Friendship, Education, and Justice Teaching: The Professional Development of Two Teacher-Friends

This paper discusses the distinct nature of friendship between teachers. Using literature on both the philosophical study of friendship and that of professional development, I present data from a qualitative study with two elementary school teachers in New York City in order to explore how the benefits of friendship might deepen an understanding of one\u27s work with students. While literature on professional development tends to focus on effectively designed and structured activity, this article highlights the importance of teacher amity in (a) staving off negative judgments about teacher work, (b) harnessing the freedom to create and err, and (c) cultivating the necessary trust to be vulnerable and seek counsel. Given the complexities of contemporary classrooms and the current spectacle of crisis in American education, I hope to offer a unique alternative to discussions on teacher identity and professional growth by seeing friendship as a vital form of education itself. In doing so, I argue for a re-centralization of teachers in educational discourse, recognizing the personal and private ways that teachers create and think of in-school relationships and how such relationships play influentially and uniquely in their lives as both human beings and professionals

The Sociality of Post-Truth: Neoliberal Culture and its Rationality

As said by Hannah Arendt (1951), “being right has nothing to do with the objective truthfulness of the Leader\u27s statements which cannot be disproved by facts, but only by future success or failure” (p. 383). Thus, the only reassurance audiences need in a post-truth culture is the constant reassurance that he, the leader, is winning, winning, winning. If post-truth signifies an appeal to the emotional drive irrespective of factual or rational truth, how does post-truth emerge and what are the conditions that feed this possibility? What in this society has ignited the affirmation of white nationalism, authoritarian leadership, and the attack on tolerance and inclusion? What role, if any, is there for curriculum studies, teaching and learning, as we consider the future of post-post truth-making that unforeseeably awaits us

What Stories, Like Water, Hold: A Response to Fikile Nxumalo

The stories we tell carry our beliefs, our histories, and our relationships. They orient us toward particular ways of living and being, both with each other and with the natural world, and guide us into our sense of self and our encounters with difference. They describe what is made alive and what is rendered in service

The quasi-human child: How normative conceptions of childhood enabled neoliberal school reform in the United States

This paper argues that normative conceptions of the child, as a natural quasi-human being in need of guidance, enable current school reforms in the United States to directly link the child to neoliberal aims and objectives. In using Foucault’s concept of governmentality and disciplinary power, we first present how the child is constructed as a subject of the adult world, then trace how such understandings invite school policies and practices that worked on the child, rather than with the child. In order to understand how the child comes to be known and recognized as a learner, both at the intersections of normative conceptions of childhood and material expectations of the student, we use Biesta’s three domains of education: socialization, qualification, and subjectification as an organizing framework and draw primarily from Common Core Learning Standards and related policy reports with the aim of reorienting educational work away from economic and political universals and toward a subjective response to the child as a human being with concerns, rights, and as a subject worthy of recognition

In Pursuit of Peace: A Qualitative Study on Subjectification and Peaceful Co-Existence in Four Elementary School Classrooms

This paper presents qualitative data gleaned from four New York City elementary classrooms and focuses on how teachers attempt, each in their own distinct way, to create educational cultures of peace. Here, classroom vignettes are reconstructed from two months of observational and interview data with attention to how teacher beliefs on peaceful co-existence manifest in the playing field of a child\u27s subject formation. Drawing from Judith Butler\u27s concept of subjectification, this study asks: what conditions of possibility do teachers conceive of when thinking about peace in their classrooms? Findings show that teachers create conditions that emerge from their particular theories about children and understandings of peace. The four classrooms presented in this paper suggest to students in four different ways that peace is emergent from and located within specific relationships: namely that between the self and others; the self and law; the self and society; and finally, within oneself

Playing Slavery in First Grade: When “Developmental Appropriateness” Goes Awry in the Progressive Classroom

This article unfurls in the aftermath of an event where three first grade children at a reputable progressive elementary school were found playing slavery during school recess. As word caught on, parents ignited into a frenzy: some railed against the teacher, others demanded an answer, while still others believed this was precisely the meaning of progressive schooling. In swift response, school administrators sent a conciliatory email apologizing for their misjudgment. Slavery, they declared, was too difficult a topic and developmentally inappropriate for such a young age. Guided by critical childhood studies and concepts of difficult knowledge, this reflective article explores how adults drew from developmental frameworks and used children as proxies to protect themselves from the complicated conversation of race and slavery. It unpacks this event through three entry points: encountering difficult knowledge in primary school; the moralization of child development; and the ongoing work inherent to social justice-oriented schooling. It is hoped that readers can take this example into their own teacher education programs and school faculty meetings to query how adults can open up spaces for critical encounters rather than launch accusations when faced with the emotional charge of oppressive histories

Forgotten memories of a social justice education: Difficult knowledge and the impossibilities of school and research

This paper is about memory, the elusive process of remembering and of an encounter between a researcher and a participant who after five years reunited to remember. The object under study is a high school social justice curriculum with a central focus on the development of social action projects. Grounded in Pitt and Britzman’s work on difficult knowledge, this paper asks: What do 10th grade students who spent four years attending a school committed to the Freirian principles of political engagement remember about their high school experience? Past and recent interviews are woven together to surface three emergent lines of thinking: the failure to secure knowledge as unitary and in agreement; education as deferred in time; and research as relational dilemmas and unconscious desire. The aim is to complicate teaching and learning by illuminating its difficulties and unseating our reliance on evidentiary accountability, production and outcome. Throughout, the positionality of the researcher is discussed, particularly as unconscious desire for social justice, as lovely knowledge, becomes transferred through one participant, Sadie

Re-Visioning into Third Space: Autobiographies on Losing Home-and-Homeland

As one Asian and one Asian American both currently living in New York City, we explore the possibilities of transnational experience as a space of the real-and-imagined, as a potential Thirdspace. Moving away from humanist assumptions of dueling dualities in the formation of identity, we seek a place that collapses social and temporal borders and transgresses geographical and physical sites. For us, challenging the essentialisms that con-fine our sense of Asian-ness in America requires that we acknowledge the material and social present, while conceiving of a Thirdspace where all such qualities are inseparable, interdependent, simultaneous, and holistic. We use autobiographies and follow post-modern geographer Edward Soja (1989), among others, in understanding the criticalness of spatiality in the ‘making of history’ and attempt to share how geographical displacement, inextricable to the real-and-imagined, play into our sense of identity. To this end, we cautiously take up the subject of home-and-homeland, careful not to fall into what Soja (1996) calls “the narrowed and aggressive centrisms and essentialisms” or “hostile and competing battlegrounds” (p. 13) of rigid definition and binary functions. Moving away from definitive confines, we consider the lead of scholars such as Homi Bhabha (1994), Soja (1996), Henri Lefebvre (1991), and Hongyu Wang (2004), and pry open a space of possibility where experience is then caught between and amongst multiple worlds and visions, where is it riddled with contradiction, coincidence, forgiveness, and rejection

Teaching World Communities as Cultural Translation: A Third Grade Unit of Study

This article bridges scholarship in global education with ele-mentary classroom teaching by presenting a series of lessons that challenge the idea of national culture as fixed and stable. The land we share is most certainly affected by its political borders, but it is also constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations that exist both within and on either side of a border. Yet very often, when teaching about another country, we tend to rely on misappropriated generalizations around food, holidays, and folktales that do not honor how culture moves, changes, and becomes translated by its unique and varied peoples