Arlo Kempf

Guest Worker Programs and Canada: Towards a Foundation for Understanding the Complex Pedagogies of Transnational Labour.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contextualise historically transnational labour experiences within guest worker programs in Canada and to provide a conceptual foundation for analysing work, learning and living relations with special attention to agricultural workers.Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a critical review of the literature as well as secondary analysis of existing research on agricultural guest workers in Ontario, Canada.Findings – The authors argue that the structural conditions for these particular forms of work, learning and living relations have a long historical trajectory that dates back in North America to the nineteenth century. They outline a long trajectory of convergence of American and Canadian policies in this regard. In terms of work, learning and living experiences we show how shaped by race, class and citizenship relations, as well as by the learning that infuses their reproduction, intensification and contestation.Originality/value – The article ...

Colour-blind praxis in Havana: interrogating Cuban teacher discourses of race and racelessness

Despite massive gains in racial equality over the past 50 years, racism persists in twenty-first century Cuba. One of the key tools for the preservation and maintenance of racism is the discourse of racelessness through which the relevance of race is denied and silenced. Paradoxically, the racelessness frame has also been a guiding anti-racist force for over a century; an effective tool for challenging racism on the island since the late eighteenth century. Based on interviews with 41 Cuban teachers conducted in the Havana area, this article investigates teacher understandings of race and racelessness in Cuban society generally, and with regard to the schooling context in particular. Conversations with teachers reveal a paradoxical formation in which teachers using the racelessness approach, are indeed doing race work in their classrooms following an anti-racism derived from the larger Cuban race narrative as well as from their own experiences with race and racism.

The Politics of Cultural Knowledge

The advent and implementation of European colonialism have disrupted innumerable epistemological geographies around the globe. Countless cultural ways of knowing and local educational practices have in some way been displaced and dislocated within the universalizing project of the Euro-Colonial Empire. This book revisits the colonial relations of culture and education, questions various embedded imperial procedures and extricates the strategic offerings of local ways of knowing which resisted colonial imposition. The contributors of this collection are concerned with the ways in which colonial education forms the governing edict for local peoples. In The Politics of Cultural Knowledge, the authors offer an alternative reading of conventional discussions of culture and what counts as knowledge concerning race, class, gender, sexuality, identity, and difference in the context of the Diaspora.

Katrina, Cronulla Beach and France on Fire: An Anti-Colonial Critique of Empire in 2006

With a focus on both the theoretical and practical implications of anti-colonial theory, this article discusses a number of conflicts that have brought the oppression of marginalized bodies to the forefront of mainstream media attention. The authors formulate an anti-colonial response to the human-made disasters in the Southern United States, France and Australia. While race is finally being taken up in the mainstream media with regard to these events, such coverage has largely involved strategic denials, powerful silences and re-invocations of dominant colonial and racial paradigms. The anti-colonial discursive framework looks to the voices of the oppressed and to the various forms of, and potentialities for, agency and resistance to guide its response to the social and discursive disasters discussed herein. Given the prominence of ‘post’ discourses in the academy, a resuscitation of the anti-colonial discourse is necessary in order to provoke action-oriented resistance-based responses to modern colonial practices.

Post-Racialism in the Classroom as Anti-Racist Praxis in Cuba?

Although Cuba is among the world’s most racially egalitarian countries, racism exists on the island despite years of progress and struggle for racial equality. One of the key concepts used by Cuban teachers to explain race and racism on the island is the discourse of post-racialism, through which the contemporary significance of race is denied. While a silencing tool at times, Cuban post-racial discourse has also been an effective strategy for countering racism on the island for well over a century. Based on a mixed method study (survey and interview) conducted in the Havana area, this article investigates teachers’ understandings of race and post-racialism in Cuba with a focus on education, schools and teachers’ work using a critical race theory framework. The findings reveal that teachers understand themselves as frontline race workers and vanguard anti-racists. At the same time, the pedagogy and practice in which they are engaged relies heavily on a color-blind, post-racial approach which is derived from the larger Cuban race narrative as well as from the teachers’ personal and communal experiences with race and racism.

Not What I Signed up for: The Changing Meaning of Being a Teacher

On the back of the toilet tank in Franco’s bathroom was a piece of concrete block with a small string attached to a jagged corner. A tag he had attached on a string read: “Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.” Franco had sent me in to take a look after I asked him about what it means to be a teacher in LA. The home decor item had come through his front window the day after his “least effective” teacher rating by the Los Angeles Times was published in its annual rating of teachers. An anonymous note in his mailbox had read, “Our kids deserve better than a piece of shit like you.” Franco is a fifth grade teacher in South LA. At the time, he was known as the teacher who was happy to take transient students, English-language learners (ELLs), and other kids whose abilities might have a hard time showing up on a state test. Franco was “the go to guy for these students.” He loved teaching them (unlike some of his colleagues) and he had preservice and professional training to support ELLs—he understood the job and did it well and with joy. Now he struggled to spread those kids around, telling his principal, “IL’ll take my fair share, but not more than anybody else—I’m done being that guy.” Franco has moved away from doing what he does best, from serving students who most need it, and from teaching with students in mind at every turn.

The History, Logic, and Push for Standardized Testing

Karl Marx suggested that people “make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please …, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”1 With this in mind, history is not merely impacted by a perpetual push and pull but rather it is forged by it; through struggle, through controversy, and through dispute (over ideas, over survival, over competitive advantage, etc). To understand our own time, the early twenty-first century, is to recognize that we are simultaneously producers of history on the one hand, and that we are produced by history on the other. Among the most important communal human systems is government, which, for a variety of reasons, often tends to reflect the values of only a small minority. In the United States and Canada, governments at various levels are responsible for systems thar organize much of our social and cultural existence: these range from schools, to transportation, to international and military relations (determining which wars and humanitarian efforts we do or do not engage in), to our access to health care. In addition to systems that are actually run by the state, governments regulate access to food, beverages, and drugs; commercial transactions; travel; and in most places, our sexual behavior.

Implications: Synthesis of Findings, Resistance, and Alternatives

In twenty-first-century schooling, standardized testing (ST) has as much to do with politics as education. In the United States, the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) may produce the largest and most complex web of ST in all of history, while simultaneously, parents in record numbers are pulling their children from the tests and public outcry has reached fever pitch across the country. In Canada, a much quieter push and pull is under way. Like other phenomena related to ST, the differences in resistance as well as political bolstering seem quantitatively (rather than qualitatively) different in Canada. The conversation about testing in Canada is a much smaller (and calmer) version of that in the United States. In Ontario, which is heavily invested in ST, teachers and a small but growing number of parents are pushing back with students opting out in small numbers. This appears, roughly, to correspond with less testing and with relatively less teaching to the test than in US contexts. While Ontario teachers primarily expressed concern with questions of the changing classroom and the changing job, many US teachers read the testing landscape with an eye toward politics as well, and many identify a hidden curriculum of testing as far as the profession.

The School as Factory Farm: All Testing All the Time

In 2004, leading testing expert Robert L. Brennan1 explained: “I failed to recognize that a testing revolution was underway in this country that was based on the nearly unchallenged belief (with almost no supporting evidence) that high-stakes testing can and will lead to improved education.”2 Despite such cautions from mainstream assessment and measurement scholars, the current frequency and use of standardized testing is unprecedented in US history. In Canada, despite significant variation across its provinces and territories, norm-referenced standardized testing (ST) has scarcely been as widely used as it is today. To be clear, testing is not the only important development underway in education. Despite a push against social foundations in education3 in some teacher preparation programs, teacher training is generally more comprehensive than it used to be. New teachers are better versed in supporting diverse students, they have access to a greater variety of instruction and assessment techniques and they have a deeper applied understanding of education research and technology than many of their predecessors. However, while testing is not the only driver of change, it is the most significant. Standardized testing is best understood as a technology, the nature and effects of which can be read a number of ways.

Revising the Pedagogical Form: Test-Oriented Teaching and Learning

I walked into Eddy’s1 classroom at just after 7 a.m. on a Monday morning. I thanked him for seeing me before class; for taking the time out of a busy day, week, and month to talk about his professional life and practice. We spent the next few moments standing on chairs, opening one large white-framed window after another, until we had let in enough cool morning air that I had to put my jacket back on. “By midmorning, it’ll be very warm in here, and other than lunch, my guys won’t be going anywhere today.” When I asked why, he told me, “all testing all the time; math and science until the end of the week, that’s it.” We had dinner that evening, the temperature had dropped again, and I asked if he had spent the day inside as he suspected. He had, and would do the same for the remainder of the week.