Dennis Carlson

Power/knowledge/pedagogy : the meaning of democratic education in unsettling times

* Critical Educational Theory in Unsettling Times Dennis Carlson and Michael W. Apple. State Educational Policy And Curriculum Reform In Unsettling Times * Education in Unsettling Times: Public Intellectuals and the Promise of Cultural Studies Henry Giroux. * Pulp Fictions: Education, Markets, and the Information Superhighway Jane Kenway with Chris Bigum, Lindsay Fitzclarence, and Janine Collier. * Citizens or Consumers? Continuity and Change in Contemporary Education Policy Geoff Whitty. * Respondent: Distressed Worlds: Social Justice Through Educational Transformations Madeleine Arnot. Education, Identity, And The Other * Becoming Right: Education and the Formation of Conservative Movements M. W. Apple and Anita Oliver. * On Shaky Grounds: Constructing White Working-Class Masculinities in the Late Twentieth Century Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, and Judi Addelston. * Self and Education: Reversals and Cycles Philip Wexler. * Respondent: Self Education: Identity, Self, and the New Politics of Education D. Carlson. Reading Curriculum Texts * Danger in the Safety Zone: Notes on Race, Resentment, and the Discourse of Crime, Violence, and Suburban Security Cameron McCarthy, Alicia P. Rodriguez, Stephen David, Shuaib Meecham, Heriberto Godina, K. E. Supriya, and Carrie Wilson-Brown. * Fiction, Fantasy, and Femininities: Popular Texts and Young Womens Literacies Linda Christian-Smith. * Image Is Nothing: Struggling to Unsettle Basal Readers and More Patrick Shannon and Patricia Crawford. * Respondent: Loose Change: The Production of Texts William G. Tierney. Pedagogy And Empowerment * On the Limits to Empowerment Through Critical and Feminist Pedagogies Jennifer M. Gore. * Who Will Survive America? Pedagogy as Cultural Preservation Gloria Ladson-Billings. * Global Politics and Local Antagonisms: Research and Practice as Dissent and Possibility Peter McLaren and Kris Gutierrez. * Respondent: Pedagogy for an Oppositional Community Kathleen Weiler

Troubling Heroes: Of Rosa Parks, Multicultural Education, and Critical Pedagogy

In this article, the author explores some of the implications of cultural studies perspectives on representation, curriculum, and pedagogy. The most significant and far reaching of these implications has to do with the postmodern disruption of the binary opposition that has framed thinking about education in the modern era: the logos/mythos or truth/myth binary. To develop these ideas, the article focuses on the mythologizing of Rosa Parks as a new, multicultural hero in American education and popular culture. The author argues that although the growing attention to Parkss life must be taken as a hopeful sign that new multicultural heroes are beginning to be celebrated in the curriculum, as Parkss life has been mythologized, it increasingly has been incorporated within a nonthreatening and even culturally conservative mythology. The article then explores some of the attributes of alternative, more progressive mythologizings of Parkss life.

Hope without Illusion: Telling the Story of Democratic Educational Renewal.

In this article, the author reflects on his participation in a project in democratic educational renewal in an inner‐city high school in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1990s. He frames the case study within a number of broader questions in democratic educational research and theory having to do with the need to construct narratives of hope without illusion. Such research narratives, he argues, are rooted in a recognition that culture is contested and thus open rather than determined. Progressive stories open up possibilities for critical reflection and strategic action at various sites, and they cross the borders between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ accounts. To develop these ideas, he draws on a number of poststructural theorists, including most notably Gramsci and Foucault. He situates the case study within the context of an analysis of the new cultural politics of: corporate‐sponsored school reform, the surveillance and policing of urban youth, and the ‘othering’ of progressives voices in urban education.In this article, the author reflects on his participation in a project in democratic educational renewal in an inner‐city high school in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1990s. He frames the case study within a number of broader questions in democratic educational research and theory having to do with the need to construct narratives of hope without illusion. Such research narratives, he argues, are rooted in a recognition that culture is contested and thus open rather than determined. Progressive stories open up possibilities for critical reflection and strategic action at various sites, and they cross the borders between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ accounts. To develop these ideas, he draws on a number of poststructural theorists, including most notably Gramsci and Foucault. He situates the case study within the context of an analysis of the new cultural politics of: corporate‐sponsored school reform, the surveillance and policing of urban youth, and the ‘othering’ of progressives voices in urban education.

2007 AESA Presidential Address Conflict of the Faculties: Democratic Progressivism in the Age of “No Child Left Behind”

The university is a geographical and material space, but it is also—and perhaps more importantly—a topological space, a conceptual structure that establishes the discursive parameters for interaction within the university and with its “outside.”1 As a topological structure, the university is an idea, and thus a way to “think” the world into existence in terms of certain borders that both divide and connect. An institution, Jacques Derrida (2004) observes, is not merely a few walls, “it is also and already the structure of our interpretation” (102). Because the university is a topological space, we carry it around with us even when we travel “outside” the university. When we travel to conferences, like this one, we carry the idea of the university with us and spatially map-out the hotel as a type of university space, mapped according to some predictable, and hopefully unpredictable, rituals of

Life Among the Ruins

We find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.

Coming Undone: James Baldwin’s Another Country and Queer Pedagogy

In this chapter, I explore some of the terrain opened up by a queer pedagogy that undoes the hegemonic norms of white and black masculinity. Any popular culture text in which masculinity is performed or represented can be read from the perspective of a queer pedagogy, to deconstruct the reigning narratives of masculinity production in American culture. In this case, I am interested in a literary text from an earlier era, James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962a), a novel that graphically depicts how hegemonic norms of white and black masculinity in the United States in the late 1950s were implicated in a destructive undoing of the self, and how the undoing of such norms can lead to a liberatory redoing of race, gender, class, and sexual identity. Baldwin’s novel, I argue, also reveals a perspective on identity that is consistent with many of the central tenets of queer theory and queer masculinity studies. When read and taught through the critical lens of queer theory, Another Country is a novel that explores the self as intersectional, that is, forged out of an ensemble of race, class, gender, and sexual identities that are dynamic and open rather than closed and fixed. I argue that Baldwin also develops a quite complex analysis of the performance of gendered sexuality in the novel and his queer characters engage (although with limited success) in re-performing and redoing masculinity.

Tidal Waves of School Reform: Types of Reforms, Government Controls, and Community AdvocatesTidal Waves of School Reform: Types of Reforms, Government Controls, and Community AdvocatesMitchellSamuel. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996. 212 pp. (cloth).

This book examines three case studies of systemic school restructuring over the past decade-the Kentucky Educational Reform Act (KERA) state reform initiative, the institutionalization of community governing boards in Chicago, and the movement for performance testing and charter schools in Alberta, Canada. In each case, the author finds that powerful business interests were the primary supporters of restructuring and that community advocacy groups and students were largely or entirely ignored by reformers. I think the book is most useful for its detailed history of each of these reform movements and for its analysis of the similarities and differences between them. The conceptual and theoretical grounding for the analysis of the case studies is far less developed, although Mitchell does clearly side with the critical theoretical tradition and its concern that education be primarily about empowering students, teachers, and the community. He places a particularly strong emphasis on involving students more in the renewal process through advocacy groups-something he finds notably missing in recent restructuring initiatives. Mitchell builds a persuasive case that the so-called second wave of school reform-which has supposedly been about decentralizing power in education-has really served to shift more power to corporate and state elites, working in cooperation. Elite groups, Mitchell concludes, have always kept their gaze firmly locked on the bottom line of raising standardized test scores in a narrowly instrumental manner and always understood the purpose of educational reform in terms of economic competitiveness and the skills needs of the labor force. Mitchell recognizes, to his