During the 1979 Victorian state election, fundamentalist Christian groups such as the Citizens Against Social Evil launched a public campaign against the inclusion of homosexual content in secondary school education. And, on March 19, 1979, the Minister of Education's office sent out an order to all secondary school principals directing them "to…

Project H.M. was just the sort of thing one might expect the Internet to latch onto: it was a live streaming video of a frozen human brain being slowly sliced apart. Users who clicked the link on Twitter or Facebook between the 2nd and 4th of December 2009 were immediately confronted with a close-up shot of the brain's interior, which was…

A book, article, or theory might be judged not only by the insightfulness of the claims it makes, but also by the connections, possibilities, and politics that it fosters. By these criteria, Robert McRuer's publications, of which the most widely known is "Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability" (2006), are crucial. He weaves…

One narrative form that has significantly shaped the Western profile of adolescence is the novel of education, or traditional "bildungsroman." The very notion that adolescence is punctuated with "storm and stress" is culled from G. Stanley Hall's close reading of Goethe's (1774) "bildungsroman," "The Sorrows of Young Werther." For Hall, Werther's…

As the attention to multiraciality has grown among Millennial college students, an emerging body of literature on multiraciality has developed in the area of student affairs education; it is this literature that is the focus of this analysis. The author's choice to concentrate on student affairs education discourse is two-fold. First, critical…

Within the context of debates about male teacher shortage, a powerful discourse about the influence of male and minority teachers as role models has acquired a particular legitimacy in the popular imaginary. In short, the call for more male teachers functions as a common-sense justification for their necessary recruitment and has been tied to a…

This article foregrounds the salience of "lived experience" in the mediation of unlearning racialized habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), and in learning and relearning the "truth about reality," or the truth about others. This article emphasizes the value of positive "lived experience" for anti-racist and reconciliation pedagogies, in addition…

In this article, the author discusses her successes and struggles as a junior faculty member, in building critical community with and among a diverse group of graduate students. Drawing from and expanding upon the current literature, she presents a definition of critical communities and then makes an argument for why teachers need to promote…

At the University of New England in the rural town of Armidale, Australia, preservice teachers undertake courses in contextual studies in education, introducing the idea that context frames the curriculum. Some students, however, struggle to appreciate the relationship between curriculum and context, principally because socioeconomic dynamics and…

This article is part of a broader effort recently undertaken by educational theorists to verify the implications of Jacques Ranciere's work for the field of educational studies. Rather than attempting to fashion productive linkages between Ranciere and other critical pedagogues, to render a "new logic of emancipation," or explore the political…

This article discusses how the white savior syndrome renders the misrepresentation of the potential of people of color to resist and lead the transformation of oppressive conditions within their own social context. Indigenous resistance requires endogenous (internal) leadership such that all social justice actions derive from and continue to flow…

In the pseudo-documentary "The Age of Stupid" (Armstrong 2009), a historian from 2055 scans the remnants of civilization and asks why, in the early twenty-first century, people did not save themselves when they had the chance. The film serves as a motif for issues raised in this article. Why do people continue to believe that education plays an…

In this article, the authors engage critical performance pedagogy scholarship on whiteness to both question and extend two persistent trends in the literature. Although intersectionality is commonly referenced in the literature, the larger impulse underscoring Crenshaw's (1991) concept is often footnoted, tangentially marked, or given mere surface…

This article examines teaching practices and pedagogies shown in three Hollywood movies. Although some government reports and the media articles may assert that the quality of teaching in public schools is poor, by contrast mainstream movies of the "urban high school" genre often champion teachers who are able to make a difference in classrooms…

"The Wire," a critically acclaimed television series on HBO, is one of the latest narratives of urban schools to appear on screen. The series--which unfolded across five seasons and aired its series finale in late 2007--is set in Baltimore and interweaves the stories of inner city residents, particularly a network of characters involved in various…