Kevin J. Burke

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.

A Critical Geographic Approach to Youth Civic Engagement Reframing Educational Opportunity Zones and the Use of Public Spaces

The article draws on work in Critical Geography Studies and Photovoice methodology, to illustrate the ways in which youth in an inner city conceptualize neighborhoods and public spaces. We utilize youth’s photographs, narratives, and maps to tell a story of youth’s lived experiences and argue that these experiences are vital sources of knowledge about how an unequal distribution of resources affects them. It is important, we argue, to not only hear student voices but also prepare them to become critical, independent thinkers, who can use multiple literacies as affordances for creating changes that help nourish them. This means fundamentally rethinking how as educators we listen to and walk with youth as they reframe the ways in which we might use public parks, neighborhood schools, community centers, and sidewalks as pedagogical and political spaces.

Racing Tradition: Catholic Schooling and the Maintenance of Boundaries.

This article seeks to add to the underdeveloped strain of inquiry on the raced social experience of students in private and parochial institutions. We examine the role Catholic schools in the city of Chicago play in the maintenance and creation of racially problematic policies, spaces, and rhetoric. The research uncovers a multitude of responses framing African American students as an exotic other in mission and action through the leveraging of liturgical, ideological, and political language and practice. Using Cultural Studies and Critical Race Theory the work seeks to create a discursive space for representation and resistance in the repositioning of dominant and sanguineous narratives about Catholic schooling both in the US and globally. We use moments when race became particularly and often painfully salient in our experiences of Catholic schooling to expose the structural and racial inequity perpetuated in establishing and enforcing racial barriers to success through religion-for-segregation educational policies.

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.

The Religion of American Public Schooling: Standards, Fidelity, and Cardinal Principles

This article focuses on the possible ways in which the standards movement and the assessments and curricular interventions that come along with it, draw on inherently religious (Judeo–Christian) language and traditions. Contributing to a larger critical conversation about standards and impact on education, and building on an emerging scholarly engagement about the (both explicit and implicit) role of religion in public education, this article examines the language framing standards and its structures and makes the point that, while a given document need not reference religious texts explicitly, as in the case of standards, it may nevertheless be guided by undergirding theological histories and sensibilities as we explore the standards movement more broadly and the Common Core more specifically. We thus attend closely to the notion of Cardinal Principles and the concept of standards in American education, seeking to connect standardization as a program of learning, to long-standing notions about, for instance, testing and student possibility rooted firmly in religious—particularly Judeo–Christian—assumptions. We close by taking seriously a recent call to consider the resacralization of society and research, particularly education research.

Popular Movies that Teach

The frame is central to film. How a filmmaker frames a shot and edits those frames together influences what the audience sees, how what is seen comes to be known, and much more. The frame limns the visual field drawing the eye and the “I” into the film’s action, its story, and what it hopes the viewer will take from the film. Of course, as film theorists and critics have shown, there is never one thing a viewer takes from watching a movie.

Introduction: A “Conversation” and the Problem of Positioning

What follows is a text about the ways in which purported experts come to define the parameters of what counts as a discussion around school reform. In order to fully situate the text that will follow—this book filled with student research and writing about how we might think about schooling in the United States—we will break this introduction chapter into three sections. The first seeks to situate the text in theory that aims to re-allow student voices into the process while also providing some description of the context for the student writing. The second examines the historical strands of our current system, suggesting that what we’ve lost is the public sense that the community is empowered to engage in educational policy debates. The final section will situate the text in the realm of pedagogy as we three seek to seriously think about the role of teaching and teachers in the realm of positing possibilities for education.

Pulling Ideas Apart: Complicating the Questions

This closing chapter, rather than concluding in a traditional sense, seeks to re-engage the value of the process of a conversation about education policy. In order to provide some manner of reflexive practice, student authors are revisited. Some of the authors of previous chapters have stepped, since the inception of the project, into classrooms of their own and now face realities that felt far away and theoretical as they worked to become expert in the writing process. Other authors, those still in college, work through what it meant to work through (endure?) a conceptual shift from student to student-becoming-expert. In the end, we find that the value, not surprisingly, of this manner of work lies in the thoughtful and difficult moments of exploration into and through difficult and ongoing problems. We find, with our co-authors, that the work of making sense of the various and sundry strands of the educational policy debate, ought best engender questions and discussion over proclamations and posturing.

An Editorial Intervention: Mushfaking

This brief interlude seeks to frame the subsequent three chapters of student writing, suggesting that the best mode for understanding the student product and processes may be the notion and practice of Mushfake discourse. In this understanding, students came to make do in the clash between their prior schooled lives and the proposal of new models for education rooted in theory beyond their own experiences.