Radical Teacher

Two Poems

2025-07-03T16:30:44-04:00

Two poems by MEH

Introduction: Radical Inspiration in Dark Times

2025-05-16T12:25:23-04:00

The introduction for Radical Teacher #132. "Radical Inspiration in Dark Times."

AI, Ai, and I: Mapping Marxist and Afrofuturist Approaches to Plagiarism and ChatGPT Through Pauline Hopkins

2025-10-07T12:31:46-04:00

This essay argues that teaching ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies in writing-intensive courses should not merely attempt to offer students guidance on responsible use of this transformative technology. Instead, the essay outlines a Marxist approach for teaching AI as a phase in the expropriation of labor. It then turns to pedagogical strategies for contextualizing a novel by Pauline Hopkins, as well as the recent controversy around it, that can put AI into historical perspective. The Afrofuturist novel, the essay shows, can demonstrate ways that labor expropriation, as well as the definition of plagiarism as theft of propertym have been racialized.

Collaborative Course Design: A Contribution Toward a Radical Food Systems Pedagogy

2025-10-07T12:31:47-04:00

The nascent (sub)field of critical food systems pedagogy is developing, in part, through a critique of conventional approaches to teaching and learning about food and agriculture. Within this fertile context, scholars and practitioners have been reckoning with what and how to teach for more just and sustainable worlds through a distinctly critical food systems pedagogy. We draw inspiration from this work, and build on it through experimentation with how we design what we teach. Our specific, modest intervention focuses on engaging students, in conversation, in the process of curriculum co-design. We explore this through a case study of co-designing The Edible Campus, a combined 4^th year and graduate level course. We provide insight into the co-design process, outline how the co-design process shaped the course, and summarize challenges of the co-design process.

Can There be a Feminist Pedagogy within the e-Learning Industrial Complex?

2024-05-14T12:52:35-04:00

This article investigates the challenges of pursuing feminist pedagogy within what we call the “e-Learning industrial complex.” It contributes to the existing scholarship on feminist pedagogy, feminist-indigenous-decolonial community engagement, and e-Learning during COVID-19 in several ways. First, it conceptualizes the e-Learning industrial complex and examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has normalized its expansion. It explains how the e-Learning industrial complex appropriates the social justice language of “accessibility” and “affordability” while capitalizing on the urgent demand for e-Learning. In doing so, the e-Learning industrial complex prioritizes e-Learning as a profit-driven venture for neoliberal universities and e-Learning industries, sidestepping both the need for transformative student learning and the imperative to ensure sustainable working conditions for faculty, staff, and other workers. Second, drawing on our experience of pursuing feminist community engagement at Lesley University, this article proposes that the efforts to devise meaningful ways of pursuing feminist pedagogies in digital learning spaces remain incomplete without examining the larger institutional structures, as well as their complicity with the e-Learning industrial complex, against which feminist pedagogies and everyone involved are situated. Third, it argues that the pandemic can turn into a “portal” – as described by Arundhati Roy (2020) – to come out of the chaos. Through collective resistance against the e-Learning industrial complex, students, faculty, staff, and community members can extend the spirit, ethics, and politics of feminist pedagogy outside of the classroom, engage in solidarity with the broader community, and nurture communities of care.

Expansive Gender Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Classroom

2024-07-19T09:44:54-04:00

In a 2023 independent study, students and a professor at a small, predominantly white, undergraduate only, liberal arts college collaborated to design a gender and sexuality worksheet: The Gender and Sexuality Galaxy. The worksheet helps students explore their identities and affinities within attractions, gender expressions, gender identities, sex identities, and sexual identities. The worksheet also allows them to learn how each of these categories is different from the others as well as where these identities and affinities might intersect. Although existing worksheets are well-intentioned, they fall flat on many levels by reinforcing binaries and heteronormativity, and by denying gender expansive, asexual, and trans people a full range of self-expression and identifications. The worksheet uses inclusive self-identification and guided learning approaches to provide space for deep reflection on identities and attractions. Our process in the worksheet research and development and this co-written article follows Diane Fujino et al. (2018) and bell hooks (1994) in conceptualising transformative pedagogy as learning that takes place in a collaborative, socially invested, and socially engaged learning community. This article details the research, development, trial study, and subsequent changes to the worksheet, contextualises it as a pedagogical tool, and discusses how others might use this resource in their classrooms and beyond. We argue that the development of this worksheet, a collaborative, student-centred project, and the resulting article, co-written by professor and student, both enact transformative pedagogy in their processes, and parallel the self-actualisation the worksheet encourages through intersectional learning about expansive ideas of gender, sexuality, and attraction.

Friday Night Comics in Dark Times

2025-10-07T12:31:41-04:00

This essay explores, in the context of the “dark times” facing public education at all levels in the United States, alternative approaches to and locations of teaching and learning, such as the weekly “Friday Night Comics” series hosted on Zoom. Drawing upon conversations with organizers and participants, plus research in comics, DIY, and critical university studies, I argue for the increasing importance of non-institutional spaces and forms of learning.

Protest Pedagogy

2025-10-07T12:31:48-04:00

When we occupy the streets for justice, we use collective power to take up space, both physically and ideologically. In this paper, I theorize protest as a construct of pedagogy through mirrored dimensions of protests in the streets. Within the context of a co-facilitated, online graduate course, I explore taking up epistemological space through intentionally complicating, questioning and expanding ways of knowing and building knowledge. This work draws from the rich lineage of counter-hegemonic narratives and collective power in Moraga & Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back, which epitomizes freedom possibilities unleashed when we speak the unspeakable as a pedagogy of protest.

Erratum to: Shankar, A. (2025). Developing Annihilationist Strategies: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and The Racial Capitalist University. Radical Teacher, 131, p. 11-19.

2025-03-13T20:22:12-04:00

This is an erratum to the article: Shankar, A. (2025). Developing Annihilationist Strategies: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and The Racial Capitalist University. Radical Teacher, 131, p. 11-19. The submission has been updated to reflect the correct title, "Developing Annihilationist Strategies: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in The Racial Capitalist University".

A link to the original article can be found here: https://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/radicalteacher/article/view/1241

Erratum to: Stewart, N. and Bigirindavyi, M. (2025). Conversational Reflection on the Co-Creation of the Principal Preparation Answerability Rubric (PPAR). Radical Teacher, 131, pp. 49-57.

2025-03-14T19:47:03-04:00

This erratum addresses an error in the original article’s abstract, which included a sentence from a previous, anonymized version of the submission. The phrase “[University Name]" was removed from the abstract in the following sentence: "The Principal Preparation Answerability Rubric (PPAR) was co-created by Joy, guided by Dr. Chadwick, to assess principal preparation syllabi and other pedagogical materials at [University Name].”

The original article can be found at online at: https://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/radicalteacher/article/view/1274

Erratum to: Asare, A. (2025). DEI in a Time of Genocide or Re-Calling June Jordan’s Years at Stony Brook. Radical Teacher, 131, pp. 68-75.

2025-03-14T19:39:48-04:00

This erratum address an error made in the original article’s abstract. The text included unintended line breaks and a revised version has corrected this to remove all breaks.

The original article can be found online at: https://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/radicalteacher/article/view/1324

Erratum to: Patel, C. (2025). DEI as a Practice of Assembling: Translation and Transformation. Radical Teacher, 131, pp. 20-27.

2025-03-14T19:28:31-04:00

This erratum is to address a missing term not included in the original article's abstract. The term "scyborg" has been added, and appears as follows: "Utilizing la paperson’s conceptualization of the scyborg --as a concept that identifies the messiness of agitating towards change within a system that is designed to maintain the status quo --I describe what..."

A link to the original article can be found here: https://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/radicalteacher/article/view/1300

So Much More Than Honour Killing: Reading The Duchess of Malfi

2024-07-28T04:40:56-04:00

This teaching note demonstrates how John Webster's Duchess of Malfi continues to resonate in an Indian classroom of the 21st century. It focuses on the patriarchal systems within which the Duchess is embedded which make it impossible for her to do justice to either her personal or her princely duties, and in doing so it illumines the situation in which many 21st century Indian middle class women find themselves.

Talking Back to Dominant Narratives in a High School’s Daily Morning Announcements

2025-10-07T12:31:44-04:00

In this piece, I describe a critical analysis of the content, language, and tone of my former school site's daily morning announcements to examine how dominant narratives about the "who" and "what" of schooling are upheld and/or challenged. I then focus my discussion on an ongoing project I undertook alongside my high school students to "write back" to the school's priorities by composing and sharing their own announcements with the school community. I examine my students' announcements for their use of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) and discuss the possibilities of engaging with student-generated announcements on a wider scale at the school to shed light on student identities and experiences that are too often missed in discourse in and about the school.

Reading Blackness as a Rhizome with Toni Morrison’s Preface to The Black Book

2025-10-07T12:31:44-04:00

This teaching note proposes the teaching of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome in conversation with the marginalization of certain communities and their liberation from oppressive narratives and structures. It focuses on the rhizome’s relation to blackness and black people. It argues that anti-black society’s narration of blackness corresponds with a “root-book” and fixes blackness in a closed, interiorized narrative of slavery and racism only. It then presents black people’s escape from this anti-black narrative and their act of connecting “blackness” to other assemblages like entertainment, sports, science and technology, everyday life, food, and so on. The teaching note illustrates the above argument by placing the rhizome in conversation with Toni Morrison’s “Preface” to The Black Book in the literary theory classroom. It introduces blackness as being in a state of “in-betweenness” as opposed to having a linear narrative trajectory with slavery as its beginning. It also studies the scrapbook form of The Black Book, and states how this form is ideal for the study of the rhizome’s formal characteristics of exteriority and lacking specific beginnings and endings. It concludes with the physical book’s limitations in encapsulating the entire rhizome of blackness and champions the need for multitextuality in an anti-racist classroom.

The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement

2025-05-27T10:58:08-04:00

A review of Neil Kraus's The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement by Jocelyn Wills

Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning by Susan D. Blum

2025-05-29T07:22:44-04:00

Jake Mattox's review of Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning by Susan D. Blum

Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life by Margaret Price

2025-06-03T07:47:13-04:00

Review of Margaret Price's Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life by Sarah E. Chinn