Search results

There is currently a dearth of research on the implications of the epistolary as a site for knowledge production. This paper aims to demystify the process of academic theorizing through the co-authors’ co-excavative epistolary method.

Through co-excavative epistolary practices, the co-authors’ relationship was deepened, the collective sense was made of Covid-19, and racial literacy-centered academic theorizing commenced. In the co-authors making meaning of their letter-writing data, they provide examples of and analyze their co-excavative letter-writing process.

The co-excavative epistolary method deepened the co-authors’ relationship to one another and improved their ability to produce useful and complicated knowledge.

The co-excavative epistolary exchanges mark a new site for academic theorizing and incite creative approaches to academic co-writing, as well as more transparency about the academic writing process in general.

Co-excavative methods disrupt traditional academic sites of knowledge production and engender space for relational intimacy.

The work introduces both a new method, co-excavative epistolary writing and a new rational framework, the critical dignity relational framework.

The pedagogical benefit of active learning environments such as simulations within University teaching is widely recognized and there is a burgeoning literature on their impact (Raymond & Usherwood, 2013; Schnurr, De Santo, & Green, 2014). Much of the empirical evidence to date has mobilized quantitative data drawn, for example, from Likert scale questionnaire responses. There remains an absence of qualitative studies that explore the in-depth views of participants involved in simulation activities and this chapter goes some way to filling that void. This chapter uses an expanded dataset comprising responses to open-ended questions gathered via a pre- and post-simulation questionnaire completed by participants at five secondary school-based EU simulations undertaken in 2017 and 2018 on the topic of the Brexit negotiations over the freedom of movement. It builds on earlier work which demonstrated that simulations can be an effective University outreach and recruitment tool to widen participation in and raise aspirations toward entering higher education (Heard-Lauréote, Bortun, & Kreuschitz, 2019) by analyzing the experience of approximately 100 secondary school participants who undertook the simulations. By exploring the educational value of EU simulations as perceived by participants, this chapter provides a snapshot of the pedagogical impact of this type of activity to the benefit of those devising such activities for delivery in the future.

This study aims to examine how critical love theory is operationalized in K-12 classrooms to support Black children. The authors use BlackCrit and a conceptual framework of critical love to describe the strategies educators used as pro-Black pedagogies of resistance.

The authors conducted a thematic analysis to identify how critical love praxis is used by K-12 educators as a tool to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism as defined by the framings of BlackCrit theory. The authors produced a literature synthesis of qualitative research that responds to this study’s research questions: How are critical love theories operationalized? What educator practices do researchers identify as material manifestations of critical love?; and How and to what extent do critical love praxis address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistorical approaches to social transformation as defined by BlackCrit theory?

Critical love theories manifest as critical love praxis. Educators used critical love praxis to address anti-Blackness, neoliberal multiculturalism and ahistoricism by cultivating and supporting the co-creation of homeplace for Black students in K-12 education. Homeplace is cultivated through critical love praxis as classroom-focused, person-focused and politically focused approaches.

This study’s findings extend current theoretical research on critical love by describing its material form in K-12 education and by identifying how a critical love praxis can work to directly challenge anti-Blackness. The authors find implications for their work in teacher education and teachers’ in-service professional development.