In this essay Malott traces his journey to critical pedagogy focusing on a significant element of his family's ethnic and class background and its connection to his own educational experiences from public schooling to university. Drawing on Marx's historical discussions at the end of Volume 1 of "Capital" Malott traces his own…

Since 2012, corporations, politicians, journalists and educators have asserted that MOOCs--massive open online courses--are radically changing North American and global education, and for the better. This article offers a counterpoint to the techno-deterministic and optimistic buzz surrounding for-profit MOOCs by contextualizing and analyzing…

This paper explores students' seemingly puzzling engagement with what I call "processes of classification." Whilst most students on the Social Identities module I taught between 2005-2006 and 2008-2009 claimed that "class didn't matter" to them, during 2009-2010 more students engaged with classificatory processes. Using the poststructuralist…

This paper discusses the historical continuity and persistence of educational inequalities I postwar Britain. It shows that despite much policy activity, educational inequalities have never really been the real target of policy action. Rather, a more concrete policy target has been the support of the markets, which were expected to act an…

This article deals with questions relating to the role of education and especially Higher Education in the reproduction of class division in society. Social classes and how they are formed and reproduced has always been one of the greatest challenges for Marxism and social theory in general. The questions regarding the role of education, and…

This paper reiterates the centrality of economics (relations of production) in Marxist models of class, while avoiding the crude determinism which results from a neglect of cultural aspects of class formation. It explores the confusion in education and educational sociology arising from non-Marxist conceptions of class which place an exaggerated…

The narrative of gendered White savior in urban classrooms is ubiquitous not only in film (Smith, 1995, LaGravenese, 2007), but also in popular and academic literature. White female teachers are at the front of the majority of increasingly privatized U.S. classrooms (Pickower, 2009, Cochran-Smith, 2004). This article ethnographically critiques the…

The paper aims to use insights from critical pedagogy to forge and exemplify links with the movement of educational inclusion. The struggles for change, theorised in terms of the emancipatory and liberating potential of schooling, set out the conceptual and analytical backdrop against which issues of exclusion and marginalisation are discussed and…

Both "dialog" and "love" set out a compact theoretical-practical corpus of reference in order to understand, study and elaborate further the ideas and radical tradition of Freire's pedagogy. One could argue that both notions reflect Freire's influence from the main narrations that compose and configure his theoretical foundations i.e. liberation…

According to Johnson and Freedman (2006, p. 16), "when teachers decide to embrace a critical pedagogy, they are deciding to bring a questioning stance into their classroom". Critical pedagogy advances the belief that all students should be taught the skills and strategies needed to acquire a critical/questioning attitude towards the texts and the…

This is a panoptic paper in five parts. In Part One, Immiseration Capitalism, I examine the current neoliberal cum neoconservative austerity capitalism and its "class war from above", in particular its resultant relative immiseration and its absolute immiseration, with particular reference to Greece, Ireland, Britain and the USA. In Part Two,…

In the May 2011 edition of this journal, Curry Malott contributed an essay review of Jean Anyon's "Marx and Education" (2011). The author would summarize Mallot's critiques of her book as follows: (1) she didn't write the book that he wanted her to write; (2) she didn't cite the authors that he wanted her to cite; and (3) her work is anti-Marxist…

The needs of students are often used as justification for actions in schools and in school policy. The concept of needs, however, and the role that the formulation of needs currently plays in the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism in schools is woefully under theorized in the field of education. The concept of "needs" in education is…

Examining the social attitudes and practical consciousness of young black American youth through an analysis of the 1999 rap song, "Bling bling," by the Hot Boyz, in this work, I review the oppositional culture hypothesis as it pertains to the black/white achievement gap, describe the current debate, and reinterpret the hypothesis within a…

The aim of this article was to investigate the influence of a hegemonic class concept in teacher education, more specifically, the changes in the construction of implicit theories of intelligence within future teachers when they were exposed to the scientific g-factor theory of intelligence. A 2 x 2 ANOVA (first versus last semester at the teacher…