Kathy Hytten

Teaching Globalization Issues to Education Students: What's the Point?.

We argue that teaching the dynamics of globalization to education students is an important aspect of teaching for social justice and for the development of critical awareness, thinking, and sensitivity. We begin this position paper by briefly characterizing globalization and exploring a range of approaches to teaching this topic. We then describe some of the challenges and risks of teaching globalization issues. We reflect on the responses of our students, looking at such issues as guilt, paralysis, disconnection, fear, pity, and anger. We end by describing how teaching about globalization can support our broader goals as critical educators, which include helping students to disrupt commonsense understandings, to unlearn dominant ideologies, to think systemically, and to create new habits of learning.

AESA - 2009 Presidential Address Cultivating Hope and Building Community: Reflections on Social Justice Activism in Educational Studies

The central topic I want to talk about today is hope. As this is a presidential address, I also want to weave my discussions about hope together with some reflections on educational studies as a field: who we are, what we have accomplished, what challenges lie ahead, and how we might respond to some of these challenges. While sometimes seen as naive or even pointless, I want to make the case that hope is a critical resource in our work in the foundations of education and it is something that we in foundations are in a unique position to help cultivate in the larger field of education (and even, ideally, beyond). I will also argue that hope and community building are intimately related; that we cultivate hope in part through creating, enhancing, and sustaining relationships with others.

Community Building in Social Justice Work: A Critical Approach

In this article we argue for the importance of building critical communities as an integral, yet neglected, aspect of education for social justice. We begin by defining critical communities and by describing goals and vision for social justice education. We then explore how community is discussed in the education literature, limitations and challenges of calling for community, and images of critical communities in social justice work. We end by exploring the role that individuals can play in nurturing and enabling social justice efforts, offering some strategies to promote community building within and beyond higher education.

Globalization, Democracy, and Social Movements: The Educational Potential of Activism.

Abstract In this essay, I explore the contemporary value of John Dewey’s conception of democracy to addressing the challenges of neoliberal globalization. I begin by describing his vision of democracy as a way of life that requires habits of experimentalism, pluralism, and hope. I then suggest that contemporary forms of mobilization, resistance, and insurgency—specifically, alter globalization activism, the Occupy Movement, and the Forward Together Moral Movement in North Carolina—model aspects of Deweyan democracy that are especially important for our times. These forms of civic activism can help reinvigorate Dewey’s vision of democracy as rich, deep, participatory, and creative. I argue a significant value of these movements is the democratic habits and ways of life they encourage and support.

On Building Islands of Decency

In this article, I argue that at its best, work in the foundations of education is about building islands of decency, borrowing from a metaphor originally used by Myles Horton. Horton suggests that in times of crisis and despair, we can work our way out of pessimism by surrounding ourselves with people who share some of our goals for a better world and working with them to create pockets of decency that are contagious. I begin by describing some of the commitments we share in the foundations field, focusing specifically on the ways we work toward social justice, diversity, and democracy. I then describe three tensions we must navigate in our work to be decent as scholars and people, unpacking the meaning of decency throughout the article. These are tensions between construction and critique, inquiry and advocacy, and humanist and instrumentalist rationality. I end by sketching some visions of hope and possibility, what the American Educational Studies Association can be in our next 50 years if we nourish the best of our habits and tendencies, and work to address some of our challenges.

Reflecting on Revolution

In Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion, editors Julio Cammarota and Michelle Fine offer a compelling and complex vision of urban youth engaged in social justice research and action. In chapters that interweave theory, research, description, images, case study, narrative, and reflection, readers are invited into the world of participatory action research (PAR), and specifically youth PAR (YPAR). Although familiar to readers outside of the U.S. context, especially in Third World countries where participatory action research originated, PAR is still fairly uncommon here. Like other critical, community-based, activist approaches to research, PAR is critiqued on the grounds that it lacks rigor, objectivity, and generalizability. Revolutionizing Education challenges this depiction of PAR, instead offering rich portraits of the power of “research conducted ‘with’ as opposed to ‘on’ youth, around the issues they find most important in their lives” (p. vii). Such research transforms the lives of participants and helps them to develop the habits, skills, and dispositions needed to also transform their worlds. As the editors suggest, this is a truly revolutionary approach to research, one that is firmly grounded in the belief that research should be participatory, should highlight indigenous knowledge, and should actively contribute to creating a better world. Revolutionizing Education is a rich, multifaceted, engaging, yet sometimes uneven, book. In our review, we begin by providing an overview of the book and then reflect on the book through dialogue, a strategy that matches the spirit of PAR. We conclude by unpacking the central theme of “revolution” and how it plays out across the various chapters. The editors open the book with an introduction to the concept of PAR and the ways in which it involves a pedagogy of resistance that has the potential to enable oppressed youth to name, understand, challenge, and transcend their own oppression. Describing YPAR, the editors suggest that it is marked by a common pattern: