In this article, we analyze the problematization of immigration in citizenship education in Chile. Drawing on Foucault's genealogy of problematizations, we explore the conditions under which curricular discourses about immigration shifted from a historical phenomenon that emphasized "the civilization process" during the 19th century to a…

Birzeit University (BZU)--established in 1924 by the Nasir family--was born out of struggle and developed as a microcosm of the Palestinian national movement against the Zionist settler colonial state of Israel. This article explores specific moments of solidarity with BZU and beyond. I map out a genealogy of three modes of solidarity with…

This article explores the cultural practice of observation in teacher education, focusing on how teachers "learn to see" the differences between students. Conceptualizing "the visual" as a curricular problem that produces certain knowledge as in/valuable, I historicize the practice of scientific observation as embodying…

Curriculum within the US was birthed in a context of antiblackness and continues to operate as anti-Black through imagining Black youth as less than and uneducable. However, despite the ways educational space has historically worked to image Black children and communities through deficit lenses, the creation of non-traditional Black curricular…

Curriculum change involves struggles among political actors and interest groups, and those efforts related to sex education have been noted for their particularly vexatious character. When Doug Ford was elected Premier of Ontario, Canada in 2018, he immediately repealed the comprehensive health curriculum of 2015 and attempted to muzzle teachers…

In this essay, I analyse Egerton Ryerson's proposed curriculum for the first state-led mass public educational system in Ontario. Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Schools in Upper Canada during the wide-scale proliferation of state schooling across Turtle Island, produced proposals for "universal" common schools, as well as…

This article traces the conditions that made possible the legislation of police surveillance of schools as a "solution" to the "problems" of "convivencia" in school, during a period of social and racial diversification of Spanish society. During the 1980s and 1990s, "convivencia" -- the ideal of living…

Philadelphia's teacher-led activist group, the Caucus of Working Educators, has displayed shifts in how it frames the central problems facing public education since its emergence in 2014. Initially, the organization tended to advance the notion that neoliberalist discourses and values were primarily responsible for "education reform"…

This article investigates the portrayal of colonialism and Indigenous peoples in curricula and textbooks in the province of Ontario, Canada. The analysis is focused on the curricular documents and texts that constituted Ontario's social studies and Canadian and World Studies stream between 2003 and 2015, which have informed the understanding of a…

The demand for evidence in particular forms shapes contemporary educational policy, curriculum studies' debates over the politics of knowledge "versus" wisdom, and research into classroom practice. This paper provides a genealogical trace that examines the arbitrary and historical linkage of discourses of vision (especially when vision…

In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milner's, "The Human Problem in Schools," published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milner's published book as well as from the historical…

This document-based historical study looks back at the early years of the social foundations of education program that originated at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the 1930s-1940s, and focuses on the sociopolitical, intellectual, and educational currents that helped bring it about. Drawing on archival materials and published monographs…

The Socratic method is a common touchstone in conversations about classroom pedagogy, widely believed to enhance student engagement and promote critical thinking. Understood as the historical inheritance of antiquity, the method is generally accepted by teachers, administrators, and scholars as a legitimate approach to instruction. As this article…

While it is true that following various Supreme Court decisions in the last century, religion is, in most cases, no longer explicitly taught in public school classrooms, we use this article to explore the ways in which implicit religious understandings regarding curriculum and pedagogy still remain prevalent in current public education. Building…

There is considerable agreement about the fact that the presence of researchers in the classroom mediates teaching and learning. Why "should" two very different forms of human activity, one designed to study the other, interact and mediate each other? In this article, we propose cultural-historical activity theory as a framework for understanding…