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This essay focuses on the disavowed histories of Italy’s fascist past with a specific focus on how select historical disavowals reverberate in the present through the law of restricted citizenship,...

This article presents Al-Kindi as the first Arab intercultural curriculum theorizer, rather than the first Arab philosopher as is often argued. He envisioned an intercultural and interdisciplinary ...

In this essay, I discuss Allan Luke’s influence on my own critical digital literacy research, beginning with the influence of his monograph “The Social Construction of Literacy in the Primary Schoo...

This article pays tribute to Allan Luke's work as a pedagogical gift. His ability to bring sociological theories of power, identity and the body to bear on conceptualizing critical literacy is a gi...

In this article, I argue that the Black experience in the United States settler colony is one primarily based in a systematic erasure of indigeneity from the enslaved African. Understanding the Bla...

In her scholarship of the past five decades, Sylvia Wynter has woven a critique of education in Caribbean, European, African, and American societies. In addition, her work demonstrates how ...

In this article I provide a brief overview of feminist standpoint theories, as well as how Native feminist theories complicate and enrich this political and epistemic tradition. Following this over...

This article examines the recently released Girl Rising film and associated campaign to analyze how the guarantee that girls’ education is panacea for local, national and global solutions is sedimented through affective logics. I view Girl Rising as a curriculum inclusive of the film, accompanying packaged lesson plans for educators, and related discourses and affects. The Girl Rising curriculum is part of a larger discursive development apparatus that anchors particular storylines about the relationship between girlhood, education and development as truth. I attend to textual and visual representations of empowered Third World girlhood in the Girl Rising curriculum. While empathy is often understood as a good feeling, I analyze its precarious dimensions, which are cultivated through curricular encounters between the Western spectator/learner and the Third World Girl. I ask: How is the ideal Third World Girl produced in and as curriculum? What are viewers provoked to feel as they consume her poten...

This paper explores nostalgia as both a limiting cultural force in the lives of school librarians and a practice that can be used to more accurately portray library work. The stereotype of the shushing, lone school librarian, based on restorative nostalgia, is related to a nostalgic oversimplification of the school librarian's historical role. Yet, this prevalent view overshadows the real work of school librarians, which is often behind the scenes. The persistence of this misperception results in school leaders simultaneously professing love for school libraries of the past while at the same time eliminating current programs. By practicing reflective nostalgia, school librarians can look at the past through the lens of their present working realities to more accurately portray their lives and work. Reflective nostalgia is the foundation of a reflective teaching practice that helps school librarians advocate for their programs and prevent demoralization. This conceptual analysis thus contributes to...

Advanced high-school courses, such as Advanced Placement (AP) courses in the United States, present a content selection conundrum of major proportions. Judicious content selection is necessary if students are to learn subject matter meaningfully, but the sheer breadth of tested material in these courses promotes nearly the opposite: “test-prep” teaching and mere “coverage” of the curriculum. This paper contributes elements of a theory of content selection that is aimed at meaningful learning (Bransford) and centered on the ideas of agency and constraint (Giddens), curricular structure (Bruner and Schwab), and knowledge and power in curriculum practice (Young). We also present the practical tool we used to select content for emphasis in a high-school government and politics course – an “advanced” course where selecting anything for emphasis is perceived as costly.

Taking inspiration from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I propose to work through some of the features of “false generosity” that arise in education and specifically in moments of acute crisis. This inquiry, which begins with (and was sparked by) events following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, continues with a discussion of Philippe Falardeau's (2011) film Monsieur Lazhar, and concludes with a reflection on Jacques Derrida's ethic of hospitality (elegantly applied by Jen Gilbert in her thinking about sexuality in schools.) Derrida provides a supplement to Freire's notion of “true generosity” by offering a radical (if impossible) model of unconditional giving and welcome. Of primary concern throughout this essay is how a posture of sympathetic paternalism expressed through superficial and symbolic gestures may not only preempt the delicate and hard work of symbolizing loss, but also obstruct the possibility of a more genuine and humanizing solidarity (what Freire would call “true...

In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milner's, The Human Problem in Schools, published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milner's published book as well as from the historical context and archived disagreements that surround the study's unfolding. My aim is to trace how constructions of knowledge in research are shaped by unconscious fantasies that are the mind's earliest resources for trying to make sense of the unknown world. The paper identifies in archived correspondence a tendency to idealize one's own knowledge in the face of controversy. To conclude, I establish a relationship between Milner's turn to an overtly psychoanalytic orientation and her capacity to move from a defensive position of mastery to a creative position of interpretation. Nearly a century after its publication, I suggest that Milner's study is prescient today for the way i...

In this article, I review influential contributions made by writing-studies researchers to the research literature on literacy sponsorship. Through this review, I show how subsequent studies have reiterated three basic assumptions of Deborah Brandt's pioneering oral-history project. However, I also demonstrate that later writing-studies research on literacy sponsorship has tended to narrow Brandt's expansive notion of literacy sponsors to denote people exclusively. I link this trend to subsequent studies' greater reliance on personal narratives as evidence sources. This genre typically concentrates power of influence in human actors. In this way, I propose that the rhetoric of literacy narratives “sponsors,” or enables and constrains, the literacy-related experiences of researchers as well as study participants, and of teachers as well as students. Moreover, I suggest that future literacy-sponsorship studies might attend particularly to the affective force of narrative rhetoric, or literacy narratives' po...

This brief commentary first clarifies Brandt's concept of sponsors of literacy in light of the way the concept has been taken up in writing studies. Then it treats Brandt's methods for handling accounts of literacy learning in comparison with other ways of analyzing biographical material. Finally it takes up Lawrence's argument about literacy narratives as sponsors of literacy.

What would a professional development experience rooted in the philosophy, principles, and practices of restorative justice look and feel like? This article describes how such a professional develo...

Social justice education (SJE) is a ubiquitous, if inconsistently defined, component of contemporary education theory and practice. Recently, SJE has come under fire for being politically biased and even “brainwashing” children in the public education system. In a liberal democracy such as our own, it is important that state‐sponsored actions and essential public goods can be justified to all citizens, not only to those with a particular set of beliefs. To defend SJE against its detractors, therefore, it is insufficient to argue over the concrete values that SJE seeks to inculcate; it is instead necessary to develop a philosophical argument situating SJE within a conception of democratic liberalism. This article provides such an argument by reviewing competing conceptions of liberalism, analyzing the political culture in Canada, and applying an interpretation of comprehensive liberalism to specific educational initiatives. Rather than defining or justifying all instances of SJE, the goal is to sho...

Discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism, focusing on the rapid flows of people, resources, and knowledge around the globe and subsequent encounters between global citizens, present a binary between “global” and “local.” At the same time educational theories, perhaps especially in the areas of language and literacy studies, promote a view of learning as occurring through mediated interactions in local, situated practices. This article offers a lens to bridge perspectives between ever‐increasing global shifts and movements and situated human interactions through a theorization of the mediational nature of place. Following discussion of global and local as binaries across literatures, I offer a theory of ontologies of place, highlighting it as mediational in meaning making in human interactions. Locating learning within a sociocultural framework, I describe a project linking underresourced English‐learning youth transnationally through multimodal e‐communication, then present an analysis of d...

In this article, I (1) argue for approaching processes, events*‐in‐the‐making, by means of process categories—to learn, to teach—not by means of categories that denote differences in state and (2) ...

In any sociocultural context, efforts to promote inclusive education may evoke trajectories of change that are as unpredictable as they are inexhaustible, stimulating the production of a range of disability subjectivities, performances, and constructions. This article unearths such local constructions by focusing on the experiences of nongovernmental organization educators and families of students with disabilities in Chennai, India, as they collectively engaged in inclusive education activity. Using the framework of differential consciousness (Sandoval, 2000) I explore the oppositional agency of participants in securing equitable opportunities for students with disabilities in mainstream settings. My aim in doing thus is to animate the links between local practices and global concepts of inclusive education. Even though the narratives of participants index “place” as the predominant signifier of inclusion, their decision making within hugely inaccessible contexts discloses their compulsory moveme...

This article develops the familiar metaphor of teaching as performance towards a definition of teaching as performative act, where words and actions aim to effect cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes in learners. To what extent, however, are the consequences of pedagogical actions commensurate with their intended effects? Can a science of “effective teaching” effectively delineate, ascertain, and predict the effects of teachers’ pedagogical practices? Through the lens of speech act theory, I argue that teaching consists of pedagogical perlocutions—speech acts whose observed and unobserved effects on learners exceed authorial intention and scientific prediction. Attempts to subdue this excess of effects lend themselves to definitions of teacher effectiveness scripted by the instruments and institutions of scientifically based research. I conclude by considering the ways in which these definitions of effects and effectiveness are themselves the performative effects of performance‐based teach...

This article reports the development of integrated arts curriculum in two Hong Kong secondary schools over a 9‐year period. Initial findings display a range of individual responses to educational change that are both non‐predictable and non‐linear. Chaos theory is used to explain these varied responses in terms of bifurcations. The findings of this study are presented as a narrative that posits a developmental model comprising personal and external domains being informed by contextual feedback. Personal domains refer to the teachers’ education, their teaching experience and their motivational energies to improve their professional status quo. External domains refer to such contextual influences as educational policies, students, colleagues and school administration. Bifurcation explains why integrated arts curriculums impact different schools and individuals in different ways. Four factors are identified to have contributed to the failure or success of integrated arts curriculum: (1) school manage...

There is considerable agreement about the fact that the presence of researchers in the classroom mediates teaching and learning. Why should two very different forms of human activity, one designed to study the other, interact and mediate each other? In this article, we propose cultural‐historical activity theory as a framework for understanding the opportunities that arise for students and teachers from the presence of researchers in the classroom. From the perspective of cultural‐historical activity theory and the concept of expansive learning, we articulate the significance of making use of the affordances that arise with the presence of researchers in educational settings. We analyze three vignettes from our research in elementary mathematics classrooms for the purpose of illustrating a cultural‐historical activity theoretic explanation of the interaction. We conclude by suggesting that the “impact” of research can be increased at least locally when participants capitalize on the opportunities ...

With the question of what is between psychoanalysis and pedagogy, this essay presents a psychoanalytic frame for thinking about the study of uncertainty in teaching and learning from the vantage of the education of the author and her notion of “difficult knowledge.” I review my body of research through these dilemmas to picture a theory of learning curious about the fate of uncertainty and affected by the object of study namely, the human subject of education. Two problematics are explored: the theoretical impetus for representing a learning matrix through the vicissitudes of uncertainty, and second, commentary on an affected research. The essay suggests a research and writing style that returns to what could not be known from the immediacy of felt experience and that only later can be narrated as a story of the disparities, accidents, vacillations and fragmentary impressions that come to compose the problem that education as an emotional situation and as such difficult to know.

In this historical study the author argues that the most influential pre–World War I educational theorists subscribed to different forms of the recapitulation theory that conceptualized non‐White cultures as childlike, prior steps toward the more advanced, industrialized West. The author demonstrates how the pedagogies of William Torrey Harris, Frank Lester Ward, Charles McMurray, John Dewey, Charles Hubbard Judd, and G. Stanley Hall all reflected some form of the recapitulation approach. Therefore, racism was built right into the underlying structure of almost all of the proposed reforms of the new education and appeared in some of the most widely used educational materials of the period (1894–1916).

The article provides a critical appreciation of the educational thought of Fazlur Rahman, a major figure in the 20th-century Muslim modernist trend. By situating his life and work in the history of Muslim reform, the article brings into relief distinctive elements of his intellectual project. Connections between Fazlur Rahman's philosophy of education and his proposal for the Qur'an's reinterpretation are outlined and assessed. In this context, his ideas about the location of meaning, role of tradition, and causes of Muslim decline which underpin his “double movement” theory are investigated. The article notes the wide-ranging impact of Fazlur Rahman's interpretive approach on educational and reformist thought in many Muslim contexts. Finally, Fazlur Rahman's theory and its underlying assumptions are assessed, bringing out in particular the tension between his scholarly and reformist aims.

Hannah Arendt articulates natality as the very “essence of education.” Natality expresses the unique capacity of each person to bring about something new in relation to an inherited world. Education’s difficult work, in Arendt’s view, is not only to introduce students to the truths of the world as it is, but also to nurture the capacity to make this world become something new. But what are the psychic difficulties inherent in allowing subjects to become new people in the aftermath of social traumas such as gender, class and racial inequality? Arguing against educational approaches that universalize identity, I suggest that an ethos of forgiveness supports a cosmopolitan educational project, which articulates the necessity of responsibility across social difference and beyond inherited notions of group belonging. Forgiveness does not replace the demand for justice, a concern that worries many critical educators, but opens us to the interpretive work of forgings new meaning, and new forms of ethical...

Curricular questions of what and how knowledge should matter take on particular urgency when the knowledge at stake refers to cultural devastation in history. Whereas narratives of progress and discourses of “protecting the child” continue to dominate the public imaginary, a number of curriculum theorists have begun to explore the multiple ways in which educators have and continue to represent such histories in the classroom. This emergent literature offers a theory of pedagogy not as a set of skills to apply, but a way of asking questions about the ethical obligations, ontological crises and anxieties at work in efforts to teach and learn from difficult histories. My article elaborates on the problem of uncertainty from the vantage of two psychoanalytic thinkers who are also interested in the work of introducing the child to a world that fails: D.W. Winnicott’s discussions with mothers on the problem of “disillusionment” and Jonathan Lear’s discussion of “radical hope.” In bringing together these...

Reading the four essays selected from the final section of The Sage Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction, “Inquiring Into Curriculum,” I am somewhat surprised by their courtesy and civility. I fe...

The relationship between what is understood as a written or formal curriculum and a curriculum in action or put into practice permeates a large part of curriculum studies well beyond those concerne...

The aim of this article is to explore, through the case of the official Israeli state curriculum, how the educational system is affected by social changes and how it responds to them, and to suggest curricular directions that go along with the new social reality that has emerged in Israel during the past decade. We offer a conceptual-theoretical analysis based on the examination of 10 subject areas taught at Israeli schools by leading experts who investigated the curriculum documents of the Ministry of Education in their disciplines. We identify three stages of curriculum development in Israel since its establishment: promotion of hegemonic national goals, emphasis on academic structure of knowledge, and in recent decades, multiple conflicting goals. Changes in the Israeli state curricula indeed reflect a response to broader social changes, yet these changes are partial, irresolute, and scattered. There is a need for a transcultural approach, promoting a core curriculum common to all groups in Isr...

Community building has been a key concern for a wide array of educational projects. Recently, educational theories concerned about social justice have begun to challenge assumptions about community...

This article explores the place of Ralph Tyler and Joseph Schwab in the history of curriculum studies, and educational theory more broadly. I argue that most analyses of both Schwab’s and Tyler’s work are built not on their own life-projects and writings, but developed from blinkered readings of a narrow range of their writings selected to meet the needs of contemporary ideological debates. When we see the work of both Schwab and Tyler within their own terms, we see them seeking to redirect educational studies away from the “theoretical” project that had its origins in the 19th-century university and toward education’s “craft” tradition. In Schwab’s case, he sought to do this in a way that fully engaged educational research and scholarship with the practical and deliberative forms of thought associated with curriculum development, in a way that promised sustained effects on schooling.

I have recently published Cultural Miseducation (Martin, 2002), a book in which I develop what I call a "cultural wealth" approach to education. Instead of focusing on individual learners-or classes of learners-this approach focuses on the wealth a culture possesses; or rather, it focuses on the stock a culture possesses, a more neutral term that encompasses both assets and liabilities. Instead of asking how children or adults learn, whether they learn what they are expected to, and what they need to know to be good citizens, and so forth, it asks which portions of stock are being preserved and transmitted to the next generation, whether some items of stock are getting lost in the process, and so forth. It may be wondered why I care about such questions. Isn't it the case that most people who claim to be worried about the transmission of cultural wealth-or the cultural heritage, as they would say-have very conservative agendas? Yes they do: defining culture and cultural wealth in very narrow, really elitist terms, as, for instance, "the classics of the West" or "the higher learning," they then blame schools for failing to transmit these things and for passing down, instead, knowledge that falls outside their definitions. Need I say that the research on women and education that Audrey Thompson discusses in "Caring in Context: Four Feminist Theories on Gender and Education" falls outside the standard, narrow definitions of culture and cultural wealth? As such, the conservatives say it does not deserve to be passed down to future generations. Reject those definitions, however, and research about women (all women, not only white middleclass heterosexual women) and about minority men-and much, much

Public debate about the goals of education is often couched in terms of an opposition between, on the one hand, the need to transmit to all students the knowledge and skills that are culturally valued and, on the other, the responsibility to foster each individual student's potential and creativity. By contrast, my aim is to show that, when one adopts a social constructivist theory of learning and teaching-enacted through an inquiry-oriented curriculum-these goals, far from being in conflict, are found to be essentially complementary and interdependent. In the development and instantiation of this argument, my illustrative examples will be drawn mainly from observations of work on topics in science; however, I believe that the inquiry approach that is proposed here is of general applicability to all areas of the curriculum.

Kudos to Ms. Gold for a concise and insightful analysis of my book, Practical Pedagogy for the Jewish Classroom: Classroom Management, Instruction and Curriculum Development. Not only does she provide a much needed historical review of the origins of modern Jewish day school education, but she appropriately notes with disappointment my lack of corroborating contemporary pedagogical scholarship. Ms. Gold writes, "I had an expectation that the author would be revisiting the world of Jewish day school education within the broad context of scholarship and research as well as from his own personal perspective." How ironic that I could not agree with Ms. Gold more! Perhaps it is an apt commentary on the state ofJewish education today that I am not more familiar with this literature. As a rabbi, I am valued by Jewish schools as a "master teacher" of Jewish texts, yet I am woefully ignorant of the fruits of modern educational scholarship. My sole academic background in educational theory and practice consists of the two required education classes that I took while in rabbinical school (on curriculum development and classroom instruction). Indeed, I myself despair of my own lack of greater academic training to better prepare me for a life-long career of teaching the Jewish tradition. But it is precisely because of this gap in my own pedagogic education that I wrote this book. I do not want to believe that my educational successes are merely the result of my own unique personal strengths as an individual-but perhaps this is indeed the case. Although it is obvious that some teachers are better than others, I shy away from claiming any such personal status as a "master teacher." I would prefer to understand my own successes as based on definable and acquirable skills and techniques. I learned how to teach through trial and error, experimenting in the classroom, seeing what worked and what did not. For every effective classroom management technique or successful lesson plan I created, I can sadly share many frustrating anecdotes of classroom failures and frustrated students.

Wayne Urban's review of Curriculum as Social Psychoanalysis: Essays on the Significance of Place and my response may provide valuable insights to readers, as it highlights the differences between Urban (a liberal scholar who is an expert in history of education) and Kincheloe (a critically grounded scholar with interests in social and educational theory and history of education). The contrasts are highlighted by the fact that Urban is an excellent scholar who presents a thoughtful and well-written review. The basis of Urban's and my differences seems to revolve around the term emancipation-a word that, Urban writes, William Pinar and I rely upon too single-mindedly. Indeed, I am guilty of emphasizing the value of an emancipatory approach to educational scholarship. As critical scholarship maintains, I attempt to clearly establish the system of meaning, the way of seeing used to examine the subject at hand. Since there is no disinterested position, no vantage point outside of sociohistorical processes, critical theorists contend that delineating one's assumptions is the most authentic stance a scholar can take. We see research as an act of decon

Teachers develop and use a special kind of knowledge. This knowledge is neither theoretical, in the sense of theories of learning, teaching, and curriculum, nor merely practical, in the sense of knowing children. If either of these were the essential ingredient of what teachers know, then it would be easy to see that others have a better knowledge of both; academics with better knowledge of the theoretical and parents and others with better knowledge of the practical. A teacher's special knowledge is composed of both kinds of knowledge, blended by the personal background and characteristics of the teacher and expressed by her in particular situations.The idea of “image” is one form of personal practical knowledge, the name given to this special practical knowledge of teachers (Clandinin, 1985; Connelly and Dienes, 1982). In this article I show how one teacher's image of the “classroom as home” embodies her personal and professional experience and how, in turn, the image is expressed in her classro...

Sichel notes in her first paragraph that "the rise of the behavioral and social sciences signaled the relative abandonment of Plato by educational theorists and policy makers." From other comments in her response I am sure she would agree that the relative abandonment of Plato is a symptom of a wider move away from a particular kind of educational thinking towards what seem like more scientific and technological models. The main characteristics of the "relatively abandoned" kind of educational thinking are those which generate educationally useful theories. These theories are marked by an imaginative specification of new ideals for the educational process in changing times, within a context of a political philosophy and moral scheme, along with the prescription of practical steps by which that ideal may be realized developmentally. The difficulty of constructing so complex a theory perhaps helps to explain why we have so few educational theories and why so many educators find it more comfortable to seek implications for education from the relative security of precisely confined psychological theories. Only Plato and Rousseau have articulated full educational theories of the kind which seem to me useful for educators. (Dewey, with some qualification, has produced something in this direction.) Despite the complexity of the task, however, we can all contribute towards it, by use of analysis, criticism, and the usual uses of reason. What we cannot do with any hope of educational fruit, I argued, is try to infer educational findings from psychological theories. We can seem to do something like this, but only at the cost of deforming education. Psychology and the other human sciences seek to describe and explain phenomena which are in the world; there is no such thing as an educational process out there waiting to be described or explained. Education exists only as we bring it into existence by our prescriptions. This is a simple way of stressing a rather stark difference between what psychologists and educators are up to. Central to my article was to argue the "inappropriateness of applied psychology"

(1977). Educational Policy-Making in New Contexts: The Contribution of Curriculum Studies. Curriculum Inquiry: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 3-18.

(1977). Linking Ways of Knowing with Ways of Being Practical. Curriculum Inquiry: Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 205-228.

(1977). Yes, We Have No Curriculum Theory: Response to Herbert Kliebard. Curriculum Inquiry: Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 269-276.

(1982). Toward a Theory of Curriculum Reform: An Analysis of the First Campaign for Sex Education. Curriculum Inquiry: Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 339-362.

In the aftermath of the recent spate of national reports indicting the state of American schooling, a national debate is emerging to sort out the nature of the education 'crisis' and to provide a set of possible solutions. One such debate, jointly sponsored by the Bureau of National Affairs, the Institute for Educational Leadership, and Harvard Educational Review, brought together in a recent two day national conference a number of government spokespersons, national educators, and prominent political leaders. The conference titled, EDUCATION, PUBLIC POLICY, AND THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION, revealed some deep divisions among the participants regarding both the problems facing public schools as well as the role the federal government should play in resolving them. While no consensus emerged in the two days of heated debate, it became clear that beneath the rhetoric and insights offered by the various participants, a number of ideological and political issues emerged that portend some of the struggles slowly developing around the "crisis" in education. The most important issues discussed at the Washington conference focused on the current state of public education, the role of federal policy in education, and the relationship between schooling and the imperatives of a high technology future. The various perspectives that emerged in the debate split primarily over political and ideological considerations. On the one hand, there was a political division between those spokespersons representing President Reagan's position and those opposed to official government policy. On the other hand, there were ideological conflicts centering primarily around the steps that should be taken to reform the nature of public education; this debate was waged primarily among political moderates and liberals, with a small number of leftist critics adding to the foray. In most instances, the questions raised as well as the solutions offered stayed within a relatively traditional educational framework.