Avner Segall

Re)Considerations of Ignorance and Resistance in Teacher Education

This article questions the status of two recurring concepts in teacher preparation: resistance and ignorance. Both of these terms have significant presence within the teacher education literature. Because both of these terms often occur in relation to a particular topic, that of race and multicultural education, we also utilize race as the discourse that frames our consideration of these two important issues. To reframe and reorient our attention to the processes of ignorance and resistance, we turn to psychoanalytic considerations of those terms and consider what such a turn can offer teacher educators as they engage teacher candidates with issues of race.

Critical History: Implications for History/Social Studies Education

Abstract Addressing the possibilities opened up for the teaching of social studies by a growing body of critical literature in and about history, this paper examines ways in which history/social studies educators might respond responsibly to the challenges posed by that literature in order to thoughtfully re-consider why we learn history, what we do (and could do) with it, and for what (and whose) purposes. With much of what was previously taken for granted in the poetics and politics of history now under scrutiny, this paper explores what it might mean to teach history that is aware of its construction and what opportunities such an awareness might afford the pedagogical practice through which students not only come to know a past but also to realize a present and a future.

White teachers talking race

In light of the increasing racial diversity in American schools and the consistently homogenous teacher workforce in the United States, understanding the ways white teachers consider and attend to racial issues is of crucial importance to the educational landscape. This paper, based on a qualitative study, explores five white American teachers’ talk about race following their viewing of a documentary film about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. The paper adds to the already rich literature on white teachers’ talk about race by using three kinds of analytic tools: narrative analysis, discourse analysis, and psychoanalytically-informed notions of ignorance and resistance that complicate the existing literature’s exploration of white teachers’ avoidance of racial issues. The authors argue that white teachers have sophisticated knowledge about race, despite the common suppositions otherwise, and suggest attention be paid to the ways in which this knowledge is activated, ignored, and/or resisted. The paper concludes with implications for teacher education.

Reflecting Socially on Social Issues in a Social Studies Methods Course

Reflection is widely embraced in teacher education as a necessary process in becoming a good teacher. While there is broad acceptance of this idea, the nature of reflection has been challenged, particularly by those seeking reflection that is socially situated and critical, implicating teaching in its broader social context. This paper examines the use of critical social reflection in two social studies methods courses that allows teacher candidates to theorize rather than consume theories generated by others. Engaging reflection as critical and social discourse reveals the idea‐making that goes on among pre‐service teachers and instructors as they actively engage theory construction.

Revitalizing Critical Discourses in Social Education: Opportunities for a More Complexified (Un)Knowing

Abstract The author seeks to revitalize the interests of social educators in the value of using critical, postmodern discourses for rich comprehension of and productive scholarly research in our field. These discourses (a) challenge existing understanding within social education and the knowledge and knower they help produce; and (b) imagine more complex, nuanced, and critical ways with which to conduct research and narrate findings. The primary foci include an examination of the role and impact of prevalent grand narratives, myths, discourses, and practices, as well as their underlying power relations. This raises questions about forms of knowledge, knowing, identity, and the subjectivity they help engender and celebrate—whether in disciplinary, curricular, and pedagogical encounters in classrooms or in research conducted in/about them. An overview of critical discourses is followed by an examination of their potential engagement in disciplines comprising the social studies. The author then moves to issues of gender and race, concluding with an exploration of critical methodologies and a discussion of the possibilities and implications they afford scholars in critical research.

Christianity and its legacy in education

Much of the discussion regarding religion and schooling in the US has been limited to ideological clashes surrounding the role of the courts and, ostensibly, the much litigated issue of prayer in schools. This comes at the expense of an examination of deeper curricular issues rooted in language and school mechanisms borne of historical consequences. The authors seek to reframe the discussion of religion and schooling, arguing that to suggest that the removal of explicit prayerfulness equates to the cleansing of US public education of its religious character is facile and ahistorical. They suggest, instead, that religion remains in the language, practices, and routines of schooling but also in conceptions of the “’child” ‘ and assumptions about the role of schools emanating from such conceptions. Evoking the notion of pentimento, the piece seeks to elucidate the Judeo-Christian character of schooling in the US as a way of re-imagining discussions regarding the relationship between religion and/as curriculum. The piece concludes with a discussion of the implications of such an examination for curriculum studies and teacher education.

Reading the bible as a pedagogical text: Testing, testament, and some postmodern considerations about religion/the bible in contemporary Education

Abstract While it is true that following various Supreme Court decisions in the last century, religion is, in most cases, no longer explicitly taught in public school classrooms, we use this article to explore the ways in which implicit religious understandings regarding curriculum and pedagogy still remain prevalent in current public education. Building on previous work, we first aim to problematize the ways religion and particularly Judeo‐Christian assumptions remain at the core of secular public education in the United States. To do so, we work to engage the Bible as the foundational Western text and its understanding of testing and of teaching as testament to illustrate particular assumptions about assessment, questioning, and the possibility for interrogating authoritative text. In the process we outline a historical precedent that twins passive reading of the Bible as always‐already containing singular truths with a modern educational system underwritten by these same assumptions about knowledge and expertise lying in the teacher and the textbook. We suggest that the Bible is not only our “first” text—authoritative, literal, and fixed—but also our first postmodern text which explicitly allows for, indeed encourages, creative, even subversive, encounters with knowledge rather than being subject to passive submission in a system of transmissive education. Ultimately, and using existing work in hermeneutics, critical literacy, and constructivist education, we pursue a critical reengagement with the historical and ongoing role of the Bible and religion in modern public, secular schooling as a way of revisiting fundamental epistemologies and ways of reading text and particularly the curricular implications of revising how we read education‐as‐text.

Reading the Newspaper as a Social Text

commonly shared experiences involve the mass media. Engaging us at almost every turn, the media—film, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, music, advertising, and software industries—have become primary avenues through which most of us come to know about the world, both near and far. They help frame the world for us, elevating certain issues, and the ways in which to engage issues to the forefront, while designating others to the margins. As such, media texts act as social texts; they construct social reality and invite us to experience that reality from preferred social positions. Through their mediation—a process combining explicit, implicit, and null messages (that is, information and perspectives that are stated, implied, silenced, or ignored), the media create spaces that invite, and at times direct, us in specific ways to negotiate opinions, attitudes, and values about the world and its people. Whether one sees the role of mass media as positive or negative, or a combination of the two, the media are not merely neutral conveyors of a message but conveyors with a message. Indeed, the media are pedagogical environments that position us to know or not know about the world and its people and do that in some ways rather than others. Exploring the media in this light, we argue, should be the focus of analysis when media texts are used in the social studies classroom. Much of the discussion in education regarding the media, especially television, has focused on decrying the media’s prevalence in students’ lives. Postman (1985) determined that the media, not school, have become the students’ first curriculum and that, consequently, teachers need to counter those influences by teaching students how to resist the media’s messages. Newspapers, however, have been immune to much of this criticism, perhaps because newspapers use the more traditional medium of print, with which teachers are familiar. Also, newspapers deal with what teachers define as serious issues and do so in more in-depth ways than other mass media. Whatever the reason, newspapers have not only escaped such scrutiny but also, for some time, been welcome in the classroom, especially in the social studies classroom. In the literature, which is written by teachers or directed at kindergarten through twelfth-grade teachers, authors discuss a variety of purposes for using the newspaper in the classroom. Many of those purposes involve issues of literacy, although some pertain specifically to content. Vockell and Cusick (1995) suggest that using newspapers in the classroom can make major contributions to growth in students’ ability and interest in reading. “Students who read and use newspapers,” the authors, using research by Stone and Grusin (1991), suggest, “have better comprehension and vocabularies than those who don’t” (2). Further, they propose that newspapers give students the opportunity “to be exposed to more up-to-date information than that found in textbooks” (2). Exploring the uses of a newspaper-ineducation program, Street (2002) writes, “The newspaper is a source of up-to-date and compelling information that teachers can use to teach current events” (131). Some emphasis in the literature is put on using the newspaper to teach current events, but there is also much discussion of newspapers as serving an already existing curriculum. After surveying teachers, Vockell and Cusick (1995) state that most teachers integrated their instruction on the newspaper with the regular curriculum, indicating that teachers believe that using Reading the Newspaper as a Social Text

Teaching with Evidence.

In this age of real and fake news, students need to be able to assess the trustworthiness of evidence. The authors’ current research examines students’ use of evidence in secondary social studies classrooms as students deliberate contemporary public policy issues. The authors found that students shifted their evaluations of the trustworthiness of evidence depending on whether they were making these assessments in the abstract or in the context of a specific issue. In the abstract, evidence like statistical data ranked high, but when students considered a policy issue, they gave greater weight to anecdote and personal experience. The authors offer several recommendations for teaching good evidence use.

The Victoria and Albert Museum

Whether measured by their expansive numbers worldwide, their collections and exhibitions, or their community-based mandates, public museums are familiar institutions from which the public asks much. Visitors seek pleasure and entertainment; they want access to objects and collections that provide them with knowledge in diverse areas, and an affirmation of a commitment to store and protect valued objects and stories. With an historical commitment to tangible material culture that represents the ‘authentic’ object, and a responsibility to provide lifelong learning through exhibition practices and programming, many museums are rethinking what they might be and what relationship they may have with their communities. In moving beyond being solely benign rooms full of objects and nostalgia for former national glories (Bennett, 1995), museums have restructured their collections, exhibition practices, and institutional mandates to increasingly invoke contemporary understandings about the contested nature of knowledge as well as addressing issues of social justice and democratic citizenship (Silverman, 2009).