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Praxis development remains invisible in many discussions of professional learning because professional educators take praxis development for granted as an indissoluble part of education and educational work. This special issue provides new insights into professional learning for praxis development, and about the conditions that enable and constrain the development of educational and social practices through professional learning initiatives. In the lead article in this special issue, Salo, Francisco and Olin Almqvist outline key features of professional learning for praxis development, which are extended in the later article by Francisco, Forssten Seiser and Olin Almqvist. Together, these important features are: power and solidarity, trust, recognition, agency, reflection, collaboration, and time. These are key ideas to be kept in mind in research and practice in professional learning, and in the organisation and administration of professional learning initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, titled "Editorial: Critical praxis and the social imaginary for sustainable food systems," discusses the need for a fundamental reimagining of how individuals and social collectives understand their roles in contemporary food systems. The dominant neoliberal and technical-rational perspectives that govern globalized food systems are intertwined with systemic inequities and extractive practices. The article emphasizes the importance of shifting away from these perspectives and highlights the concept of critical praxis as a way to navigate and reimagine practices in food systems. The article also explores various themes and perspectives that challenge the dominant thinking in food systems and call for more just and sustainable approaches. [Extracted from the article]

This essay invites my colleagues in business schools to do their research differently by working with and for community/grassroots organisations. Based on my fieldwork experience at a free food store problematising food surplus and food waste in Aotearoa New Zealand, I offer 'activist performativity' as a scholarship modality that builds on critical praxis aligning activism, research and teaching for a socially just and sustainable society. I present my attempt to become an-Other critical scholar bridging multiple domains as a case of activist performativity with the hope of collectively transforming the alienating research practices at business schools as critical scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educating students to think critically about theory and practice is no simple task. Performative approaches, using the arts as a catalyst for learning and teaching, can be useful to develop students’ capacity for critical thinking and action. Critical performance pedagogy (CPP) is an approach that draws on critical, performative, and collaborative practices to open students to new ways of thinking and acting for emancipatory change. CPP is an embodied learning approach that draws on traditions in critical education, political theater and the social sciences. Its purpose, to make learning accessible through critical and creative exploration. A performance assessment, as an example of CPP, demonstrates how performative processes (e.g. the development and delivery of a performance play) can be used to support the development of critical praxis. Students can initially be apprehensive coming into this assessment, however report that their engagement in performance development, delivery of the performance play and watching other students’ performances has supported a deeper understanding of critically reflective practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore the concept of solidarity in the context of empirical social inquiry, a concept that is underdeveloped in the research methodology literature. We do so by drawing connections and contrasts to other more established methodological concepts such as reflexivity and positionality. We draw upon existing literature as well as reflection and analyses of our personal experiences and research endeavors to illustrate the nature of solidarity as a relationally grounded transformational practice. Through our exploration, we aim to articulate principles that can be utilized to understand solidarity as a methodological concept, based on our assertion that through such an understanding, we are better placed to engage in transformative and justice-oriented research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Successful campaigns to remove Confederate monuments from U.S. campuses have been instrumental in restructuring these spaces to better reflect our diverse communities and foster the sense of belonging important to the well-being of all students. Nevertheless, these campaigns also obscure the more mundane ways in which hegemonic historical narratives continue to inform the memories students develop inside and outside of the classroom. I thus propose a model of everyday critical praxis wherein we integrate resistant historical narratives into our pedagogy in ways that leverage the rhetorical influence of the more quotidian memory practices that inform our daily lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shifting the current food system toward a more sustainable and equitable model requires an alternative imaginary. Agroecology represents such an approach, but despite the construct’s promise, policy and academic communities alike continue to maintain the current system. We contend that shifting away from the existing, dominant food system requires researchers to engage stakeholders with discourses that give meaning to an agroecological imaginary. We provide a methodological case study for how interested analysts may build agroecological traction through critical praxis. We advance our argument theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. Theoretically, we draw on scholarship arguing that food system transformation requires a discursive imaginary. Methodologically, we outline how Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as both a theoretical and methodological framework, illuminates the discursive power that shapes the future of food. We first used CDA to analyze United States Agency for International Development (USAID) policy, and subsequently presented those results to focus groups comprised of USAID-funded university-based research-practitioners. Empirically, we suggest that our methodology represents one possible mechanism or strategy to encourage the dialogue necessary to secure a new critical food system praxis. We conclude by offering recommendations for future inquiry.

The ability of individual-level interventions to improve people's financial conditions is compromised when the root causes of precarity develop at systems levels. While it can be a challenge to intervene at the systems-level, we contend that one approach is for social work and allied professions to treat financial education as political education. Building on the activist organizing approaches of Paulo Freire and the Black feminist scholarship of bell hooks, we offer a framework to target systems as critical sites for change. If we wish to empower people to transcend rather than cope with the oppressive power of racial capitalism, there may be no choice but to find ways to raise people's consciousness about structural oppression as the root cause of financial precarity. Implications for practice are discussed in the contexts of labor organizing and the Black cooperative movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legacy of the American plantation system of the Antebellum South is frequently examined for its influence on American government. However, we do not discuss at length its influence on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. We attempt to address this shortcoming by contextualizing the plantation narrative within the nonprofit sector. We then pose and start to answer three questions to provide a path forward for the sector to address current and future challenges. We conclude with a personal narrative in which we grapple with some of these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this 2021 AFHVS Presidential Address, Kim Niewolny provides a brief foray into the onto-epistemic framing of critical praxis for sustainable food systems transformation. Niewolny proposes we engage in the creative entanglement of critical praxis and the social imaginary to "unthink" the orthodoxies that govern our ideas of the possible. She offers several possibilities as pathways toward a food system that embodies health equity, ecological justice, land sovereignty, and human rights, including: (1) agroecological research and movement building; (2) food, farm, and health policy; (3) food and farm system worker protections as public health and human rights concerns; (4) intersectional food justice scholarship and curriculum; (5) narrative-led, community-based, and action-oriented methodologies as multi-dimensional inquiry; (6) and multi-sector and multi-racial coalitions as dynamic networks that challenge linear, neoliberal, and technical-rational practices. Niewolny concludes with a call for radical hope as a principle for critical food systems praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University-based teacher education programs struggle with recruitment and retention of Black teachers. While the enrollment of children of color in K-12 public schools has held steady for over a decade, Black teachers continue to represent only a small percentage of classroom teachers and leave the classroom at higher rates than their White counterparts. In this article, drawing from an in-depth interview sequence (Seidman in Interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences, Teachers College Press, New York, 2013), we theorize one Black teacher's racialized lived experience with colleagues and institutions to explore the factors that contributed to her early exit from the profession. With a Subject-Object Theory analytic framework (Kegan and Lahey, in: Lyons (ed) Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: mapping a way of knowing for professional reflective inquiry, Springer, Boston, 2010), our analysis underscores how a series of racially hostile encounters undermined her motivation and ability to enact change at the institutional level. Findings suggest that focusing primarily on consciousness and awareness raising in teacher education programs may fall short for Black educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a qualitative study of the differential uptake of SFL-inspired metalanguage and SFL-based pedagogy by two senior secondary history teachers in Australia. The teachers were involved in design-based research aimed at improving disciplinary writing for high stakes examinations. While both attended the same training seminar and had similar access to support from researchers during the project, their uptake of the metalanguage and pedagogy differed. One teacher rejected most of the SFL metalanguage but enthusiastically adopted joint writing practices from genre-based pedagogy, using her own metalanguage. The other did not adopt joint writing but enthusiastically engaged in explicit teaching of metalanguage and clause-level grammar. While struggles arose during the process of critical SFL praxis with these teachers, both also communicated positive outcomes for student confidence and ability to write for examination, which they attributed to an explicit focus on teaching writing. Their different responses to the project illustrates how profoundly the different readiness of teachers to engage with explicit knowledge about language (KAL) can be affected by different teaching contexts and personal backgrounds. It foregrounds the importance of 'meeting teachers where they are at' and of the development of long-term partnerships between teachers and researchers supporting development of KAL over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work builds upon and extends critical youth studies scholarship concerned with strategies for engaging with young people as active change agents with arts-based research to advance theory and practice for democratic and emancipatory research with young people. In this paper, we share a collaborative self-study where we critically reflected upon our distinct experiences doing arts-based participatory youth research. We applied a critical analysis to our pedagogical and research practices in a systematic manner to garner insights, strategies, and tools that can enhance and improve them. We conceive of 'places of possibility' as literal and metaphorical spaces where young people are afforded the tools and resources necessary to imagine alternative realities, identities, and systems than what currently exists, primarily through art and creative practices (Goessling, K. P. 2017. "Youth Learning to be Activists: Constructing 'Places of Possibility' Together." Critical Questions in Education 8 (4): 418–437. doi:17/10/goesslingfinal.pdf). We examined our art and creative practices for generating pedagogical places of possibility at three intersections: (1) creative practices as pedagogy, (2) moments of encounter, and (3) thick participation. Our findings provide strategies and tools for designing transformative research spaces with young people that are humanizing and liberatory places of learning and knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability science offers an alternative space for research that challenges colonial histories of western science, especially in its orientation to interdisciplinarity and for addressing complex problems through equitable knowledge co-production processes. However, the justice-oriented commitments within sustainability science remain underdeveloped, in particular for centering indigenous research methods (IRM) and promoting decolonization of academic institutions. In this paper, we draw from more than 10 years of experience across three cases of conducting sustainability science in Indigenous homelands. The cases focus on (1) adaptive responses to the Emerald Ash Borer insect which threatens black ash basketmaking cultures and economies; (2) efforts to link science with decision making to protect public health and reduce shellfish bed closures; and (3) collaborative research to support dam removal and river restoration. We identify tensions in science as a discourse, including how sustainability science is uniquely shaped by practices of naming and social constructions of time. We then describe how we engage these tensions through four main commitments to critical praxis, or tailored practices that respond to emergent problems and systems of power. These commitments include centering Wabanaki diplomacy and IRMs, redesigning all stages of research for inclusivity and dialogue, attending to multiple temporalities, and supporting Wabanaki and Indigenous students as leaders and researchers. To conclude, we reflect on how these practices may be adapted to other contexts, histories, and sustainability-related issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, using in-depth, semi-structured, collaborative dialogues, I asked 11 child and youth care practitioners working in various Canadian provinces, including British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario, "How do you understand, name, reproduce, contest, and struggle with White settler privilege?" The intent was to name and challenge the dominant Whitestream norms in child and youth care. This project was inspired by the significant work of Indigenous and racialized activist- scholars to address the ongoing overrepresentation of Indigenous families across colonial systems in which child and youth care practitioners work, such as the child welfare and justice systems, and the underrepresentation in others, such as educational systems. Participants named colonial violence and systemic racism as entrenched in child and youth care practice while recognizing the difficulty of challenging dominant White norms and conventions in the classroom and field. I explore how this key finding unsettles child and youth care pedagogy and practice. In closing, I propose two practical ethical pathways towards unsettling White settler privilege in child and youth care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a broken narrative concerning the early history of anti-oppressive practice as an approach in the U.K. to youth and community work and the struggles over this in the context of UK higher education between the 1960′s and the early 2000’s. Educating informal educators as youth and community workers in the UK has been a site of contestation. Aspects of a genealogy of that struggle are presented in ways which link publicly available histories with personal memories and narratives, through the use of a personal archive developed through collective memory work. These are chosen to illuminate the links between theory and practice: on the one hand, the conceptual field which has framed the education of youth and community workers, whose sources lie in the academic disciplines of education and sociology, and, on the other hand, the social movements which have formed the practice of informal educators. Six have been chosen: (1) The long 1968: challenging approaches to authority; (2) the group as a source of learning; (3) The personal and political: experiential learning from discontent; (4) Paolo Freire and Critical Praxis; (5) A critical break in social education and the reality of youth work spaces as defensive spaces; (6) New managerialism: ethics vs. paper trails. The approach taken, of linking memory work with present struggles, is argued to be a generative form for current critical and enlivening practice.

The Journal of Environmental Education (JEE) has produced and circulated different forms of knowledge for 50 years, mostly for a North American readership and, most recently, a globally-extended English-speaking audience. A critical theory of theory in environmental education (EE) and its research (EER) is needed in looking 'back,' 'now', and 'forward.' This critical theory will reexamine the field's knowledge assumptions, presuppositions, and 'post' forms of intellectual representation and academic exchange so as to reveal the underlying logics, mediations, constructions, characteristics, and commitments within a post-Anthropocene aspiration. The critical theorization of performative abstractionism in EER uses various histories of theory that parallel the JEE's 50 years. The early 1990s is found to be a crucial turning point in the critical/praxical approach of EE. Seventeen characteristics of intellectual work and its exchange in postmodern knowledge productions are identified into which the performative abstractionism of allegedly 'new' theory fit. This historically attuned critical theory concludes reconstructively with the outline of a framing of praxis in the generalized form of a stratified and de-centring approach to the 'politics of inquiry.' The eco-ethico-political aim of this 'post foundational' approach to inquiry is to reverse the geographically reduced global accelerations, intensifications, and individualizations of abstractionism in EER. A 'practices theorizing' imperative is to re'turn' EER to the ecological ontologies of rematerialized, everyday practices of (environmentally or/and ecologically) ethical value, political concern, and esthetic sensibility needed to ensure the field's criticality, relevance, credibility, and sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article discusses how Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, its thematic concerns and aesthetics, are developed in tandem with the discourse of diaspora and exilic consciousness leading to critical praxis. It traces the interactions between exilic consciousness and identity construction in the context of resistance literature. These interactions exhibit the author's ability to be inside and outside discourses of struggle producing a model in which exile challenges bigoted struggles, hence the evolution of critical praxis. In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Abulhawa represents another humanistic voice that resists dominant political narratives by dismantling their hegemonic power structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the growing collaborations among students, faculty and community-practitioners attempting to build healthy, equitable and sustainable food systems within post-secondary institutions and the ensuing implications for food movements. Specifically, we investigate the role of Community Service-Learning (CSL) in fostering food systems change through a case study of Planning for Change: Community Development in Action, a graduate CSL course at the University of Toronto and a partnership with Meal Exchange, a national non-profit organization, to develop the Good Food Challenge on college and university campuses across Canada. Using CSL to support social movements is not uncommon; however, there has been little application of these pedagogical approaches within the field of food systems studies, especially in the area of campus food movements that engage diverse groups in mutually beneficial and transformative projects. Our description of the case study is organized into three categories that focus on key sites of theory, practice and reflection: classroom spaces, community spaces and spaces of engagement. Through reflection on these spaces, we demonstrate the potential of CSL to contribute to a more robust sustainable food movement through vibrant academic and community partnerships. Together, these spaces demonstrate how campus-based collaborations can be strategic levers in shifting towards more healthy, sustainable and equitable food systems.