Social Foundations of Education as an Unwelcome Counter-Narrative and as Educational Praxis

Abstract

I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on the field of Social Foundations of Education (SFE), in part because it affords an opportunity to advance an historical analysis of the trajectory of the field different from what we provided when my colleagues and I sent to press the Handbook of Research the Social Foundations of Education in 2009 (Tozer, Gallegos, Henry, 2011). I also welcome the opportunity to acknowledge a particular activist tradition established by earlier generations of Social Foundations scholars who have influenced my work. To quote Stuart Hall, these men and women engaged Social Foundations “as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect” (in Tozer et al., 2011, p. 11). Finally, this occasion invites a perspective on the equity work in Chicago Public Schools that we have pursued since I introduced it in my AESA Presidential Address in 2006.