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This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

This chapter applies a qualitative theoretical approach, drawing on critical literacy frames including socio-cultural theory and auto-ethnography to examine the journey of a language arts teacher in her struggle to respond to her students’ resistance and create a classroom context of mean-making and empowerment. Asserting the process as the decolonization of pedagogy, the chapter asserts the language arts classroom as a borderland, a site for both critical analysis and a source for creativity and possibility (Giroux, 2001) to teach students who are traditionally underserved in the educational community. The chapter points to ways students’ rich cultural heritage and the teacher’s autobiographical narrative can become part of the classroom pedagogy and result in a rich learning experience that is transformative.

Educator‐philosopher Paulo Freire (1921‐1997) is internationally known for his adult literacy work with peasants and workers in his native Brazil. Through a process of “conscientization”, the oppressed become active subjects in the making of culture and history, as opposed to passively accepting that which is imposed on them by society’s élite. Freire’s pedagogy has been embraced by many in the Third World and adapted to a First World context by North American educators. The annotated bibliography that follows presents a selection of Freire’s work, as well as that of other educators who have adopted a “Freirean” approach to education. In addition, several books recount Freirean inspired literacy campaigns instituted in countries rocked by political conflict and revolutionary change.

Spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in the open acknowledgment of the importance of teaching and learning praxis that is grounded in compassion, understanding, cocreation, community, and flexibility. This is especially so for ‘traditional’ university spaces, in essence questioning and resisting the many established dynamics that face-to-face teaching and learning took for granted within many neoliberal and neocolonial higher education contexts. In this chapter, I propose positioning a love ethic as a primary point of departure for all educational engagements, a foundational shift in ontology (way of being) of the university. By focusing on love as liberation and justice, and teaching as an act of love, I draw on critical, engaged, and feminist pedagogies, as well as my experience as a lecturer in a social justice– and global citizenship-oriented program at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, where I positioned a love ethic as central to my pedagogical approach. I argue that when we begin to view love as more than mere emotion, but as an ideological position that informs values and praxis within higher education (and our university “classrooms” in particular), we may move toward new and exciting ways of envisioning the decolonized university of the 21st century. A love ethic, as defined by bell hooks, offers possibilities for an approach to critical transformation that is not merely motivated by the change of institutional structures, but by the reform of values guiding teaching and learning and ways of being within higher education institutions.

This chapter describes a case study of a social change project in medical education (primary care), in which the critical interpretive evaluation methodology I sought to use came up against the “positivist” approach preferred by senior figures in the medical school who commissioned the evaluation.

I describe the background to the study and justify the evaluation approach and methods employed in the case study – drawing on interviews, document analysis, survey research, participant observation, literature reviews, and critical incidents – one of which was the decision by the medical school hierarchy to restrict my contact with the lay community in my official evaluation duties. The use of critical ethnography also embraced wider questions about circuits of power and the social and political contexts within which the “social change” effort occurred.

Central to my analysis is John Gaventa’s theory of power as “the internalization of values that inhibit consciousness and participation while encouraging powerlessness and dependency.” Gaventa argued, essentially, that the evocation of power has as much to do with preventing decisions as with bringing them about. My chosen case illustrated all three dimensions of power that Gaventa originally uncovered in his portrait of self-interested Appalachian coal mine owners: (1) communities were largely excluded from decision making power; (2) issues were avoided or suppressed; and (3) the interests of the oppressed went largely unrecognized.

The account is auto-ethnographic, hence the study is limited by my abilities, biases, and subject positions. I reflect on these in the chapter.

The study not only illustrates the unique contribution of case study as a research methodology but also its low status in the positivist paradigm adhered to by many doctors. Indeed, the tension between the potential of case study to illuminate the complexities of community engagement through thick description and the rejection of this very method as inherently “flawed” suggests that medical education may be doomed to its neoliberal fate for some time to come.

Student transitions from secondary to tertiary education have attracted global attention as universities and colleges of higher education seek to improve student retention. Over the course of one academic year, I documented the transitional experiences of first-year male Emirati students at a college of higher education in a rural location of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In this paper I describe four categories of cultural border crossing experiences – smooth, managed, difficult, and impossible – with easier and smoother crossing experiences associated with close congruency (related to the students’ self-perceived attitude and scholastic preparedness as broadly reflected in their competence in their second language, English) between the predominantly Arabic life-world associated with Emirati families and government schooling and the dominant Western/English language culture in institutes of higher education. Additionally, I describe and evaluate students’ cultural border crossing experiences with some Foundation program faculty, finding that those teachers who developed a classroom culture based on Kleinfeld’s (1975) notion of ‘warm demandingness’ and caring rapport-building appeared to have the most positive impact upon the students. Implications from this research have the potential to positively impact both the student and faculty classroom experience in the Gulf tertiary classroom, in addition to improving overall student retention rates.

In August 2007, over 6,000 sociologists gathered in New York to attend the 102nd meeting of the American Sociological Association and discuss the possibility of radical social transformation in post-modern capitalist society.¹ The adoption of the conference theme ‘Is another world possible?’ was theoretically significant, for it seemed to call into question one of the most fundamental assumptions upon which critical sociology depends: that despite the rarity of radical social change, it is possible, desirable and even imperative to imagine and struggle for better alternatives to existing ways of being. From phenomenological insights into the contingency of our subjective interpretations of reality to the imperative of reconciling ‘appearance’ with ‘reality’; from the long history of collective movements to defend human dignity to the ‘politics of small things’ (Goldfarb, 2006), critical theories of society presume that human fates are not determined and futures are not reified, and that the possibility of possibility is a pre-condition for ‘normal’ human existence. This is not to say that progressive alternatives to the status quo are not often and everywhere repressed to some degree and in some form, or that they are equally distributed or attainable. But as Gustavo Gutierrez once remarked, a ‘commitment to the creation of a just society and, ultimately, to a new human being, presupposes confidence in the future’ (2003, p. 197).

A lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ (LGBTQ+) community’s hunger for its history became an arena for creative, unorthodox work involving a library and information science (LIS) educator, librarians and other educators, and even a university library. The result was fundamentally collaborative, involving community and educational organizations; all inspired by social responsibility and community engagement goals, some of which can be found in a university mission statement. The story of these individuals and organizations begins with a drive toward a greater awareness of LGBTQ+ history, a goal that led to creating inclusive high school history curricula. Along the way, these efforts generated information resources such as a community-generated database, a temporary history exhibit, a conference, and a workshop geared to gay straight alliance (GSA) organizations in high schools. GSAs and their statewide supporting organization, the Illinois Safe School Alliance, were also the part of this work. While the larger goal of this work was to help diverse constituencies understand the importance of their history by developing, curating, and utilizing information resources that fulfill overlooked community information needs, this chapter comes to focus on a piece of that work, the development of Illinois’s first LGBTQ+ history elective. Consequently, this chapter can show how librarians and libraries can actualize social justice aims and thereby expand traditional library practices through sustained efforts that may lead to smaller specific goals, some of which may develop in unforeseen ways. The key is to expand the existing aims of libraries into sustained community engagement while remaining open to the opportunities that arise along the way.