The Library of Congress has acquired the Omar ibn Said Collection, including an exceptional artifact, the autobiography of Omar ibn Said, written in ancient Arabic by an African enslaved man. In this article, I analytically examine the role of literacy in Omar ibn Said's life as informed by African cultures, ethnicities, histories, languages, and…

In the midst of the complicated racial-linguistic landscape that is Montreal, Quebec, the educational experiences of the relatively small population of Anglophone Blacks are often invisibilized within the education literature, and relatively little attention is paid to the nature of Black students' and educators' struggles with racism and…

The argument has been propounded that academic disciplines and school subjects provide a powerful, authoritative knowledge which is key to enabling children to better understand the world in which they live. Inherent in this perspective is that children's experience, knowledge and understanding are poorly formed and of limited everyday use and…

In the lead article, Persson (2012a) focuses on salient issues that have not as yet been addressed by others, and which are relevant, and germane. With the advent of the Internet and web and e-mail, conversation and discussion among scholars have increased tremendously. At the current time, researchers are able to share their data, their thoughts…

In this essay Michael Merry defends the following prima facie argument: that civic virtue is not dependent on integration and in fact may be best fostered under conditions of segregation. He demonstrates that civic virtue can and does take place under conditions of involuntary segregation, but that voluntary separation--as a response to…

The author recognises the fact that knowledge of cultural diversity and its implications is growing in the field of giftedness research and practice. In some ways, the target article could therefore be considered "old news." The author contends that his effort to address culture variation and its problematic impact on research, however, is not to…

The disturbances that took place across English towns and cities in 2011 raised significant debate and discussion about their causes and the motivations of the "rioters". Media and official explanations citing criminality and opportunism, repeated the now familiar narratives of cultural deficit, blaming absent fathers, poor parenting and…

This study is interested in understanding the configurations of knowledge underpinning three examples of curriculum policy texts in the specific case of the school subject of geography. The three policy texts are the 1991 Geography National Curriculum (GNC), the "Opening minds" curriculum and the GNC 2007. I start with the proposal that…

There is a growing body of literature discussing evidence-based education, practice, policy, and decision-making from a critical perspective. In this article, drawing on the literature and policy documents related to evidence-based education in the USA, Britain, and Canada, I join this critique and offer an anticolonial perspective. I argue that…

Criticisms of Howard Zinn's work on U.S. History are examined in the context of increasing emphasis on the idea of "American exceptionalism" in contemporary political and cultural discourse, and particularly the insertion of American exceptionalism into revised social studies standards for the state of Texas. Analysis focusing on the…

Few scholars have achieved the level of recognition and respect among the wider public as Howard Zinn. This should not come as a surprise, given the "unconventional" ways that Zinn embodied and enacted his scholarship. He often took his teaching and writing into those seemingly restricted spaces of popular protest, converting words into…

"The accomplishments of Indians and their actual place in the story of the United States have never been remotely touched by ... [most] historians. The major reason for this omission is that a substantial number of practicing historians simply do not know the source documents with sufficient precision to make sense of them; ... They spend a…

Warns that instead of tying the peoples of the world together in brotherhood, advances in telecommunication foster ever-increasing isolation and ethnocentrism among nations. (PD)

Examines the central communicative features of Richard Rorty's post-foundational philosophy. Argues that Rorty's commitments to edifying philosophy, the cultural conversation, ethnocentrism, and a pragmatic approach to epistemology are all best understood from the perspective of rhetorical theory and practice. (MM)

Reflects on the actual use of the English first-person plural pronoun "we," exploring cultural and social values of such usage and how the pronoun, as currently and frequently used, actually excludes populations and individuals assumed to be included and supports ethnocentric values. (CB)