Radical Teacher

Making Space for Radical Pedagogy

Michael Bennett — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Learning from Our History: The Role of the New York Collective of Radical Educators in Movements for Educational Justice

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Educator activists can play an important role in transforming not only what happens inside classrooms but also larger educational systems. While recent focus in research has been on social justice caucuses in teacher unions, there are also radical educator collectives like the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) that organize outside of union spaces. In this article, we (the current NYCoRE leadership body) analyze the historical impact of NYCoRE to theorize about the role of educator collectives in educational justice movements. Using oral history interviews with founding members of NYCoRE, we found that NYCoRE has provided a political home for radical educators, supported critical professional development, and prepared educators to contribute to educational justice movements. National implications are discussed.

Developing Classroom Community Agreements to Cultivate a Critically Compassionate Learning Community

Jesica Siham Fernández — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

A classroom community agreements activity is described to cultivate a critically compassionate learning community. Reflections on co-developing and implementing these agreements in collaboration with college students are described. By facilitating opportunities for critically reflexive dialogues with students, a set of agreements are developed and incorporated into the learning environment. Thus, the agreements can help inform values and practices for critical consciousness learning among students, and can help educators engage inclusive teaching practices. When developed with students, these agreements can support the diverse, equitable, and humanizing learning spaces that are necessary to support student academic thriving.

Unconditional Care Beyond the Carceral Education State: A Call for Abolitionist Departure

Margaret Goldman — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This paper wrestles with the concept of care and its role in the movement towards abolitionist education. I draw from my experiences as a teacher / ethnographer in an alternative high school, called FREE LA, that serves and was created by system-impacted young people who have been pushed out of or barred from, or otherwise refused to participate in, traditional schooling. Grounded in students’ perceptions of how this space departs from traditional schools and other carceral institutions, I grapple with their consistent emphasis on care. Students’ juxtaposition between the type of care they experienced in traditional schools, and a different type of care experienced at FREE LA, leads me to consider both the violent genealogies of conditional care as endemic to state schooling, and the potential for reclaiming old-new genealogies of unconditional care that map radically reimagined educational space(s). The juxtaposition between these two types of care opens broader questions about the limitations of educational reform and the possibilities for abolitionist departure.

Teaching and Learning a Joyful Citation Praxis: Affective Relations for Fostering Community Through Our Compositions

Kylie E. Quave, Savannah Hagen Ohbi — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Many of us learned to cite sources to avoid plagiarism or to give credit. Yet there are many more generative reasons to teach and learn citation. This essay offers a teacher’s perspective and a student’s perspective on our personal journeys toward viewing and practicing citation as a way of joyfully generating community with others. We describe our individual struggles, how anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and critical feminist scholars have shaped our thinking, and what we do within the classroom to practice a joyful, generative way of citing. We offer suggestions for how to hold ourselves and students accountable to more inclusive and community-oriented ways of citing by infusing reflective practice throughout the semester in college writing-intensive courses.

Notes from the Anti-Displacement Studio

Lily Song — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This article addresses the question of how design pedagogy and methods can be reformulated and retooled to support community-led anti-displacement planning and design initiatives. It critically examines and reflects on a series of architecture courses taught by the author in which students have worked with Boston-based community leaders on anti-displacement planning and design strategies over two academic years. The analysis particularly focuses on the anti-displacement studio, which takes a grounded, relational, and reparative approach to addressing current gaps in design studio education by aligning university-based teaching and learning with community-led decolonizing agendas. Leaning into the university’s location in Lower Roxbury and harnessing the instructor’s existing relationship with community leaders as an anchor for ongoing collaboration, the studio remains a work-in-progress that is replete with tensions and challenges, which carry implications for radical planning and design pedagogy.

The Educational Radicalism of Bob Moses

Jay Gillen — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Those who come in contact with the Algebra Project, founded 40 years ago by Bob Moses, tend to underestimate the extraordinary radicalism of Dr. Moses’s strategy for using math literacy as an organizing tool. The Algebra Project uses hard-earned insights from the Black freedom struggle to create space for young people to fashion their own insurgency. The goal of the Project is the destruction of caste in the United States, approached through the counter-intuitive vehicle of math classrooms.

Safe Space

Carol Smith — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Safe Space reflects upon the ways in which racism creeps into classrooms and makes itself known despite teachers' best efforts to prevent it from invading the safe space they attempt to create.

Still

Mary E. Cronin — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Poetry.

Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education

Paul Buhle — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Review of Tom Roderick. Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education.

Israelism

Bob Rosen — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Brief film review.

Visibility, Precarity and Public Spaces: Reading Matthew Arnold’s “West London” in an Indian Classroom

Saradindu Bhattacharya — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

This essay is an account of my experience of teaching Matthew Arnold's "West London" in an Indian classroom through the conceptual prism of vulnerability. The essay argues that the configuration of public space in Arnold's poem in terms of differential class relations in Victorian society offers a literary mode of visualizing vulnerablity and prompts an ethical recognition of the humanness of marginalized characters. It further demonstrates how the peadgogic exercise of 'reading' such poetry in the contemporary urban Indian context can alert students to the politics of occupying and negotiating public spaces in terms of (the lack of) class position and privilege across diverse cultural and historical contexts.

Teaching Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in First-Year Composition

Samantha Prillaman Conner — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

My teaching note explores how to teach Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God in first-year composition classrooms. I discuss the demographics of my classroom in a rural public university, and my students' reactions to reading the novel. This article highlights the successes and challenges of my classroom discussions and activities relating to reader comprehension and code switching. In addition, I explore ways to implement antiracist and feminist pedagogies while keeping students out of the "panic zone."