Volume 16, numéro 3, 2025

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Newark, New Jersey has been at the forefront of school reform from the civil rights era through more recent efforts to resist neoliberal school reform approaches during the 2010s. Drawing on interviews with activists, policymakers, and school reformers, this paper documents the history of community organizing as a strategy to improve conditions in Newark’s schools. The paper concludes that community organizing in Newark has (1) increased representation for people of color in positions of institutional authority, and (2) achieved intermediate reforms that improved conditions in schools. However, community organizers in Newark have often come up against a power structure that resists broader challenges to class inequality and policymakers that prefer market-based approaches to school reform.

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In recent years, there has been an increase in reports declaring Canadian universities are suffering from a ‘viewpoint diversity crisis’ that purportedly compromises their ability to serve as bastions of open inquiry. This article contextualizes this narrative, tracing its historical roots and examining its production within a right-wing infrastructure that has long targeted the academy and sought to undermine public faith in higher education to further an ideological agenda reflective of Friedrich Hayek’s reverence for free market fundamentalism and concomitant contempt for social justice. To the degree that universities are imperiled as proponents of viewpoint diversity claim, the tangible threat stems from externally coordinated assaults on academe and not the contrived crisis projected onto it.

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Few studies have explored how whiteness might be reinforced in the “trauma-informed” assessments, practices, and policies of school social workers. This critical qualitative research study asks: How does whiteness structure how Canadian school social workers recognize, understand, and respond to students’ expressions of trauma in K-12 schools? Data were collected from nineteen school social workers in Ontario using vignettes and semi-structured interview questions. Data were analyzed through critical thematic analysis, guided by critical trauma and critical whiteness theories. Findings include school social workers protecting white victimhood and the embedding of (neoliberal) technologies of whiteness into trauma-informed practices. Additionally, participants demonstrated using “wise practices” to resist these pressures and meet the needs of racialized students. Recommendations include the adoption of different trauma assessment tools; alternative training of social workers; policy advocacy; and future areas for research.

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The abolitionist movement is gaining momentum in the United States and the United Kingdom and calls to shrink the carceral state have become a staple of grassroots movements and activist groups fighting for a more just world in the 21st century. The role played by higher education (HE) educators in this struggle for a world without prisons is an important and yet difficult one, as they can expose university students to abolitionist ideas but have to do so in the context of a HE sector that is increasingly governed by neoliberal logics of marketization and professionalization. In this article, I reflect on my own experience teaching prison abolition to criminology students at Liverpool Hope University (LHU). The article revisits Richard Stanley Peters’ notion of education as initiation to show how an abolitionist pedagogy grounded in critical perspectives on punishment can be practiced to de-initiate students from two problematic mindsets that criminological education tends to produce: that of guardians of order and internal critics.

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The work of John Dewey continues to challenge educators whose work is to put theory into practice in the classroom. In the United States and elsewhere, a popular impression of Dewey and progressive education is that of inductive, child-centered pedagogy, but his writings in Democracy and Education—as well as in subsequent re-writings of previous works such as in How We Think (1910) — demonstrate that his earlier notions of inductive methods and a child-centered progressivism were supplanted by a pragmatism that was more akin to today’s social constructivism in terms of consideration of experience, subject matter, community, and the inherent tension between public and private and objective and subjective knowledge (Garrison, 1995, Prawat, 2000). Contrasting the current resurgence of a myopic psychological behaviorism ushered in by neoliberal testing and the standards movement over the past 25 years, Dewey’s turn toward recognizing the social and interactive continues to provide sustenance and hope for the development of more educationally robust schooling, both reflective and leading to a social and civil society that is more democratically infused. Here we attempt to explain how ideas Dewey first laid out in Democracy and Education have been seminal in our own pursuit and development of more philosophically vigorous contemporary constructivist theorizing whose philosophical anthropology, in contrast to most cognitively defined and confined versions, embraces and engenders a critical, creative, and emancipatory education. We will pay particular attention to the educative and emancipatory potency emanating from Dewey’s emphasis on community and communication, and exemplified in our descriptions of actual classroom practice.

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Cultures of teaching represent the habits, knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs that educators share or embody as a professional body or group. To learn more about teaching cultures, specifically cultures of graduate teaching assistants (TAs), I interviewed 17 TAs at a large Canadian university. I adopted Dan Lortie’s classic work on teaching cultures as a theoretical framework and analyzed interviews using grounded theory principles. Results implied that TAs had various teaching habits, including conservative teaching tendencies. According to Lortie, conservatism stands for ways educators rely on their past (schooling) experience to guide how they teach. I build on this, using the phrase ‘Teaching with Ghosts’ to call attention to how an educator’s past experience or prior knowledge, history, and memories haunt classrooms and hinder educational change. While I found evidence of conservatism among TAs, literature indicates that schoolteachers, professors, and teacher candidates for example all have conservative orientations. I conclude with a teaching audit and encourage educators to nurture more sustainable teaching dispositions.

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Humour as a performance has been studied at length from the prism of its relationship to politics. However, there are fewer works that looks at humour as pedagogy. Pedagogy includes every aspect of an individual as embedded in a socio-economic and political order. This embeddedness brings an individual face to face with diverse sources from which it learns. The paper argues that humour in its different avatars fulfils the purpose of teaching-learning in the same way as any other pedagogical tool. By acting as such it ensures its role as working for the status quo as well as for the anti-status quoists. Humour then ceases to be a mundane experience without any relevance but becomes one of the most sources of consensualisation as well as rebellion in contemporary times.

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The high and ever-rising cost of college textbooks is a significant financial burden for students and their families, hindering access to essential learning materials and affecting academic performance and retention rates. To address these issues, instructors and universities are exploring cost-control methods such as free source materials, Open Educational Resources (OER), and automatic textbook billing (ATB) for affordable materials. This study analyzes the impact of automatic textbook billing, more specifically Equitable Access at one institution, examining potential savings for students. However, findings suggest that Equitable Access does not benefit most students financially. It disproportionately benefits students in higher-paying majors with expensive textbooks, subsidized by those in lower-paying majors with cheaper textbooks, raising equity concerns. This issue is particularly significant for students of color, who are more likely to graduate from lower-paying majors, bearing an undue financial burden.

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Critical political education courses, as theoretical-philosophical and methodological spatial processes, serve to awaken the working-class consciousness toward a revolutionary praxis. They are regarded as strategic education processes for the organization of the working class for the political struggle toward human emancipation. This study presents a literature review of articles on critical political education courses, obtained from Marxist academic journals. Twenty articles were included in the study, using the following method of selection. The article content was analyzed and discussed along two thematic axes: “Conception of Critical Political Education Courses” and “Contributions of Marxist Critical Theory in the Political Education Courses of Workers.” The study found that the main ideas developed in the articles were “historical-dialectical materialism,” “historical-critical pedagogy,” “socialist pedagogy,” “the pedagogy of social movements,” and “applications to Latin American countries.”