The purpose of this philosophical liberal critique of the 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) is to highlight the danger of using a single lens perspective in social work education in addressing discrimination, racism, inequality and other forms of injustices. A brief review of the concept of social justice illustrates how…

Romanticized rural storytelling creates difficulties for rural children in finding mirrors, seeing people like themselves and places like their homes as principal characters and settings in picturebooks. The same romanticism likewise makes it unlikely for picturebook readers in cities and suburbs to find realistic windows into rural life. Despite…

Equity-oriented school improvement driven by neoliberal policies focuses attention on a narrow range of inequities. Such policies fail to achieve substantive transformations that address educational constraints experienced by multiply-marginalized youth of color. We engage a critical race and intersectional feminist examination of our pedagogy in…

Using critical theories of dominant-and counter-narratives, this study analyzed the texts of selected young adult books that focused on an underrepresented population of working-class rural youth in Appalachia. We explored how the dominant deficit narratives of these communities shaped the identity construction and choices of the books'…

This article explores how Third Way policies have weakened class consciousness in education and how a Marxist model of education offers a powerful alternative to this weakening. By blending neoliberal approaches with social democracy, the Third Way promotes individualistic and market-oriented reforms in education, which have been found to deepen…

This article provides a practical agenda for educational leaders to address diversity in their organization. Firstly, loose definitions of the term diversity have led to its wide misuse; leaders need to agree with their community on its contextual definition. Secondly, the theoretical underpinnings of diversity have been limited to critical theory…

It is often assumed that media literacy serves to protect and uphold democratic practice and that media literate citizens are the best safeguards for democracy. However, little attention is paid to defining this practice and its relationship to ongoing inequities within democratic societies. In this essay, we argue media literacy operates from…

How can disproportionate elite political, economic, and social power -- the essence of inequality -- be challenged peacefully and democratically with empowerment from below through critical pedagogy? Paraguay presents a fascinating case study to address this question, especially considering how its history of colonization, authoritarianism, and…

This study examines the experiences of nine first-generation, single-mother college students, focusing on these intersecting, double-jeopardy identities. Participants' difficulty navigating college varied; contributing factors included family background, social capital, the type of college attended, and whether they established a mentor. The…

The primary purpose of this article is to present the critique of critical pedagogy in analogy to Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels's critique of critical critique and through the materialist theory of education developed by the Polish philosopher of education and Marxist Bogdan Suchodolski, whose work, Fundamental Ideas of a Materialist Theory of…

Despite providing valuable intellectual labor to universities, graduate students experience oppression based on social class (e.g., underpaid labor, student debt, barriers to unionizing), which is compounded for graduate students who hold minoritized statuses (i.e., students of color, sexual minoritized students). Minimal research has focused on…

With neoliberal policy central to the many challenges faced within the education system including an increasing gap between rich and poor (Reay, 2017; Giroux, 2014), this article explores how an Education Studies programme, drawing on the principles of critical pedagogy, can help students to better understand and interrogate neoliberalism and its…

Best practices in civic education emphasize deliberative pedagogies as one of the most powerful ways to educate enlightened democratic citizens. Yet deliberative pedagogies are rooted in a white normative ideal of discursive democracy that, in the service of "civility" and "reasoned discourse," fails to account for the social…

The world is facing increasing crises such as climate, inequality and disease, which are set to impact student futures in devastating ways. Without a change in the way citizens think at the ballot box and the supermarket, these crises indicate an intensification of global disaster with very real consequences. This paper deploys critical theory in…

In the last decades, agroecological and permacultural initiatives and organizations have grown. These initiatives attend to notions of food sovereignty and alternative models of agricultural production. The confluence of different actors and social initiatives through which experiences and knowledge of cultivating food are shared, and new ones are…