Part one: This article is the first part of a project concerned with developing a Marxist critical pedagogy that moves beyond a critique of capital and toward a communist future. The article begins with a brief survey of and intervention in the contemporary historical and political moment as it pertains to the potentiality of a communist pedagogy,…

Whereas epistemological debates raged in educational administration during the Theory Movement, or inspired by intervention from Thom Greenfield, Richard Bates or Colin Evers and Gabriele Lakomski, epistemology and the quest for the scientific study of educational administration has somewhat diminished in the era of managerialism and the pursuit…

This article explores Lyotard's notion of performativity through an engagement with McKenzie's analysis of performance as a "formation of knowledge and power" that has displaced the notion of discipline as the tool for social evaluation. Through conditions of "performance" capitalism, education is to conform to a…

Philosophers of education tend to mention Max Weber's social theory in passing, assuming its importance and presuming its comprehension, but few have paused to consider how Weber's social theory might consciously inform educational theory and research, and none have done so comprehensively. The aim of this article is to begin this…

Geographical knowledge is powerful if it is critical and empowering. This article develops this argument with reference to the philosophy of knowledge and Laura Wheelahan's advocacy of critical realism as the philosophical strand of her social realist curriculum theory. While the GeoCapabilities Project has drawn on the sociological strand of that…

In this essay, I review three recent monographs: Jordynn Jack's "Autism and Gender," Anne McGuire's "War on Autism," and Melanie Yergeau's "Authoring Autism." Each of these texts centers disability--autism in particular--and in doing so, they highlight the insidious ways in which our cultural, institutional, and…

I argue that analyses of racial(ised) discourse and policy processes in education must grapple with cultural disregard for and disgust with blackness. This article explains how a theorization of antiblackness allows one to more precisely identify and respond to racism in education discourse and in the formation and implementation of education…

For those engaged in educational "improvement," it is important to pause from time to time to ask the question: what is improving? If Bourdieu's thesis is correct, namely that education is a key site of social reproduction, does school improvement, and/or improvement of mathematics education, also enhance that capacity for the social…

This chapter reviews ways that researchers have presented variously narrow and broad groupings of special student success programs over the course of decades. Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) is proposed as a way to conceptualize various kinds of community college student success programs as instances of a more general type of program.

Disabled children experience unique vulnerabilities in the context of child protection and welfare services. Current research alludes to strong concerns about social inequality, professional responses, judgement, knowledge and awareness limitations, and practical constraints. This article presents a focused commentary on the literature pertaining…

This paper discusses teacher resistance to recognizing some perspectives of difficult histories. The paper focuses on the following question: How does affect contribute not only to the formation of teacher resistance, but also to its disruption in ways that enable the productive reclaiming of teachers' engagement with traumatic histories? To…

In this article, Nesta Devine responds to Jonathan Boston's article "Child Poverty in New Zealand: Why It Matters and How It Can Be Reduced" ("Educational Philosophy and Theory," v46 n9 p995-999, 2014). Devine wishes to consider Boston's position from two angles: one is to rehearse the point that these statistics are an…

Across the higher education sector international education has been described as experiencing a "crisis of identity." The recent proliferation of new terms advanced to label "internationalization," it has been suggested, represents little more than "tautology." Here, we address questions posed by de Wit regarding this…

The phrase "the two cultures debate" has a particular connotation in the British context. It was prompted by a lecture given in the 1950s by the novelist C.P. Snow. Snow's first career had been in science, and he drew on his inside knowledge of that domain in a sequence of novels, known collectively as "Strangers and…

It is typically understood that friendship is define as "a close and informal relationship of mutual trust and intimacy" (Oxford English Dictionary). On a basic level, friends care about each other. They spend time interacting in ways that are mutually beneficial. Friendships usually take a period of time to develop--people typically do…