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  Romantic Agrarianism and Movement Education in the United States: Examining the Discursive Politics of Learning Disability Science

  Scot Danforth

  "This article will explore the deficit-based characterizations of lower social class families, children, and neighborhoods in the history of the scientific discourse that built the learning disability construct, illuminating an often overlooked discursive connection between lower class status and learning disability."

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  Taking a Critical Stance in Research

  Margaret Grogan and Juanita M. Cleaver-Simmons

  "Most important to all these critical stances in research is the desire to transform existing forms of social organisation. The purpose of research conducted within the critical paradigms is not just to describe or understand social phenomena but also to change them. This is in contrast to the purposes of traditional research which are most often to explain or understand the social world."

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  Becoming a Critical Citizen: A Marxist-Humanist Critique

  Juha Suoranta, Peter McLaren, and Nathalia E. Jamarillo

  "Rehabilitating Marxism in the field of education does not mean trying to bring back a sort of fashionable "retro" or soft-focus Marxism that scholars in cultural studies have flirted with for too many years. Instead, it draws from the notion that Marxist historical materialist critique offers among the best analyses needed today in the struggle for an anticapitalist future. Many contemporary cultural studies scholars all too readily dismiss this "classical" Marxist thought as being unaware of its own Eurocentrist assumptions and viewpoints, not to mention its linkage to an Enlightenment modernity that has long since faded after the so-called demise of industrial society and the advent of what has been called the new "digital society." This situation has been particularly acute since 1968, with the withering of the state as the primary site of revolutionary struggle among antagonistic classes."

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  Critical Pedagogy in Stark Opposition to Western Neoliberalism and the Corporatization of Schools: A Conversation with Peter McLaren

  Peter McLaren

  In this dialogue, Professor McLaren draws on a critical pedagogy theoretical framework to critically analyze the harmful effects of capitalism on poor working-class people, including factory workers in countries such as Argentina. He points out the resilience with which these workers resisted the arbitrary decision of CEOs who closed the factory where they were working. These CEOs closed the factories when they realized they could no longer maximize their profits. As McLaren eloquently points out, these factory workers, inspired by a strong sense of collectiveness and work ethic, combined with their unshakable determination to cake their destiny in their own hands, organized and ran the factory for the equal benefit of each worker. Professor McLaren goes on to talk about the negative influence of U.S. neoliberal policy on third world countries. Along the same line, he provides a sharp critique of universities in the United States that have followed a corporate model of education to fit the logic of the capitalist system. Professor McLaren invites concerned citizens, particularly students, to use their agency to counter the corporatization and militarization of schools. Finally, in linking capitalism to other forms of oppression, such as racism, Professor McLaren maintains, "Racism often keeps White workers from recognizing that it is in their interests to unite with their Black and Brown brothers and sisters and fight their capitalist bosses."

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  If There Is Anyone Out There

  Peter McLaren

  "In the near-necrotic thrall of the 2008 presidential election, most of the discussion centered on the historical magnitude of the climate in which the election took place… The bulk of these questions helped to shape the state of expectant anxiety and intense anticipation experienced by many as the Obama presidential team prepared to take office. However, the reality on the ground proved to be much more dismal than the hopes and dreams unleashed by Obama’s scintillating anticipatory rhetoric."

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  Preface: Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Against the Resurgence of Confederate Ideology

  Peter McLaren

  "Rethiuking Race, Class, Language, and Gender comes at a portentous rime. Following in the wake of the collapse of free marker fundamentalism, the ever-turbulent topic of race is at the forefront of discussion, even when it is discernibly absent from view. The ever-present tendency to view race as a code word for "special interests" has never been more prevalent, even though Blacks, Latino/as, and other oppressed minority groups still lack the social power to transform in any serious way the complex system of social relations char oppresses them. With the first African American president now at the helm of the country, a powerful White backlash has been unleashed against people of color. The mere mention of race in the public square is now considered by many White people (who consider themselves to be the new, unacknowledged, oppressed) to be a declaration of war against them."

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  Women and Educational Leadership

  Margaret Grogan and Charol Shakeshaft

  "This groundbreaking book presents a new way of looking at leadership that is anchored in research on women leaders in education. The authors examine how successful women in education lead and offer suggestions and ideas for developing and honing these exemplary leadership practices."

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  Afterword to Public Pedagogy and the Challenge of Historical Time

  Peter McLaren

  "The editors of this outstanding volume have assembled a potent group of scholars and activists- both veterano/as and voices newly emergent on the scene- from a wide range of disciplines both inside and outside of the field of education. These contributors do not contest the mutually determining relationship between pedagogy and politics, and have dedicated themselves to deploying their pedagogical initiatives in the service of reclaiming the public sphere. They are committed to transforming our social universe from an arena of strife and exploitation to counter-public spaces able to foster relations of mutuality, trust, and social and economic justice. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's (1988) book, Manufacturing Consent, is perhaps the most well-known treatise on how public pedagogy operates, and its particular focus was on the role and functioning of the media. It prophetically underlined the growing pedagogical role of the corporate media in manufacturing what Chomsky (1989) would later call “neccssary illusions'' that ideologically condition the public to accepting certain events and social relationships as unshakably true and abso1utcly essential. The Handbook of Public Pedagogy is written in the spirit of this storied volume. All of its contributors assert the vital need for defending the enduring values of public life and for transforming those dimensions of public life under threat of an encroaching barbarism, the most hideous instantiations of which revealed themselves in the criminal domestic and foreign policy abominations of the Bush administration."

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  Capitalizing on Difference

  Tara Widner

  "Capitalizing on difference is about building on assets that stem from differences among people. Capitalizing on difference suggests that differences are seen as adding benefits, not as the source of barriers. Difference may mean race, socioeconomic status, religion, sexual orientation, or gender as well as ability, personality, or philosophy. When capitalized on, these differences create a larger perspective -- a more inclusive view. Emotionally intelligent leaders use these differences as an opportunity to help others grow, develop, and ultimately capitalize on them."

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  Contesting the New "Young Hegelians": Interrogating Capitalism in a World of "Difference"

  Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale and Peter McLaren

  "We begin with David Harvey's scorching criticism of contemporary post-Marxist, postsocialist "Left" theory and practice since it provides an apt entry point into the main argument of our chapter, namely, the importance of resuscitating the concepts of class, class analysis, and class struggle in this age of globalized capitalism…Taking a cue from Marx and substituting "phrases" with "discourses," we contend, following Harvey, that much of what falls under the rubric of "post-al" theory and politics is rather superficial and esoteric; little more than an academic exercise of nominalism and excessive discursivism. The fetishization of language has led us willy-nilly down a path where politics takes a back seat to aesthetics, where form takes precedence over substance, and where pseudoradicalism replaces genuine political engagement with inequitable social and economic arrangements."

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  Foreword to Bridge Leadership: Connecting Educational Leadership and Social Justice to Improve Schools

  Margaret Grogan

  "The narratives and essays in Bridge Leadership: Connecting Educational Leadership and Social Justice to Improve Schools refer to social justice with an ease of familiarity that suggests the term has a firm place in our lexicon. Genreally speaking, the authors in this book are talking about human rights, the debilitating effects of poverty, racism, and sexism, homophobia, equity, equality of opportunity, the value of diverse opinions and of cultures, and the increased consciousness of the relations of power."

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  Foreword to Phoenix in Academe

  Margaret Grogan

  "CGU has not only survived its turbulent beginnings, but, in my view, it has re-emerged from the ashes of early disagreements to embody the core of the original vision: a strong, independent, graudate component."

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  Foreword to Transforming Teacher Education: What Went Wrong With Teacher Training and How We Can Fix It

  Peter McLaren

  "For decades, teacher education has weathered strategic assaults of reform from both the educational left and the right. Often the moral character of the country is reflected in the nature of the battles over public education and the education of its teachers. Teacher training has pointed to dispossessed children and society as its reasons for stunted growth, while society and families direct their dissatisfaction back on America's teachers. The casual observer would mistakenly diagnose these outlets as the sources of our educational maladies. But the critical observer understands “what went wrong in teacher training” has long roots; teacher education's demise is inextricably tied to the birth and purpose of public education. The continued corporate infiltration of education has negatively affected teacher education, and we are now facing a crisis of educational democracy."

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  Harvesting Victory: Education, Student/Farmworker Solidarity, and the Growth of an Organizing Model

  Melody González, Natasha Noriega-Goodwin, Marc Rodrigues, Jorge Rodríguez, Marina Sáenz-Luna, Sean Sellers, John-Michael Torres, and Kandace Vallejo

  "On May 23, 2008, farmworkers and student activists gathered with corporate executives, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont), and dozens of members of the local and national media for a standing room-only press conference under the dome of the U.S. Capitol announcing an accord between the Burger King fast food corporation and a Florida farmworker organization, the Coalition of lmmokalee Workers (CIW). Weeks earlier, Burger King made headlines when a spate of malicious Internet postings defaming the CIW and its supporters were traced back to a company executive, and news surfaced that the company hired an unlicensed private investigator to infiltrate and spy on the CIW' s key ally organization, the Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA) (Schlosser, 2008)."

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  Seeking Democracy in American Schools: Countering Epistemic Violence Through Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy

  Jean J. Ryoo and Peter McLaren

  This chapter begins by describing how America's ideal of democracy is impossible under today's capitalist system that denies human beings access to true equality and freedom. The authors then explore how schools--organized according to the competition and self-centered individualism of capitalism--teach children to believe in a superficial form of "multiculturalism" through a process of epistemic violence that denies them an understanding of how knowledge is produced according to power relations. Finally, this chapter explains how revolutionary critical pedagogy can help counter such epistemic violence and shallow multiculturalism, and offers suggestions for what real teachers can do in their own schools today.

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  A Possible Praxis

  Peter McLaren

  "Rebel Literacy: Cuba's National Literacy Campaign and Critical Global Citizenship is a step-child of the Critical Pedagogy Program at St. Thomas, which ended after only four cohorts. Its author, Mark Abendroth, was a member of Cohort T wo. As a scholar-activist, Abendroth has produced a courageous and prescient volume that will impact the field of critical pedagogy for years to come. Each page of this volume will repay the reader mightily in its creative retelling of the Cuban National Literacy Campaign- undeniably among the world 's greatest educational accomplishments of the 20th century. Of course, this book is much more than a retelling, it is also a rethinking of the very meaning of literacy and critical citizenship today. And for this reason it merits the attention of educators everywhere."

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  Borderlines: bell hooks and the Pedagogy of Revolutionary Change

  Nathalia E. Jaramillo and Peter McLaren

  "We invoke Frieducha to begin this chapter on bell hooks because in many ways, hooks's expansive writings can be interpreted as a sequence of Kahlo paintings. Every text, essay, or critical exposé is an expression of hooks's inner and outer self and of the existential realities that give shape to her thinking in and about the wider social setting. hooks joins the ranks of adelita artists, women who with the power of the pen or the paintbrush have become major pedagogical forces in the formally schooled and the unschooled, producing "texts" accessible to people from various backgrounds and from equally diverse life trajectories. Like Kahlo, hooks does not deny the centrality of personal experience as an objective place from which to interpret the social world. hooks also recognizes that personal experience is grounded in concrete relations that extend well beyond an individual's stream of consciousness. For hooks, every reflection, analysis, persona) story, or anecdote encompasses broader relations of racial, class, and sexual exploitation; she denaturalizes the mythic status of oppression and demonstrates the ways in which oppression slices open corporeal wounds within and across communities. Like a Frida Kahlo self-portrait, hooks carries her politics inside her personal life; her writings are at once subjective and transhistorical, they reach across the divide of time to places both intensely familiar and unvisited."

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  Conscious Leadership in a Political World

  Margaret Grogan and Charol Shakeshaft

  "In this chapter, we explore the literature on women's approach to educational leadership in the United States, examining strategies and approaches that women choose to negotiate the political, and male, world of school organizations. Building on research describing the intersection of political and nontraditional approaches to educational leadership, this chapter explores the possibilities for women's engagement with political frames, ways to define and negotiate agenda setting, to map the political terrain, networking and coalition building, and bargaining and negotiating. Moving beyond the current knowledge of the challneges and opportunities for women educational leaders in the United States (Shakeshaft et al., 2007), this chapter explores the idea of collective leadership that we see as conscious leadership in a political world. We consider what we can learn from women's approaches to leadership in a political and gendered world that nurtures a collective experience. In this chapter, we consider how the notion of leadership can be expanded by building on a women's experiences of leadership."

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  Foreword to Contesting Neoliberal Education: Public Resistance and Collective Advance

  Peter McLaren

  "Thanks to the efforts of Dave Hill, Britain's relentless, white-knuckled scourge and leading teacher educator, Marxist educational critique is racking up some considerable achievements in the United Kingdom. Along with comrades Mike Cole, Paula Allman and Glenn Rikowksi, Hill has, with impressive frequency, been pounding away at capital's viscera for decades, specializing in freeing teacher education from the thrall of the forces of marketization and privatization. In the landmark volume, Contesting Neoliberal Education: Public Resistance aud Collective Advance, Hill has brought together radical/left academics and trade union/labor organization activists in a text that is as uncompromising as it is protagonist. Hill is not content to be merely an editor or a contributor to leftist journals, or the author of leftist tomes; he is a Marxist scholar/activist with unflinching intent. That intent is directed not only at promoting resistance to the globalization of capitalism in general and neoliberalism as policy and practice in particular, but at charting out the promises and possibilities for a postcapitalist society."

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  Institutional Diversity Work as Intellectual Work

  Jeni Hart, Margaret Grogan, Jackie Litt, and Roger Worthington

  "More recently, however, [University of Missouri-Columbia] has made strides toward building a more inclusive and welcoming campus among both students and faculty. Recent administrative initiatives have provided the recruitment and retention of minority faculty and students; provided diversity training for faculty, staff, and students; and explored institutional changes to promote equity and inclusiveness. To better understand how such initiatives fit within faculty responsibility, we provide a conceptual framewokr to help guide the remainder of the study."

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  Socialist Pedagogy

  Peter McLaren and Juha Suoranta

  "Socialist pedagogy (as well as Marxism) has had several conceptual and historical uses both in social theory and in various political practices. It has become fashionable even among leftist intellectuals to abandon the socialist movement as a rite of passage of becoming political “mature." In addition to the largely mythological uses that are functional for the reproduction of the transnational capita list class, socialism and its pedagogical principles have been treated as a worthy political philosophy containing highly pertinent ideas, insights and arguments for social scientific analysis as well as for developing diverse social and educational practices that offer a much needed counterpoint to a society imprisoned by capita l's law of value. In this sense the aim for truly critical social and educational theory has always arguments for the ongoing development socialist theory and pedagogy by recognizing their potential but also by their limitations. Our attempt to develop a radical humanistic socialism and socialist pedagogy in part by de-writing socialism as a thing of the past-assumes the position that socialism and pedagogical socialist principles are not dead letters, but open pages in the book of social and economic justice yet to be written or rewritten by people struggling to build a truly egalitarian social order outside of capitalism's law of value."

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  The Reign of Capital: A Pedagogy and Praxis of Class Struggle

  Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale and Peter McLaren

  "Even among the educational left-- comprised of self-described “progressive” critical pedagogues and radical democrats—Marxism and the concept of class have been deemed defunct and class struggle is viewed as anathema to serious political progress. Apparently, one can fulminate against neoliberalism as a form of cultural pedagogy while largely flouting the fact that “neoliberalism is in the first [emphasis ours] instance a theory of political economic practices” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2) designed to benefit the global capitalist elite on the backs of laboring classes. One can also, presumably, ignore that neoliberalism is a class practice and that “neoliberal ideology was the dominant classes’ response to the considerable gains achieved by the working and peasant classes between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s” (Navarro, 2006, p. 24)."

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  Wither Thou Goest: The Trailing Spouse or Commuter Marriage Dilemma

  Roxanne Greitz Miller

  "The Bible verse above [from Ruth] is often used during wedding ceremonies to capture the intended devotion of spouses to each other. However, over the last several years of my 16-year marriage, my spouse and I have faced the modern reality that, when both partners are highly invested in their careers and occupy leadership roles, it is often difficult to find promising employment opportunities for both partners in the same geographic location. During our marriage, we have lived together as a traditional couple and family, sharing a house in the same city 365 days a year. We also have each occupied the role of trailing spouse, whereby, to continue living as a traditional couple/family, one of us has made a career sacrifice for the other. Currently, we are partners in a long-distance commuter marriage in which we each live in our own house, 2,712 miles from each other, for three weeks of every month."

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  Critical Pedagogy

  Peter McLaren and Jennifer Crawford

  "Critical pedagogy looks at schools in their historical context as dominant social, cultural, and political institutions rather than as sites of social mobility, recognizing how schooling reflects an asymmetrical distribution of power and access to resources based on race, class, and gender. Although there is a great deal of debate around the founders, terminology, and implementation of critical pedagogy, critical pedagogues are united by their commitment to social transformation for the collective good. Critical pedagogy is a fluid and transgressive discourse and practice in which people continuously redefine the world through the contexts in which they find it. Its introduction into curriculum studies has served to redefine the field."

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  Foreword to Marxism and Educational Theory: Origins and Issues

  Peter McLaren

  "Marxist analysis can help us explain how imperialism (both economic and military or a combination thereof) is becoming acceptable today (with the emergence of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower) after having been the object of scathing critiques in the preceding decades. What are the characteristics of current conceptions of progress and nation change that can lead people – even those who champion equality before the law, freedom of the press, and religious freedom and adhere to the principles of self-government and that all human beings are naturally equal and that certain fundamental moral principles are universally valid - to support unreservedly imperial rule? What is it about disenfranchised workers and farmers that can lead them to vote for a political party that clearly further disenfranchises them? How can constituencies such as these, who adamantly believe in law and order, support an administration that is proposing to cut a billion dollars in federal funding of local law enforcement agencies at a time of rising murder rates and other violent crimes throughout the United States? The answer, of course, is an exceedingly complex one, and a fuller and more comprehensive answer demands an historical materialist approach."