Volume 13, numéro 1, 2022

EN :

This paper critiques the role of resilience and grit in neoliberal education. Both concepts have become popular within research, policy, practice, and public discourse about education. Proponents claim that the concepts affirm and support the ability of marginalized youth to succeed in schools and society. However, resilience and grit minimize the impact of structural inequality and social domination on oppressed youth in schools, obscuring the necessity of collective struggle in order to achieve educational liberation. Resilience and grit function as what the author calls the “terms of endurance” in neoliberal education because they individualize and depoliticize educational problems and practice. Against the affirmation of durative language in the cultural politics of education, the author calls for critical educators to insist instead on a transformative approach.

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This qualitative study explores the experiences of students whose education was disrupted by school closures during the COVID-19 global pandemic. With a focus on mental health concerns, the article presents the reflections, thoughts and feelings of students whose public examinations were cancelled and who experienced both the abrupt termination of a phase of their formal education and the loss of traditional ways of marking that ending. Findings show that feelings of loss and illegitimacy augment the stress and anxiety surrounding high-stakes tests and their cancellation. There are several implications for policy and practice, if student mental health is to be foregrounded and taken seriously. Communication, dialogue, and possibilities for taking back agency and critical hope may all go some way towards mitigating these mental health concerns. The validity of using re-purposed components to allocate grades is called into question, as are the role and place of high-stakes testing per se.

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The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the foundation of critical literacy. I claim that critical literacy should be conceived as praxis rather than a unified theory. This is because the foundation of critical literacy includes diverse philosophical positions with some disagreements between them. When critical literacy is treated as a unified theory, such internal contradictions implode the theory. Instead, by conceiving it as praxis, even those theoretical tensions can be rendered generative for insatiable reading of the wor(l)d. To demonstrate this, I juxtapose Marxist/Freirean approach and Foucauldian approach to critical literacy. The former approach solidifies the battle ground for critical projects by “naming” the wrongs of the world, while the latter dissipates such identification by inserting divergence and discontinuity into the narratives. I discuss the kinds of critical literacy questions these two approaches enable us to ask, and generate new questions that emerge from the theoretical tensions.

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Insofar as Education for Sustainable Development still represents a redemptive intervention, one according to the demands of a monolithic improvement agenda, its chances are greatly enhanced by the restoration of Grand Narrative initiated by the epochal turning. The much vaunted Anthropocene returns to the agents of change the opportunity to redirect the unified ‘geostory’ of ‘biohistory’ towards a steadier state. That is to say, the Anthropocene collapse of the ‘human’ and ‘natural’ spheres into each other’s orbits restores to ESD its promise to heal the planetary condition. This paper proposes, though, that such a re-fertilisation of ESD can bear fruit only if its premises are radicalised, indeed revolutionised. Employing a red biocentric approach – a praxis which advocates communism without anthropocentrism – it is argued that education for sustainability under current conditions equates to teaching and learning towards collectivism, class-, species- and world-consciousness. Furthermore, it is suggested, such consciousness is meaningless without vehicles for its articulation and actualisation. This means organisation, activism, disobedience, and the emergence of the possibility of the mass Earth Strike. Education for Sustainability and Communism (ESC) is unsurprisingly an activity unconfined by classroom walls: the condition of its possibility is the real, material site of resistance and of spectacle. It is argued that in order to break the impasse between critique and transformation, ESC affords the only viable possibility for the evolution of education for development that is fit for the Anthropocene.

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In this article I focus on the differences between social democratic and Marxist education theory and policy and proceed to distinguish between Classical Marxism and two-types of neo-Marxist analysis (`Culturalist' and `Structuralist'). I then set out what I consider to be five key questions Marxists ask about education policy. relate to: (i) Curriculum and Assessment, (ii) Pedagogy, (iii) The Organisational Culture within the School/ Institution, (iv) Organisation of The Education System and of Students, that is, comprehensive schooling or selective schooling, and (v) Ownership and Control of Schools, Colleges and Universities. I conclude by setting out what is specifically Marxist about the various policy proposals put forward. These are, firstly, the belief that reforms are not sustainable under capitalism; secondly, that what is needed is a revolution and that Marxists need to engage in activist praxis, and thirdly, is the salience of class analysis and organisation as compared with other forms of structural oppression and discrimination and inequality. Marxists go further than criticizing (and acting against) social discrimination, oppressions, for example of sexism, homophobia, racism, into economic rights, and into the recognition that full economic rights cannot be achieved under a capitalist economic system, but only under a socialist or communist system.

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Political imagination has never been more important, yet it is very often foreclosed in conservative educational spaces. It’s important to question the occlusion of political imagination from both science and education on a general level—something STEM-types are actively discouraged from thinking about. In order for education fields to progress and face the crises of our century there must be space to dream/think/imagine ‘the political’ along infinite horizons. This essay is an attempt to clear some space for political imagination by problematizing quick dismissals of older critical perspectives (e.g. materialisms), and suggests that any turn to ontology needs to be continually interpreted and politicized. Giving space to politics and imagination is vital as educators dream about different futures in the ruins of capitalism. This paper speaks to the ‘ontological turn’ that is still occurring in various academic disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

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This critique of STEM comes from a feminist, embodied approach, which takes into account how my positionality in relation to the acronym intersects with my lived experience and perspective. My hope is that speaking from personal experience will help initiate fissures and dissonance about STEM discourse, in chorus with other positions and arguments, to critically question and hopefully dislodge the STEM acronym as a hegemonic, pervasive, and unexamined construct. I offer my experiences as a way of joining others in open critique of an often unquestioned yet neoliberal dominating force in science education. My lived experiences (and frustrations) with STEM are numerous. I condense these experiences into four episodes: the STEM academic job interview, the STEM education meeting, dissonance between STEM and my gendered identity, and exclusion of my humanist science research interests by the STEM acronym.

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Although many other factors come to bear on present issues in the contemporary world, vaccine hesitancy and refusal are also the direct result of poor STEM education. In this article we employ a sociological thought experiment methodology to articulate the shortcomings of STEM education and suggest pathways for much needed changes in solving future pandemics and other 21st century challenges. The problems we expose in STEM education include unequal access to high quality education via inter and intra school tracking and curricular issues where STEM does not integrate with other disciplines, like social studies, and fails to engage a critical perspective on STEM informed by advanced philosophies of science and epistemology.