The contemporary landscape of dread in living and teaching demands a creative and experimental form of investigation that can trace the affective contours of the present and uncover the obscure openings for an oppositional imagination. In a series of interlinked excurses, this essay articulates a poetic probing of the nexus of slow fascism and…

Empowered students have the ability to think and act reflectively as individual subjects of a society or a culture who have formed a conscious self-awareness of the meanings of their multiple affiliations and the significance of their worldly transactions with the other. Teaching should incorporate student ideas and experience actualized from acts…

Author Jane Anna Gordon begins this commentary by saying that early in her academic career she was struck by the dual character of schools as places that can damage and waste the human potential of some on one hand, and that can and should be put in the service of liberation on the other. She writes that this point was driven home to her through…

The need for and impact of Object Based Learning (OBL) takes on particular relevance in institutions such as anthropology museums. Although museums in general have moved in the last several decades toward a renewed focus on their social impacts, anthropology museums in particular have needed to grapple with their own histories and the kinds of…

One of the more long-standing and commonly held views among educational theorists maintains that schools are one of the primary sites of social and cultural reproduction--sites where students are corralled and organized for the reproduction of the existing social arrangement. In this article author Gregory Bourassa argues that if this…

In this article, Christopher Emdin articulates what he considers a necessary stance on the education of urban youth of color who are deeply embedded in hip-hop. He brings singer/songwriter Stevie Wonder and Maxine Greene into the discussion to highlight the ways that these youth can be imagined differently and taught to their strengths and gifts,…

As an educator, Maxine Greene returned repeatedly to the dynamic transaction that John Dewey had theorized between a vital social world and individual creativity. With Dewey, she viewed mutually transformative relations with others as the wellspring of all personal growth and social progress and as key to achieving a form of freedom that both…

Within the current U.S. sociopolitical context of rampant violence, increasing levels of racism and xenophobia in society and the rise of authoritarianism in schools, a new and fresh confluence of Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire's work revitalizes and expands the concept of radical hope. Their educational philosophies enable one to see beyond…

Education under neoliberal reform has been targeted as an indispensable source of profit. Market-based reforms have commodified education and are transforming public school into a corporatized industry concerned not with democracy but with the smooth functioning of the capitalist economy. Targeting public schooling as a site in which to accumulate…

Academic practice is scrutinized and regulated with such "Corporate speak" terms as "performance indicators," "benchmarking," "service providers" and "clients." As part of a field where ideological shifts continue to apply marketized frames of reference as neoliberalism tightens its grip, new terms…

Authoritative knowledge produced by white acacemics has forged much of the cannon in educational research. Recently, scholars of color, have been asserting their unique positionalities to conduct research and teach among their own communities. As a result they have provided a challenge to normative privilege whiteness in education. Claims of…

During the Second World War, the Luftwaffe ran a maximum security prisoner of war (POW) camp called "Stalag Luft III," which imprisoned captured Allied air force servicemen. The story of the 1944 escape from Stalag Luft III is one of the most famous stories of the Second World War as described in the firsthand written account and…

One only needs to look at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) logo, with its abstract outline of the CMHR building, to see the way in which the museum's architecture has come to stand for the CMHR's immaterial meanings and content. The CMHR's architecture becomes a material intersection of discourses of cosmopolitanism, human rights, and…

From atop the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), juts the Tower of Hope, a 23-story illuminated glass architectural feature meant to symbolize "the goal of the human-rights journey," namely, "hope for a changed world." The prominence of hope as an ideal is literally set in stone at the CMHR. Hope for the museum itself is…

Author Julie Pelletier recently became part of a new committee at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR): the Indigenous Education Working Group (IEWG). The IEWG is a working group made up of Indigenous individuals with a background in indigenous education. The first project the IEWG undertook was assisting with the development of Indigenous…