Sarah M. Stitzlein

What Can We Learn from Teacher Dissent Online

Abstract Given the prevailing spirit of teacher frustration regarding current educational policy, the authors perused frequently visited teacher blogs and discussion boards in the summer of 2009 to determine whether teachers are effectively using them to express professionally informed political dissent regarding educational policy. While many teachers are frustrated with educational policies, they are not particularly adept at voicing their dissent against such policies. Many downplay their professional knowledge, avoid overtly political postings, and feel isolated from others who share their views.

Private Interests, Public Necessity: Responding to Sexism in Christian Schools

This synthetic review aims to unite a seemingly disjoint collection of studies over the past 3 decades around their shared examination of sexism in an often overlooked U.S. population, namely girls attending private Christian schools. This undertaking reveals substantial harms that I categorize as those of immediacy and potentiality, which are occurring behind the protective wall separating church and state. Contra the majority of philosophers of education and researchers in this area, these studies lead me to argue that the state has the obligation and legal ability to intervene in this private domain. Notably, this study begins to flesh out a notion of educational harm that may be robust enough for state policy making and legal action in private schools. Based on a legalized understanding of sexist harm, I conclude with a detailed analysis of Constitutional provisions and court decisions relative to state intervention and freedom of religious practice.

Getting into the habit: using historical science to understand race in contemporary schools

Most historical analyses of the scientific study of race focus on the surface level physical features of differing bodies. They fail to consider the scientific and popular accounts of racialized bodies as engaged in routine activity, thereby overlooking corporeal habits as the key historical tenet of the construction of scientific racial categorization. This paper traces the study of race via habits through modern science and attempts to reconcile this approach to understanding race with contemporary popular notions that uphold the lived experience of race and conflicting genetic accounts that debunk racial distinction. Moreover, the paper explores habits of discerning and living race that are cultivated in schools and through popular culture. Offering a pragmatist and poststructuralist theoretical analysis of habit as socially and biologically co‐constituted, this paper argues that habits should overtly occupy the minds of scientists, social constructionists, and teachers as they enact and respond to race. It urges these scholars and social activists to move beyond the claim that race is a social construction to understanding the historical intention of the construct and its link to racism. Finally, this paper considers how students in schools learn both to detect and embody race via habits and calls for making those habits more flexible as a way to promote a positive future for living and responding to race.

Improving Public Schools Through the Dissent of Parents: Opting Out of Tests, Demanding Alternative Curricula, Invoking Parent Trigger Laws, and Withdrawing Entirely

Some parents and caregivers, frustrated by low academic performance of their local school, emphasis on testing, or the content of the curriculum, have worked independently or formed parent groups to speak out and demand improvements. Parents and families enact solutions such as opting out of tests, developing alternative curricula, invoking parent trigger laws, and withdrawing their children from public schools. When engaged well, these outcries of family dissent can be used to improve public schools and to keep them truly public. In this article, I define good dissent and show how it keeps schools healthy. I examine the actions, publications, and web sites of major parent organizations and individual parents to argue that some parents are demonstrating good and admirable dissent that can help improve school quality, parent satisfaction with schools, and student experiences in them; others not only fail to employ good dissent, but may actually be hurting the viability of our public schools and the type of graduate they produce.

Democratic education in an era of town hall protests

One central aspect of a healthy democracy is the practice of democratic dissent. For the first time in many years, dissent is being widely practiced in town hall meetings and on street corners across the United States. Despite this presence, dissent is often suppressed or omitted in the prescribed, tested, hidden, and external curriculum of US schools. This article calls for a realignment of these aspects of curriculum with both a guiding vision of ideal democracy and a realistic interpretation of democracy as it is currently invoked in order to maximize this historic moment and work toward more robust democracy as a whole. This article will define dissent, show why it matters for healthy democracy, describe its role in the conscious social reproduction of citizens, reveal implications of the current more consensus-oriented forms of democracy portrayed in US schools, and call for new work on consensus and dissent in schools given changes in the present environment.

Skill and Persistence in Gender Crossing and Nonconformity Among Children

ABSTRACT Several scholars have lauded gender crossing as one pathway for tearing down hierarchies of gender and sexuality. Central but often under-examined in their discussions is understanding the skill and persistence of childhood gender nonconformists. In examining some of these skills, this article investigates their relationship to specific social situations or geographic locations and considers their psychological and corporeal aspects. These skills, asserts the author, may prove to have significant implications for a classroom aimed at combating oppression of gender and sexuality premised upon discretely defined genders.

Neoliberal narratives and the logic of abstinence only education: why are we Still having this conversation?

ABSTRACT Given the lack of citizen or medical support for abstinence-only education, we ask how abstinence-education maintains such a stronghold in America and other Western democracies’ public policy and consciousness. Our response has three parts. In the first, we outline the disproportionately negative health outcomes of sex education experienced by female, impoverished, ethnic and racial minorities, and LGBT youth. Next we address prominent narratives in sex education. We use the work of Pierre Bourdieu as a frame to understand neoliberal narratives and the accrual of cultural capital. Next we address two specific narratives in sex education, both of which align with broad tenets of neoliberal thought: the first of these is a focus on individual responsibility at the expense of understanding broader social structures. The second questions the role of education in a democratic nation that privileges the private over the overall health of the citizenry. In closing, we highlight comprehensive alternatives to sex education that can better prepare healthy individuals and democracy.

Hoping and Democracy

Too often, hope is described in individualist terms and in ways that do not help us understand contemporary democracy or offer ways to improve it. Instead, I develop an account of hope situated within pragmatist philosophy that is rooted in the experiences of individuals and grows out of real life circumstances, yet cannot be disconnected from social and political life. This account can help us to better face current political struggles related to hopelessness and despair, all the while building democratic identity. To examine the ways in which shared hoping and the content of our hopes shape our identity and our work together in democracy, I consider both how and what we hope in political contexts.