Volume 16, numéro 4, 2025

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Activist approaches to teaching resist neoliberal and white-centric approaches to education. Within such a framework, students can develop racial literacy and civic identity as activist citizens. In this case study of one classroom in a publicly funded democratic school, the teacher used activist pedagogy — an approach that directly engages young people with real-world injustices and supports them to take action — to weave together restorative pedagogy, racial literacy, and elements of critical race theory. The teacher’s practices illustrate how these theoretical perspectives, when combined, can nurture students’ sense of justice and equity. Drawing on classroom observations, interviews, and students’ written/artistic works, the article highlights how children in a mixed-grade class (ages 9–11) used critical inquiry and activism to advocate for social change. Even within a neoliberal system of schooling, this study shows the potential of a holistic, activist-oriented framework to empower young people to see themselves as capable of transforming the world around them.

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Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, also known as EDI, is one of several acronyms that refer to policies and practices of organizations, such as K to 12 school boards and post-secondary institutions, to promote inclusive and equitable environments. While EDI has become a ubiquitous discourse in educational administration, its impact extends into classroom pedagogies, hiring practices, curriculum development, and institutional culture. In this article, we critically examine the extent to which EDI committees and initiatives fulfil their promise of fostering inclusive environments to support equity-denied groups. We address the following research questions: (1) How have EDI frameworks evolved in education? (2) What gaps exist between EDI policies and their implementation for transformative impact? (3) What alternative approaches can create sustainable and impactful change? Overall, the article casts a critical eye on EDI initiatives, exploring opportunities, challenges, and potential futurities considering the polarizing discourse of political correctness and anti-wokeness.

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This case study investigates the perceptions of teachers and students about learning decision-making and democratic participation in their primary education school. This research, conducted at a public school in Barcelona (Catalonia), aims to characterize the opportunities and limitations the studied school provides in this regard, based on the perceptions of 101 students aged 6 to 8 and six of their teachers. Following a qualitative methodology, which included interviews with teachers and a research dossier for the students, the investigation reveals that students perceive that they engage in decision-making within their immediate environment, but show limited awareness of broader, long-term decisions. As inferred from the interviews, teachers appear to significantly influence these processes, since their opinions and beliefs about citizenship and decision-making seem to shape the guidance they provide to students. The findings point out the complexities of learning decision-making and democratic participation in school to foster an active, critical and participative citizenship.

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Poverty impacts the mental, physical, social and emotional health and wellbeing of individuals, particularly Indigenous children and adolescents living in remote reserve communities. Within many diverse ways to conceptualize poverty, Indigenous poverty stems from the detrimental traumas resulting from colonialism, continued systemic racialization, removal of cultural identity and loss of self-determination. Residential schools and other colonial policies and traumas have eroded Indigenous culture, language and ways of life. Ongoing systemic and environmental racism, discrimination and stereotyping lend to the continued cycle of poverty for Indigenous people living in Canada, with those living on reserve experiencing the most extreme effects on their life and academic success. This article reviews the literature to draw attention to the impacts of complex and multifaceted Indigenous poverty on educational outcomes for those Indigenous students living on reserve. Overall, students who experience poverty experience negative impacts on their physical, mental, cognitive and emotional development, functioning and processing, resulting in lower educational and academic outcomes and a more likely chance that they will continue to experience poverty as adults. In the context of Indigenous ways of being, living in poverty can cause a disconnection from the land, culture and identity so integral to their being.

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Epistemologies are understood as ways of knowing that stem from an individual’s ontological orientation. Such orientations are intimately tied to personal experiences that educational scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings (2001) argued create “systems of knowing” based on majority-normative epistemological stances. In this manuscript, we were interested in analyzing how institutional knowledge is transformed into a system of knowing based on a norming of beliefs through educational research funding. Specifically, we analyse the ways leadership within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) conceptualizes ideas of "quality" research based on public blog posts by the institute's former director. Our results show a tilted appreciation for replicable studies based on an epistemology that understands educational research to be similar to scientific research in all fields – one centered on “rigorous reasoning” aimed at generating testable theories to expand outcomes at scale. As such, we argue such a discourse of quality research is contributing to the perpetuation, rather than amelioration, of inequities within educational settings. To end, we provide possible new directions for centering context-based epistemological understandings of quality within educational research. Such epistemologies are better suited to inform researchers who seek to close opportunity gaps in educational settings as well as increase the impact of educational research across multiple contexts.

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Guest editors’ introduction to special section, Investigating Education, Class Antagonisms and Solidarity: Toward Critical Humanist Democratic Societies. This collection details how critical educators contend with alienating conditions as students and teachers investigate social issues, direct knowledge, their exchanges, and personal agency toward democratic participation to secure their everyday needs, human freedom, and dignity.

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This paper returns to the roots of European Humanism to rediscover the moral and political base for contemporary narrative inquiry. A brief analytical review is conducted of forms of artistic representation from C15th/C16th Florentine painting to reveal steps taken to use narrative form in the pursuit and advocacy of humanist method. This is placed within the frame of a Ricoeur (1989) four-stage typology for narrative method. The paper closes with an argument that social and educational research should be guided by Humanist principles in its aims, but also in its method – Humanist in intent, Humanist in substance.

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We contend that September 11th and the Black Lives Matter movement acted as critical moments that challenged earlier notions of the American identity and the false pretenses of a racially, religiously, and culturally equitable United States. Using theoretical lenses of double consciousness and cultural memory, we further that the way newspapers present narratives of these events emphasizes how the memories of a country and who they think they are fluctuate and change throughout time. We end with implications for social studies spaces that seek to explore 9/11 and the Black Lives Matter movement’s impact on American national identity, and/or hope to critique how memories shaped by media outlets like newspapers reinscribe or counter previous notions of the American national identity.

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This small labor history studies the rhetoric and techniques used by administrators in the University System of Maryland to disperse and co-opt nascent graduate worker and adjunct unionization efforts in the 2010s. Those efforts centered on exploiting the strange social status of academic labor, claiming to speak for workers, and relying on the concept of university “shared governance” to create toothless advisory bodies. The success of that rhetoric, however, was contingent on intra-union conflict over turf and the inexperience of USM graduate organizers, who have continually directed their organizing efforts towards lobbying for state collective bargaining rights. USM’s rhetorical reframing of graduate academic labor contributed to the continuous defeat of graduate union drives in the USM for the last twenty years. This study suggests that efforts to change U.S. higher education through labor organizing should be wary of any attempt to channel organizing energy into bureaucratic bodies and that success will require an expansive definition of “shared governance” that includes graduate workers, adjuncts, and staff.

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Global pedagogy refers to a broad, ethically grounded approach to education that extends beyond national boundaries and emphasizes the collective responsibility to teach and learn about interconnected global crises and historical injustices. The question of Palestine and the ongoing genocide in Gaza serve as the "canary in the coalmine". Its suppression is not an isolated phenomenon but a diagnostic for a wider authoritarian turn that seeks to foreclose the very possibility of critical, transnational solidarity. In this dialogue, Michel Peters, a philosopher of education, and Linda Herrera, a critical anthropologist of education in the Middle East, engage in a dialogue about how educators can keep critical thought and solidarity alive by partaking in practices that are resilient, resourceful, and relentlessly focused on building counter-publics. These requires embracing a “fugitive” pedagogy, curating and archiving counter-memories, and building transnational literacies of solidarity.