In this paper, I consider pedagogical moments when the project of pedagogy is to "not understand," as understanding would entail complicity with dehumanization. I explore the slipperiness of understanding and parse when understanding is helpful and when it reinscribes structures of dehumanization. I examine when it might be important in…

More than merely policy, neoliberalism shapes how teachers relate to their students and classrooms. This article seeks to make visible how neoliberalism functions to form and deform teacher's subjectivities (and in turn their pedagogical practices) through an analysis of the experiences of two teachers within an accountability-constrained…

This paper critically examines the impact of neoliberalism on Quality Assurance (QA) in Higher Education (HE), employing an integrated approach that combines Foucauldian deconstruction and Freirean reconstruction. It explores the pervasive issues of accountability, standardization, and control that have increasingly dominated the field,…

This article takes as its starting point the mattering of Black women's lives and builds upon connections between cultural representations of Black women and their social devaluation. The goal of this article is to explore the revolutionary possibilities that can emerge when social constructions of Black womanhood that affirm Black women's agency…

Equity and widening participation (EWP) initiatives in Australia are increasingly reimagined in policy as sites where participants are constructed as competitor-individuals, with education considered only in terms of employability, social mobility and nation-state market competition. In the context of EWP outreach, and with school students in…

As part of my work as an educator, I see the need to surface for discussion what might indeed be considered as acts of oppression on the part of peer reviewers when certain aspects of knowing and meaning are misrecognized, obscured, or suppressed. Drawing on observations concerning coercive and oppressive relational and educational practices found…

In this essay, I explore the concept of embodied knowledge that stems from the Brown female body grounded in the critical scholarship by Chicana Feminist Theorists. I share three testimonios of "momentos"--moments in my life--where my embodied knowledge, through emotions, feelings, and senses guided my practices. Through this…

This response to Fleer, Adams & Gunstone builds upon "Transformative pedagogy: Dinka playgroups as spaces for cultural knowledge productions of Western science" by expanding conceptual understanding of the cultural practices of Dinka refugee children. Drawing upon both disciplinary literacy research and research into the role of play…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to articulate, and advocate for, a deep shift in how the authors conceptualize and enact school leadership and reform. The authors challenge fundamental conceptions regarding educational systems and call for a dramatic shift from the factory model to a living systems model of schooling. The authors call is not…

In this critical reflective analysis, we explore the nature of schooling for Black children and youth before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and envision its transformative possibilities. We draw from Black intellectual thought around antiblackness, Black joy, and Brown's humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge to interrogate our own pandemic…

Humanizing pedagogies present a promising framework for contesting dehumanizing practices all too common in U.S. urban schools. To co-construct such pedagogies, however, teachers and students must negotiate between the humanizing and dehumanizing discourses that circulate within their school context. Drawing from data collected from a qualitative…

This paper is a meditation on the idea of South-South dialogue, beginning with the "South-South Dialogues: Situated Perspectives in Decolonial Epistemologies" symposium held at the University of Queensland in 2015. I interrogate the concept of South-South dialogue, apposing it to the Cartesian 'I think', and then question the…

Timothy San Pedro and Valerie Kinloch are among a powerful cohort of scholars who are pushing the ontological boundaries surrounding how we think about the conduct of educational research. A longstanding tension in the history of educational research has been conceptualizations of the goal of such work as discovering foundational principles about…

The psychoeducational intellectual work of Lev Vygotsky (1896-1943) provides a theoretical and sociohistorical meaning that allows you to see from a contextualized perspective the higher forms of self-regulation, conscious control and forms of self-governance. This contribution to the theory of the psychology of education is clearly consistent…

After more than a decade of democratic citizenship education in public schools in South Africa, the Department of Basic Education (DoBE) has still not produced sufficiently plausible ways for how democracy and citizenship ought to be taught in classrooms. I argue that the recent "practical guide" on how to cultivate "responsibility…