Louise B. Jennings

Rooted in resistance: women teachers constructing counter‐pedagogies in post‐authoritarian Brazil

This study focuses upon the narratives of women educators (educadoras) who contributed to radical democratic school reforms in post‐authoritarian Brazil. We illustrate through three of the teachers’ narratives how their professional identities and actions were shaped partly by their experiences of resisting the military regime and by their participation in professional development opportunities that grew from liberatory social movements. Our analysis focuses on their efforts to construct counter‐pedagogies in their disciplines of history, mathematics, and physical education that resisted colonizing, authoritative practices and moved toward more liberatory, humanizing pedagogies. We consider how these counter‐pedagogies reflect both women’s ways of knowing that emphasize dialogue, collaboration, community, and the value of personal knowledge and relationships, as well as feminist principles of consciousness‐raising and social action. This analysis highlights possibilities and challenges of radical democratic reform in education by focusing on the work, experience, and identities of women educators engaged in the day‐to‐day efforts to bring about lasting change.

Supporting Critical Dialogue Across Educational Contexts

We dedicate this article to our good friend and colleague, Jennifer Wilson, a person with whom we loved to think and laugh and write. Through an act of violence, her life was taken away from us on August 28th, 2011. This article draws upon five different empirical studies to examine how critical dialogue can be fostered across educational settings and with diverse populations: middle-school students discussing immigration picture books, a teacher study group exploring texts on homelessness, a teacher education class studying critical literacy, working class adults in a culture circle in Brazil interrogating systems of poverty, and teens in youth organizations discussing their photo-essays that challenge negative stereotypes of youth. In this paper, we analyze discursive practices that fostered critical dialogue across these settings. In doing so, we seek to describe practices that can support practitioners as they facilitate critical dialogue with learners and one another in order to become more critically engaged participants in their own communities.

Teaching in the borderland: critical practices in foundations courses

Using first-person accounts of classroom experiences, five professors examine the intersection of social foundations and borderland theory and their efforts to move students through resistance to understanding and affirmation of sociocultural diversity. The authors present this paper in two parts, the first providing examples of using a borderland approach within the classroom and the second providing illustrations moving these borderland strategies beyond the classroom. In each case, authors show the interwoven nature of pedagogy, identity, knowledge, and experience as they work to connect theory and practice. All of the institutions represented have majority white populations, and many do not reflect the diversity of the communities in which they are situated. The need for borderland practices in social foundations courses is urgent in these areas. These pedagogical reflections, although not meant to be recipes for success, provide examples of practices that can serve to meet the growing demands from schools and communities for culturally competent, socially aware teacher–leaders, and reaffirm the critical importance of social foundations in teacher education.

Poetic Inquiry as a Research and Engagement Method in Natural Resource Science

Abstract Complex and “wicked” natural resource issues often require transdisciplinary research approaches–methods that span boundaries among disciplines and engage multiple sectors of society in the research process. Social-ecological systems approaches acknowledge the complexity of dynamics within and feedbacks between natural and social systems, but have insufficiently incorporated the subjective lived experience, agency, culture and power dynamics of people within these systems. We propose that poetic inquiry, together with poetry-based approaches to engagement and science translation, offers a novel set of methods for data generation, analysis, communication, and engagement for natural resource social scientists. We introduce arts-based research and poetic analysis, their benefits and criteria for quality, and reflect on the transformative potential of poetic inquiry. We present cases of poetic inquiry that disrupted hierarchies and humanized research by centering on the participants’ lived experience, evoking emotion, amplifying participants’ voices, fostering researcher reflexivity, and encouraging collaborative research and public scholarship.

Holocaust Education and Critical Citizenship in an American Fifth Grade: Expanding Repertoires of Meanings, Language and Action

This classroom ethnography examines fifth-grade children engaging in a year-long study of rights, respect, and responsibility, culminating in a focused study of tolerance and intolerance organised around literature regarding the Holocaust. The chapter illustrates how children built upon academic and social practices established from the first days of school to expand their repertoire of meanings, language, and actions of (in)tolerance, gaining more complex understandings of the social, political, and moral implications of the Holocaust. This approach included empathy-building, a focus on rescue and resistance and the bystander response, building a knowledge base about the Holocaust, stories of individual experiences, and opportunities to make personal connections. Students in this bilingual class also developed individual and social actions addressing injustice in their own communities. The study highlights the importance of long-term engagements, a layered curriculum that supports children in building understandings over time, and varied opportunities for making meaning together. The chapter argues that this classroom experience supported students as critically engaged citizens and community members.