Policy Dialogue: Black Teachers of the Past, Present, and Future

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-102
Author(s):  
Gloria Ladson-Billings ◽  
James D. Anderson

In the second half of the twentieth century, the ranks of Black teachers and school administrators declined precipitously. Today, less than 7 percent of American teachers are Black. This loss has had a number of consequences for schools and communities, but perhaps especially for Black students. As recent research has found, Black students benefit socially and academically from having a Black teacher, are less likely to be suspended or expelled, and are more likely to enroll in college.For this inaugural policy dialogue, the HEQ editors asked Gloria Ladson-Billings and James D. Anderson to reflect on the past, present, and future of the Black teacher corps. Their wide-ranging exchange explores the various roles of educators, the legacy of segregation, the role of policy, and the Black experience. They close with a provocative list of research questions for emerging and established scholars to consider.

Author(s):  
Michael P. Roller

The conclusion revisits the three major inquiries addressed in the text, drawing together the evidence and contexts provided in the previous seven chapters. The first investigates the role of objective settings, such as the systemic and symbolic violence of landscapes and semiotic systems of racialization in justifying or triggering moments of explicit subjective violence such as the Lattimer Massacre. The second inquiry, traces the trajectory of immigrant groups into contemporary patriotic neoliberal subjects. In other terms, it asks how an oppressed group can become complicit with oppression later in history. The third inquiry traces the development of soft forms of social control and coercion across the longue durée of the twentieth century. Specifically, it asks how vertically integrated economic and governmental structures such as neoliberalism and governmentality which serve to stabilize the social antagonisms of the past are enunciated in everyday life.


Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID SEHAT

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 265-287
Author(s):  
Feras Krimsti ◽  
John-Paul Ghobrial

Abstract This introduction to the special issue “The Past and its Possibilities in Nahḍa Scholarship” reflects on the role of the past in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nahḍa discourse. It argues that historical reflection played a pivotal role in a number of scholarly disciplines besides the discipline of history, notably philosophy and logic, grammar and lexicography, linguistics, philology, and adab. Nahḍawīs reflected on continuities with the past, the genealogies of their present, and the role of history in determining their future. The introduction of print gave new impulses to the engagement with the historical heritage. We argue for a history of the nahḍa as a de-centred history of possibilities that recovers a wider circle of scholars and intellectuals and their multiple and overlapping local and global audiences. Such a history can also shed light on the many ways in which historical reflection, record-keeping practices, and confessional, sectarian, or communalist agendas are entwined.


2021 ◽  
pp. 36-54
Author(s):  
Larry T. Shillock

Contributor Larry T. Shillock discusses the ways mid-twentieth century film forms limit the role of place on women. Shillock tests standard assessments of the femme fatale before detailing the ways in which noir stories change when approached through the women. Following Shillock's argument, these women often occupy the center of the stories. Shillock uses one of the quintessential noir narratives, Out of the Past (1947), and its heroine, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), to support this idea. The adjustments Jacques Tourneur makes to Daniel Mainwaring’s novel, Build My Gallows High (1946), to show the care taken to ensure that Moffat appears as something other than "a dame, a moll, or an object of male affection." Shillock maintains that Tourneur’s Moffat proves herself equal to the men she encounters. By the end of the film, she is their better since she recognizes the constraints her world places on her as a woman.


Author(s):  
Andrew Byers

The book argues that concerns about sexuality were fundamental to how the U.S. Army managed its deployments and military occupations throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Far from being just a marginal release from the stresses of military service and combat, sexuality stood at the center of the military experience. The book uses the concept of a “sexual economy of war” to highlight the interconnectedness of everything from homosexuality, competing conceptions of masculinity, and the proper role of military families, to issues like rape and sexual violence, as well as attempts by the army to combat venereal disease via the regulation of prostitution. The book reveals that the contentious debates of the past two decades surrounding sexuality and the U.S. military are, in many ways, echoes of similar issues from the early twentieth century.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 504
Author(s):  
Mina Khanlarzadeh

In this paper, I offer a comparative analysis of the political thoughts of twentieth century Iranian revolutionary thinker and sociologist Ali Shari’ati (1933–1977) and German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Despite their conspicuously independent historical-theoretical trajectories, both Shari’ati and Benjamin engaged with theology and Marxism to create theological–political conceptions of the revolution of the oppressed. Shari’ati re-interpreted and re-animated Shia history from the angle of contemporary concerns to theorize a revolution against all forms of domination. In comparison, Benjamin fused Marxism with Jewish theology in his call to seize the possibilities of past failed revolutions in the present. Both Shari’ati and Benjamin conceptualized an active messianism led by each generation, eliminating the wait for the return of a messiah. As a result, each present moment takes on a messianic potential; the present plays an essential role to both thinkers. Past was also essential to both, because theology (through remembrance) had made the past sufferings incomplete to them. Both thinkers viewed past sufferings as an integral part of present struggles for justice in the form of remembrance (or yād or zekr for Shari’ati, and Zekher for Benjamin). I explore the ways Shari’ati and Benjamin theorized the role of the past in the present, remembrance, and messianism to create a dialectical relation between theology and Marxism to reciprocally transform and compliment both of them.


2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 675-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayana Kee Campoli

In U.S. public schools, the shortage of teachers of African descent specifically, and teachers of color more generally, is a worsening problem that has severe, detrimental effects on students. This shortage of Black teachers is driven in part by high turnover, much of which is precipitated by the poor working conditions in their schools. In this study, I analyze data from a sample of approximately 1,600 Black teachers who participated in the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS, 2007–2008). My findings about the role of supportive principals have implications for how state departments of education should use Every Student Succeeds Act funds.


Author(s):  
Rafał Kamprowski

For a long time, history of women was not in the mainstream of interest. The interest for this topic was not shown untill the twentieth century. The aim of this paper is to present a long and difficult struggle to gain the status similar to the one women have nowadays. It is difficult to understand the present reality without going back to the past. The role of women is undergoing a lot of changes all the time. This subject is a huge field for research. The article attempts to give a summary of publications which deal with women’s issues.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-287
Author(s):  
Paulina Čović ◽  
Dragica Koljanin

The implementation of comprehensive educational reforms which include adult education is taking place in Serbia. The bases for the reforms are new approaches to education and learning, because rapid changes in all spheres of life have opened up the need for lifelong learning and education. However, the moment when  society recognized the need for an institutional and organized form of adult education was preceded by a long development path in the second half of the twentieth century. This paper will examine the role of history as a subject in primary education of adults within the Second Chance project. History as a subject is undeniably important for development of one`s identity and understanding of the present in order to prepare to be a responsible part of society. Considering that Serbia has in the past been faced with the problem of illiteracy, there will be a brief overview of adult education in the second half of the twentieth century.


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