Nancy Ares

The Geographies of Difference: The Production of the East Side,West Side, and Central City School

Citywide constructs such as “West Side” or “South Side” are spatial codes that result from more than the informal conversations of city residents. This article shows how elementary school educators in one U.S. metropolitan school district participated in the production of a local knowledge of the East Side and West Side space and individual. It demonstrates how educators used these codes to name race and class, as well as to obscure the codes’ meanings. The article maps the convergence of institutional technologies and local educational knowledge whereby this knowledge resisted change and buttressed the citywide East Side–West Side relations and knowledge. The disjunctures in this knowledge base are also identified, as educators attempted to produce a knowledge of a third space that they termed “Central City.”

Cultural Practices in Networked Classroom Learning Environments

This paper presents results of a case study conducted in secondary mathematics classrooms using a new generation of networked classroom technology (Participatory Simulations). Potential for drawing on youths’ cultural practices in networked learning environments is explored in terms of opportunities for traditionally underserved students to participate in powerful mathematical discourse and practice. As mediated by the networked technology, the multiple modes of participation and opportunities to contribute to the group’s accomplishment of its task served as important avenues for underserved students to bring to bear resources they develop through participating in everyday practices of their communities. The goal is to provide examples of networked activities’ potential for leveraging cultural practices of marginalized groups through pedagogy that invites youth to draw on linguistic resources and interaction patterns they develop as members of cultural groups.

Appropriating roles and relations of power in collaborative learning

Using situated social practice theories to investigate classroom interactions highlights the mutually constitutive nature of students’ activity and classroom practices. Combined with examination of the circulation and techniques of power, students’ appropriation of roles and redistribution of power is illuminated. In this case study, a teacher’s hierarchical collaborative learning system spread rights to exercise power differentially among students. Analyses revealed the ways in which students appropriated that structure to construct a more egalitarian system, as well as the inherent tensions and contradictions that accompanied that appropriation. Their reproduction and transformation of roles and power in the collaborative learning system afforded opportunities to engage as active agents; to participate in the construction of knowledge, skills and practices; and to contribute meaningfully to the social and academic life of the classroom. The hope is to contribute to theory and practice in a way that addresses the complexity of collaborative learning and resists simplistic adoptions that may undermine student learning and agency.

Mathematics and Numeracy as Social and Spatial Practice

This study of networked classroom activity proposes that a resource-rich point of view is powerful in increasing the engagement of marginalized students in mathematics classes. Our work brings attention to the values, beliefs, and power relations that infuse numeracy practices and adds attention to mathematical dimensions of social spaces. Findings show that the multiple modes available to communicate mathematically, to contribute, and the inquiry-oriented discussions invited students to draw on a variety of expressive modes to engage with complex mathematical concepts. Spatial analyses illuminate the relations among reproduction and production of knowledge, as well as the social space that characterized the networked classroom activity. They also reveal the affordance of emergent, transformed social spaces for youth’s use of a variety of social and cultural displays in producing mathematical knowledge. Students extended notions about social space by adding attention to affective features of classroom and school activities.

Tuck and Guess’ Foundational Question

We placed this chapter at the beginning of the book to emphasize the importance of the question, “whose land are we talking about?” Indeed, the very question of ownership is one Tuck and Guess remind us is open to challenge. Beginning with this chapter, we are signaling to readers that the spaces that we are writing about in the book are Indigenous spaces that have been violently overlaid with colonizing practices, actions, images, etc.

About These Times

We decided to situate this book in the context of neoliberal policies and practices around education reform, given their widespread influence in the US and elsewhere. Such policies and practices have been pursued in a variety of places across the globe; a common denominator among them is their commitment to capitalism (for example, the United States, New Zealand, the UK, and Australia (Davis & Bansel, 2007).

Story Maps as Convincing Representations of Claims to Space

The goal in this chapter is to illustrate how a critical geography framework guided my analysis of one resident/activist’s perspectives and participation in the Coalition for the Children of Lakeview (CCL; for an in-depth description, see O’Connor, Ares, & Larson, 2011), a resident-driven community-transformation initiative in upstate New York. As such, it is both a methodological piece and a report of research findings.

Reterritorializing as Community Activism in an Urban Community-School Transformation Initiative

A resident-driven school and community transformation initiative in upstate New York, the Coalition for the Children of Lakeview (CCL), is the site for this chapter’s critical geography analysis. A Planning Panel1 (PP) of approximately 116 individuals representing residents (51%) and social service and governmental agency representatives (non-residents) (49%) was formed in 2005 to make critical decisions regarding the content of the CCL plan (e.g., specific foci such as k-16 education, employment, housing, public safety).

Inviting Emotional Connections to Ethnographic Research: An Ethnodrama of a Community Change Initiative

Two central struggles facing activist scholars, including critical ethnographers of education, are (a) power relations researchers and participants navigate and (b) dissemination of our work to reach multiple audiences, including study participants and others outside academia. This one-act ethnodrama was written as part of a critical ethnography of a community change initiative. Ethnodrama is an appropriate choice given roles afforded participants and audience in which emotional connections and closeness of data and experience are highlighted.

Liberation or Oppression?—Western TESOL Pedagogies in China

In this article, we examine power relations in College English teaching in China, focusing on the symbolic capital of English as a global language. Framing our discussion with Bourdieus concept of symbolic capital and a review of literature, we problematize the importation of pedagogies from Western countries to China and argue that seemingly liberating pedagogies, such as the communicative language teaching approach, can be turned into a form of oppression of both the instructors and the students. Drawing on Freires critical pedagogy, we propose that a truly liberating pedagogy should be based on a dialogical relationship between policy-makers, teachers, and students in consideration of the specific economic, social, and cultural backgrounds of the students and teachers.