American Educational Studies Association Research Articles

Educational gag orders as white property of interest: reinscribing higher education's ethos in radical tradition

PurposeIt is critical for those who are engaged in the work of resisting the movement of academically restrictive policy to understand that it is a deliberate act on the part of conservatives to outlaw critical race theory (CRT) specifically, because it is a theoretical mechanism for discrediting the rhetorical foundations of their policy movement. The knee-jerk institutional courses of action to now defund initiatives and curriculum related equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) represent what has always been a deeply rooted investment in white supremacy on the part of the institutions (Baldwin, 2021; Patel, 2021; Squire, 2021).Design/methodology/approachThe author explores and defines the CRT tenets of interest convergence (Bell, 1980) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) in relation to EI (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011) as frameworks for examining three EGOs in the region where these policies have become most dominant. All three are critical tools of analysis for understanding the stake the White conservative political elite have in EGOs, and the magnitude of EI these policies represent, and stand endorse in their rhetoric. Definitions of EI often rely on the work of Amanda Fricker’s (2013) text on the subject, but this paper is invested in the expansions of this theorization for speaking to the nature of the injustice that EGOs represent as a matter of historical trend, with grave implications for futures marked by continued oppression. Whiteness as property and interest convergence are points for explicating the dialectic and material aspects of issues of race and equity in this country; namely, how knowledge processes inherent to higher education sound even more alarms as EGOs become commonplace for college campuses.FindingsTo support the arguments laid out, the author provides a historical review of the settler-colonial foundations of higher education as an american institution. This is meant to provide contour to the image of postsecondary education that exists today. In accordance with this paper’s allegiance to CRT, many of the texts would be considered revisionist history (Delgado and Stefancic, 2023), which stray from dominant narratives of american comfort and speak more accurately to the experiences of minoritized populations. The author then applies the same analysis to the sociopolitical contexts of EGOs, and to policy language itself. Each section is closed with an explanation of its connection to tenets of CRT and EI so as to provide a thread to follow into the subsequent discussion section.Research limitations/implicationsIn the first presentation of the early writings of this work, the author was lucky enough to be in community with Barbara Applebaum at the annual meeting for the American Educational Studies Association and engage in discourse surrounding EI and CRT applications to EGOs. In conversations surrounding the will in the willful ignorance that is exemplified in the movement of EGOs, the author had shared with Dr Applebaum the early thinking on how that will was the same force that brought together converging interests, which have continually forecasted interest divergence. This is commonly referred to as “political backlash.” The author had said something along the lines of: “if we follow the interest convergence, we can get in front of the subsequent political moves to turn the clocks on what was once celebrates progress.” This conversation planted the seed for what is the thesis of this paper. Interest convergence and divergence happen at the will of white populations because of the american truth of whiteness as property. In the context of higher education, this means that because educational pursuit has largely been white property, it has served as an arena for white populations to converge and diverge their interests with those of the minoritized. For example, the policies that drained federal funding for higher education in the 1970s were passed on the tails of a Civil Rights Movement that shook the very foundation of this country and expanded access to postsecondary education for racially minoritized groups (Berret, 2015).Originality/valueEnsuring that this social construction is a matter of status quo has largely been the work of postsecondary institutions, and EGOs represent the most recent attempt at epistemically imposed inferiority. Explicit attention to the fact of higher education’s complicity and overall investment in the socialization of oppression is necessary to engage in transformative practice that resists anachronism. If higher education researchers and practitioners do not recognize the stake in both the presence and resistance to EGOs, there would likely be acts of resistance that will belie an act of interest convergence – and later divergence – on the part of the state.

Contributors

Contributors

The Enemy Said We Will Not Make it Home: Critical Race Theory, Educational Foundations and the Fight Against Precarity

The following article is an edited transcript of the R. Freeman Butts lecture of the American Educational Studies Association that took place on November 5, 2021, in Portland, Oregon. In the address, Stovall provides an assessment of the recent attacks on Critical Race Theory and the work needed to resist the current attacks.

The Queer Love Project

Research Article| April 01 2020 The Queer Love Project: AESA, Fatigue, and Building the Body of an Organization Boni Wozolek; Boni Wozolek Boni Wozolek is currently an assistant professor of education at Penn State University, Abington College. Her work considers questions of equity and access at the intersections of race, sexual orientations, and gender with its multiple expressions and identities. Dr. Wozolek serves on the executive council of the American Educational Studies Association (2016–19) and sits on the editorial team for the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (2018–24). Her recent publications include contributions to the Journal of LGBT Youth, Journal of Gender Studies, the Urban Review, and Educational Studies. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Silvia C. Bettez; Silvia C. Bettez Silvia Cristina Bettez is a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations at UNC Greensboro. She teaches graduate-level qualitative research and equity in education courses. Her scholarship centralizes social justice with a focus on fostering critical community building, teaching for social justice, and promoting equity through intercultural communication and engagement. She served as the 2018–19 American Educational Studies Association president-elect and program chair. She has publications in several journals, including Equity and Excellence in Education, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Educational Studies, and Multicultural Perspectives. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Roland Sintos Coloma; Roland Sintos Coloma Roland Sintos Coloma is professor and assistant dean of Teacher Education and co-director of the Kaplan Center for Research on Urban Education at Wayne State University. He served as president of the American Educational Studies Association (2018–19) and editor of the Educational Studies journal (2014–17). A scholar of history, cultural studies, and education, his work addresses critical questions of race, gender, and sexuality from transnational and intersectional perspectives. His research has received funding from the US Department of Education, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and AERA-Spencer and Connaught foundations. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Hilton Kelly Hilton Kelly Hilton Kelly is dean of liberal arts and humanities and professor of sociology at Livingstone College in Salisbury, NC. He received his BA in history from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and both his MS in labor studies and PhD in sociology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Kelly was the 2018 president of the American Educational Studies Association. In 2010, he published Race, Remembering, and Jim Crow’s Teachers in the Routledge Studies in African American History and Culture Series. His articles have appeared in Urban Education, Educational Studies, the Urban Review, the Journal of Negro Education, the American Sociologist, and Vitae Scholasticae: The Journal of Educational Biography. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2020) 26 (2): 223–226. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8141746 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Boni Wozolek, Silvia C. Bettez, Roland Sintos Coloma, Hilton Kelly; The Queer Love Project: AESA, Fatigue, and Building the Body of an Organization. GLQ 1 April 2020; 26 (2): 223–226. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8141746 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Decolonizing Urban Education

Drawing insights primarily from Ethnic Studies, this essay is broken into the following components: outlining the elusive task of defining urban; delineating three decolonizing moves in relation to representation, structure, and affect; and ending with the ongoing struggles for Ethnic Studies in PK-12 schools and higher education. The goal is to sharpen nuestra facultad and deeply engage with el sitio y la lengua of urban schools and communities in order to unpack what has been normalized, construed as common sense and, therefore, taken for granted. An earlier version of this essay was given as the author’s presidential address at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Educational Studies Association in Baltimore, Maryland.

Mahayana Buddhism and Deweyan Philosophy

My paper examines some of the many similarities between Mahayana Buddhism and Deweyan philosophy. It builds upon two previously published works. The first is my dialogue with Daisaku Ikeda President of Soka Gakkai International, a UN registered ngo currently active in one hundred ninety-two countries and territories, and the Director Emeritus of the Center for Dewey Studies, Larry Hickman (see Garrison, Hickman, and Ikdea, 2014). My paper will first briefly review some of the many similarities between Buddhism and Deweyan pragmatism. Second, I will also briefly review additional similarities in the published version of my Kneller Lecture to the American Educational Studies Association (see Garrison, 2019). In the present paper, I will introduce some new similarities of interest to educators. Among these are Dewey’s surprisingly Buddhist notions of language and logic as merely useful conventions. Secondly, I examine Dewey’s argument that “causation as ordered sequence is a logical category,” not an ontological category (LW 12: 454). The similarity to the opening chapter of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka, or Middle Way, is striking. I will suggest a logical reading has some interesting implications for student-teacher relations.

Critical Educational Psychology

I read Stephen Vassallo’s text, Critical Educational Psychology (2017), with interest. As a faculty member in an interdisciplinary social foundations unit who often works with educational psychology colleagues and students, I inhabit a kind of epistemological borderlands in which I regularly engage with and support projects animated by theoretical foundations that differ from or conflict with those in my own terrain. Historians Adelman and Arons’ (1999) characterize “borderlands” as having “contested boundaries between colonial domains” (p. 816), a generative metaphor that might apply to intercultural exchanges in a variety of academic spaces and fields. I wondered whether Vassallo’s text, a recipient of the American Educational Studies Association’s Critical Choice Award (2018), might offer me additional insights for crossing over from my non-positivist and critical spaces to support post-positivist and realist work.

Nichiren Buddhism and Deweyan Pragmatism: An Eastern-Western Integration of Thought

Let me begin by thanking the members of the George F. Kneller Advisory Committee and you the members of the American Educational Studies Association for inviting me to give the annual Kneller Lecture on this the fiftieth anniversary of the Association.The present phase of rising nationalism and growing global xenophobia does not suggest this is the season for the integration of international thought. Nonetheless, my lecture focuses on an instance of a nascent integration of Eastern and Western philosophical and educational ideas.

Here, There, and Back Again with the Social Foundations of Education: Tracing Conocimientos In/Toward Coalitional Journeys

This article narrates a parallel personal and professional journey of scholarly engagement with the field of the social foundations of education and its home in the American Educational Studies Association. It draws on Gloria Anzaldúa's (2000) notion of conocimiento as multileveled and connective knowings, and María Lugones's (2008) idea of coalitional journeys to describe the histories and possibilities for the field.

Reflections on the Social Foundations of Education

The essay examines the state of the American Educational Studies Association and Social Foundations of Education through the lenses of auto-ethnography and critical reflection. A discussion of the relevance of the AESA and social foundations in the context of transformative education for scholars from marginalized communities is central to the thesis. AESA is situated in the context of the transnational politics of inclusion/exclusion in the United States. The author supports a transnational hemispheric approach to social foundations for the American Educational Studies Association.

Living Memories of Womanlishness/Womanish and Womanism: Finding Voice on the Heels of Thinkers and Do-ers

When I received an e-mail from Roland (Sintos Coloma) about participating in the 50th celebration of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), I did not hesitate to agree to do so. What I did not envision, at the time, is how difficult and complex this process of writing an article for the special issue of Educational Studies is. I have several titles and introductions filed under the proverbial t because nothing felt fiery, engaging, or like me. I knew that living memories is a must, in light of 2017's conference theme: “Memory, Remembering & Forgetting: (Re)Envisioning Educational Worlds.” However, my spirit and soul were hungry for (what?); but I couldn't name the missing ingredient(s).

Remembering Social Foundations of Education: Autobiographical Wanderings

For this collection of articles celebrating the 50th anniversary of the American Educational Studies Association, I was invited to contribute a narrative detailing my history and relationship to the field, influences to my development as a scholar, the state of the field during my presidency, and any advice or guidance I might share with current scholars and graduate students of Social Foundations of Education. As with any story, my perspectives are partial, based on my memories of events and experiences, and may or may not be consistent with the views and memories of others.

History, Pending

Tesconi-Warren collaborations began 50 years ago at the University of Illinois-Chicago, then abbreviated fondly as “Chicago Circle,” perhaps the only American institution of higher learning named for a traffic-control installation. We offered Foundations courses in teacher preparation programs of the College of Education, occasionally as a team. Our wives and children became friends. Van Cleve Morris was our dean and president of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) around the time Tesconi brought Warren into the young association early in the 1970s. We jointly designed a PhD specialization in education policy studies and secured grants to support multicultural curriculum development and recruitment of American Indian students from Chicago's Native community. Later, we went separate ways. Our work became more administrative, Tesconi as dean of education and social services at the University of Vermont and American University and Warren in a similar capacity at Indiana University. This article relies extensively on personal memories, refreshed and fact-checked through AESA archives. Readers may find it fantastical and on some points mistaken. But the want of a history of AESA makes searching its past for coherence a stagger through patchy recollections. Believing is seeing. Although our association experiences have extended across 5 decades, the ones we emphasize here occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. All had rippling effects. Specifically, we cite Pride and Promise, an AESA-sponsored publication in 1984; enactment of standards for assessing Foundations courses and sequences in professional education programs; and the AESA campaign to establish what was originally called the Council of Learned Societies in Education, a bonding of Foundations-related associations subsequently renamed the Council for Social Foundations of Education (American Educational Studies Association, 2017, sec. 1978; Tozer, Gallegos, Henry, Greiner, & Price, 2011).An AESA narrative should be constructed as multiple stories with shifting centers of gravity, a design permitting transdisciplinary understanding of how diversity can grow as one without compromising unique traits and histories. Sturdy purposes, reinterpreted and reaffirmed, injected the powerful secret ingredients. The association has always been hydra-headed, but united nonetheless. Membership analyses would confirm whether the guesses have merit. AESA has changed without coherently pinpointing when, how, and why. It devised long-range plans but did not follow them religiously. The flexibility may well have proved to be an asset.

On Building Islands of Decency

In this article, I argue that at its best, work in the foundations of education is about building islands of decency, borrowing from a metaphor originally used by Myles Horton. Horton suggests that in times of crisis and despair, we can work our way out of pessimism by surrounding ourselves with people who share some of our goals for a better world and working with them to create pockets of decency that are contagious. I begin by describing some of the commitments we share in the foundations field, focusing specifically on the ways we work toward social justice, diversity, and democracy. I then describe three tensions we must navigate in our work to be decent as scholars and people, unpacking the meaning of decency throughout the article. These are tensions between construction and critique, inquiry and advocacy, and humanist and instrumentalist rationality. I end by sketching some visions of hope and possibility, what the American Educational Studies Association can be in our next 50 years if we nourish the best of our habits and tendencies, and work to address some of our challenges.

New Editors’ Vision Statement

As the official journal of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), Educational Studies provides a cross-disciplinary forum for the exchange and debate of ideas generated from the disci...

Educational Theory and Practice at the Fin de Siècle: From Pre-School to After-School

It is a great honor to be invited to deliver the George F. Kneller Lecture at the American Educational Studies Association conference. When I was a graduate student many years ago, believe it or no...

Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies Third Edition, 2012, Draft Presented to the Educational Community by the American Educational Studies Association's Committee on Academic Standards and Accreditation

This third edition of the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies is presented to the educational commun...

Critical, Interpretive, and Normative Perspectives of Educational Foundations: Contributions for the 21st Century

In 2011, the American Educational Studies Association's (AESA) Committee on Academic Standards and Accreditation (CASA) revised the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundation...

Strong community service learning: philosophical perspectives

This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2012. Community Service Learning (CSL) is, potentially, the most powerful and far-reaching educational reform movement in recent memory. Yet, that potential has yet to be realized. One major reason for CSL's limited success is found in its runaway conceptual confusion: in becoming everything to everyone, CSL has lost its philosophical bearings and, not surprisingly, its practical value. This study attempts to restore CSL's philosophical bearings, arguing that there are particular understandings of its components that imply particular kinds of educational practices. In this philosophical clarification lies the hope that CSL can meet its immense potential as a transformative school and community practice. This book is a must-have for teachers, school administrators, educational scholars, and students who have an interest in making schools a vital community resource.

Dialogue on Modernity and Modern Education in Dispute

This is a dialogue or conversation between Michael Baker (MB) and Michael A. Peters (MP) on the concept of modernity and its significance for educational theory. The dialogue took place originally as a conversation about a symposium on modernity held at the American Educational Studies Association meeting 2010. It was later developed for publication in this form.