The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students

The Institute for Critical Education Studies at UBC is very pleased to announce the launch of a new issue of Workplace: Journal for Academic Labor: The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students.

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor
No 22 (2013)

The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students
Special Issue Edited by Bradley J. Porfilio, Julie A. Gorlewski , & Shelley Pineo-Jensen

Table of Contents

The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students: Introduction to the Special Issue

Brad Porfilio, Julie A. Gorlewski, Shelley Pineo-Jensen

Dismissing Academic Surplus: How Discursive Support for the Neoliberal Self Silences New Faculty
Julie Gorlewski

Academia and the American Worker: Right to Work in an Era of Disaster Capitalism?
Paul L. Thomas

Survival Guide Advice and the Spirit of Academic Entrepreneurship: Why Graduate Students Will Never Just Take Your Word for It
Paul Cook

Standing Against Future Contingency: Activist Mentoring in Composition Studies
Casie Janelle Fedukovich

From the New Deal to the Raw Deal: 21st Century Poetics and Academic Labor
Virginia Ann Konchan

How to Survive a Graduate Career
Roger Todd Whitson

In Every Way I’m Hustlin’: The Post-Graduate School Intersectional Experiences of Activist-Oriented Adjunct and Independent Scholars
Naomi Reed, Amy Brown

Ivory Tower Graduates in the Red: The Role of Debt in Higher Education
Nicholas D. Hartlep, Lucille T. Eckrich

Lines of Flight: the New Ph.D. as Migrant
Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim

Protest violent police repression of striking Mexican teachers

LETTER FROM US section of the Trinational Coalition to Defend Public Education

Asking us to support Mexican teachers – send to Mexican officials

We stand in solidarity with the teachers of CNTE in Mexico who are calling upon the government for a genuine dialogue, that their demands be acknowledged and that violent repression not be used against the nationwide movement in defense of public education as it was today in Mexico City. The rights to assemble and express legitimate concerns are rights that are inalienable rights that are part of the civil and democratic freedoms for which humanity has fought and died for during the last two centuries. WHEREVER POSSIBLE, ORGANIZE DEMONSTRATIONS IN FRONT OF MEXICAN CONSULATES AND TAKE PHOTOS TO BE SENT TO THE SAME ADDRESSES AS THE COPIES OF PROTEST LETTERS. Even a photo of 5 people in front of a consulate is a tremendous morale booster for our brothers and sisters fighting against the destruction of teacher unions & public education!

Police end teachers protest in Mexico City
Police attack striking Mexico teachers

LETTERS TO THE GOVERNMENT CAN BE SENT TO:
LIC. ENRIQUE PEÑA NIETO
Presidente Constitucional de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos
enrique.penanieto@presidencia.gob.mx

LIC. OSORIO CHONG MIGUEL ANGEL
Secretario de Estado
secretario@segob.mx

LIC. CHUAYFFET CHEMOR EMILIO
Secretaria de Educación Pública
emilio.chuayffet@sep.gob.mxrasagas@live.com
Prof. Eligio Hernández de Oaxaca XXII: eligiogonzalez@hotmail.com

Below is a copy of the letter that the US section of the Trinational Coalition to Defend Public Education sent to the protesting teachers in Mexico. Use it as a template and send copies to:
seccionmexicana.coali@gmail.com
Maestra Graciela Rangel de Michoacán sección XVIII: rasagas@live.com
Prof. Eligio Hernández de Oaxaca XXII: eligiogonzalez@hotmail.com

MEXICO D.F., MEXICO September 13, 2013

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The Trinational Coalition to Defend Public Education-USA extends our support for your valiant and militant struggle to defend not just your rights as teachers and trade unionists, but the Mexican people’s right to a public education that is guaranteed in your federal constitution. We applaud your courageous resistance against implementation of the present changes in the constitution which would use standardized tests for teachers to be hired and to keep their jobs, standardized tests for students that will limit their future opportunities in life as well as reducing federal funding to state and local schools. These changes will have the worst impact on the poorest states and communities, especially those whose population mainly speak languages other than Spanish.

We face similar attacks in the United States of America under the guise of “reform”. Your struggle for educational and union justice is an inspiration to us about how teachers and communities can unite to defend public education. You have clarified for the world that the forces behind these so-called reforms are powerful corporate interest that intend to privatize public education.

YOUR STRUGGLE IS OUR STRUGGLE!

In solidarity,

Rosemary Lee, for Trinational Coalition to Defend Public Education-section USA

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.

Constructing a Bakhtinian/Freirean Dialogic Pedagogy for the College Composition Classroom

New issue of Critical Education includes Sean McAuley’s article “Constructing a Bakhtinian/Freirean Dialogic Pedagogy for the College Composition Classroom”.

Critical Education is a open access journal published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies at the University of British Columbia. Check out the journal and register to become a reader, reviewer, and/or author.

Constructing a Bakhtinian/Freirean Dialogic Pedagogy for the College Composition Classroom
Sean J McAuley

Abstract

Author McAuley discusses the perception of dialog in the field of Education and argues for a more complex and comprehensive understanding of the term. The discussion identifies two camps of dialogic pedagogy based upon the theories of either Mikhail Bakhtin or Paulo Freire and teases out the differences and commonalties between the two theorists’ understanding of dialog. In particular, the author contrasts Bakhtin’s socio-psychological aspects of dialog with Freire’s socio-political ones. The discussion then moves to a review of practitioner research based in Bakhtin, Freire or a combination of the two in order to show how the theories can work in concert within a dialogic pedagogical stance. The discussion concludes with a consideration that a dialogic pedagogy based in both theorists clarifies the discussion and mutually edifies both educators and student through a more comprehensive understanding of dialogic pedagogy.

Keywords

critical pedagogy; dialogic pedagogy; bakhtin; freire; dialog

New edition of “The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities” in production

I’m very pleased to announce that the Fourth Edition of the The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities is now in production at The State University of New York Press and will be available in 2014.

This fourth edition includes 12 new chapters on: the history of the social studies; creating spaces for democratic social studies; citizenship education; anarchist inspired transformative social studies; patriotism; ecological democracy; Native studies; inquiry teaching; Islamophobia; capitalism and class struggle; gender, sex, sexuality and youth experiences in school; and critical media literacy. Chapters carried over from the Third Edition, which was published in 2006, have been substantially revised and updated, including those: on teaching in the age of curriculum standardization and high-stakes testing; critical multicultural social studies; prejudice and racism, assessment; and teaching democracy.

As with previous editions——the first edition of The Social Studies Curriculum was published in 1997 and the Revised Edition was released in 2001——the aim of this collection of essays is to challenge readers to reconsider their assumptions and understandings of the origins, purposes, nature, and possibilities of the social studies curriculum.

A fundamental assumption of this collection is that the social studies curriculum is much more than subject matter knowledge—a collection of facts and generalizations from history and the social science disciplines to be passed on to students. The curriculum is what students experience. It is dynamic and inclusive of the interactions among students, teachers, subject matter and the social, cultural, economic and political contexts education. The true measure of success in any social studies course or program will be found in its effects on individual students’ thinking and actions as well as the communities to which students belong. Teachers are the key component in any curriculum improvement and it is our hope that this book provides social studies teachers with perspectives, insights, and knowledge that are beneficial in their continued growth as professional educators.

I am very appreciative to all the authors who wrote chapters for this and previous editions of the book, including: Jane Bernard-Powers, Margaret Smith Crocco, Abraham DeLeon, Terrie Epstein, Ronald W. Evans, Linda Farr Darling, Stephen C. Fleury, Four Arrows (aka Don T. Jacobs), Kristi Fragnoli, Rich Gibson, Neil O. Houser, David W. Hursh, Kevin Jennings, Gregg Jorgensen, Lisa Loutzenheiser, Joseph Kahne, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Christopher R. Leahey, Curry Stephenson Malott, Perry M. Marker, Sandra Mathison, Cameron McCarthy, Merry Merryfield, Jack L. Nelson, Nel Noddings, Paul Orlowski, Valerie Ooka Pang, J. Michael Peterson, Marc Pruyn, Greg Queen, Frances Rains, David Warren Saxe, Doug Selwyn, Özlem Sensoy, Binaya Subedi, Brenda Trofanenko, Kevin D. Vinson, Walter Werner, Joel Westheimer, and Michael Whelan. Each of one of these contributors are exemplary scholars and educators and their work has had a tremendous impact on my own thinking and practice as well as many other educators.

Contents
The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities
(4th Edition)

Preface

Part I: Purposes of the Social Studies Curriculum

1. Social Studies Curriculum Migration: Confronting Challenges in the 21st Century
Gregg Jorgensen, Western Illinois University

2. Social Studies Curriculum and Teaching in the Age of Standardization
E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia
Sandra Mathison, University of British Columbia
Kevin D. Vinson, The University of the West Indies

3. Creating Authentic Spaces for Democratic Social Studies Education
Christopher R. Leahey, North Syracuse (NY) Public Schools & SUNY Oswego

4. “Capitalism is for the Body, Religion is for the Soul”: Insurgent Social Studies for the 22nd Century
Abraham P. DeLeon, University of Texas, San Antonio

Part II: Social Issues and the Social Studies Curriculum

5. Dangerous Citizenship
E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia
Kevin D. Vinson, The University of the West Indies

6. Teaching Students to Think About Patriotism
Joel Westheimer, University of Ottawa

7. Ecological Democracy: An Environmental Approach to Citizenship Education
Neil O. Houser, University of Oklahoma

8. Native Studies, Praxis, and The Public Good
Four Arrows, Fielding Graduate University

9. Marxism and Critical Multicultural Social Studies Education: Redux
Curry Malott, West Chester University
Marc Pruyn, Monash University

10. Prejudice, Racism, and the Social Studies Curriculum
Jack L. Nelson, Rutgers University
Valerie Ooka Pang, San Diego State University

11. The Language of Gender, Sex, and Sexuality and Youth Experiences in Schools
Lisa Loutzenheiser, University of British Columbia

Part III: The Social Studies Curriculum in Practice

12. Making Assessment Work for Teaching and Learning
Sandra Mathison, University of British Columbia

13. Why Inquiry?
Doug Selwyn, SUNY Plattsburgh

14. Beyond Fearing the Savage: Responding to Islamophobia in the Classroom
Özlem Sensoy, Simon Fraser University

15. Class Struggle in the Classroom
Greg Queen, Fitzgerald Senior High School (Warren, MI)

16. Critical Media Literacy and Social Studies
Paul Orlowski, University of Saskatchewan

17. Teaching Democracy: What Schools Need to Do
Joseph Kahne, Mills College
Joel Westheimer, University of Ottawa

Part IV: Conclusion

18. Remaking the Social Studies Curriculum
E. Wayne Ross, University of British Columbia

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.

Cultural Logic, Works & Days to co-publish special issues on “Education for Revolution”

The journals Cultural Logic and Works & Days are collaborating to co-publish special issues on “Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Education for Revolution.”

The issue will be published this fall, in print, by Works & Days. Cultural Logic will then publish an expanded online version—including several additional articles, including pieces on Greece, India, and Turkey—in 2014.

Rich Gibson and E. Wayne Ross, co-editors of the special issue, describe the context and focus of the issue as:

The core issue of our time is the reality of the promise of perpetual war and escalating color-coded inequality met by the potential of a mass, activist, class-conscious movement to transform both daily life and the system of capitalism itself. In this context, schools in the empires of the world are the centripetal organizing points of much of life. While the claim of capitalist schooling is, in the classics, education, “leading out,” the reality is that schools are segregated illusion factories, in some cases human munition factories. Rather than leading out, they encapsulate.

Mainstream educational and social research typically ignores, disconnects, the ineluctable relationships of what is in fact capitalist schooling, class war, imperialist war, and the development of varying forms of corporate states around the world.

At issue, of course, is: What to do?

The long view, either in philosophy or social practice is revolution as things must change, and they will.

Connecting the long view to what must also be a long slog necessarily involves a careful look at existing local, national, and international conditions; working out tactics and strategies that all can understand, none taken apart from a grand strategy of equality and justice.

“Marxism and Education: Education for Revolution” will be the second collaborative publishing project between Cultural Logic and Works & Days. In 2012, the journals co-published the special issue “Culture and Crisis,” edited by Cultural Logic co-editor Joseph G. Ramsey) in print and online versions.

Table of Contents for Marxism and Education: International Perspectives on Education for Revolution

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 J. Blacker, University of Delaware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insurgent Pedagogies and Dangerous Citizenship
E. Wayne Ross, The University of British Columbia
Kevin D. Vinson, The University of The West Indies

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

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

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

About the Co-editors:
Rich Gibson is emeritis professor of social studies in the College of Education at San Diego State University. He worked as a foundry worker, an ambulance driver, a pot and pan washer, fence painter, soda jerk, bank teller, surveyor’s assistant, assembly line chaser, a teacher, a social worker, organizer and bargaining agent for National Education Association, TA, and as a professor at Wayne State University. With about ten other people, he helped to found what is now the largest local in the UAW, local 6000, not auto-workers, but state employees.

E. Wayne Ross is professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia and a former secondary social studies (Grades 8 to 12) and day care teacher in North Carolina and Georgia. He has taught at Ohio State University, State University of New York, and the University of Louisville. Ross is a member of the Institute for Critical Education Studies at UBC and co-editor of Critical Education and Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor.

Gibson and Ross are co-editors of Neoliberalism and Education Reform (Hampton Press) and are co-founders of The Rouge Forum, a group of K-12 and university education workers, parents, community people, and students, engaged in fighting for a democratic and egalitarian society. Find out more about The Rouge Forum conferences here and here.

About Cultural Logic:
Cultural Logic—which has been on-line since 1997—is an open access, non-profit, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal that publishes essays, interviews, poetry, reviews (books, films, other media), etc. by writers working within the Marxist tradition.

CL co-editors are: David Siar (Winston-Salem State University), Gregory Meyerson (North Carolina A & T University), James Neilson (North Carolina A & T University), Martha Gimenez, (University of Colorado), Rich Gibson (San Diego State University), E. Wayne Ross, (University of British Columbia), Joe Ramsey (Quincy College)

About Works & Days:
Works & Days provides a scholarly forum for the exploration of problems in cultural studies, pedagogy, and institutional critique, especially as they are impacted by the global economic crisis of late capitalism. Whereas most scholarly journals publish groups of relatively unrelated essays, each volume of Works & Days focuses on a specific issue, and contributors are encouraged to share their work with each other.

Recent special issues of the Works & Days journal have focused on the effect of globalization on women and the environment, the attacks on academic freedom, the privatization of higher education under neoliberal capitalism, the increasing exploitation of part-time, temporary faculty, the shift from print to electronic media, and the politics of knowledge.

Works & Days is edited by David B. Downing (Indiana University of Pennsylvania).

Popular Education Network Conference 2014

The 6th International Conference of the Popular Education Network (PEN)
Thursday 24 – Saturday 26 April 2014
University of Malta Valletta Campus

This conference seeks to build on the success of previous PEN conferences held in Edinburgh (2000), Barcelona (2002), Braga (2004), Maynooth (2007) and Seville (2011).

The conference is an opportunity for university-based teachers and researchers, student-activists and others involved in higher education, who share a common interest in popular education – many of whom work in considerable isolation in their own institutions – to meet, exchange ideas, learn from each other and enjoy some much needed solidarity and conviviality.

The language of the conference will be English.

For a better understanding of the rationale of the conference and for immediate steps to follow, you are kindly asked to click on the following: (1) programme; and (2) expression of interest form.

For queries regarding the academic programme contact:

Professor Carmel Borg
Faculty of Education
University of Malta
Msida MSD 2080
MALTA
Tel: +356 2340 2935
Email: https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/carmelborg

For queries regarding the conference arrangements contact:
Ms Lucienne M. Bugeja
Senior Executive, Logistics & Events Coordination
University of Malta Valletta Campus
Old University Bldg
St Paul Street
Valletta VLT 1216
MALTA
Tel: +356 2340 7511
Email: https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/luciennembugeja

Catch-22 and the Paradox of Teaching in the Age of Accountability (New issue of Critical Education)

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,

Sandra Mathison
Stephen Petrina
E. Wayne Ross
Institute for Critical Education Studies
University of British Columbia

Critical Education
Vol 4, No 6 (2013)
Table of Contents
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/182405

Articles
——–
Catch-22 and the Paradox of Teaching in the Age of Accountability
Christopher Leahey

Abstract

Drawing upon Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, this paper explores the logic of standards-based education reform and the myriad ways in which accountability systems, performance standards, and market-based reform initiatives have degraded teaching and learning in public schools. In this critical analysis of essential elements of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top fund, the author explores three dominant themes woven throughout Heller’s work: (1) the reliance on symbolic indicators of progress, (2) the irrational nature and deadening effect of bureaucratic rules and procedures, and (3) the dangers of unchecked capitalism. The author suggests that these reform efforts are not only counterproductive, but eroding the democratic foundations of our public school systems. The author concludes that to maintain their autonomy and professionalism, teachers will have to find alternative ways of organizing and produce a counter narrative that not only exposes the failings of standards-based reform but also offers meaningful alternatives.

Coring the Social Studies within Corporate Education Reform

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
wayne.ross@ubc.ca

Critical Education
Vol 4, No 5 (2013)
Table of Contents
http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/182404

Articles
——–

Coring the Social Studies within Corporate Education Reform: The Common Core State Standards, Social Justice, and the Politics of Knowledge in U.S.
Schools
Wayne Au, University of Washington, Bothell

Coring the Social Studies within Corporate Education Reform: The Common Core State Standards, Social Justice, and the Politics of Knowledge in U.S. Schools
Wayne Au

Abstract

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been adopted in 45 U.S. states. Driven by a wide coalition that includes both major U.S. political parties, the business elite, for-profit education corporations, cultural conservatives, and both major U.S. teachers’ unions, the CCSS have mainly garnered glowing praise in mainstream U.S. media and widespread acceptance amongst political figures and public school districts nationwide. This paper undertakes a critical analysis of the origins and political tensions found within the CCSS, arguing that the CCSS will inevitably lead to restrictive high-stakes, standardized testing similar to that associated with No Child Left Behind. Further this paper specifically examines the treatment of the social studies within the context of CCSS and questions the likely outcomes of the recently drafted College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards within the current political and cultural context of the United States.

Keywords

Social Justice; Common Core; Curriculum; Education Reform