Vidya Thirumurthy

Issues in Education: Critical Pedagogy: An Overview

Critical pedagogy gained significant momentum with the translation of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), along with Freire’s subsequent exile from Brazil, which included time spent first in Bolivia and Chile, and then throughout the world. Broadly speaking, critical pedagogy is an approach to understanding and engaging the political and economic realities of everyday life. Distinct from critical thinking (a term that has been hijacked by many anti-critical teachers and textbook publishing companies), critical pedagogy calls for an active engagement with oppressed and exploited groups (DuncanAndrade & Morrell, 2008). Critical pedagogy challenges the social, environmental, and economic structures and social relations that shape the conditions in which people live, and in which schools operate. Such an approach includes different dimensions, of which only a few will be discussed here. It must be said that any attempt to define or categorize critical pedagogy is usually counterproductive to the development of radical agency, for to do so risks limiting its constant evolution and re-invention by numerous communities and collective struggles worldwide. Critical pedagogy demands that people repeatedly question their roles in society as either agents of social and economic transformation, or as those who participate in the asymmetrical relations of power and privilege and the reproduction of neoliberal ideology. Critical pedagogy lies in direct opposition to the current educational landscape in the United States. Jaramillo and McLaren (2009) argue that

Special Education in India at the Crossroads.

Mom: Arutz, liririg your /zomei.i~ork diary. Aruiz: I Irazie orrly math a i d science Iiomei.i1ork today. Mom: SIzozo mc! H m m m ! What hazw you zi1ritter1, Arurz? I can’t make any seizse at all. Again you did trot copy the sums or your science Izome7iiork correctly from the blackboard. Hmii m a y times Itazv I told you to carefully copy zdznt the twc/ier ~ iv i tes on the board? Look 1107~1 you /lave spelled Siecrrec. I don’t ktzozu 7dzat to do zidh you. (Arurr sits still otz the chair as his eyes 7 1 ~ 1 1 up 7 i d h tears.)

Children's literature to help young children construct understandings about diversity: perspectives from four cultures

The power of children’s literature in enhancing young children‘s understandings of critical issues in their social worlds is often left untapped by early childhood educators. We live in a complex world. Diversity and differences are the norm, not the exception. Children deserve the opportunity to engage in experiences that enable them to appreciate this diversity and difference while, at the same time, being aware of sameness. Well-chosen children’s literature can be a rich resource for educators as they support young children’s quest to better understand the world around them.

Globalization or Hegemony? Childcare on the Brink: Hints from Three Geographically Distant Localities in North America

In a previous publication the authors examined selected aspects of the structure and curriculum of fifteen childcare centers located in three geographically distant locations in North America and determined that contrasts within and between the regions in terms of structure and curriculum guided by the National Association for the Education of Young Childrens approach indicated that a culture inherent to childcare centers exists. Methods included participant observation and archival research. Journal data were analyzed for emergent themes utilizing modified grounded theory. Content analysis was used on government regulations, environmental and learning materials lists, and curriculum forms. In this article the authors re-examine the data to find that NAEYCs positional power, as a childcare organization, appears to be influencing the nature of childcare in North America, with some negative consequences.

Kolam: A Mathematical Treasure of South India

It is 5:00 a.m. in the morning in Thanjavur, India. Sita wakes up to the call of a rooster. As she gets up from her bed, her 2-year-old son and 3 1/2-year-old daughter follow her. After quickly brushing her teeth and washing her face, Sita reaches for a small dish containing white chalk powder with a gritty feel. With her children in tow, she carries the dish and a pail of water to the threshold of the house. Setting the dish and pail of water to the side, she sweeps to even the muddy ground at the entry to the house. Then, she lifts up the pail and showers the ground with water to purify it. Once the dust settles, Sita scoops out some of the white powder and places it in her left palm. She pinches a little bit of the white powder between her right thumb and index finger. As she rubs her fingers, the white powder flows evenly and steadily from between her fingers to the ground in dots (pulli). Sita frequently pinches the white powder from the dish. Her movements are swift and it appears as though her fingers kiss the ground. Soon, she has nine equidistant dots placed in every row and column (9 x 9) and the infrastructure for her kolam is ready. With the framework of dots complete, she uses a steady hand to draw a curvilinear line (kambi) with the same powder, moving her fingers forward and never going over the same line again, weaving in and around the dots to make sure every dot is encased. Against the dark brown, wet ground, the kolam in white stands out. The completed drawing took Sita about 10 minutes. As she worked, the children participated peripherally, occasionally grabbing the white powder and attempting to mimic their mother. by Vidya Thirumurthy and Ksenija Simic-Muller

Issues in Education: Children Were Punished: Not for What They Said, but for What Their Teachers Heard

(2010). Issues in Education: Children Were Punished: Not for What They Said, but for What Their Teachers Heard. Childhood Education: Vol. 86, No. 3, pp. 130-131.

Issues in Education: Vaccination Revisited: Negotiating Parental and Community Authority in Early Childhood Education

For several years, my wifesherri and I have served as the co-presidents of our children’spreschool, anonprofit parent cooperative with classes for 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children in Washington State. Although state law requires that parents submit their children’s immunization records as part of enrollment protocol, as presidents, we typically do not examine this information, given the broader organizational responsibilities connected to our position. Imagine my dismay, then, when after penning an op-ed in our city’s newspaper about the troubling rise in parental exemptions from school vaccination requirements, I was informed that approximately one out of every six children in our preschool was not vaccinated. Compulsory vaccination emerged in the United States as part of a “bio-politics of the population” in the latter half of the 19th century, as medical technologies were applied on political and spatial levels through the development of modern administrative systems of surveillance and regulation (Foucault, 1978, p. 139). Those opposed to vaccination at the time-and especially parents of young children-took their fight to courtrooms, state legislatures, school boards, and, in some instances, to the streets through acts of civil disobedience and even mob violence (Colgrove, 2006; Leavitt, 1982). While historians have, as Nadja Durbach (2005) notes, “often seen anti-vaccinationism as anti-progressive,” people’s resistance to what was an often insensitively administered, ”invasive, insanitary and sometimes disfiguring procedure” (pp. 2-3) more than a century ago should be viewed today within the context of a more informed, empathic, and subtly nuanced understanding of the past. As a medical intervention, vaccination has come a long way in the more than 200 years since Edward Jenner, an experimenting physician in Gloucestershire County, England, discovered he could protect people from the death grip of the smallpox virus by infecting them with cowpox, a significantly more benign disease of the skin. But Jenner probably never would haveimagined that two centuries later, with countless lives saved and smallpox-the most prolific killer of young children-all but vanquished from the face of the earth, vaccination still would be a controversial and contentious procedure. A year ago, Sherri and I were having dinner with neighbors. After telling them about my research on the history of child health policies, they informed us that neither of their children had been immunized. They were not, they said, philosophically or religiously opposed to the practice. Instead, they knew their children were safe due to the ”herd immunity” within the neighborhood-the blanket protection from contagion achieved when the vaccinated population is large enough to protect the unvaccinated. They were, in essence, “free riders“ who wanted their children to benefit from the small risk incurred by others within the community-like us-who vaccinated their children (Menzel, 1995). I did not question or advise either our neighbors or the parents at our preschool about their decisions not to vaccinate their children. It is such an emotionally charged issue that I was unsure I would accomplish anything, and the risk of deeply offending them seemed a powerful deterrent at the time. The debate about vaccination persists because it provokes challenging questions about how to balance individual liberty with the welfare of the larger community. The procedure often pits medical science against religious belief, parental authority against that of the state, and, more recently, the legitimacy of government reports