Tag Archives: film

Documentary on East Van’s Purple Thistle Centre – Common Notions: No Handbook Required

Carla Bergman, Corin Browne and John Collins have made a film about The Purple Thistle Centre, which will be screened at the DOXA film festival:

Common Notions: No Handbook Required
Wednesday, May 11, 2016 – 5:00pm
Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour St)

For almost 15 years, the youth-run arts and activism space, the Purple Thistle, has been home for a variety of activities, from guerilla gardening to DIY publishing and screen-printing. Common Notions: Handbook Not Required is not only a celebration of the Thistle’s achievements, it’s a manifesto for the youth liberation movement. An array of alternative education advocates and scholars including Astra Taylor, Gustavo Esteva, and Madhu Suri Prakash, as well as local organizer Khelsilem, make a compelling case for democratizing knowledge and re-imagining our current systems of education. They argue that institutionalized schools, as we currently know and understand them, offer an extremely narrow and commodified definition of what it means to teach and to learn. Consensus decision-making, inclusivity, and a strict “noassholism” policy are just some of the Thistle’s guiding principles. Last year, the Thistle officially closed its doors. But this isn’t necessarily all bad news. Youth members and staff facilitators say the spirit of the collective will carry on in different permutations. After all, the Thistle was never meant to be an institution, but a path to a different way of experiencing the world. -SC

 

Common Notions: Handbook Not Required Trailer from John Collins on Vimeo.

Reforming Academic Labor, Resisting Imposition, K12 and Higher Education (Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, No. 25)

New Workplace Issue #25

Reforming Academic Labor, Resisting Imposition, K12 and Higher Education

Workplace and Critical Education are published by the Institute for Critical Education Studies. Please consider participating as author or reviewer. Thank you.

Critical Education to publish articles series “The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education”

Forthcoming articles in the current volume of Critical Education will include a special series examining The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education, edited by Derek R. Ford (Syracuse University), Brad Porfilio (California State University, East Bay), and Rebecca Goldstein (Montclair State University).

The series will be launched on March 30, 2015 and run through August 15, 2015.

Here is a full listing of forthcoming articles in Critical Education, from March through September 2015:

Critical Education
ISSN 1920-4125

Forthcoming Articles in Volume 6:

Volume 6 Number 6
March 21, 2015
‘That would give us power…’ Proposals for Teaching Radical Participation from a Society in Transition
Edda Sant
Manchester Metropolitan University

Volume 6 Numbers 7-16
Critical Education series The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education
Editors: Derek R. Ford, Brad Porfilio & Rebecca Goldstein

Volume 6 Number 7
March 30, 2015
The News Media, Education, and the Subversion of the Neoliberal Social Imaginary
Derek R. Ford
Syracuse University
Brad Porfilio
California State University, East Bay
Rebecca A. Goldstein
Montclair State University

Lessons from the “Pen Alongside the Sword”: School Reform through the Lens of Radical Black Press
Kuram Hussain
Hobart and William Smith College
Mark Stern
Colgate University

Volume 6 Number 8
April 15, 2015
Breathing Secondhand Smoke: Gatekeeping for “Good” Education, Passive Democracy, and the Mass Media:  An Interview with Noam Chomsky
Zane C. Wubbena
Texas State University

Volume 6 Number 9
May 1, 2015
Speaking Back to the Neoliberal Discourse on Teaching: How US Teachers Use Social Media to Redefine Teaching
Kessica Shiller
Towson University

Volume 6 Number 10
May 15, 2015
Political Cartoons and the Framing of Charter School Reform
Abe Feuerstein
Bucknell University

Volume 6 Number 11
June 1, 2015
Neoliberal Education Reform’s Mouthpiece: Education Week’s Discourse on Teach for America
Michelle Gautreaux
University of British Columbia

Volume 6 Number 12
June 15, 2015
Re-Privatizing the Family: How “Opt-Out” and “Parental Involvement” Media Narratives Support School Privatization
Amy Shuffelton
Loyola University Chicago

Volume 6 Number 13    
July 1, 2015
Learning from Bad Teachers: The Neoliberal Agenda for Education in Popular Media
José García
University of Texas at Austin

Volume 6 Number 14
July 15, 2015
#TFA: The Intersection of Social Media and Education Reform
T. Jameson Brewer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Matthew Wallis
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Volume 6 Number 15 
August 1, 2015
Engagement with the Mainstream Media and the Relationship to Political Literacy: The Influence of Hegemonic Education on Democracy
Paul R. Carr
Université du Québec en Outaouais
Gary W. J. Pluim
Lakehead University
Lauren Howard
Lakehead University

Volume 6 Number 16
August 15, 2015
Teach For America in the Media: A Multimodal Semiotic Analysis
Sarah Rose Faltin Osborn
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Jessica L. Sierk
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Volume 6 Number 17
September 1, 2015
Capitalizing on Knowledge: Mapping Intersections Between Cognitive Capitalism and Education
Joseph Paul Cunningham
University of Cincinnati

“The Wobblies” (1979 documentary)

The 1979 documentary, The Wobblies, directed by Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird, is now available on line at google video (1:28:39). Highly recommended.

Related links:
“Remember the Industrial Workers of the World?”
By Michael Aktinson (Village Voice) June 20, 2006

This 1979 documentary established a new, primary-research modus for historical nonfiction—no narrator, no authorial perspective, just original documents and witnesses—but its subject matter was, and still is, its most radical characteristic. By the ’70s American culture had been made to forget that the Industrial Workers of the World had ever existed, just as in the century’s first decades the segregated union utopia was condemned, brutalized, legislated against, campaigned against, and demonized. Today, things haven’t changed much—Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird’s film stands among a scant handful of books detailing the labor movement’s astonishing power and growth, its newspapers and songs and sheer membership, as well as the sickening history of suppression, murder, and criminal injustice that was brought to bear upon it. (Don’t forget Warren Beatty’s Reds, shot around the same time and with several of the same elderly survivors.) American high schoolers should have to see it to graduate, but then so much of what they’re taught would evaporate as a consequence. Released with new interviews and old anthems, and alongside nine other classic docs in the “Docurama Film Festival I.”

Documents, Essays and Analysis for a History of the I.W.W. at marxist.org

Jim Crutchfield’s I.W.W. Page

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) web site