Category Archives: Social Studies

“Anarchism…is a living force within our life…” Anarchism, education and new possibilities

CALL FOR PAPERS

Educational Studies, Special Issue
“Anarchism…is a living force within our life…” Anarchism, education
and new possibilities

Guest Editor
Abraham P. DeLeon
University of Texas at San Antonio
Manuscripts due April 1st, 2011

The title for this special issue emerged from the work of Emma Goldman
and other anarchists that have developed a reflexive and subversive
body of literature that has inspired countless political movements and
actions. Indeed resistance seems to become a living force inside of
anarchists based on their participation in such events like the
Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, Paris in 1968, Seattle in
1999 and Genoa in 2001. Today, anarchism is found in a diverse range
of fields such as philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, justice
studies and human rights scholarship. It is a rich tradition aligned
with multiple anarchisms rather than with a monolithic body of theory.
Anarchists critique hierarchies, resist authority, oppose coercive
institutions, employ alternative spatial arrangements and create
organic, communal societies based on mutual aid and social justice.
Although many anarchists have pushed for the end of compulsory
schooling, anarchist theory and practice can potentially serve a
subversive role in resisting how schools fashion student bodies into
workers, managers, owners and the other nefarious identities that
capitalism requires for its reproduction. Despite being
interdisciplinary, anarchist theory and practice is omitted from
educational scholarship and has only begun to be recently theorized
despite having a vested interest in educational projects throughout
the globe.

This special issue will address this current gap by inviting a broad
range of scholars to submit their theoretical, qualitative, and
conceptual papers that explore anarchism within the context of
critical educational theory and practice, particularly its
implications for critical pedagogy and the foundations of education.
Papers can attend to a wide variety of interdisciplinary anarchist
perspectives related to education. Historical work is welcomed that
examines anarchist-inspired models of education. Visionary papers that
imagine other future anarchist educational possibilities may be
provocative. Ethnographers that have embedded themselves within
anarchist educational movements will also be of interest. Scholars
that conceptualize anarchist theory and critical pedagogy through
eco-justice, critical race theory, poststructuralism, critical
discourse studies, indigenous education or queer theory are highly
sought. All submissions will be subject to a blind and rigorous peer
review process. The guest editor also seeks book reviews that explore
anarchist theory and any other media review connected to anarchism
and/or its practice. Poetry written or inspired by anarchists is also
highly encouraged. Hopefully, this special issue will serve as a
beginning conversation for how anarchist theory can be embedded within
educational theory, critical pedagogy and the foundations of education
serving as a catalyst for a more inclusive critical educational
theory. Manuscripts are due by April 1st, 2011 and are submitted
through Educational Studies’ online submission system, at
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com:80/heds. Please direct all inquires
about possible submissions by email to the guest editor, Prof. Abraham
P. DeLeon at Abraham.deleon@utsa.edu

New issue of Critical Education: “Why the Standards Movement Failed: An Educational and Political Diagnosis of Its Failure and the Implications for School Reform”

Part 2 of Larry Stedman’s analysis of the failure of the standards movement, just published by Critical Education.

Why the Standards Movement Failed: An Educational and Political Diagnosis of Its Failure and the Implications for School Reform
Lawrence C. Stedman

Abstract

In the first paper, “How Well Does the Standards Movement Measure Up?,” I documented the movement’s failure in diverse areas—academic achievement, equality of opportunity, quality of learning, and graduation rates—and described its harmful effects on students and school culture.

In this paper, I diagnose the reasons for the failure and propose an alternative agenda for school reform. I link the failure of the standards movement to its faulty premises, historical myopia, and embrace of test-driven accountability. As part of the audit culture and the conservative restoration, the movement ended up pushing a data-driven, authoritarian form of schooling. Its advocates blamed educational problems on a retreat from standards, for which there was little evidence, while ignoring the long-standing, deep structure of schooling that had caused persistent achievement problems throughout the 20th century. Drawing on reproduction theories and analyses of the neoliberal reform project, I make the case for repealing NCLB and Race to the Top and outline a progressive framework for reconstructing schools.

Historians Against the War: Links to recent articles

“How the Power of Myth Keeps Us Trapped in War”
By Ira Chernus, TomDispatch.com, posted January 20

“Tunisia’s Democratic Revolution”
By Stephen Zunes, Truth-out.org, posted January 19

“Violence Doesn’t Work”
By Howard Zinn, CommonDreams.org, posted January 18 (from the September 15, 2001 issue of The Progressive)

“From Military-Industrial Complex to Permanent War State”
By Gareth Porter, CommonDreams.org, posted January 17

“Ike’s Warning Resonates: 50 Years Later, Obama Should Learn Eisenhower’s Lesson about the Military-Industrial Complex”
By Melvin A. Goodman, Baltimore Sun, posted January 17

“Twisting MLK’s Message of Peace”
By William Loren Katz, ConsortiumNews, posted January 17

“It’s Still the Same Old Story—From Guns to Nukes”
By Lawrence A. Wittner, History News Network, posted January 17
The author is a professor of history emeritus at SUNY Albany

“An Assassination’s Long Shadow”

By Adam Hochschild, New York Times, posted January 16
On the murder of Patrice Lumumba, January 16, 1961

“Historians Criticized as Often AWOL from Public Debate over ‘War on Terror’”
By Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, posted January 12

“How Many Gitmo Alumni Take Up Arms? Not Nearly as Many as the Department of Defense Is Claiming”

By Peter Bergen, Kathleen Tiedemann, and Andrew Lebovitch, Foreign Policy, posted January 11

Educating for Peace in a Time of Permanent War: Call for proposals:

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

FOR A BOOK ENTITLED

EDUCATING FOR PEACE IN A TIME OF PERMANENT WAR:
ARE SCHOOLS PART OF THE SOLUTION OR THE PROBLEM?

Under Contract
Routledge / Taylor & Francis

Co-editors Paul R. Carr (Lakehead University, Orillia) & Brad J. Porfilio (Lewis University)

Afterword Zvi Bekerman (Hebrew University)

SCHEDULE

1. Chapter proposals due: February 28, 2011
2. Feedback and decisions from editors to contributors: April 4, 2011
3. First drafts due to editors: July 15, 2011
4. Feedback on first drafts from editors to contributors: September 5, 2011
5. Final drafts by contributors due to editors: October 14, 2011
6. Manuscript to publisher: December 1, 2011
7. It is our expectation that the book will be publisher in early 2012

Statement of aims
This project responds to a defined need to add to the literature in a critical manner, providing scholars, educators and others interested in peace and peace education with a nuanced, complexifed analysis and, importantly, strategies to better understand how schools engage with the notion of war and peace, and, moreover, what they can do to become part of the solution related to creating societies that strive to establish peace as a foundational component to socio-cultural, economic and political manifestations framing relations and experiences.

This CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS seeks critical contributions from scholars who are concerned with the unchecked infiltration of the military within schools, whether it be through the curriculum, through pedagogy, through policy, through experiential learning, or through military recruitment. As Paulo Freire and other critical theorists, including Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, bell hooks, Joe Kincheloe, Antonia Darder and others have acknowledged, education is a political process, and it should, necessarily, address human suffering and oppression. The willful neglect, combined with our individual and collective complicity within the military enterprise, sometimes referred to as the military-industrial complex, takes place at many levels, including ignorance of militarization at home and abroad, tacit support for military conflict in spite of alternatives for peace that exist, an uncritical reading of history that glorifies war and patriotism, a lack of critical engagement to promote peace over war, and a general reluctance to infuse a more critical pedagogical experience interwoven into education that would allow for deliberative democracy and engagement that seeks to contextualize and bring to life diverse epistemologies, value-sets, disciplines, theories, concepts, and experiences.

Little is done in schools at the formal and informal levels to address war and peace, especially in relation to what can and should be done to bring about peace, and this volume seeks to provide a range of policy, pedagogical, curriculum and institutional analyses aimed at facilitating meaningful engagement toward a more robust and critical examination of the role that schools play (and can play) in framing war, militarization and armed conflict.

We are particularly interested in the connection between war and peace. Many excellent texts deal specifically with peace and peace education, and we are hoping that this volume will make a more explicit connection between war/conflict/militarization and peace in and through education. We are also interested in nuanced, alternative, critical interdisciplinary studies that bring to light how we know, understand, engage with, and problematize war within our societies, and, particularly, within our schools. This manuscript is intended for an international audience, and we welcome proposals from scholars in diverse contexts, geographical locations and disciplines.

ONE LINE DESCIPTION OF THE BOOK

Ignorance is no defense, and may even be construed as complicity in the quest for what Peter McLaren calls “permanent war”.

If education is not about peace, then is it about war?

Can a society have education that willfully avoids considering peace as its central objective?

FOCUS

This book intends to better articulate how schools are part of the war industry, and, importantly, how schools can do peace education by examining war.

War is not a nebulous, far-away, mysterious venture; we are involved in perpetrating and perpetuating it, and education about and against war can be as liberating as it is necessary.

If war equates killing, can our schools avoid engaging in the examination of what war is all about?

This book shines a light on the pivotal role played by schools and education in ending or continuing war.

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS

1. Submit the following by February 28, 2011, to Paul R. Carr and Brad J. Porfilio: prcarr@gmail.com & Porfilio16@aol.com
2.
a. Title of proposed chapter
b. Author(s) and complete institutional titles and contact information
c. A 150-word biography for each author
d. A 300-word abstract of the proposed chapter, including what research methods are being used, theoretical and conceptual framework used, focus, and findings (or expected findings), and how the chapter is directly connected to the focus of the book.

Co-editor biographies

Paul R. Carr is originally from Toronto, and now resides in Montreal. He was recently an associate professor at Youngstown State University, where he taught courses in multicultural education, the sociology of education, diversity and leadership, and qualitative methodology, and is now an Associate Professor at Lakehead University (Orillia) in the Departments of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Studies. His current research is broadly concerned with social justice, with specific threads related to critical pedagogy, democracy, media literacy, and intercultural education. In 2007, he co-edited The Great White North? Exploring Whiteness, Privilege and Identity in Education (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers), which won two national awards, and, in 2008, co-edited another book, entitled Doing Democracy: Striving for Political Literacy and Social Justice (New York: Peter Lang). He recently finalized two other edited books: the first in French entitled Les faces caches de l’intercultural (Paris: L’Harmattan), and the second, with Brad Porfilio, entitled Youth Culture, education and resistance: Subverting the commercial ordering of life (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers). He has recently authored book entitled Democracy and critical pedagogy: Does your vote count? (New York: Peter Lang). Paul is the co-founder and co-director of the Global Doing Democracy Research Project, which aims to produce a range of studies on the international level, leading to critical, comparative analysis of how democracy and education can be more effectively connected.

Dr. Brad J. Porfilio is Assistant Professor of Education at Lewis University in Romeoville, IL. He teaches courses on critical pedagogy, qualitative research, globalization and education, multicultural education, foundations of education, and curriculum theory in the Educational Leadership for Teaching and Learning Doctoral Program. The Educational Leadership Program at Lewis University is unique in its critical and transformative focus where students are prepared to become transformative educational leaders who are deeply discerning, knowledgeable and approach the educational system as a potential avenue for challenging and transforming the status quo. Dr. Porfilio received his PhD in Sociology of Education in 2005 at the University at Buffalo. During his doctoral studies, he served as an Assistant Professor of Education at Medaille College and D’Youville College, where he taught courses across the teacher education spectrum and supervised pre-service and in-service teachers from Canada and the US. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, edited volumes, and conference papers on the topics of urban education, critical social studies education, neoliberalism and schooling, transformative education, teacher education, gender and technology, and cultural studies. He recently published three co- edited volumes: The first, co-edited with Curry Malott, The Destructive Path of Neoliberalism (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers), the second, co-edited with Paul R. Carr, Youth Culture, Education and Resistance: Subverting the Commercial Ordering of Life (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers), and the third, co-edited with Curry Malott, Critical Pedagogy in the 21st Century: A New Generation of Scholars (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing).

Paul R. Carr Brad J. Porfilio
Lakehead University (Orillia) Lewis University
prcarr@gmail.edu porfilio16@aol.com

Announcing the Purple Thistle Institute! Radical social change from below

Announcing the Purple Thistle Institute!
RADICAL SOCIAL CHANGE FROM BELOW

The Purple Thistle in East Vancouver, Coast Salish Territory is super‐pleased to announce that in JULY 2011 we will be running a three‐week summer institute. We’d be thrilled if you would consider attending.

WHAT IS IT? The PTI will be something like an alternative university, or maybe better: an alternative‐to-university.

The idea is to bring together a bunch of engaged, interested people to talk about theory, ideas and practise for radical social change. We’ll have a great time, meet good people, get our praxis challenged and with luck refine and renew our ideas, politics and energies.

Importantly, the conversations will very deliberately cut across radical orientations – anarchists, socialists, lefties, progressives, anti‐colonialists, anti‐authoritarians, ecologists of all stripes are welcome.

The idea is to work, think and talk together – to articulate and comprehend differences sure – but to find common ground, get beyond factionalized pettiness and stimulate radical ecological and egalitarian social change. We want to get good people with good ideas together to talk and listen to each other.

WHEN IS BEING HELD? July 4th – 23rd, 2011

WHAT WILL THE SCHEDULE LOOK LIKE? Essentially all three weeks will follow the same pattern. We will be running 6 days a week with Sundays off. We will be offering 8 morning classes of which participants will be able to choose up to four to attend. Then we will all have lunch together, then every afternoon community work placements will be offered. Evenings will be a mix of open‐space activities, shows, speakers, films and free time.

WHAT WILL THE CLASSES BE LIKE? We have put together an awesome roster of instructors and speakers including Astra Taylor, Cecily Nicholson, Carla Bergman, Am Johal, Matt Hern, Geoff Mann, Glen Coulthard and lots more. The classes will be fairly rigourous (loosely at an upper‐year university level) and include a certain amount of reading and some writing. Attendance is not mandatory and you can engage with as much or as little as you like. The classes include: Decolonization, Activist Art, Urban Studies, Deschooling, Understanding Economics, Contemporary Social Philosophy and Critical Theory.

WHO IS THIS FOR? The PTI is for anyone, of any age, but we will be giving priority to youth, racialized and low‐income folks. As mentioned the classes will be pretty rigourous intellectually, but please don’t let that scare you off. The language will not be overly academicized and as long as you like to read, think, talk and listen you’ll probably be OK. The one real requirement is that you are keenly interested in radical social transformation and come with a generous spirit ready to listen and collaborate.

WHAT WILL IT COST? The three weeks are priced on a sliding scale: $350 ‐ $500. This includes lunch six days a week. If you are coming from out of town, need a place to stay and want to kick down an extra $100 we will find you a good billet who will give you a bed and feed you. There will be a few bursaries available, but we are going to need most people to pay at least the minimum.

HOW DO I APPLY? Hit us with an email at institute@purplethistle.ca and we’ll send you a formal application and instructions.

Update to issue 17 of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

The current issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has been updated with two new field reports.

Issue No. 17 of Workplace “Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions” is guest edited by Howard Stevenson of Lincoln University (UK).

The new field reports include:

The NEA Representative Assembly of 2010: A Longer View of Crisis and Consciousness
Rich Gibson

Abstract
Following the 2009 National Education Association (NEA) Representative Assembly (RA) in San Diego, new NEA president Dennis Van Roekel was hugging Arne Duncan, fawning over new President Obama, and hustling the slogan, “Hope Starts Here!” At the very close of the 2009 RA, delegates were treated to a video of themselves chanting, “Hope starts Here!” and “Hope Starts with Obama and Duncan!” The NEA poured untold millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours, into the Obama campaign. In 2009, Van Roekel promised to tighten NEA-Obama ties, despite the President’s educational policies and investment in war. What happened in the year’s interim? What was the social context of the 2010 RA?

Resisting the Common-nonsense of Neoliberalism: A Report from British Columbia
E. Wayne Ross

Abstract
Faced with a $16 million budget shortfall, the Vancouver school trustees, who have a mandate to meet the needs of their students, have lobbied for more provincial funding to avoid draconian service cuts. The government has refused the request, and its special advisor to the Vancouver School Board criticizes trustees for engaging in “advocacy” rather than making “cost containment” first priority. The clash between Vancouver trustees and the ministry of education is not “just politics.” Rather, education policy in BC reflects the key features of neoliberal globalization, not the least of which is the principle that more and more of our collective wealth is devoted to maximizing private profits rather than serving public needs. British Columbia is home to one of the most politically successful neoliberal governments in the world, but fortunately it is also a place to look for models of mass resistance to the neoliberal agenda. One of the most important examples of resistance to the common-nonsense of neoliberalism in the past decade is the British Columbia teachers’ 2005 strike, which united student, parent, and educator interests in resisting the neoliberal onslaught on education in the public interest.

Historians Against the War and Veterans for Peace respond to attacks on Wikileaks

From Historians Against the War (HAW) Steering Committee (SC):

Over the last few weeks Wikileaks has released numerous classified U.S. government cables that have revealed what U.S. diplomats are saying to each other on a range of topics, from the war in Iraq to heads of state. The documents unveil disturbing facts about these wars, including secret CIA paramilitaries, unaccountable military task forces, and the widespread killing of civilians. The release represents a contribution to the right of the public to know, both in the United States and around the world, what the U.S. government really thinks and does, as opposed to the fictions that often pass for official statements.

In response, members of the U.S. government and public, from both parties, have unleashed a firestorm of verbal abuse, physical threats, legal maneuvers, and economic pressure to try and silence Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, and to prevent the publication of any more U.S. government documents.*

We call on all HAW members to oppose these attacks and to stand up for freedom of the press and the free distribution of information. Several petitions are circulating on the web — for example, at https://sites.google.com/site/wilibeaks (Voters for Peace) and http://www.credoaction.com/campaign/wikileaks/index2.html?rc=homepage (Credo). We ask you to sign them and to ask your friends and colleagues to do so as well.

* For recent background articles on these attacks, see, e.g.:

Glenn Greenwald, “Joe Lieberman Emulates Chinese Dictators”

Tom Hayden, “The Lynch Mob Moment”

Robert Scheer, “From Jefferson to Assange”

Editors of The Nation, “First They Came for Wikileaks Then . . .

++++++++++++++

Veterans For Peace in Support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks and to Boycott Ebay, Paypal and Amazon Corporations

Yesterday, the Executive Committee of Veterans For Peace voted to break all commercial ties with the Amazon Corporation and call for our members to boycott eBay Corp. and PayPal Corp. This includes, but is not limited to,

Removing the Amazon link from the VFP website. Previously we had encouraged our members to use this link when making purchases from Amazon Corp., as a fundraising method for our organization.

Urging our members, supporters and the public to boycott Amazon, eBay and PayPal corporations.

Urging Julian Assange and the Wikileaks team to continue their fight in the most important area of free speech: government secrets.

The U.S. Justice Department is reportedly considering charging Assange under the Espionage Act. This much-discredited and little-used law was last invoked against journalists, unsuccessfully, in the failed Pentagon Papers case in 1971. However, prosecution and conviction under this act, passed in 1917 to stifle dissent during WWI, may have little to do with espionage and everything to do with government repression.

For example, the federal government used the Espionage Act to prosecute Gene Debs, the great union organizer and socialist presidential candidate, for a 1918 Canton Ohio speech against U.S. involvement in the “Great War.”

Another citizen prosecuted in the same period under the same law, according to Kevin Zeese, director of Voters for Peace, was Rose Pastor Stokes, sentenced to ten years in prison for a letter to the Kansas City Star, saying “no government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people while the government is for the profiteers.”

The government-war-private corporation axis is exposed fully in this case. Credit card companies Mastercard and Visa, along with giant online retailer Ebay Corp., owner of PayPal Corp., have voluntarily joined Amazon Corp. in answering the government’s request to block WikiLeaks’ funding in an effort to keep additional information from a citizenry increasingly fed up with war, secrecy and corporate power.

VFP gave imprisoned Army PFC, Bradley Manning, its Courage of Conscience award earlier this year for releasing documents detailing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Resistance to the attack on WikiLeaks and Assange is also growing and VFP considers it important to do what we can to join that resistance.

-end-

“Youth-Led Organizations, the Arts, and the 411 Initiative for Change in Canada: Critical Pedagogy for the 21st Century”

Critical Education has just published its latest issue:

“Youth-Led Organizations, the Arts, and the 411 Initiative for Change in Canada: Critical Pedagogy for the 21st Century”
Brad J. Porfilio, Michael Watz

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to document a group of Canadian youth activists’ and artists’ perceptions and experiences with developing and sustaining an arts-based educational initiative that “undertakes public education and the promotion of civic participation of young people on social issues that frame their development within their communities.” Through the youth activists’ and artists’ narratives, we highlight the youths’ motivation to establish this organization, the methods they use to engage their audience in social commentary and activism, how they confront and overcome barriers in schools when implementing their pedagogical initiatives, and the challenges they face in keeping their project intellectually vibrant and culturally relevant to youth. Moreover, we argue that critical pedagogues must take seriously the cultural work proffered by youth-led social justice initiatives if critical pedagogy is to remain relevant in promoting equity and social justice in schools and in society.