Tag Archives: Critical Education

New article in Critical Education: Global Pedagogy and the Question of Palestine: A Dialogue

Global Pedagogy and the Question of Palestine: A Dialogue

Linda Herrera
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Michael A. Peters
Beijing Normal University / University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14288/ce.v16i4.187433 

Keywords: Palestine in Critical Pedagogy, Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy, popular education, empowerment, grassroots, global citizenship, genocide, Anti-colonial pedagogy

Abstract

Global pedagogy refers to a broad, ethically grounded approach to education that extends beyond national boundaries and emphasizes the collective responsibility to teach and learn about interconnected global crises and historical injustices. The question of Palestine and the ongoing genocide in Gaza serve as the “canary in the coalmine”. Its suppression is not an isolated phenomenon but a diagnostic for a wider authoritarian turn that seeks to foreclose the very possibility of critical, transnational solidarity. In this dialogue, Michel Peters, a philosopher of education, and Linda Herrera, a critical anthropologist of education in the Middle East, engage in a dialogue about how educators can keep critical thought and solidarity alive by partaking in practices that are resilient, resourceful, and relentlessly focused on building counter-publics. These requires embracing a “fugitive” pedagogy, curating and archiving counter-memories, and building transnational literacies of solidarity.

Author Biographies

Linda Herrera, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has researched, written about, and taught courses on education and power in the MENA region, qualitative research methods (with a focus on critical ethnography and oral history), international development policy, youth and generations, childhood in global context, the social effects of technological change, and critical democracy and citizenship education. Her books include, Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt (OUP, 2025), Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-first Century (University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (State University of New York Press, 2006).

Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University / University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Michael A. Peters is Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University Faculty of Education PRC, and Emeritus Professor in Educational Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is the executive editor of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and founding editor of five international journals, Policy Futures in Education, E-Learning and Digital Media (SAGE), and Knowledge Cultures (Addleton), The Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy (Springer), Open Review of Education Research (T&F). His interests are in philosophy, education and social policy and he has written over eighty books, including most recently: Wittgenstein and Education: Pedagogical Investigations, (2017) with Jeff Stickney, The Global Financial Crisis and the Restructuring of Education (2015), Paulo Freire: The Global Legacy (2015) both with Tina Besley, Education Philosophy and Politics: Selected Works (2011); Education, Cognitive Capitalism and Digital Labour (2011), with Ergin Bulut; and Neoliberalism and After? Education, Social Policy and the Crisis of Capitalism (2011). He has acted as an advisor to governments and UNESCO on these and related matters in the USA, Scotland, New Zealand, South Africa and the European Union. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ in 2010, a Fellow in 2018, and awarded honorary doctorates by State University of New York (SUNY) in 2012 and University of Aalborg in 2015.

Special Issue Call for Papers — THE GREAT BEYOND: SURPASSING HISTORICAL DAMAGE AND PIVOTING TOWARDS PROTECTING BLACK BOYS

[Click to enlarge images]

Special Issue Call for Papers — THE GREAT BEYOND: SURPASSING HISTORICAL DAMAGE AND PIVOTING TOWARDS PROTECTING BLACK BOYS

Guest Editors:

John A. Williams III – Texas A&M University
Daniel Thomas III – Texas A&M University
Marcus W. Johnson – Texas A&M University

Despite the resilience and brilliance of Black boys, they continue to face historical and systemic challenges rooted in institutional racism, socioeconomic inequity, and educational disparities (Andrews, 2023; Bryan, 2021; James, 2012; Noguera, 2009). Literature suggests that Black boys are not a monolith and their experiences vary along the lines of various social constructs within the U.S. (e.g., socioeconomics, regional origins, urbanicity, spirituality, etc.) (Dumas & Nelson, 2016; Walker et al., 2022). When discussing the ramifications that continue to linger over Black boys in various environments, there is still an opportunity to redress and critique current and historical elements that bred those conditions that damage Black boys. To look and proceed forward with applicable solutions, Black boys require that researchers, community activists, and policymakers stop glamorizing practices, policies, approaches, and programs that do not unequivocally protect Black boys. The multidimensionality that Black boys possess should be protected, not exploited, championed, not oppressed (Ladson-Billings, 2011; Warren et al., 2022; Wint et al., 2022). In securing a safer environment for Black boys, specifically in the U.S., research is needed that expands the boundaries into territories that question age-old practices and models that, when investigated, have no positive bearing on Black boys – yet they are still alive and well.

This special issue seeks to illuminate pathways to critique long-standing and often ignored structures and practices (e.g., corporal punishment, tracking, high-stakes testing) that still foster damaging outcomes for Black boys, while centering research and policy approaches that actively protect, promote, and empower them for excellence.

The issue aims to move beyond documenting harm towards actionable solutions that restore, reinforce, and celebrate Black boys’ full humanity. The special issue seeks manuscripts that are empirical (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods) or conceptual and contain contextually rich historical examinations of Black boys in education and society. We seek scholars with a U.S. and international perspective on Black boys and hope to have scholarship from a myriad of individuals (graduate students, junior and senior scholars).

All abstracts should be emailed to John A. Williams III (jwilliams3@tamu.edu) with the subject line “Critical Education Special Issue: Black Boys.” Abstracts due: February 1, 2016.

 Each manuscript will go through a double blind peer review, and all authors invited to submit a manuscript will be required to serve as peer reviewers.

 Should you have any questions, please reach out to John A. Williams III, jwilliams3@tamu.edu.

 References

Andrews, D. C. (2023). Black boys in middle school: Toward first-class citizenship in a first-class society. In Advancing Black Male Student Success from Preschool Through Ph.D. (pp. 45-60). Routledge.

Bryan, N. (2021). Remembering Tamir Rice and other Black boy victims: Imagining Black playcrit literacies inside and outside urban literacy education. Urban Education, 56(5), 744-7710.

Dumas, M. J., & Nelson, J. D. (2016). (Re) Imagining Black boyhood: Toward a critical framework for educational research. Harvard Educational Review, 86(1), 27-47.

James, C. E. (2012). Students “at risk” stereotypes and the schooling of Black boys. Urban Education, 47(2), 464-494.

Ladson Billings, G. (2011). Boyz to men? Teaching to restore Black boys’ childhood. Race ethnicity and education, 14(1), 7-15.

Noguera, P. A. (2009). The trouble with black boys:… And other reflections on race, equity, and the future of public education. John Wiley & Sons.

Walker, L., Goings, R. B., & Henderson, D. X. (2022). Unpacking race-related trauma for Black boys: Implications for school administrators and school resource officers. Journal of Trauma Studies in Education, 1(3), 74-89.

Warren, C. A., Andrews, D. J. C., & Flennaugh, T. K. (2022). Connection, antiblackness, and positive relationships that (re) humanize Black boys’ experience of school. Teachers College Record, 124(1),111-142.

Wint, K. M., Opara, I., Gordon, R., & Brooms, D. R. (2022). Countering educational disparities among Black boys and Black adolescent boys from pre-k to high school: A life course-intersectional perspective. The Urban Review, 54(2), 183-206.

https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/announcement/view/182282

New issue of Critical Education, Vol. 16 No. 1 (2025)

Vol. 16 No. 4 (2025)

Articles

Empowering Changemakers:
Activist Pedagogy in a Democratic School 
Crystena Parker-Shandal

The Future of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) in Education 
Keep, Reform, or Dismantle? 
Ardavan Eizadirad, Gerald Walton

Learning Decision-Making and Democratic Participation in Early Primary Education 
A Case Study in Catalonia 
Clara Gallart , Jordi Castellví

Educational Outcomes of Indigenous Students Living in Remote Reserve Communities 
Complex and Multifaceted Indigenous Poverty
Kristen Anderson, Saiqa Azam

Fail Fast: The Discourse of Quality Research Perpetuated by Leadership at The Institute of Education Sciences
Jacob Bennett, Vonna Hemmler

Investigating Education, Class Antagonisms and Solidarity: Toward Critical Humanist Democratic Societies

Critical Humanism and Problems of Change 
Arturo Rodriguez, Kevin R. Magill

The Emergence of Narrative and the Discovery of Humanism
Curriculum and Research Lessons from the Italian Renaissance
Saville Kushner

“More beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said”: 9/11, BLM, and the creation of an American identity
Joanna Batt, Michael L. Joseph, Anthony L. Brown

Meet-and-Defer
The Rhetorical Unmaking of Graduate Academic Labor at the University of Maryland 
Samuel DiBella

Book & Media Reviews

A Sociopolitical Agenda for TESOL Teacher Education, by Peter I. De Costa and Ozgehan Uştuk (Eds.), Bloomsbury Academic, 2023, 208 pp., $ 108, (ebook), ISBN 9781350262850
Hossein Davari, Saeed Nourzadeh

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

Critical Education v15 n4 – Just published

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

Table of Contents
Designing Curriculum for Critical Consciousness: A White Teacher’s Process
Allarie Coleman

Hope Kitts

Playing Around: Basketball Personhoods as Sites of Dialogue, Education Research, and Epistemic Disobedience
Juan F. Carrillo, Dan Heiman, Noah De Lissovoy

Maiyoua Vang

Lilia Monzo, Elena Marquez

Molly Wiant Cummins

Using Virtual Learning Labs to (Re)Mediate Exclusionary Discipline Practices for Young Children of Color with Disabilities
Saili Kulkarni, Sunyoung Kim, Nicola Holdman

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.

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.

https://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/index

XII International Conference on Critical Education (Ankara, Turkey)

XII International Conference on Critical Education

Ankara University
July 3-6, 2024

REVITALIZING THE WORK OF CRITICAL EDUCATION IN AN AGE OF MULTIDIMENSIONAL CRISIS: COMMUNITY, STRUGGLE AND RESISTANCE

Living in an age of economic, social, political, personal, and ecological crises, educators and school communities face serious physical and mental risks, tensions and other challenges. Under the effect of rising authoritarianism, conservatism, commodification, inequality, pseudoscience, fatalism, war, migration, unemployment, poverty, racism, misogyny, discrimination, displacement, abuse and xenophobia, educators and students feel more andmore insecure, hopeless, powerless, and become isolated from the community. There has been an increase in neoliberal, neo-conservative, andanti-democratic, authoritarian pressures on education, becoming the most significant and current obstacles to development, emancipation and humanization of both educators and students. Curricula have been structured to align with the requirements of the neoliberalism and neo-conservatism diverting from the liberating educational practices. While public education is diminished and discredited with lower funds, unscientific education, private schools are skyrocketing. The ideal of education for public good has been replaced by commodified education. Multiple intertwined crises require a response and community effort that interrupts paralysis, isolation. For these reasons, against all these attacks and the current of isolation, atomization, objectivation, and fragmentation, we would like to convene in the XII.International Conference on Critical Education in Ankara, Turkey, as the space of people where the powers and ideas can be developed, our solidarity and sense of community are refreshed, and we reconstruct new ways of resistance, struggle, and transformation.

We open this call for papers with some comments on our theme and purpose. We welcome all to join our conference which aims to advance and strengthen research, pedagogy, struggle, and critical community. Educators under the stress need this fellowship with new urgency. Critical educators are a foremost ally with democratic communities of struggle facing new attacks on the historic expansions of democracy and its promise. Fresh attempts to rebuild the discredited means of unjust exclusion now intensify at the head waters of the river of historic progress for the oppressed.

We welcome critical educators, progressive thinkers, and students to participate in the XII International Conference on Critical Education, fostering solidarity within community to seek new sources of inspiration, learning experiences, and tools of struggle, in order to build a democratic, scientific,libertarian, egalitarian, public, and secular education.

The International Conference on Critical Education, previously held in Athens (2011, 2012, 2017), Ankara ( 2013), Thessaloniki (2014, 2022), Wroclaw (2015), London (2016, 2018), Naples ( 2019), Valetta, Malta (2023) is a forum for scholars, educators and activists committed to social justice and social emancipation.

This conference, will be hosted by the Ankara University Institute of Educational Sciences with the help of the Faculty of Educational Sciences and its departments. The 12th ICCE will take place at the Cebeci Campus of the University of Ankara.

The Language of the conference will be English and Turkish.