should use appropriate language. Manuscripts should not exceed 8000 words. For further information and authors’ guidelines please see www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/howtocontribute.asp

All papers will be peer-reviewed, and evaluated according to their significance, originality, content, style, clarity and relevance to the journal.

Please submit your initial abstract (300-400 words) by email to the Guest Editors.

GUEST EDITORS
Petar Jandrić, Department of Informatics & Computing, Polytechnic of Zagreb, Croatia (pjandric@tvz.hr)
Christine Sinclair, Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK (christine.sinclair@ed.ac.uk)
Hamish Macleod, Moray House School of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK (h.a.macleod@ed.ac.uk)

IMPORTANT DATES
15 February 2014 – Deadline for abstracts to guest editors
1 May 2014 – Deadline for submissions/full papers
1 July 2014 – Deadline for feedback from reviewers
1 October 2014 – Final deadline for amended papers
Publication date – in 2015, to be decided

Call for Manuscripts: The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education

Critical Education
Call for Manuscripts:
The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education

Series Editors:
Derek R. Ford, Syracuse University
Brad Porfilio, Lewis University
Rebecca A. Goldstein, Montclair State University

As the neoliberal agenda for public education in North America intensifies, educational literature has increasingly turned its attention toward understanding the logics and processes of neoliberal privatization. Additionally, attention has been paid as to how educators resist these processes and practices, both in the classroom and beyond. This special issue seeks to deepen our understanding of the neoliberal privatization of education by extending critical examinations to an underrepresented field of cultural production: that of mainstream media reporting on education and the neoliberal privatization of education, which many believe represents a new round of primitive accumulation. By examining and analyzing the mainstream media’s relationship to the processes in which neoliberal education ideologies are constructed, reflected, and reified, articles in this issue will explicate the various ways in which the mainstream media has helped facilitate and legitimate neoliberalism as a universal logic in reforming education, both locally and globally. Articles will also speak to how critical educations have guided students in K-20 schools to understand the mainstream media’s relationship to supporting the neoliberal takeover of schools.

We welcome conceptual, empirical, theoretical, pedagogical and narrative articles that approach this topic from a variety of perspectives and frameworks. Articles included in the special issue may ask and examine questions such as, but not limited to: How has media coverage of teachers’ unions and teachers’ strikes reinforced and/or advanced privatization? What shift has taken place in terms of who is positioned in the media as educational “experts”? What are the differences between the way that various major news networks, newspapers, and news magazines talk about educational privatization? How are Teach For America and Teach For All being propelled by media coverage? What are the variations in media coverage of the neoliberal agenda for education? What are the alternatives and prospects for challenges to the mainstream media? How has ALEC impacted school reform policies and practices on the state level and to what extent has the media covered it? How have critical educators positioned their students to understand the mainstream media’s role in supporting the corporate agenda for schooling?

Manuscripts due: May 1, 2014

For details on manuscript submission see: CE Information for Authors

Class Struggle and Education

Critical Education
Vol 4, No 10 (2013)
Table of Contents
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/182467

Articles
——–

Class Struggle and Education: Neoliberalism, (Neo)-conservatism, and the
Capitalist Assault on Public Education
Dave Hill

Abstract

In this article I examine the nexus, the mutually reinforcing connection between neoliberal and neoconservative ideology and social and political forces, and variation between countries such as Britain, the USA and Turkey. This analysis is then applied in particular to neoliberal/ neoconservative education `reform’ in England, focusing on marketisation, high-stakes testing, privatization and pre-privatisation, and the increased surveillance of teachers as a result of new public managerialism in education, as reinforced and enforced by the school inspection system. These effects are then related to the lived work experiences of specific teachers, using their own word. I conclude the article by examining and calling for resistance, for teachers and critical education workers to educate, agitate and organize in various arenas, and to consider the importance of political programme- in particular to consider the utility of the transitional programme as advanced by Trotsky.

Would BC Libs send Port Mann Bridge drivers to Europe to research professional education of engineers? Or, why teacher education matters

In what is perhaps the most bizarre government sponsored “research” project ever in the history of British Columbia, the Ministry of Education has given two contracts to a 19 year old high grad to research teacher education in Finland and disseminate her findings to university deans in British Columbia, with the intent of transforming the professional preparation of teachers. Read the original news report here.

The reporter wrote the story in the genre of “young person with passion providing a unique perspective to spark change” without irony, without critical perspective on the workings of government, or any consideration of what it means to conduct social research.

But many in the chattering class who take education issues seriously, myself included, responded with criticism of the Rick Davis, a BC Superintendent of Achievement, who gave government contracts to support the teen’s “research” in Finland.

What I find particularly interesting is the mini-backlash in the Twittersphere against folks who are critical of giving under the table contracts to unqualified teenagers to travel to Europe to conduct “research” on the professional preparation of teachers.

The critics of the critics make an argument that goes something like this, “Everybody knows something about education, schooling, (and thus teacher education) so why are you trying to silence this young woman?” (Which, by the way, no one is trying to do, the criticism has been directed at government, not the young “researcher” in question.)

Yes, people have perspectives on their experiences, but as heartfelt (or extensive) as they may be they are not inherently informative for research, policy, or practice. I celebrate and encourage a complicated conversation on social issues. Broad public dialogue on social issues is a key measure of the health of a democracy. But all perspectives are not equal.

Participation in a public dialogue is important. Engage in the conversation. Share your ideas. The twist in this particular circumstance is that government has endorsed and financially backed a person with no distinctive qualifications (save having been a student in school) not to engage in a conversation, but to influence public policy on professional preparation of teachers.

Would the critics of the critics support having random patients sent to Europe to research the professional preparation of physicians? A random selection of drivers who cross the Port Mann Bridge everyday sent to Europe to research professional preparation of engineers?

No doubt that the years spent in a classroom give people a particular perspective on what teaching, education, and schooling are about. And I don’t deny the personally meaningful understandings that result from those long days and years. But, a student perspective is only a partial perspective on the complexity of what it means to teach. And, I would add that even the practice of classroom teaching itself is only a partial perspective on what is needed for effective professional preparation of teachers.

Despite what some characterize as a “Mickey Mouse” discipline, teacher education is not merely 50 Nifty Ways to teach algebra, The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or Pride and Prejudice.

Professional teachers are not merely competent in disciplinary knowledge, but understand the epistemological structures of their disciplines and the contested nature of what is or isn’t taught in school. Professional teachers don’t merely have a caring attitude toward their students they understand human development and the ways in which social and economic inequalities impact on the daily experiences of their students.

As in any professional practice, novice teachers begin their careers with an understanding of what it means to teach, and teach well, that is heavily influenced by their own experiences as students (as well as the popular “image” of what it means to be a good teacher). It takes time in the classroom, often years, before the full complexity of the job is understood even by those who are in the classroom every single day …

And, British Columbia Ministry of Education contracts with a high school grad to “research” teacher education in an effort to “spark change”?

Rick Davis and the Ministry are either woefully ignorant of what it means to teach and what it means to prepare teachers or they just don’t care. And this has nothing to do with the teenage victim of their ignorance or indifference.

Educational Entrepreneurship, Creative Destruction, and the Junk Food of Education Reform

New issue of Critical Education just published:

Critical Education
Vol 4, No 9 (2013)
Table of Contents
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/182459

Special Report
——–

Educational Entrepreneurship, Creative Destruction, and the Junk Food of Education Reform: An Interview with Alex Molnar
Samantha M. Paredes Scribner, Robert J. Helfenbein
Indiana University – IUPUI

Abstract

Alex Molnar has taken up the question of commercialization in education over an extensive career that most recently has been in concert with the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), an organization dedicated to the scholarly response to this very education reform movement. In the Spring of 2012, a dialogue was engaged to explore issues of the moment for scholars of education and how we might respond.

Healthy Systems: Literature, Nature, and Integrity

Critical Education has just published its latest issue at http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled. We invite you to review the
Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.

Thanks for the continuing interest in our work,

Stephen Petrina
Sandra Mathison
E. Wayne Ross
Institute for Critical Education Studies
University of British Columbia
https://blogs.ubc.ca/ices/

Critical Education
Vol 4, No 7 (2013)
Table of Contents
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/182445

Articles
——–

Healthy Systems: Literature, Nature, and Integrity
Rachel A Wilkinson

Abstract
Our interactions with everyday objects inform our understanding of the world; yet today much of what we use is tossed immediately. Items made in haste, used in haste, and made into waste belie the values that, for centuries, humans have taken for granted. What do our consumption practices teach our students today? I suggest that apathy, loss of agency, lack of integrity, and disconnection is often a result of our incomplete understanding of what lasts and where things go when we’re finished with them. Fortunately, the literature classroom, which can introduce students to texts such as “God’s Grandeur,” Grapes of Wrath, and Frankenstein, among others, offers educators an opportunity to challenge our throwaway society and reverence what lasts.