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Teaching For Social Justice In A Highly Politicized Historical Moment, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

The theme for the Volume 15 issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy, “Teaching for Social Justice in a Highly Politicized Historical Moment,“ is a continuation of a conversation that began in two earlier issues. In Volume 12, we explored the larger institutional structures that maintain inequalities and racism with the theme, “Black Lives Matter and the Education Industrial Complex.” That was followed with an inquiry in Volume 14 on the role that the past plays in wrongs in the present and the issues it raises in our attempts at seeking reconciliation in “The Ethics of Memory: What Does it …

On The Continuity Of Learning, Teaching, Schooling: Mead’S Educational Proposal, From The Perspective Of Decolonization And Land/Place-Based Education, Cary Campbell

Journal of Educational Controversy

In her 1943 article “Our Educational Emphases,” Margaret Mead inquired: What constitutes education in “the broadest sense” of the term, as a continuing human process. More specifically she asked, how and from what basis can we understand the educational processes of long-standing/Indigenous societies as continuous with the forms of education practiced in modern industrialized society? In short, Mead proposes that we recognize the essential continuity of learning, teaching, and schooling across all human societies. In this article, I explore the controversies that Mead’s proposal raises for contemporary, intersecting discourses on decolonization, Indigenous pedagogy, and place- and Land-based education. I argue …

Anti-Affirmative Action And Historical Whitewashing: To Never Apologize While Committing New Racial Sins, Hoang V. Tran

Journal of Educational Controversy

Apologies, official or otherwise, for historical wrongs are important steps in the road towards reconciliation. More difficult are historical wrongs that have yet to be fully acknowledged. The reemergence of affirmative action in the public consciousness via the Supreme Court represents a striking example of the ways in which our collective consciousness has yet to fully account for our past educational sins: segregation and income inequality. This essay explores the multiple consequences to our historical memory when the anti-affirmative action narrative continues to dominate the public discourse on racism in education. I offer a renewed focus on ‘fenced out’ as …

Review Of Jefferson’S Revolutionary Theory And The Reconstruction Of Educational Purpose By Kerry T. Burch, Tony Decesare

Journal of Educational Controversy

This is a review of Kerry T. Burch's book Jefferson’s Revolutionary Theory and the Reconstruction of Educational Purpose.

The Ethics Of Memory: What Does It Mean To Apologize For Historical Wrongs, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

The controversy for this issue focuses on the theme, “The Ethics of Memory: What Does it Mean to Apologize for Historical Wrongs.” Although the controversial scenario we posed for this issue stems from current events in the news, we invited authors to examine more deeply the historical and cultural undercurrents that gave rise to them. Our authors responded from a number of different perspectives that encapsulate different times, populations, scholarly disciplines, methodologies and ways of interpreting the question.

About The Authors

Journal of Educational Controversy

"About the Authors" for Volume 14 of the Journal of Educational Controversy

The Complexity Of Collaboration: Personal Stories From A School And College Partnership, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

The controversy for this issue focuses on the complexity of collaboration when schools and universities that come out of two different cultures meet and work intimately to solve common problems. What makes this issue different from our other issues in this journal is the complete focus on one collaborative school/university partnership that offers readers an opportunity to hear the authentic voices of all the stakeholders as they collectively tell their stories. All the papers, video interviews, classroom videos, and forums published in this issue focus on this one experiment conducted between a school in a rural community in Washington State …

Stories Of Social Justice Educators And Raising Children In The Face Of Injustice, James Wright, Amanda U. Potterton

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article examines life stories of the authors, who are parents and social justice scholars and educators from different races and backgrounds. The authors consider the emotional process of personally and collectively coping with and navigating parenting and sharing critical truths with their children in the current social, political, and cultural environment and in light of recent assaults on communities of color. They employ life history methodology to explicitly continue a critical conversation that was started by Matias and Montoya (2015) about Critical Race Parenting, and they encourage other scholars, particularly those who are parents, to think about, and articulate, …

Good Intentions Gone Awry: Education Policy And Paradox Of Consequences In Rural Ethnic China, Jinting Wu

Journal of Educational Controversy

This paper provides a situated critique of how evidence-based, “best practices”-oriented research can result in unanticipated consequences and perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophesy at the expense of deeper understanding of educational problems. I structure the paper along two analytical steps. First, I explore the sociology of unintended consequences through German Sociologist Max Weber and his contemporary critic Mohamed Cherkaoui. Second, I draw from an ethnographic study in rural ethnic communities of Southwest China to illustrate how best intentions at providing free compulsory education go awry, and how the controversial policy both fails and succeeds in fabricating its intended outcome. The ethnographic …

Is “Best Practices” Research In Education Insufficient Or Even Misdirected? An Issue Dedicated To John G. Richardson, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

Editorial and Dedication for Volume 11, Issue 1

Is “Best Practices” Research in Education Insufficient or even Misdirected?

AN ISSUE DEDICATED TO JOHN G. RICHARDSON

A Violence Of “Best Practice” And Unintended Consequences?: Domestic Violence And The Making Of A Disordered Subjectivity, Tracey Pyscher

Journal of Educational Controversy

Often, efforts by schools to standardize marginalized children with histories of domestic violence have alarming effects. More recent efforts of standardization typically find a sustained existence in the discourse of “best” practices predicated upon a religious-like adherence to behavioral data driven frameworks. This article traces how children and youth with histories of domestic violence (or HDV youth) navigate and resist deficit laden school subjectivities shaped by special education discourses of medicalization and pathologization. In one case study, I spell out how an elementary school created and maintained an HDV child’s EBD (emotional behavioral disordered) subjectivity with detrimental effects. The article …

Crowding New Public Management Off The University’S Horizon Of Expectations, Michael Schapira

Journal of Educational Controversy

This article is a response to Asger Sørensen’s vivid example of how neo-liberal university reform has subjected Danish universities to New Public Management. Sørensen effectively shows the noxious effects of NPM by discussing the infamous Koldau case, where newly empowered rectors, who served as centralized arbiters of university affairs, superseded academic decision-making. He concludes that one reason these cases have not been met with resistance by faculty is that they are paralyzed by radically conflicting normative visions of the university. In this article I respond to Sørensen by suggesting that conflicting normative visions need not be a disempowering condition and …

Grit: A Short History Of A Useful Concept, Ethan W. Ris

Journal of Educational Controversy

The character trait "grit" is a much-discussed and debated topic, both among education researchers and in public forums. Employing longitudinal discourse analysis, this paper examines the history of grit over more than a century, paying special attention to the ways in which adults have attempted to inculcate it in children. The author finds that current discussion of grit’s salience for the education of disadvantaged students ignores the rich historical context of a long-sought trait, which in fact has usually been the focus of anxiety from middle and upper-class parents and educators. Grit functions as a proxy for a type of …

Some Reflections On The Tenth Year Anniversary Issue Of The Journal Of Educational Controversy, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

Welcome to our 10th Year Anniversary Issue and the first issue to be published exclusively on our new website. We have now completed the transfer of our nine earlier volumes to this site. Over the last ten years, the Journal of Educational Controversy has created a dynamic conversation around some of the most challenging dilemmas and controversies that arise in the education of citizens for a pluralistic, democratic society. For this special issue, we decided it was time to let our authors select their own controversies rather than ask them to respond to our scenarios. We have divided the articles …