The Obama Education Files: Is There Hope to Stop the Neoliberal Agenda in Education?

The contributors to this special issue of The Journal of Inquiry and Action provide insight into why the Obama administration’s educational policies manifest the dominance of neoliberal ideology over most elements of social life. The articles presented herein build on the work originally presented in The Phenomenon of Obama and the agenda for Education: Can hope audaciously trump neoliberalism? (Carr & Porfilio, 2011)

A School-Based Project: Increasing Ontario Pre-Service Teacher Candidates\u27 Experiences With Cultural Diversity

This paper details a service-learning project involving thirty-two Ontario, White pre-service teachers in Buffalo, New York. We provided reflective activities to help future teachers develop an awareness and understanding of how unjust educational practices inhibit the educational performance of marginalized students. Although fourteen students did increase their awareness of urban school conditions and communities, we also learned that neither our teaching nor the service-project pushed eighteen participants to \u27see\u27 how educational practices work to perpetuate the racial and social class structure. Armed with this knowledge, we recognized that more time and energy must be expended to create research activities as well as authentic learning experiences to guide prospective teachers to recognize institutional practices that create social inequalities

Hick-Hop, Dirt Roads, Camouflage, Lift-Kit Trucks and John Deere: Rural White Working Class Pride

Presentation given at the International Critical Media Literacy Conference

The New Politics of the TextbookCritical Analysis in the Core Content Areas /

XXX, 337 p.online resource

The New Politics of the TextbookProblematizing the Portrayal of Marginalized Groups in Textbooks /

XXXII, 316 p.online resource

Stemming the exodus: An exploration of parental selection of their children’s urban schools

Paper presented during a roundtable session at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting. During the past decade, urban school districts across the US have encountered shrinking enrollment. To help ameliorate this problem, the researchers sought to understand the factors parents, who enrolled children in an urban school district grappling with shrinking enrollment, considered important when selecting schools for their children. During the 2016-2017 school year, 1023 parents from an urban school district located in Northern California completed an anonymous, online survey. The four most important factors they considered salient when selecting schools were: (1) school safety and safe areas surrounding their children’s schools (2) special needs programs, (3) educators, and (4) academics. This study provides direction for US urban school districts that are facing diminishing enrollment due to students exiting their schools

Critical Media Literacy and Environmental Pedagogy: Children’s Books, Hip-Hop, Fake News and Hell

This panel consists of four presentations focusing on multiple literacies and their relationship to issues centering on critical environmental pedagogy and the global climate crisis. The presenters provide in-depth critical analysis of various forms of media from widely varying philosophical and theoretical perspectives. These various analyses help us formulate critical questions in unquestioning, authoritarian times. How are our understandings of the current global climate crisis influenced and developed through these various forms of media? The first presentation, The Power of Discourse: CML and The Tantrum that Saved the World. This research project uses both critical theory and Michel Foucault’s notion of power to analyze a new children’s picture book titled The Tantrum that Saved the World. Published in 2018 by World Saving Books, the e-version’s 64 colorfully illustrated pages tell of a little girl who stares down the climate crisis, channeling tantrum power into positive action. Equally important, the analysis brings media literacy into dialogue with discursive practices that cannot take hold in the absence of critical theory. The second presentation, Biased Coverage: How The Flint Water Crisis was Covered and Where We are Now. will focus on the media coverage immediately following the Flint water crisis and how it not only tapered off in the year that followed, but also was full of discriminatory, biased reporting and practices. Hip Hop and Climate Change the third presentation will focus on the texts and activist work of several hip-hop artists who are committed to eliminating oppressive conditions that are responsible for environmental degradation at today’s historical juncture. The final presentation, Hell: Critical Environmental Pedagogy through Popular Dystopic Films situates the critical analysis of popular fictional dystopic climate disaster films within the current historical dystopic-like milieu in which climate change is relegated to the status of hoax and the ways in which these films perpetuate the cultural hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) of the neo-liberal moment. Films such as The Day after Tomorrow and Hell are analyzed using a number of theoretical perspectives from Klein (2014) to Hedges (2015). Many documentaries have been produced on climate change but this presentation will focus on popular films. Brian Lozenski --Chair Derek Ford -- Discussan