At the time of Obama's draconian anti-immigrant policies leading to massive deportation of undocumented, poor immigrants of colour, there could not be a more timely and important book than this edited volume, which critically examines ways in which immigration, race, class, language, and gender issues intersect and impact the life of many immigrants, including immigrant students. This book documents the journey, many success-stories, as well as stories that expose social inequity in schools and U.S. society. Further, this book examines issues of social inequity and resource gaps shaping the relations between affluent and poor-working class students, including students of colour. Authors in this volume also critically unpack anti-immigrant policies leading to the separation of families and children. Equally important, contributors to this book unveil ways and degree to which xenophobia and linguicism have affected immigrants, including immigrant students and faculty of colour, in both subtle and overt ways, and the manner in which many have resisted these forms of oppression and affirmed their humanity. Lastly, chapters in this much-needed and well-timed volume have pointed out the way racism has limited life chances of people of colour, including students of colour, preventing many of them from fulfilling their potential succeeding in schools and society at large.

This Fist Called My Heart: The Peter McLaren Reader, Volume I is "at the same time an homage, a gathering, an intellectual activist's...toolkit, a teacher's bullshit detector, a parent's demand list and an academic's orienting topography. This collection of essays...represents some of the most central and important work of Peter McLaren; work he has done on behalf of people's liberation and humanization over more than three decades. [It provides] readers with an opportunity to develop a deep understanding of McLaren's intellectual history and academic development, and the thinking processes that lead to his current framework and intellectual/philosophical/political situatedness in humanist Marxism. Through these gathered and sequentially presented essays, readers will be able to `see' McLaren in the process of his theory construction, over time, without missing his essence of struggling for a just society that promotes the full humanity and liberation of all people. [Here,] we have curated some of the most exemplary essays along the trajectory of Peter McLaren's long and impactful career. These pieces track and document Peter's intellectual grow as one of North America's most important intellectuals and advocates for critical pedagogy; his theorizing of the discursive and the everyday through post-modernist and post-structural lenses; his contributions to the literature and practice of critical multiculturalism; his stirring work on capitalist empire, and valiant struggles to resist it; through to his foundational, long held connection and cutting edge contribution to the field of humanist Marxism."

Democracy can mean a range of concepts, covering everything from freedoms, rights, elections, governments, processes, philosophies and a panoply of abstract and concrete notions that can be mediated by power, positionality, culture, time and space. Democracy can also be translated into brute force, hegemony, docility, compliance and conformity, as in wars will be decided on the basis of the needs of elites, or major decisions about spending finite resources will be the domain of the few over the masses, or people will be divided along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, religion, etc. because it is advantageous for maintaining exploitative political systems in place to do so. Often, these frameworks are developed and reified based on the notion that elections give the right to societies, or segments of societies, to install regimes, institutions and operating systems that are then supposedly legitimated and rendered infinitely just because formal power resides in the hands of those dominating forces. This book is interested in advancing a critical analysis of the hegemonic paradigm described above, one that seeks higher levels of political literacy and consciousness, and one that makes the connection with education. What does education have to do with democracy? How does education shape, influence, impinge on, impact, negate, facilitate and/or change the context, contours and realities of democracy? How can we teach for and about democracy to alter and transform the essence of what democracy is, and, importantly, what it should be? This book advances the notion of decency in relation to democracy, and is underpinned by an analysis of meaningful, critically-engaged education. Is it enough to be kind, nice, generous and hopeful when we can also see signs of rampant, entrenched and debilitating racism, sexism, poverty, violence, injustice, war and other social inequalities? If democracy is intended to be a legitimating force for good, how does education inform democracy? What types of knowledge, experience, analysis and being are helpful to bring about newer, more meaningful and socially just forms of democracy? Throughout some twenty chapters from a range of international scholars, this book includes three sections: Constructing Meanings for Democracy and Decency; Justice for All as Praxis; and Social Justice in Action for Democracy, Decency, and Diversity: International Perspectives. The underlying thread that is interwoven through the texts is a critical reappraisal of normative, hegemonic interpretations of how power is infused into the educational realm, and, importantly, how democracy can be re-situated and re-formulated so as to more meaningfully engage society and education.

The word fundamentalism usually conjures up images of religions and their most zealous followers. Much less often the word appears in connection with political economy. The phrase "free market" gives the connotation that capitalism is freedom. Neoliberalism is the rise of global free-market fundamentalism. It reaches into nearly every aspect of our daily lives as it seeks to dominate and eliminate the last vestiges of public domains through wanton privatization and deregulation. It degrades all that is public. The good news is that a global community of resistance continues to struggle against neoliberal oppression. Formal and informal education entities contribute to these struggles, offering visions and strategies for creating a better future. The purpose of this volume is twofold. Several contributors will highlight how the neoliberal agenda is impacting educational policy formation, teaching and learning, and relationships between institutions of higher education and communities. Other contributors will highlight how the global community has gradually become conscious of the ideological doctrine and how it is responsible for human suffering and misery. The volume is needed because the growing body of educational research linked to exploring the impact of neoliberalism on education and society fails to provide conceptual or historical understanding of this ideology. It is also an important scholarly intervention because it provides insights as to why educators, scholars, and other global citizens have challenged the intrusion of market forces over life inside universities and colleges. Teaching faculty, research faculty, and anyone who yearns to understand what is behind the debilitating trend of commercial forces subverting humanizing educational projects would benefit from this volume. Activists, educators, youth, and scholars who seek strategies and visions for building democratic higher education and a more democratic society would consider this volume essential reading.

The word fundamentalism usually conjures up images of religions and their most zealous followers. Much less often the word appears in connection with political economy. The phrase "free market" gives the connotation that capitalism is freedom. Neoliberalism is the rise of global free-market fundamentalism. It reaches into nearly every aspect of our daily lives as it seeks to dominate and eliminate the last vestiges of public domains through wanton privatization and deregulation. It degrades all that is public. The good news is that a global community of resistance continues to struggle against neoliberal oppression. Formal and informal education entities contribute to these struggles, offering visions and strategies for creating a better future.The purpose of this volume is twofold. Several contributors will highlight how the neoliberal agenda is impacting educational policy formation, teaching and learning, and relationships between K-12 schools and communities. Other contributors will highlight how the global community has gradually become conscious of the ideological doctrine and how it is responsible for human suffering and misery. The volume is needed because the growing body of educational research linked to exploring the impact of neoliberalism on schools and society fails to provide conceptual or historical understanding of this ideology. It is also an important scholarly intervention because it provides insights as to why educators, scholars, and other global citizens have challenged the intrusion of market forces over life inside K-12 schools. Teacher educators, schoolteachers, and anyone who yearns to understand what is behind the debilitating trend of commercial forces subverting humanizing educational projects would benefit from this volume. Activists, educators, youth, and scholars who seek strategies and visions for building democratic schools and a society would consider this volume essential reading.

This book addresses and demonstrates the importance of critical approaches to autoethnography, particularly the commitment that such approaches make to theorizing the personal and to creating work that embodies a social justice ethos. Arts-based and practice-led approaches to this work allow the explanatory power of critical theory to be linked with creative, aesthetically engaging, and personal examples of the ideas at work. By making use of personal stories, critical autoethnography also allows for commenting on, critiquing, and transforming damaging and unjust cultural beliefs and practices by questioning and problematizing the relationships of power that are bound up in these selves, cultures and practices. The essays in this volume provide readers with work that demonstrates how critical autoethnography offers researchers and scholars across multiple disciplines a method for creatively putting critical theory into action. The book will be vital reading for students, researchers and scholars working in the fields of education, communication studies, sociology and cultural anthropology, and the performing arts.

As the title of this book suggests, how we understand, perceive and experience democracy may have a significant effect on how we actually engage in, and with, democracy. Within the educational context, this is a key concern, and forms the basis of the research presented in this volume within a critical, comparative analysis. The Global Doing Democracy Research Project (GDDRP), which currently has some 70 scholars in over 20 countries examining how educators do democracy, provides the framework in which diverse scholars explore a host of concerns related to democracy and democratic education, including the impact of neoliberalism, political literacy, critical engagement, teaching and learning for and about democracy, social justice, and the meaning of power/power relations within the educational context. Ultimately, the contributors of this book collectively ask: can there be democracy without a critically engaged education, and, importantly, what role do educators play in this context and process? Why many educators in diverse contexts believe that they are unable, dissuaded and/or prevented from doing thick democratic education is problematized in this book but the authors also seek to illustrate that, despite the challenges, barriers and concerns about doing democracy in education, something can, and should, be done to develop, cultivate and ingratiate schools and society with more meaningful democratic practices and processes. This book breaks new ground by using a similar empirical methodology within a number of international contexts to gage the democratic sentiments and actions of educators, which raises a host of questions about epistemology, teacher education, policy development, pedagogy, institutional cultures, conscientization, and the potential for transformational change in education.

This edited volume contributes to a burgeoning field of critical scholarship on the news media and education. This scholarship is based on an understanding that the news media has increasingly applied a neoliberal template that mediates knowledge and action about education. This book calls into question what the public knows about education, how the public is informed, and whose interests are represented and ultimately served through the production and distribution of information by the news media about education. The chapters comprising this volume serve to enlighten and call to action parents, students, educators, academics and scholars, activists, and policymakers for social, political, and economic transformation. Moreover, as the neoliberal agenda in North America intensifies, the chapters in this book help to deepen our understanding of the logics and processes of the neoliberal privatization of education and the accompanying social discourses that facilitate the reduction of social relations to a transaction in the marketplace. The chapters examine the news media and the reproduction of neoliberal educational reforms (A Nation at Risk, Teach For America, charter schools, think tanks, and PISA) and resistance to neoliberal educational reforms (online activism and radical Black press) while also broadening our conceptual understanding of the marketization and mediatization of educational discourses. Overall, the book provides an in-depth understanding of the neoliberal privatization of education by extending critical examinations to this underrepresented field of cultural production: the news media coverage of education. The contribution of this edited volume, therefore, helps to build an understanding of the contemporary dynamics of capital accumulation to inform public resistance for social transformation.

This book is one of the few scholarly works on critical pedagogy that makes use of empirical data in the specific context of analyzing both academic and sociopolitical articulations of critical student agency and agentive growth of Latino immigrant students.

Reinventing Critical Pedagogy offers a fresh perspective from which to read, discuss, and debate recent critical interpretations of schooling and our world at present. The authors build upon past accomplishments of critical pedagogy and critique those elements that contradict the radically democratic orientation of the field. Ultimately, they argue that critical pedagogy needs to welcome a wider representational and ideological base for the oppressed, and that it should do so in a way that makes the field more vital in the preparation for the revolutionary struggles ahead. Reinventing Critical Pedagogy takes a step in that direction because it not only takes to task "external" forces such as capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but also engages the manifestations of these external forces within critical pedagogy itself.

Reinventing Critical Pedagogy offers a fresh perspective from which to read, discuss, and debate recent critical interpretations of schooling and our world at present. The authors build upon past accomplishments of critical pedagogy and critique those elements that contradict the radically democratic orientation of the field. Ultimately, they argue that critical pedagogy needs to welcome a wider representational and ideological base for the oppressed, and that it should do so in a way that makes the field more vital in the preparation for the revolutionary struggles ahead. Reinventing Critical Pedagogy takes a step in that direction because it not only takes to task OexternalO forces such as capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but also engages the manifestations of these external forces within critical pedagogy itself.

This edited volume contributes to a burgeoning field of critical scholarship on the news media and education. This scholarship is based on an understanding that the news media has increasingly applied a neoliberal template that mediates knowledge and action about education. This book calls into question what the public knows about education, how the public is informed, and whose interests are represented and ultimately served through the production and distribution of information by the news media about education. The chapters comprising this volume serve to enlighten and call to action parents, students, educators, academics and scholars, activists, and policymakers for social, political, and economic transformation. Moreover, as the neoliberal agenda in North America intensifies, the chapters in this book help to deepen our understanding of the logics and processes of the neoliberal privatization of education and the accompanying social discourses that facilitate the reduction of social relations to a transaction in the marketplace. The chapters examine the news media and the reproduction of neoliberal educational reforms (A Nation at Risk, Teach For America, charter schools, think tanks, and PISA) and resistance to neoliberal educational reforms (online activism and radical Black press) while also broadening our conceptual understanding of the marketization and mediatization of educational discourses. Overall, the book provides an in-depth understanding of the neoliberal privatization of education by extending critical examinations to this underrepresented field of cultural production: the news media coverage of education. The contribution of this edited volume, therefore, helps to build an understanding of the contemporary dynamics of capital accumulation to inform public resistance for social transformation.

This Fist Called My Heart: The Peter McLaren Reader, Volume I is "at the same time an homage, a gathering, an intellectual activist's...toolkit, a teacher's bullshit detector, a parent's demand list and an academic's orienting topography. This collection of essays...represents some of the most central and important work of Peter McLaren; work he has done on behalf of people's liberation and humanization over more than three decades. [It provides] readers with an opportunity to develop a deep understanding of McLaren's intellectual history and academic development, and the thinking processes that lead to his current framework and intellectual/philosophical/political situatedness in humanist Marxism. Through these gathered and sequentially presented essays, readers will be able to `see' McLaren in the process of his theory construction, over time, without missing his essence of struggling for a just society that promotes the full humanity and liberation of all people. [Here,] we have curated some of the most exemplary essays along the trajectory of Peter McLaren's long and impactful career. These pieces track and document Peter's intellectual grow as one of North America's most important intellectuals and advocates for critical pedagogy; his theorizing of the discursive and the everyday through post-modernist and post-structural lenses; his contributions to the literature and practice of critical multiculturalism; his stirring work on capitalist empire, and valiant struggles to resist it; through to his foundational, long held connection and cutting edge contribution to the field of humanist Marxism."

Democracy can mean a range of concepts, covering everything from freedoms, rights, elections, governments, processes, philosophies and a panoply of abstract and concrete notions that can be mediated by power, positionality, culture, time and space. Democracy can also be translated into brute force, hegemony, docility, compliance and conformity, as in wars will be decided on the basis of the needs of elites, or major decisions about spending finite resources will be the domain of the few over the masses, or people will be divided along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, religion, etc. because it is advantageous for maintaining exploitative political systems in place to do so. Often, these frameworks are developed and reified based on the notion that elections give the right to societies, or segments of societies, to install regimes, institutions and operating systems that are then supposedly legitimated and rendered infinitely just because formal power resides in the hands of those dominating forces. This book is interested in advancing a critical analysis of the hegemonic paradigm described above, one that seeks higher levels of political literacy and consciousness, and one that makes the connection with education. What does education have to do with democracy? How does education shape, influence, impinge on, impact, negate, facilitate and/or change the context, contours and realities of democracy? How can we teach for and about democracy to alter and transform the essence of what democracy is, and, importantly, what it should be? This book advances the notion of decency in relation to democracy, and is underpinned by an analysis of meaningful, critically-engaged education. Is it enough to be kind, nice, generous and hopeful when we can also see signs of rampant, entrenched and debilitating racism, sexism, poverty, violence, injustice, war and other social inequalities? If democracy is intended to be a legitimating force for good, how does education inform democracy? What types of knowledge, experience, analysis and being are helpful to bring about newer, more meaningful and socially just forms of democracy? Throughout some twenty chapters from a range of international scholars, this book includes three sections: Constructing Meanings for Democracy and Decency; Justice for All as Praxis; and Social Justice in Action for Democracy, Decency, and Diversity: International Perspectives. The underlying thread that is interwoven through the texts is a critical reappraisal of normative, hegemonic interpretations of how power is infused into the educational realm, and, importantly, how democracy can be re-situated and re-formulated so as to more meaningfully engage society and education.

The word fundamentalism usually conjures up images of religions and their most zealous followers. Much less often the word appears in connection with political economy. The phrase "free market" gives the connotation that capitalism is freedom. Neoliberalism is the rise of global free-market fundamentalism. It reaches into nearly every aspect of our daily lives as it seeks to dominate and eliminate the last vestiges of public domains through wanton privatization and deregulation. It degrades all that is public. The good news is that a global community of resistance continues to struggle against neoliberal oppression. Formal and informal education entities contribute to these struggles, offering visions and strategies for creating a better future.The purpose of this volume is twofold. Several contributors will highlight how the neoliberal agenda is impacting educational policy formation, teaching and learning, and relationships between K-12 schools and communities. Other contributors will highlight how the global community has gradually become conscious of the ideological doctrine and how it is responsible for human suffering and misery. The volume is needed because the growing body of educational research linked to exploring the impact of neoliberalism on schools and society fails to provide conceptual or historical understanding of this ideology. It is also an important scholarly intervention because it provides insights as to why educators, scholars, and other global citizens have challenged the intrusion of market forces over life inside K-12 schools. Teacher educators, schoolteachers, and anyone who yearns to understand what is behind the debilitating trend of commercial forces subverting humanizing educational projects would benefit from this volume. Activists, educators, youth, and scholars who seek strategies and visions for building democratic schools and a society would consider this volume essential reading.

At the time of Obama's draconian anti-immigrant policies leading to massive deportation of undocumented, poor immigrants of colour, there could not be a more timely and important book than this edited volume, which critically examines ways in which immigration, race, class, language, and gender issues intersect and impact the life of many immigrants, including immigrant students. This book documents the journey, many success-stories, as well as stories that expose social inequity in schools and U.S. society. Further, this book examines issues of social inequity and resource gaps shaping the relations between affluent and poor-working class students, including students of colour. Authors in this volume also critically unpack anti-immigrant policies leading to the separation of families and children. Equally important, contributors to this book unveil ways and degree to which xenophobia and linguicism have affected immigrants, including immigrant students and faculty of colour, in both subtle and overt ways, and the manner in which many have resisted these forms of oppression and affirmed their humanity. Lastly, chapters in this much-needed and well-timed volume have pointed out the way racism has limited life chances of people of colour, including students of colour, preventing many of them from fulfilling their potential succeeding in schools and society at large.

The word fundamentalism usually conjures up images of religions and their most zealous followers. Much less often the word appears in connection with political economy. The phrase "free market" gives the connotation that capitalism is freedom. Neoliberalism is the rise of global free-market fundamentalism. It reaches into nearly every aspect of our daily lives as it seeks to dominate and eliminate the last vestiges of public domains through wanton privatization and deregulation. It degrades all that is public. The good news is that a global community of resistance continues to struggle against neoliberal oppression. Formal and informal education entities contribute to these struggles, offering visions and strategies for creating a better future. The purpose of this volume is twofold. Several contributors will highlight how the neoliberal agenda is impacting educational policy formation, teaching and learning, and relationships between institutions of higher education and communities. Other contributors will highlight how the global community has gradually become conscious of the ideological doctrine and how it is responsible for human suffering and misery. The volume is needed because the growing body of educational research linked to exploring the impact of neoliberalism on education and society fails to provide conceptual or historical understanding of this ideology. It is also an important scholarly intervention because it provides insights as to why educators, scholars, and other global citizens have challenged the intrusion of market forces over life inside universities and colleges. Teaching faculty, research faculty, and anyone who yearns to understand what is behind the debilitating trend of commercial forces subverting humanizing educational projects would benefit from this volume. Activists, educators, youth, and scholars who seek strategies and visions for building democratic higher education and a more democratic society would consider this volume essential reading.

As the title of this book suggests, how we understand, perceive and experience democracy may have a significant effect on how we actually engage in, and with, democracy. Within the educational context, this is a key concern, and forms the basis of the research presented in this volume within a critical, comparative analysis. The Global Doing Democracy Research Project (GDDRP), which currently has some 70 scholars in over 20 countries examining how educators do democracy, provides the framework in which diverse scholars explore a host of concerns related to democracy and democratic education, including the impact of neoliberalism, political literacy, critical engagement, teaching and learning for and about democracy, social justice, and the meaning of power/power relations within the educational context. Ultimately, the contributors of this book collectively ask: can there be democracy without a critically engaged education, and, importantly, what role do educators play in this context and process? Why many educators in diverse contexts believe that they are unable, dissuaded and/or prevented from doing thick democratic education is problematized in this book but the authors also seek to illustrate that, despite the challenges, barriers and concerns about doing democracy in education, something can, and should, be done to develop, cultivate and ingratiate schools and society with more meaningful democratic practices and processes. This book breaks new ground by using a similar empirical methodology within a number of international contexts to gage the democratic sentiments and actions of educators, which raises a host of questions about epistemology, teacher education, policy development, pedagogy, institutional cultures, conscientization, and the potential for transformational change in education.

Thirteen contributions from academics representing a variety of disciplines confront issues relating to social justice in a post-9/11 world. Sample topics include the politics of coalition building among progressive educators and the role of participatory democracy in the critical praxis of social justice. The volume (which is not indexed) conclude