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For one professional teacher of writing, language is one of many locations in which political struggles exist, and the classroom is a site from which he and his students can actively examine culture, developing strategies of language use that can facilitate social change. Critical and feminist pedagogies are two closely related ways of teaching from which socially created power structures can be examined so that society can move towards new ways of thinking and towards a new consciousness. Davis, Resta, Miller, and Fortman (1999) encourage instructors in their informative years of teaching (i.e., beginning teachers) to conduct a type of action research in their own classrooms to discover ways to develop more effective classroom practices. This article is about such research. The article begins with how critical and feminist theories informed the author/educator's teaching of first-year composition at New Mexico State University, a land-grant institution. It then describes the specific classroom strategies that he adopted based on his reading of these two theories. Finally, it explores the student outcomes attributed to the implementation of these theories during the spring 1999 semester. (NKA)

Recommends that preservice teachers reflect on race and pursue racial competence when learning to teach in multiracial schools, noting how teacher educators can prepare them to pose tough questions about racial issues. Discusses teacher reflection and the complexities of race in teaching and learning. Suggests critically engaged dialogue and race reflective journaling to facilitate reflections on race. (SM)

An Appalachian college professor describes his efforts to merge political activism, scholarship, and teaching, and offers some thoughts on transformative education that prepares students for their role in a democratic society. An important approach to transformative education is service learning programs that incorporate local issues and politics and thereby provide an experiential base for critical thinking. (TD)

Instrumental aims in vocational education pose a genuine threat to democratic citizenship by undermining student critique of prevailing social circumstances. By employing a broadened Aristotelian framework, career education can combine work-related subject matter with critical learning objectives, but that would require significant reform in content, objectives, and presentation. (Contains 33 references.) (TD)

Examines the philosophical foundations of Freire's view of liberation education, outlining a more consistent historicist interpretation that retains the liberating power of modernism and its critique of dehumanization. Recognizes the malleability and contradictions of identity, embraces epistemic uncertainties and varieties of reason in knowledge, and respects the plural conceptions of the good that can shape moral and political life. (SM)

A participatory research project examined the transformative process that a first-grade two-way Spanish immersion classroom underwent to build a community of learners. Drawing on a critical pedagogy framework, the teacher provided daily opportunities to engage young students in dialogue to develop their voices and created a literacy-rich environment that empowered students. (Contains 24 references.) (Author/SV)

Examines how computer-mediated communication and hypertext in a critical literacy pedagogy (focused on writing as the ideological problem to be examined) can (1) support a critical examination of how discursive-contexts-position authors in potentially oppressive ways; and (2) help highlight how discursive agency might be constructed so that students see cultural difference as potential for intervening into ideology. (SR)

Describes initiatives in community-based participatory research by students at Pitzer College, such as the creation of the Pomona Day Labor Center and the school's Center for California Cultural and Social Issues. (EV)

Kendi’s answer to the question of ‘How to be an Antiracist” is simple and succinct: to become an antiracist you must be an activist, advocating antiracist policies that engender racial equity and reduce comparable racial inequity. But the real solutions are more complex than that. He claims that the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it and then dismantle it, yet he abandons their descriptions for historically inaccurate narratives, and poorly supported autobiographical vignettes, and offers no way to identify racism, racialization, or how they manifest. The taxonomy he offers is disconnected from prevailing theories. It equates ‘anti-White racism’ and ‘Black racism’ to anti-Black racism and white supremacist violence, apprising equal validity to the terms for racial analysis. Racialized ‘whiteness’ is left unquestioned and omitted, and functionally maintains ‘race,’ ‘racisms’ and ‘antiracism,’ racialization, and their mystification.

This paper begins with the introduction of online education development in U.S. higher education. It examines the challenges of online learning, highlighting that online education often yields poorer outcomes, with lower completion rates and fewer educational learning outcomes. It identifies key determinants impacting online learning outcomes: student agency, the level of interaction within online courses, and digital literacy. The study emphasizes the importance of professional development (PD) for online instructors, especially in community colleges.Critical pedagogy serves as the conceptual framework for the PD, advocating for educational systems that empower students and teachers to challenge oppressive structures and to contribute to educational equity. It stresses the need for instructors to be facilitators of learning, promoting active dialogue and collaborative knowledge construction. The paper discusses scaffolding strategies, promoting student agency, enhancing interaction, and integrating technology-enhanced learning (TEL) as essential components of PD for online instructors.The paper concludes by arguing for the necessity of humanizing online education, aligning it with the principles of critical pedagogy to create more inclusive and empathetic online classrooms. It suggests that as online education evolves, there is a responsibility to ensure that PD programs reflect these humanizing principles, contributing to a more equitable and reflective education system.

Four games were designed as part of an autoethnographic, teacher research study conducted from 2013-2017 on the implementation of play-, game-, and design-based teaching and assessment. The study was conducted at two urban, independent, K-12 day schools with fewer than 500 and 100 students, respectively, and supported as part of a certification program in Serious Game Design & Research. Pirate Oasis, a six-week ecological engagement, human development game, and the first developed for the Games for Social Justice Course (G4J). Friendship Is Magic, a  Alternate Reality Game that was never played. #SaveOurGirls is a 3-hour forum game, simulation & workshop on combating human trafficking through public pedagogy. The experience is meant for 10-15 players and 30-60 audience members. Xplore LA, a location-based, geocaching,  two-dimensional fighting game, designed by students to inspire young people to explore their local parks and other green- and play-spaces in park-poor communities in Los Angeles, like Boyle Heights. Xplore LA was designed as one of three projects organized to engage youth to access recreational sites near them via public transportation in the park-poor community of Boyle Heights. Through the campaign, students also developed a Ross Valencia Park Redesign, a Pocket Park Manual and the foundations for Xplore LA.

I raise the questions: How does nemachtili encompass a Freirean and critical Indigenous methodology to address learning spaces? How is nemachtili articulated in an online learning space? This study engages nemachtili through a critical case study of an online course for Chicano youth as a research approach responsive to the racialized settings that Chicanos inhabit.

The advent of AI-generated news as a novel form of content demands renewed attention toward modes of understanding reader perceptions. This research sought to answer: What evaluative criteria do readers use to perceive automated news content? To answer this, the study employed a two-phase survey methodology designed to elicit reader perceptions of AI-generated news. Phase 1 yielded 26 dynamic descriptor words and reflected broad social perceptions of AI. In Phase 2, a series of exploratory factor analyses (EFA) was conducted on results of a survey using the 26 items obtained in phase 1 to uncover underlying factors contributing to differences in how readers ranked articles based on the aforementioned descriptor words. In both phases, readers were informed at the beginning of the survey that the articles were generated using AI. The first set of exploratory factor analysis results were obtained using varimax rotation, which revealed five salient factors underlying the 26 descriptors labeled Quality, Engagement, Alienation, Effort, and Coherence. The second exploratory factor analysis used oblimin rotation, which contrastingly revealed nine salient factors, which were labeled Credibility, Prolixity, Engagement, Substance, Clarity, Alienation, Complexity, Effort, and Neutrality. When compared with the results of factor analyses for human-generated news content, the findings offer new constellations of terms that reflect the dimensions that readers attend to in articles attributed to artificial intelligence.

The facilitation of culture circles should be seen as part of this necessary expansion. Despite being an integral component of critical pedagogy, culture circles are frequently excluded from conversations about liberatory praxis. The following reports showcase the design and implementation of culture circle-based, human development, co-curricular programs for middle and high school students. These programs paired larger project for liberation, with play-, game-, and design-based pedagogical approaches, that cultivated value-creative, critical, local, and global citizenship.

In celebration of our 20th Anniversary as a journal, the InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies editorial team opted to put forth a call on the work of Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy, and culture circles. It’s hard not to continue to see why critical pedagogy, a praxis of nurturing critical consciousness toward humanization and society towards justice, continues to be an essential aspect of education in P-20 settings in a healthy democracy. This issue was an opportunity to showcase contemporary work and research inspired by the legacy of Paulo Freire. Humanizing education is a collective practice in partnership with students and communities, redresses structures that maintain social inequalities and hierarchies of human life, and repairs the harm they have inflicted (Freire, 1970; Paris & Alim, 2017). The call to humanize education is especially urgent given our ongoing crises in education: unceasing youth gun violence and school shootings (Schildkraut & Muschert, 2019); the defunding divestment of public instruction and closures of public schools (George, 2024); the varied emergences COVID-19 variants and other looming pandemics (Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021); corresponding deterioration of working conditions and livable wages for those working for our nation’s education systems (Schmitt & deCourcy, 2022; Souto-Manning & Melvin, 2021); book bans and bans misconstruing interpretations of Critical Race Theory, and acceptance and kindness towards LGBTQIA students, teachers, and their families (Morgan, 2022); proposed and implemented legislation to dehumanize queer, trans, nonbinary, and intersex children and parents (Goldberg & Abreu, 2024); and ongoing racialized hate and terror harming Black, Asian, and other nonwhite students, teachers, and their families, among others (Gillborn, 2006; Gover et al., 2020 ; Tuchinda, 2023; Wun, 2014). The urgency of critical pedagogy remains as relevant as ever.

This paper explores how a spiritual pedagogy in religious education (RE) can contribute to children’s spiritual development to a larger extent than it currently does in the UK and in Norway. Contemporary RE focuses largely on knowledge transmission, but it could be reimagined to empower students to transform their lives by nurturing their spirituality. The paper starts by defining spirituality as a relational experience involving one’s connection with oneself, others, the natural world, and potentially the transcendent. This definition serves as a conceptual framing for the rest of the discussion, clarifying how spirituality is understood and how RE can nurture it. The paper then discusses Biesta’s pedagogical concept of subjectification, which opens up a space in RE to focus more on experiential and relational dimensions and individual empowerment. Empirically, I discuss the opportunities provided by Norwegian and British RE curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family therapists must have an appreciation for the complexity of the human experience. From a social justice lens, this requires therapists to work to not only eliminate human suffering, but to promote equity, inclusion, wellness. Within this manuscript using a Liberation Psychology framework we describe the development of a Research Methods course in a Master's Level Marriage and Family therapy program as an example of integrating social justice pedagogy intentionally across core curriculum. The intentional development of this course is connected to the aim of gradual and sustained exposure to diversity issues and content across the entire curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean, then, when we adopt and advocate a standpoint that is not tied to a single locus or body of experience, that in fact attempts to expand possibility rather than narrow it, that simultaneously values context while recognizing disconnection from it? What are the implications for thinking, teaching and doing, when the standpoint urges us to look outward and inward at the same time, demanding that we be rooted in the local even as we trace its threads to and from the global? In this essay, I respond to the provocation offered by Girginova et al. as they argue for a global standpoint in media and communication research, asking for a nuanced approach to positionality that allows for openness in both research and teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response essay discusses the need to study global communication (GC) from different standpoints, the pitfalls therein, and strategies to overcome them. It starts with two reflections: from China, and on the uneven landscape of GC research and pedagogy around the world, where obstacles and opportunities co-exist. This is followed by a critique on comparative analysis that can be used productively, or it can lead to atheoretical comparativism that reproduces problems of the status quo. Two examples are given to showcase how critical GC pedagogies of power and counter-power can be carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shortcomings of the current English secondary school history curriculum have been widely discussed since its inception in 2013. Less widely explored, however, are the narratives underpinning a key classroom resource: textbooks. In this paper, I review nine history textbooks currently in use in schools across the country, drawing on post-colonial theories in order to assess the extent to which the narratives of these textbooks are fundamentally rooted in Eurocentric discourses of superiority. Findings demonstrate that textbooks across the sample draw on outdated tropes when discussing Others in a global and historical context, ultimately reifying notions of 'Oriental' barbarism, despotism, and religious fanaticism, 'African' servility and submissiveness, and 'native' savagery and backwardness, whilst also emphasising ideas around European civility and advanced development. Accordingly, with few exceptions, the 'master narratives' of these textbooks wholly conform to the model I identify for Eurocentric worldviews, being (i) totalistic; (ii) oppositional; and (iii) teleological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses findings from an ongoing qualitative studies about the incorporation of popular culture in university-based professional education. The focus is on how popular culture can become a curricular resource to support learning about theory or concepts and contentious or sensitive issues, at a time when neoliberal trends of consumerist ideology and technical vocationalism influence professional education and universities generally. Students who enter programmes expecting an emphasis on work-related information risk missing content and experiences designed to foster their development as well-informed, curious, and ethical professionals. Three tensions that emerged in the analysis are highlighted: un/applied, in/attentive, and a/critical. After grounding the study theoretically and reviewing literature on university-based professional education and public pedagogy, those tensions are outlined using segments of data to suggest the potential and limitations of a pedagogical approach that can make education both critical and enjoyable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we teach critical hope, amidst contemporary challenges that seem intractable, within neoliberal educational institutions that work to foreclose transformative pedagogies and through academic critique that can result in cynicism and disillusionment among students? Here, I draw on the writings of Paolo Freire, J.K. Gibson-Graham and Sarah Amsler, as well as long-term research at the University of Sussex in the UK, to propose a critical-creative pedagogy that enables students to better understand global challenges and to imagine alternative responses to them. Consisting of whole-person learning, the use of arts and design methods and praxis, this pedagogy aims to nurture students' critical hope. In this article I sketch an outline of its elements, advance philosophical arguments for their importance and share brief examples from my own teaching in International Development to show how it can be enacted in classrooms. Critical-creative pedagogy necessitates generative theorising that allows pedagogies of possibilities to emerge and grow, critical engagement with the neoliberal education system to find spaces for action, and a radical understanding of pedagogical creativity. It results in practices of pedagogical prefiguration that enable students, and educators, to collectively imagine heterodox responses to contemporary social, economic and ecological challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical thinking is embedded in national university graduate outcomes and included in international bodies' statements on higher education. At the same time, there are tensions surrounding critical thinking in higher education, such as its commodification, Eurocentrism, and relationship to rapidly digitalising cultures. Drawing from the philosopher Bernard Stiegler's writings on human originary technicity, this paper argues that critical thinking takes different forms according to technical and cultural milieus. For Stiegler, human originary technicity makes prosthesis the human condition: we are biological and technical, both organic and inorganic matter. Reasoning, reflection, and evaluation are relative to the technologies of memory that form everyday and intellectual culture. Stiegler's analysis articulates how digitalisation threatens and protects reasoning and reflection, enabling the demonstration of how critical thinking takes specific forms in digitalised societies. The paper proposes prosthetic critical thinking as a practice that can embrace differing understandings of critical thinking, namely as skills and dispositions associated with reasoning and as the practice of critical pedagogy. The resulting understanding of critical thinking shows it to be a plural, inclusive, and contingent practice relevant to higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research article, the authors examine the intersections of culturally sustaining pedagogy and critical family engagement to explore the possibilities for equitable family-school partnerships in urban schools. Based on the common values of trusting and caring relationships and power disruption within those fields, as well as data from a multi-year qualitative study of teachers and their relationships with students' families, the authors introduce the framework of teacher-family solidarity. The framework challenges traditional conceptions of parent-teacher relationships, and the supporting narratives of teachers and parent/caregivers illustrate that teacher-family solidarity should become an indispensable part of culturally sustaining pedagogy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the role of Hip-Hop teaching artists in a school change initiative. A school-university-community partnership in a Canadian city, the project sought to develop a school-wide focus on the "urban arts" for student learning and wellbeing. The experiences of nine teaching artists over four years, examined through the lens of Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy, offer insight into the roles of Hip-Hop based teaching artists in a nontraditional, arts-based, school change initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]