Tackling Negative Representation: The Use of Storytelling As a Critical Pedagogical Tool for Positive Representation of Roma

This article focuses on the negative representation of Roma in Greece in the early twenty-first century. It investigates how negative feedback takes the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy that suppresses the self-esteem of young Roma and maintains a distance between Romani identity and education despite several positive yet little known examples of Romani scientists and scholars. The article questions how negative Romani images canbe reversed in order to enhance Roma’s educational success. The importance of innovative educational activities based on Romani literature, critical multiculturalism, and the parameter of Romani bilingualism is highlighted. Particularly, the article focuses on the power and the echo that stories can have (storytelling),where protagonists have a Romani connection or identity and are portrayed as positive models, both within classrooms with Romani students and within a society where the idea of Romani literature is a fantasy.

Living and Learning in the Global Village

This paper begins with a discussion of some of the promises and pitfalls confronting education in the Information Age. After exploring the business motivation that drives the education agenda and examining what some futurists are calling the end of the job, we identify four principles or themes that could help transform education as we approach the millennium. We argue that critical literacy, connectivity, creating a civil society and critical multiculturalism can foster an educational system that could resolve economic, cultural and social inequities. The information highway offers unprecedented opportunities for educators to create collaborative learning environments that will stimulate critical thinking skills and academic excellence among all students.

Addressing Critical Multiculturalism in Online Education Using a Poly-Framework Approach

Given the increasing number of available e-learning platforms, individuals are now able to pursue degrees and courses through an online modality. As a result, education has proliferated to include individuals from varying cultural groups, age distributions, and occupational qualifications. With the inclusion of a wide variety of groups, multicultural considerations are critical. However, from a multiculturalist and poststructaralist perspective, conventional models of multiculturalism are considered essentialist and often fastened by tradition rather than dynamic and continuously evolving practices. In this paper, the authors will apply multiculturalism to online education; present a critical perspective; and finally demonstrate a novel, dynamic and adaptable model that uses a poststructuralist viewpoint in order to meet the multicultural needs of the online student of today and possibly tomorrow. This model is derived from the key strengths of the Social Ecological Model, Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, and Kolb's learning styles.

Manifesto for Critical Andragogy

The aim of educating adults not only concerns knowledge transference and intellectual mastery. The foundational theories and associated praxes are just as important, as they enable educators to critically observe human terrain and empower learners. This chapter proposes a fresh approach to andragogical learning design called critical andragogy. Using a neo-Marxist framework, the genesis of critical andragogy amalgamates literature from critical theory, critical pedagogy, critical multiculturalism, and transformative learning. Then, using a qualitative metasynthesis, that literature is critically analyzed, refined, and nested in the context of current why adult learners pursue new learning activities. The combination of the learner's purpose and the revised andragogical theory then become the outputs that culminate into a unified theory of critical andragogy that derivative of key principles extrapolated from current literature.

The Call for Critical Multiculturalism

This review looks at the current literature within Indigenous and newcomer relationships under the contemporary Canadian multicultural framework. The ever-increasing prevalence of Indigenous social movements and instances of cross-continental migration position the topic at the forefront of social policy since the inception of multiculturalism as a governmental policy in the 1970s. Traditional multiculturalism positions newcomer populations in support of the ongoing formation of the Canadian settler state due to factors of misinformation and hierarchized measures of a newcomer group’s ability to successfully integrate. Considerable efforts are required to diminish the discursive gap between the historically oppressed social groups. The literature posits structural change within the theory of critical multiculturalism to support nuanced binationalism and increased instances of social interaction. These efforts are required to facilitate a potentially transformative relationship between each group in relation to the greater multicultural project.

Antidotes to Brexit

A core message of the book is that authoritarian populism (Brexit nationalism) is a state of affairs where emotions are orchestrated by an increasingly demagogic subsection of the elite to polarise, mobilise and demonise, a reactive, illiberal and antagonist form of politics. It presents a threat in that although perhaps it has manifested itself in one of its most extreme forms in Britain through Brexit, it is in fact an endemic threat to all of Europe. In January 2019 a group of thirty lead European thinkers, writers, historians and nobel laureates, declared that Europe as an idea was “coming apart before our eyes” and the consequences would be “calamitous” if the rising tide of populism was not challenged. The final section of the book seeks to identify the panacea to the rise of authoritarian populism and forms of agonism, both in Britain and Europe. Britain’s future relationship with the EU will be a key determiner in Britain’s course as a nation, hence the book advocates Britain’s eventual re-entry into a reformed European Union grounded within the concept of Social Europe and a conception of identity that is inclusive and accommodated in a structural framework that is deliberative and egalitarian. The chapter also seeks to challenge ‘post-truth’ politics through a reformed public sphere and inclusive and bridging speech acts and rhetoric. Finally, the chapter reflects on the value of critical multiculturalism as a mechanism that might dispel monoculturalism and nativism.

Countering Complacency With Radical Reflection: Supporting White Teachers in the Enactment of Critical Multicultural Praxis

Although White teachers can be effective teachers of racially diverse students, studies continue to document factors that can undermine their success, such as color-blindness and unawareness of racial privilege. We argue that these factors contribute to a sense of complacency among White teachers regarding the implementation of culturally affirming practices. In this review, we advance an argument for the need for radically reflective practices that are necessary for the constitution of effective educational praxis for White teachers who teach in urban classrooms of mostly Black and brown students. Using Critical Multiculturalism as a framework, we address a gap in the translation of theory to practice by providing a set of process-oriented strategies that are necessary for the constitution of teacher praxis that is both radically reflective and radically hopeful, and where complacency is not an option.