George L. Boggs

Critical Digital Literacies and the Struggle over What’s Common

It is tempting and even useful to imagine stable camps in a warlike contest over common interests in school reform, and it is an ingrained national tradition to portray meaningful struggle between camps, with Jimmy Stewart or Sidney Poitier playing the good guy in the movie version. Web 2.0 activism, a type of critical literacy, challenges that view as teachers and parents, long positioned in the backseat in national education reform, are increasingly able to drive, organize, and disagree with self-selected protagonists of positive change. In this chapter, we examine the connections among Critical Digital Literacies (CDL) and the struggle over what is “common” among stakeholders in American education.

Music Experiences as Writing Solutions

Edgar Corral and I met during my first day on the job as a teacher educator. It was a Young Adult Literature course, and I found myself distracted by the hand-decorated notebook cover on Edgar’s notebook. It was striking. Edgar’s explanation was even more striking: “I create these frame sequences when I zone out listening to music,” he told me.

The Reordering of Knowledge

In his newest book Religion and Critical Psychology (2007) Jeremy Carrette argues that knowledge is “reordered” through political and economic orientations and that this reordering often goes unexamined (p. 41). The “disciplinary regimes and concepts” that direct the production of knowledge are thus “ethical systems of framing the world and they require our philosophical scrutiny and moral evaluation” (p. 55). In the first half of his book, Carrette provides evidence for the following claims: (a) that a knowledge economy exists, (b) that the knowledge economy promotes moral and philosophical “amnesia” (p. 57), (c) that scholars would recognize more fully the rules governing the production of knowledge if it weren’t for this “amnesia” caused by the knowledge economy, and (d) that there are sites from which a critical perspective on the knowledge economy might be established. In the second half of the book Carrette deals with psychology of religion as a product of the knowledge economy. The work as a whole is “an attempt to end the political innocence of one field of inquiry” (p. 40). The result is a challenge that reaches beyond the psychology of religion, questioning the lines that divide the psychology of religion from other human sciences.