Abortion in the United States' bible belt: organizing for power and empowerment

Over the last 30 years, conservative power in the United States, financed and organized by Christian fundamentalist sects, the Catholic Church, and conservative corporate and political leadership, has become more threatening and potentially destabilizing of progressive democratic principles and practices. Powerful interlocking political, financial and social forces are arrayed against women in many Southern and Western states. They are having destructive effects on women's ability to control their fertility and maintain bodily integrity and health. Poor women and women of color are disproportionately affected by restrictions on abortion services. Strategically developed interventions must be initiated and managed at every level in these localities. It is urgent to coordinate and empower individuals, multiple organizations and communities to engender effective changes in attitudes, norms, behavior and policies that will enable women to obtain reproductive health services, including abortion care. This paper describes contextual factors that continue to decimate U.S. women's right to health and, then, describes a community organizing-social action project in a number of US' states aimed at reversing the erosion of women's right to have or not to have children

“We Do Everything with edTPA” interrupting and disrupting teacher education in troubling times

This chapter juxtaposes our analysis of dilemmas related to high-stakes teacher performance assessments with excerpts from a recent electronic chat between the authors and a private edTPA “tutor” to illustrate the complexity of preparing candidates for teacher licensure in the midst of neoliberal educational policies. Written as a series of narrative interludes or interruptions-a parallel to how we see edTPA disrupting our work as teacher educators-this chapter offers a rhetorical representation of the absurdity that results from the corporatization of teacher evaluation. In so doing, we seek to highlight the ethical conundrums that outsider evaluation presents across the teacher preparation landscape, while simultaneously modeling critical responses to these disruptive educational policies