Tag Archives: interview

Critical Pedagogy and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Keeping Communities Together in Times of Crisis

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fatma Mizikaci and Eda Ata (University of Anakara, Turkey) began a free online webinar series called Global Thursday Talks to examine the social and political impact of the pandemic on education, and explore how the creation of digital communities has become indispensable in maintaining connectivity and building networks.

The book version of these GTT talks and interviews, Critical Pedagogy and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Keeping Communities Together in Times of Crisis has just been published by Bloomsbury.

A wide-range of critical scholar/activist educators from Europe, North America and Turkey participated in the seminars and contribute to the book. I’m really pleased to have had the opportunity to participate in the project along with Antonia Darder, Liv Mjelde, Michael Apple, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, and many others.

My dialogue with Fatma and Eda as part of GTT is wide-ranging. I discuss my journey as an activist educator and experiences that shaped my thinking about education and its role in the transformation of society. I also describe how the pandemic created a crisis for teaching, learning, and democratic action within the pre-existing crisis that is neoliberal capitalism, including how the threats of corporate education intensified during the pandemic. I also spend time talking about various models of critical resistance for teachers and teacher educators – that is – how post-pandemic educators can take advantage of the disruptions of traditional practices to create more flexible, responsive and subversive approaches to teaching and learning.

“We can learn lessons from the streets” – Interview with Documento (Athens, Greece) on Uprisings in the USA

Here is a brief interview I did with Anna Papadimitriou for Documento newspaper (Athens, Greece), published in the June 6-7, 2020 edition. English text below.

Documento: The death of George Floyd has sparked massive protests in the United States. It seems that this is one of the “dominoes” that brought people out to the streets. What are the reasons fuelling people’s rage?

EWR: The brutal and horrifying killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin is the tipping point for large scale protests that ripped through over 120 cities in the United States. Floyd’s death is reminiscent of Eric Garner’s 2014 death at the hands of New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo who placed him in a prohibited chokehold while Garner uttered “I can’t breathe.” But in recent weeks we have also witnessed the police killing of Breonna Taylor in her home in Louisville, Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery’s shooting death in Georgia by a white ex-police officer. The United States, and African Americans in particular, have suffered from an epidemic of police brutality and killing for years. Since 2014, after Michael Brown, an unarmed black man was gunned down by police in Ferguson, Missouri, there have been over 5,000 Americans shot and killed by police. Indeed, the rate of fatal shootings by police is remarkably consistent, averaging about 1,000 deaths per year. The rate at which African Americans are killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans. Fatal police shootings have taken place in every state.

The ongoing protests of the police killing of George Floyd has predictably fostered a further eruption of police violence as police across the country have tear-gassed peaceful protesters, driven police vehicles through crowds, opened fire with rubber bullets on journalists and people on their own property. So the civilians’ rage against police violence has prompted law enforcement officers to escalate the unrest.

Police violence and murder in the United States cannot be separated from the context of racism and white supremacy that has been part of the country’s history and make up since its founding. The police in the North America and elsewhere were created to protect property and enforce repressive laws in the interest of maintaining interests advantaged by status quo inequalities, it has long been the norm for police to break up demonstrations of people advocating for civil rights or to attack trade unionists.

While the focus of protests in the US as well as in Canada have been in response to police violence and violence against black people there is the matter of the growing inequalities and inequities in everyday life. The coronavirus pandemic illustrates this as African Americans are dying from COVID19 at three times the rate of white people, as does continued lack of access to adequate health care for all Americans, the attack on women’s rights to make decisions about their own health, etc.

Then there is the largest bailout in the history of the US, USD 2trillion, which primarily protects the investor class and corporate interests, while 40 million workers are without jobs. The official US unemployment rate is now nearly 15%, the highest since records began. And most economists believe that the real figure is above 20%.

Documento:  President Trump is evidently a polarizing figure who is adding fuel to the fire, but it is evident that the American society as a whole is deeply fragmented and polarised.

EWR: The United States has long been a fragmented and deeply divided society. It is a country that has been built on slavery, racism, and white supremacy. The US Civil War, fought over slavery, begat continuing conflict over the racism and access to civil rights that has never been resolved. At the end of the First World War in 1919, Black Americans experienced the deadliest episode of races riots and lynching in US history. The apartheid society of the US continued to function well into the 1960s with de facto racial segregation continuing for years in housing and schools. The Black Lives Matter movement is a response to the cumulative impact of white supremacy and the longstanding fatal inequalities it produces.

Trump is certainly a polarizing figure and he added fuel to the fires with his ever increasing authoritarian and now clearly fascist rhetoric. At his political rallies and in his public statements Trump has offered encouragement and apologies for white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups. His remarks about  Unite the Right rally in Charlotteville, Virginia in 2017 were particularly flagrant. Trump’s approach has been to produce chaos and division rather than seek peace, reconciliation, solution to problems. By all accounts, his personal as well as domestic and foreign policy are at heart based upon bullying and authoritarianism and laced with ignorance and incompetence. This can be seen in his rhetoric regarding China and North Korea for example as well his characterization of US protesters as “terrorists,” his belligerent attitude toward state governors’ handling of the protests, his lack of empathy for 100,000+ coronavirus victims and his failure to manage pandemic.

Documento: What should we expect for the next day? Can these protests bring real change to the American society? Can a new political movement be born out of these protests? Or more is needed to bring change in an already established system?

It is absolutely possible for the current uprising to spawn a new political movement that leads to real change. It is possible, but not likely to produce systemic change. My pessimism for revolutionary change in the United States is because the vast majority of Americans see political conflicts through the lens of the two party system that dominates the political narrative. White there are some differences between the Trump’s Republican Party and the Democratic Party, particularly on social and cultural issues, both parties are supremely committed to the status quo, which is a view of the world that is defined by neoliberal capitalism and the extension and strengthening of empire. Both parties are driven by the interests of the corporate capitalism and of the super-rich. Despite the common rhetoric of the United States as a fountain of democracy and freedom, its politics is defined by economic-elite domination – the one percent and organized groups representing corporate interests have substantial independent impact on government policy. This is clearly illustrated in by the Trump administrations dismantling of environmental protections. Average citizens and mass-based groups have little influence on government policies. The protests illustrate the power of the people, but that power needs to coalesce in forms that are not coopted by either of the reigning political parties. The first step toward revolutionary change takes place in the mind. If there is change in the way people start to understand the world — such as rejecting the packaged ideological narratives of major corporate media  — then there will be a change in the way people behave. I am optimistic about what can be learned in the streets.

Dangerous Citizens Save Democracy: My interview with Documento

Documento, a newspaper in Athens, Greece, published Anna Papadimitriou’s interview with me on October 22, 2017.  Over the course of the interview we covered a variety of topics including the state of democracy in the world today, the ways in which democracy submits to capitalism and the role of schools in the creation of democratic citizens.

We discussed, in particular, the concept of dangerous citizenship, a notion I developed along with Kevin D. Vinson.

The interview was published in Greek. Below I have posted the unedited version of the interview in English.

Interview with Anna Papadimitriou for Documento (Athens, Greece)

October 2017

  1. Your research interests focus on the role of teaching in building a democratic society in the face of antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism, and intolerance. Nowadays, many countries define themselves as democracies, but one can find one or more of the antidemocratic impulses you mention. How would you define a modern democratic society? Is there any country on the planet that corresponds to your description?

Our default for understanding the world is typically to use fixed terms and ideas that we believe correspond to some unchanging reality. The problem is that our language of democracy is static, but the real world is constantly changing. Our thoughts, ideas and terminology about democracy are merely representations of what we think it is and in many ways these ideas no longer correspond to reality, indeed the reality is nearly the opposite.

Here are some examples of what I mean. This past summer Poland’s parliament passed a law undermining the independence of courts, even though separation of powers is a key idea defining liberal democracy. Earlier this month the Spanish government sent police to attack voters and confiscate ballot boxes in the Catalan independence referendum. Poland and Spain are considered democratic governments, but they are not acting in accordance with the typical ideas we hold about how a democracy works. I could add many examples from the United States, Turkey and other so-called democracies.

We generally accept the idea that the more people participate in a democratic society the more democratic it becomes, but some political scientists now question whether citizen participation is actually good for democracy, arguing that political participation and deliberation makes things worse. There are now political scientists advocating epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable, as better than democracy.

This is not a new idea. In 1975, the Trilateral Commission published a report, The Crisis of Democracy, which described the problems faced by governments in Europe, U.S. and Japan as stemming from “an excess of democracy” and advocated restoring the power of centralized institutions.

U.S. political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page produced a major empirical study in 2014 that illustrates that the United States is a functioning oligarchy (which they described as “economic elite domination”). The study concluded that the public has almost no influence over policies the US government adopts, but the central features of democratic governance persist, outwardly.

In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley described our current circumstances:

“by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial … Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

What counts as democracy today, that is state-capitalist electoral politics, is a spectacle, which Chris Hedges calls “meaningless theatre” and Paul Street describes as “fake-democratic ‘marionette theater’ for a corporate and military deep state” that grinds down democracy, if such a thing ever really existed.

  1. In your various works, you address the idea of dangerous citizenship. How would you define it?

If we, here I’m speaking of educators, are truly committed to building a more equitable world we have to re-imagine our roles and find ways to create opportunities for students to construct personally meaningful understandings of the world. What we understand about the world is determined by what the world is, who we are, and how we conduct our inquiries. Education is not about showing life to people, but bringing them to life. The aim is not getting students to listen to convincing lectures by experts, but getting them to speak for themselves in order to achieve, or at least strive for an equal degree of participation and a more democratic, equitable, and just future. This requires a new mindset, something I call dangerous citizenship.

Schools are the primary source of citizenship education and a key site where the state attempts to shape young peoples’ understanding of the world. It is the place where myths of democracy are propagated. Dangerous citizenship is, firstly, a radical critique of schooling as social control. It is also a collection of strategies that might be used to disrupt and resist the conforming, anti-democratic, anti-collective and oppressive potentialities of schools and society.

Dangerous citizenship requires people take on actions and behaviours that bring with them certain necessary dangers; it transcends traditional manoeuvres such as voting and signing petitions, etc. Citizenship from this perspective, is a praxis-inspired mindset of opposition and resistance, an acceptance of a certain strategic and tactical stance. Of course, the implication here is that dangerous citizenship is dangerous to an oppressive and socially unjust status quo, to existing hierarchical structures of power.

We need new pedagogical imaginaries for teaching because traditional conceptions of “democratic” citizenship are bankrupt, perverted by capitalism’s triumph over the interests of the people.

Dangerous citizenship embodies three fundamental, conjoined, and crucial generalities: political participation, critical awareness, and intentional action. Its underlying aims rest upon imperatives of resistance, disruption, and disorder.

Dangerous citizenship embraces political participation, but not necessarily traditional means. For example, if state-capitalist electoral politics is meaningless theatre, then voting is perhaps not a meaningful or useful way to be politically engaged. Voting can even be seen as non-democratic, particularly when is suppresses minority viewpoints and enhances the beneficiaries in what is essentially an oligarchy or plutocracy.

Secondly, dangerous citizenship is informed by Paulo Freire’s idea of conscientization, that is a consciousness-raising that facilitates the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Dangerous citizenship asks how can we achieve that kind of critical awareness and understanding?

Thirdly, dangerous citizenship promotes intentional, critical action, behaviours designed to instigate human connection, true engagement with everyday life, meaningful experience, communication and change.

Democracy, in this context, is not about electoral politics, but a force that breaks down the barriers that separate people – class, race, national territory – and creates community. The more porous the boundaries of social groups, the more they welcome participation from all individuals, and as the varied groupings enjoy multiple and flexible relations, society moves closer to fulfilling the democratic ideal.

  1. Do dangerous citizens have a place in a democratic society or are they needed when democracies are fading?

Democracy, as I see it, is something that is yet to be achieved.

The first premise of dangerous citizenship is that democracy does not dominate capital. Capital always trumps democracy – pun intended.

As an unfinished, or never finished project democracy cannot exist in a space where critical social analysis is discouraged. This is a key point for educators to understand. We cannot achieve democracy when curriculum is standardized and regulated. Teachers and curriculum have been subject to ever intensifying policy regimes that attack academic freedom and discourage critical thought. This is happening world-wide and has been taken to extremes, for example, by the Erdoğan government in Turkey.

The primary role of capitalist schooling is social control, most evident in the aims to win children of poor and working classes to be obedient, dutiful and useful to the ruling class under a variety of myths, such as “we are all in this together.” Governments would have us believe that civil disobedience is our problem. But has historian Howard Zinn observed our problem is civil obedience in the face of extreme inequalities that produce poverty and starvation, war and cruelty.

The majority of countries in the world describe themselves as some kind of democracy, a republic or constitutional monarchy. But these are shallow and hollow examples of democracy at best and perversions of the idea of democracy at worst.

Democracy as an associated way of living – where citizens are concerned with the development of shared interests that lead to sensitivity about repercussions of their actions on others and a critical examination of existing social, economic, and political inequalities are at the centre of the endeavour should be our goal. Achieving democracy in this sense is a struggle.

Being a dangerous citizen means living in ways that challenge – are dangerous to the existence of  – the status quo and the many inequities that define our world today and that brings with it inherent dangers because enemies of equity and justice can be ruthless.

  1. You were born, raised and educated in the US, but you also have a Canadian citizenship after having spent years in Canada. Can you provide some examples of dangerous citizens in these two countries? How are they confronted by the political authorities?

My goal has been to challenge teachers to examine examples of creative disruption of everyday as potential sources for new critical pedagogies of resistance to be employed in schools. This is an effort to subvert the traditional aims and methods employed in state-capitalist sponsored schools.

The idea of dangerous citizenship is inspired by my interest in post-left, insurrectionist anarchism (such as Guy Debord and the Situationist International) and politically inspired performance artists who aim to creatively disrupt everyday life. These are models for creative pedagogies of resistance.

For example, the “brandalism” – Situationist inspired détournement of corporate advertising – at the 2015 Paris Climate Talks is a good example of dangerous citizenship. As are the “ethical spectacles” practiced by Greenpeace, Yes Men, and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Posse.

Occupy Wall Street, the indigenous Canadian Idle No More movement are, I think, excellent examples of dangerous citizenship, challenging the status quo, refusing to work within a system that perpetuates social and economic inequalities and generally using direct action tactics to achieve change. But I believe the larger civil society movement, where people are organized to express the will of the “third sector” (non-governmental, non-capitalist), also fits in mould, particularly the anti-austerity movement in Greece and Spain (e.g., the Indignant Citizens Movement), which illustrates the double-edged dangers of dangerous citizenship in practice.

In the mid-twentieth century philosopher Paul Taylor argued “we must decide what ought to be the case. We cannot discover what ought to be the case by investigating what is the case.” We—educators and citizens—must decide what kind of world we want to live in. That means asking, in particular, in what sense of democracy do we want this to be a democratic society? We must engage these questions not as merely abstract or rhetorical, but in relation to our lived experiences.

 

 

Schooling Corporate Citizens: A Conversation with Ronald W. Evans

Fireside Chat with Ron Evans on Education Reform, Social Studies, and Democratic Citizenship, Hosted By E. Wayne Ross 

This conservation with Ron Evans was conducted in the plenary session of the 2015 retreat of College and University Faculty Assembly of National Council for the Social Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte on January 16, 2015. Evans discusses his new book, Schooling Corporate Citizens, the politics of education reform and how that recent reforms have affected the (official) nature and purposes of social studies education, his approach to research and writing, and life in the academy.

Introductions

Ron Evans is a leading authority on social studies and curriculum history. His book The Social Studies Wars was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2004 by Choice Magazine. His biography of controversial progressive educator Harold O. Rugg, This Happened in America, won the 2008 Exemplary Research Award from the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). His book The Hope for American School Reform, on the origins and development of the new social studies of the 1960s, also won the Exemplary Research Award from NCSS (2011). He founded the Issues Centered Education Community of NCSS in 1988. Currently, he is a Professor in the School of Teacher Education at San Diego State University.  He lives in the San Diego area with his wife, two children, and a cat.

E. Wayne Ross is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia. His books include The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities Critical Theories, Radical Pedagogies and Social Education.

 Listen to the interview here (audio starts a minute or two into the interview):

Books by Ron Evans:

Schooling Corporate Citizens: How Accountability Reform has Damaged Civic Education and Undermined Democracy (2015)

The Hope for American School Reform: The Cold War Pursuit of Inquiry Learning in Social Studies (2011)

The Tragedy of American School Reform: How Curriculum Politics and Entrenched Dilemmas Have Diverted Us From Democracy (2011)

This Happened in America: Harold Rugg and The Censure of Social Studies (2007)

The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach The Children? (2004)

The Handbook of Teaching Social Issues (1996) 

Questions

How did you come to write Schooling for Corporate Citizens?

What motivates your work?

How did you come to write this book?

What motivates your work?

What sources did you draw on?

Where do you do your writing?

Describe your daily routine.

Describe how you do your research. Did you have formal training in archival research?

You’ve written four previous books of curriculum/social studies history, what did you learn from writing Schooling for Corporate Citizens?

Looking back across your books on curriculum history and education reform in the 20th and 21st centuries, you’ve trace the corporate/capitalist agenda in school reform and it’s anti-democratic, anti-community consequences:

  • Do you still have faith in schools to promote democracy / democratic citizenship?
  • Did you find out anything that surprised you?  That excited you?  That disappointed you?

How does a boy from Oklahoma who slacked his way through college end up doing all this work as a teacher/scholar in social studies?

What do you do when you’re not writing?

 

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.