LGBTQ+ Ally Education for Adults with Disabilities

The authors - a faculty member from the humanities, a chief diversity officer and a student leader - offer a "lessons-learned" essay in which they describe providing an LGBTQ+ ally education workshop to a group of adults with developmental disabilities. We describe the the obstacles and the payoffs of collaboration across academic units and roles and a commitment not merely to adapt curriculum with accessiblity in mind but to radically reimagine it, and, in the process, more fully coming to embrace the idea of universal design.

Sensory Details

Poem about a Walt Whitman poem that disappears from a high school anthology.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities: by Davarian L. Baldwin

In today’s politically charged, anti-education climate, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower should be required reading for every urban community organizer and higher education stakeholder. Davarian L. Baldwin blends captivating interview excerpts and thoroughly researched data to tell the stories of the winners and losers in and around well-known universities in urban areas from coast to coast. Cultural differences, policing problems, economic disparities, real estate transactions, taxes, and subsidies are all addressed. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a powerful conversation starter about who really benefits from the physical presence of American universities, and how universities might change their tactics to expand those benefits to communities at large.

Antiracist and Faith-based: Critical Pedagogy-Informed Writing and Information Literacy Instruction at a Hispanic-Serving, Lutheran Liberal Arts University

English faculty and librarians at a Hispanic-Serving Lutheran liberal arts university collaborated to integrate critical information literacy in a first-year writing course, following the Lutheran educational tradition of valuing inquiry and aligning with a faith-based social justice mission. The authors discuss an Evangelical Lutheran tradition of education committed to antiracism, and the challenges of enacting these values of equity and inclusion while addressing institutional racism. The authors also describe how curricular revisions in writing and information literacy instruction informed by critical pedagogy decentered whiteness in the curriculum, while creating needed opportunities for students and faculty to engage in cross-racial dialogue about systemic racism.

The Corporatization of the Liberal Arts College: Even the Class Notes!

Writing the class notes for the alumni magazine at a liberal arts college serves many purposes. This article explores how the motives of the person who writes the notes may come in conflict with the powers that be at the school, especially when the notes touch on topics that are seen as "political" or potentially controversial.

Mobilizing BIPOC Student Power against Liberalism at Soka University of America: A Collection of Voices

We write as a collective of BIPOC undergraduate activist students/organizers and contingent/tenured professors dedicated to Black, Third World, and Indigenous liberation through a feminist analysis at Soka University of America (SUA). We focus our critique on liberalism as a dominant political paradigm that has solidified the reign of empire and it’s necropolitical grips on our communities within and without SUA, our SLAC. We highlight through a brief chronology of the epistemic and physical struggles against hegemonic power exercised by our university the ways in which liberalism acts as counterrevolutionary ideology and offer critical reflections/interventions on our struggles against white supremacy at our SLAC, as well as on how our university administration utilizes “liberalism” as a technology of imperialism. We come together to resist empire from where we stand. We believe in the pedagogical possibilities of resistance.

Ethical Considerations on Representing Slavery in Curriculum

Critical discourse on the role of slavery in U.S. history curriculum has tended to rely on calls for justice through truth and complexity. Yet the “truth” of slavery is almost incomprehensibly violent, constituting a form of “historical trauma”; the resultant instructional methods thus resemble what Berry and Stovall term a “curriculum of tragedy.” Ethical questions emerge regarding this method. Chiefly, if slavery constitutes a “historical trauma,” what are the possibilities of a Trauma-Informed curriculum? What are the responsibilities owed to students and historical subjects? Building from critical interventions in Black Feminist Theory and the work of the Frantz Fanon, I propose curricular interventions that attempt to mediate concurrent dynamics of trauma, pain, mourning, action, and revenge.

Education Reform: What Is Really Achieved by Trying to Close Achievement Gaps?

In this article, I trace the history of the substitution of education reform for economic reform in order to ask, and answer, this question: why do we continue to imagine that (higher) education is where we, finally, achieve equality? The substitution of education reform for economic reform begins in the early 1960’s with the landmark “Coleman Report.” I argue that this report, and others that followed, show conclusively that economic inequality simply reproduces itself, and no amount of educational reform can make up for its devastating effects. However, at this very same time, education reformers begin to believe that educational “achievement” is the cause of increased economic opportunity and equality, rather than an effect of (un)equal economic status. This confusion of cause and effect not only distracts us from meaningful economic reform, it also puts tremendous pressure on teachers and institutions. Finally, and fatally, substituting educational reform for economic reform remakes equality itself into something that is earned rather than given.

Towards A Pedagogy of Transnational Feminism When Teaching and Activism Go Online

This article explores the possibilities and limitations of online teaching, based on our experience transforming a study abroad program to Argentina into an online class, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and uprisings for racial justice. In a moment when radical educators and activists are moving online, the article considers the spatial politics involved in teaching about protest and resistance online, and in establishing transnational solidarities between U.S. and Latin American scholars, artists, activists, and students. We introduce the theory and practice of a trasnational feminist pedagogy that incorporates embodied knowledge, fosters transnational collaborations, and promotes liberatory learning practices. Drawing on autoethnography, participant observation, visual and media analysis, student interaction with course materials, and interviews with transnational feminist scholars, we investigate how educators and students adapt their teaching and learning practices to an online environment. Transnational feminist pedagogy is a flexible method that allows for transformative teaching, is attentive to power dynamics in and out of the classroom, and maintains commitments to antiracist, feminist and socialist pedagogy.

For Whom The Bell Does Not Ring

A poem.