Search results

This chapter describes the impact of a multicultural curriculum transformation assignment on the consciousness and pedagogy of pre-service and in-service educators preparing to teach and lead within diverse U.S. P-12 schools. Highlighting how two university faculty leveraged a mosaic of critical theories and pedagogies to engage action research exploring the inquiry, How might the application of an assignment grounded in an instructional framework comprised of theories in educational leadership, critical multicultural education, and critical pedagogy inspire and motivate pre- and in-service educators to teach, lead, and serve for social justice beyond their program of study?, It provokes us to consider how best to prepare educators with the knowledge, skill, and will to teach and lead employing a praxis situated in equity and justice. Findings contribute to scholarly conversations and school-based practices focused on culturally responsive teaching and leadership, and prove relevant for P-12 educators, teacher educators, those in educational leadership, and educators advocating equity and justice for historically marginalized and minoritized students attempting to learn in unjust classroom and school spaces.

This chapter provides discursive space for story-telling to provide narrative reflection on the experiences associated with struggles and advantages attributed to advancing non-traditional perspectives into practice. I utilize an auto-ethnography (L. Anderson (2006). Analytical autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 373–395; C. Ellis & A. P. Bochner (2000). Auto-ethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 733–768). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; L. Richardson (2000). Writing. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). London: Sage) to detail my lived experiences as a scholar who has encountered the outsider-within status in academe (Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.). I detail my dual role as a social agent and as an African-American female scholar and the complexities of teaching social justice while promoting the need for activism of social justice and equity in our U.S. schools. Therefore, this study amplifies silenced voices regarding challenges for African-American female scholars engaged in transformative pedagogy in academe. I will utilize a Critical Race Theory lens to examine the racialized experiences that persist for African-American faculty seeking to advance transformational perspectives in academe, and thus through teaching, helping students to realize inequities in K-12 classroom settings (Grant, C. (2012). Advancing our legacy: A Black feminist perspective on the significance of mentoring for African-American women in educational leadership. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(1), 101–117.).

This chapter locates our book in social science debates and critiques challenging ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning researching approaches emanating from the global north. This is an important contextualising move, given that these debates have surfaced crucial understandings about the dangers of unquestioned assumptions underpinning researching approaches in intercultural and cross-cultural contexts. The chapter outlines how practice architectures, the key theoretical lens employed in this book, have attempted to counter these exclusions. It focusses on the theory’s emergence from the relational (political and material) work of the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network. This historicising move is part of our shared authorial commitment to rendering visible the taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning researching approaches, including those, such as practice architectures theory, that have a shared commitment to critical educational praxis. The final section of the chapter considers the possibilities and limitations of practice architectures theory as a means of challenging taken-for-granted ontological and epistemological assumptions of research and researching practices.

In these uncertain and risky times, the work that educators and educational researchers carry out may feel inconsequential. In preparing young people to live well in a world worth living in, educators must consider, firstly, what roles they can play in a global environment riven by volatile economic, social, and environmental contexts, and secondly, the responsibilities they bear as researchers to produce forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and this world.

In this chapter, we introduce the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network and how it is that we, as researchers from around the world, came together to discuss our researching practices in coming to know and explore educational research problems concerning equity, diversity and social justice within and across different cultural settings. We share short stories of ourselves to reveal how it is that we have come to know, be, and act as researchers in our projects and how working alongside each other – our mutual relatings – have generated further understanding about our own and each other’s researching practices.

This chapter establishes the purpose of the book, where we share empirical work through the lens of practice architectures. For instance, what is considered to be an educational equity problem across international or cross-cultural sites? What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand educational inequity in its diverse forms in different sites? How are taken-for-granted research practices enabling and/or constraining different forms of understandings about educational inequity, including the issues to be researched and/or the direction of the research project? We then provide an overview of the remaining chapters.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine school health education in the USA and present alternative approaches for more critical and comprehensive health education.

An ecological model framework is used to identify the limitations and opportunities for improvement in school health education in the USA. An argument is made for school health education that embraces ecological approaches, political economy theory, and critical pedagogies.

US schools have been tasked with providing health education that is primarily rooted in individualistic approaches. Often missing from this education is recognition of the social and structural determinants of health that greatly influence one’s ability to practice the health behaviors promoted in schools. This raises pedagogical and ethical concerns, which can be addressed by teaching health education that is grounded in ecological and political economy understandings of health and in critical pedagogies that allow students to more comprehensively and accurately understand health, how their worlds influence health, and their agency within those worlds.

This paper offers justification for a critical model of school health education and for the professional preparation of school health educators that is grounded in critical pedagogy and ecological approaches.

This work complements other research on critical health education by adding explicit integration of the ecological model and the political economy theory within critical pedagogies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the expectations of human resource management professionals as they relate to reality‐based learning experiences that can shape college graduates' education. Computer‐based simulations can provide a strong opportunity for learning‐by‐doing, so it would be important to understand what skill sets should be targeted for these.

A survey was used for the research question: what work‐related skill sets will human resource management (HRM) professionals value in recent college graduates who are starting in entry‐level HRM positions? The respondents were from the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM).

The respondents targeted specific skill sets that they value, and the data provided can now be applied in creating reality‐based learning opportunities using educational simulations in an online environment.

The potential for future research includes the opportunity to collect data on student use of educational simulations that focus on providing the subject HRM skill sets in this paper.

The implications for pedagogy include the use of educational simulations that target the reinforcement of specific HRM skill sets that have been identified. These can provide college students with a unique opportunity for praxis.

This paper examines the underlying value of reality‐based learning and how the use of educational simulations can add value in praxis. Additionally, it identifies several HRM skill sets for recent college graduates seeking to enter the HRM field. This paper will be of value to university educators, curriculum management professionals, university administrators, and university technology management professionals.

In this paper the co-authors, educators and organizers working together in a liberatory curriculum development organization (People's Education Movement Chicago), put forth a conceptualization of Critical Race Praxis (CRP) in education as it applies to K-12 curriculum and education writ large. They take Yamamoto's (1997) premise seriously in that they need to spend less time with abstract theorizing and more time in communities experiencing injustice.

The co-authors utilize critical race counterstory methodologies to analyze and (re)tell their experiences building and supporting justice-centered curriculum bound in CRP. In doing so, they share narratives that illuminate their individual and collective experiences navigating the gratuitous violence of white supremacy and other forms of structural oppression, and their work to center justice in and out of K-12 schools.

The findings provide examples of organizational praxes within the tenets of CRP (Conceptual, Material, Performative and Reflexive). For People’s Education Movement Chicago the conceptual conditions of their praxes begin with an intersectional analysis of schooling, education, and life. Within the CRP tenant of the material, the co-authors share experiences that detail their continuous political education and offer seven emergent ways of being and building to bound the material change they seek to create through their work. Next, the co-authors share their insights on the performative tenet, with a focus on curriculum, which creates learning experiences that support people to remember social movements and develop within them the curiosity and agency to act on their findings in ways that center justice and transformation. Finally, the findings related to reflexivity focus on the authors’ internal practices as a collective. The authors place process over product which, as they articulate, is a must if they are to produce a vital harvest for communities they work with and for.

The authors conclude the article with the following offerings useful to P-20 educators, researchers, school administrators and community members advancing more just educational futures: a commitment to the on the groundwork, situating social justice as an experiential phenomenon, the utilization of interdisciplinary approaches, collaborative work and capacity building, and a commitment to self and collective care.

As P-20 teachers, community workers, organizers, caregivers and education scholars of color building together in a K-12 curriculum development organization, the authors suggest that now is the moment to pivot away from the rhetoric of “we don't do CRT” and into work that constructs paths toward praxes bound in the tenets of CRP.

This chapter focusses on the research methodology of the completed project, drawing on what Martin (2008) described as ‘Indigenist’ research traditions or practices. The project drew upon tenets of critical race theory which developed over the life of a university teaching and learning project to support the praxis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, or Indigenous,1 pre-service teachers on their final internships prior to graduating.

The broader project was conceptualised and framed within our prioritisation of Indigenist standpoint and critical race theory. Our project was designed to amplify the perspectives and voices of Indigenous students in situations where White, hegemonic relations appeared to constrain their potential achievement on practicum in socially unjust and often racist ways. Research into the achievement and success of Indigenous education graduates in Australia is dominated by non-Indigenous reporting, framed in deficit language of Indigenous ‘underachievement’, ‘barriers’, ‘lack’, and ‘disengagement’, rather than from their experience of injustice in their professional preparation as teachers.

The research design troubled how researchers like us ‘come to know’ Indigenous achievement in the higher education sector through the pre-service teachers’ words, impelling us to listen to stories of discrimination, rather than to official accounts of how they ‘failed’ to measure up to teacher standards. The attention to detail in the multi-site, micro-level practices in teacher education and the ways these unfold in situ for Indigenous students would not be possible without the Indigenist research methodology developed in partnership with Indigenous research colleagues and student co-researchers.

This chapter then serves to remind educational researchers that research is a practice and has practice architectures with particular hegemonic arrangements which have not transpired to serve the interests of Indigenous peoples. Honouring Indigenist standpoint and employing critical race theory in research design thus means paying particular and careful attention to the work that research practices do, on, to, and with communities, not normative (colonial) crafting of the praxis research problem.

Wānanga are Indigenous educational institutions that encompass a diverse approach to education. Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, an ‘Indigenous University’, is an environment where innovative thinking and culturally based teaching practice enhances student experiences in an Indigenous Māori environment. It is in this space that Māori ideology and epistemology are practiced and viewed as normal. This diverse environment accepts without qualification that education and knowledge will be provided to the highest level through an Indigenous Māori lens. Culturally responsive environments are conducive to learning experiences for Indigenous Māori students. Pedagogy that is underpinned by cultural values and philosophy enhances the reciprocal learning experiences that are shared between lecturer and student. A positive learning environment promotes a distributive action, where the student experience is further shared with whānau (family), hapū (sub-tribe), Iwi (tribe) and communities in which they interact and engage.

This introduction provides an overview of the themes and chapters of this volume.

The chapters illustrate current approaches to theories, research methods, pedagogy, and praxis in gender studies showing both continuity and change.

Newer approaches, gender-centered, intersectional, and global offer a critique of older ways of gathering and understanding data, ways that respond to and are impacted by social change.

The chapter and the volume are intended to encourage further advances in gender research.