“WE LOST THE PLADO”: Tracing privileged school literacies in one kindergarten classroom

Drawing from a network case study, this article traces enactments of a letter writing enquiry in one Kindergarten public school classroom in New York City, and in doing so, explores both the affordances and limitations of sociomaterial approaches employed by the researcher towards school literacies. Looking down at one morning meeting revealed rotting pumpkins, playdough, pocket charts and cheese sandwiches, doing the work of environmental nonprofits, DOE officials, and cafeteria staff, all becoming entangled with the teacher and students in solving the problem of food waste at lunch, and ultimately to students writing letters to their school administrators. Yet, in looking out from this same data, I reconsider how the curriculum was not only constituted by networks of circulating materials, but also by networks circulating students' bodies into unequal school spaces, fuelling changes in the school’s enrolment and funding through neighbourhood gentrification. I propose ways in which sociomaterial accounts of literacy curriculums may contribute bridgework along with accounting for structural inequalities mobilized in and through schools.

Media Education: Rethinking the Role of Photographic Representation in Public Education

This essay investigates both the pedagogical and communicational roles of photography and education in contemporary society. Assuming that photography and education not only show people their world, but that they also offer them the means to help create it, this essay explores the various ways that social forces have kept people from the democratic possibilities such institutions offer. Indeed, since they are typically controlled by state and corporate interests, photographic institutions and public education systems, as well as their specific representations and practices, typically reinforce a hegemonic order rather than challenge it. Through these institutions such forces have shown and taught us only a limited version of what constitutes our lives by structuring and ordering the material conditions and symbolic spaces of our world, including many of our own thoughts, actions, and experiences. This essay suggests that the critical tendencies of the few alternative photographic and popular educational practices that challenge this order continue to collaborate and develop systematic practices designed to challenge depoliticizing forces, particularly by investigating the spaces most immediately accessible to a large portion of the population: the public school classroom.

Media Education: Rethinking the Role of Photographic Representation in Public Education

This essay investigates both the pedagogical and communicational roles of photography and education in contemporary society. Assuming that photography and education not only show people their world, but that they also offer them the means to help create it, this essay explores the various ways that social forces have kept people from the democratic possibilities such institutions offer. Indeed, since they are typically controlled by state and corporate interests, photographic institutions and public education systems, as well as their specific representations and practices, typically reinforce a hegemonic order rather than challenge it. Through these institutions such forces have shown and taught us only a limited version of what constitutes our lives by structuring and ordering the material conditions and symbolic spaces of our world, including many of our own thoughts, actions, and experiences. This essay suggests that the critical tendencies of the few alternative photographic and popular educational practices that challenge this order continue to collaborate and develop systematic practices designed to challenge depoliticizing forces, particularly by investigating the spaces most immediately accessible to a large portion of the population: the public school classroom.

“Keep Walls Down Instead of Up”: Interrogating Writing/Making as a Vehicle for Black Girls’ Literacies

Drawing on data generated following the 2016 United States presidential election, in this article the author considers how a classroom makerspace made Black girls’ literacies visible in new ways. During a six-week integrated humanities unit in a third-grade public school classroom in the Midwestern U.S., four Black girls used making to create a space for themselves to collaboratively make sense of contemporary (im)migration issues. In the findings, the author provides two analytic snapshots to illustrate how the girls’ making exemplified the six components of the Black Girls’ Literacies Framework—an asset-oriented framing that highlights how Black girls’ literacies are (1) multiple, (2) connected to identities that are (3) historical, (4) collaborative, (5) intellectual, and (6) political/critical (Muhammad & Haddix, 2016). In closing, the author offers provocations for educational researchers and practitioners to consider, as they facilitate school-based opportunities for Black girls’ literacies to be made visible through making.

The EVAC Movement Story: Why Youth Storytelling Is Powerful . . . and Why It’s Dangerous

In this reflective essay, Alan McCullough Jr., Felton Morrell Jr., Bernard Thomas III, Vincente Waugh, and Nicholas Shubert with their teacher, Amy Donofrio, share the youth self-authorship methods that empowered them to transform their labels from “at-risk youth” to “at-hope youth leaders” in Jacksonville, Florida. After realizing that they had similar experiences with Jacksonville’s extreme violence and crime, they partnered to form the EVAC movement. The power of their shared stories led them from inviting officials to their classroom to hear their stories and collaborate for change to eventually speaking at the White House, meeting President Obama, making the front page of the New York Times, and presenting at Harvard University. In this reflection, the authors share how utilizing the power of youth storytelling in the context of a public school classroom can support youth to heal and lead community change, as well as the ways in which youth stories are dangerous—particularly to the systems of racism and oppression that their stories challenge.

Civil Rights and Schools: Tinker v. Des Moines

The 1969 Supreme Court ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines established that students in public elementary and secondary schools do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Before Tinker, students often faced punishment from school officials for their role in protests both on and off campus. A rise in civil rights protests and the role of young people in the social movements of the 1960s led to frequent conflicts between students and school administrators. Many black students were especially vocal in contesting racial discrimination at school in the two decades following the 1954Brown v. Board of Education decision. But before Tinker, students in public elementary and secondary schools were not considered to have any constitutional rights, including the right to free expression. Some of these students brought lawsuits in response to punishments they believed unfairly disciplined them for participating in legitimate protests. The political activism of young people and developments in First Amendment law eventually brought the Constitution into the public school classroom, leading to Tinker and other cases that established students’ rights.

Conclusion

The five chapters of Contesting the Classroom show how authors have reimagined and renegotiated literature’s place within the schools that create future generations of readers. In many cases, these reimaginations are suffused with palpable anxiety over the state of education. Yet they also creatively rethink the educational endeavor, and literature’s relationship to it. Indeed, a common thread in the novels examined in this work is the idea that literature's pedagogical potential does not stop at the doors of the classroom, nor is it limited by traditional classroom definitions of pedagogy. Accordingly, the conclusion of this work poses a series of questions in the spirit of these texts, that open themselves up to other spaces of encounter besides the public school classroom, and other forms of pedagogical writing besides linear narrative prose. In what spaces outside of the classroom do students encounter local literature? And what are the unexpected genres and styles, beyond the print narrative, that engage with education? New locations of pedagogical encounter discussed include small publishers, book fairs, and online spaces; other genres include photography and song.

Critical Classrooms Matter: Baltimore Teachers’ Pedagogical Response After the Death of Freddie Gray

The purpose of this article is to discuss the possibilities of public education. We argue that public schools, despite their flaws, still provide necessary spaces of civic engagement. When major social and/or political events happen, young people have few outlets to discuss, process, and understand implications. In this article, we share the experiences of Baltimore’s teachers after the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed Black man, who lived in Baltimore and died in police custody. Following his death, the city exploded in protest, both violent and peaceful. We interviewed eight teachers and collected curriculum samples to make sense of how they used the public school classroom as a space of critical care, social justice, cultural relevance, and anti-racism to contextualize current events in their city. There are implications here for school district professional development and teacher education.

A Discussion on English Language Students’ Body Image: Beauty Standards and Fatness

In this qualitative study, we intend to discuss how adolescent students in a Brazilian public school classroom define their body image and personalize the themes beauty standards and fatness. Grounded on a critical approach to language teaching, these two social themes were problematized in eight lessons of Ensino Médio (secondary education). The discussion of the empirical material suggests that (1) body image is strongly connected to gendered relations, making life experiences of men and women different based on the bodies they have, and (2) beauty standard and fatness are strongly related to students’ lives since twelve out of nineteen students personalized the themes by telling oppressive stories they went through because of their bodies.