Radical Education Research Articles

Emergence of the Educational Transactional Analyst

This article reflects on the qualities and processes that are fundamental to the formation of transactional analysis educators. The author uses her own reflections on her professional practice in South Africa to distill what might be at the heart of transformation and change within a developmental context. She considers how working from within a paradigm of nonduality can enhance the experience of transformational learning within the radical education model and become a key aspect of educational transactional analysis training and examination.

Socially Engaged Art, Experimental Pedagogies, and Anarchiving as Research-Creation

Archives, as repositories of culture and knowledge, are closely linked to colonial power, control, hegemony, and conquest. In recognizing the limitations and problems of conventional archives, scholars and artists offer counter-archiving as a method of interrogating what constitutes an archive and the selective practices that continuously erase particular subjects. Unlike static, stable, and linear colonial archives, counter-archives are grounded in accountability and reciprocity. Similarly, the anarchive is concerned with what it can do in the present-future. As such, anarchiving is less a thing, then a process or an action. This article examines anarchiving as research-creation practices through three provocations: anarchiving as indeterminate transformation, anarchiving as felt, and anarchiving as response-ability. We examine a particular anarchiving project Instant Class Kit dedicated to radical pedagogies and social justice. Anarchiving is fundamentally about practicing an ethics based on response-ability, stewardship, care, and reciprocity that center relationships to land, territory, human, and more-than-human bodies.

Creating spaces for radical pedagogy in higher education

This paper tells stories from a higher education study abroad collaboration entitled Investigating Diversity, Human Rights and Civil Society in Japan and Australia. Starting from a pedagogical focus on students’ active learning about human rights, this project has come to value relationship building—between academic institutions, civil society and community groups, and individuals. We ask ‘what is human rights education?’, and argue for a radical pedagogy in which knowledge about human rights and diversity is negotiated in ‘third spaces’ (Bhabha). In an attempt to address the ‘im/possibility of engaging with alterity outside of a pedagogic relationship of appropriation or domination’ (Sharma), learners ‘become border crossers in order to understand otherness on its own terms’ (Giroux). As the stories demonstrate, active learning also requires active unlearning (Spivak). Pivotal to our radical pedagogy is a conception of human rights education as dialogic and that creates the conditions for ethical encounters with otherness.

The pornographic mirror: Sexual performances and sexual personas in academia

This article makes a case for sex-positive research and pedagogy that acknowledges and hence reflects on the researcher’s use of a “pornographic mirror,” a critical and consensual engagement with erotic and pornographic (self-)imagery that opens up bodily sensations and analysis in the public sphere. The article will do so by means of examples of research in which scholars were able to successfully test out such corporeal-driven scholarship and use of porn images. In the first example, the author interviewed an older generation of sex educators in San Francisco, who in the 1960s/1970s pioneered the idea that students could perform and analyze their own sexual behaviors by acting in, and reflecting on, sexually explicit movies, an idea which has also been incorporated into contemporary feminist and queer pornography. This historical moment in radical pedagogy is extended into a contemporary example of sex-positive research about online dating, in which the author comments on her use of sex chat and sexual self-imagery to dissect the online dating site adultfriendfinder.com.

Review of Peter McLaren (2019). Breaking Free: The Life and Times of Peter McLaren, Radical Educator. Illustrated by Miles Wilson.

Review of Peter McLaren (2019). Breaking Free: The Life and Times of Peter McLaren, Radical Educator. Illustrated by Miles Wilson.

Radical Teaching Then & Now

The introduction to the issue.

Design Thinking, Collaborative Innovation, and Neoliberal Disappointment: Cruel Optimism in the History and Future of Higher Education

The extensive amount of academic labor of minoritized faculty, especially at research institutions, has been well documented in the academic literature. Three tenured associate professors at The University of Texas present the genesis, evolution, and postscript of leading and serving in an initiative to de-silo and encourage collaboration across the university, culminating in a collaboratively taught course. Integrating concepts of teaching in the neoliberal university context, the gendered and raced distribution of academic labor, and slow scholarship, the authors discuss the pedagogically productive process of collective teaching and decision-making, the frustrations inherent when employing radical pedagogy, and institutional shifts that prioritize a customer-service model of teaching, learning, and rapid research productivity. The authors conclude with reflections and recommendations for scholar-researchers similarly placed in institutional contexts where encroachments upon academic freedom and an embrace of business models collide with personal goals of career satisfaction, collective work, and improving pedagogy.

Cross This Out: A Pedagogy of Disruption and Healing

Critical courage and love require that we consider our own humanity's need for not only justice but also healing. Often, radical educators relentlessly focus on working towards social justice to the point where they neglect their own self-preservation, which includes processes and practices of healing. This article discusses how a pedagogy of disruption and healing were applied towards confronting a racist act of vandalism at a California public university. In discussing the values-centered, socio-historically grounded, and higher purpose-driven responses to the racist act, the author illuminates the four principles that grounded the disruptive and healing-centered actions. In making transparent the principles that informed the designed response, others can be able to make adaptations necessary for their own contexts. To assist with invoking one’s radical agency the author also reveals how other educators across the country have implemented these principles within their own contexts towards manifesting their own visions of a more healthy, just, and meaningful life that is rooted in an analysis of the conditions that inhibit that well-being in the first place.

C. B. Macpherson: Philosopher or Radical Educator?

AbstractPhillip Hansen’s Reconsidering C. B. Macpherson:From Possessive Individualism to Democratic Theory and Beyond has many virtues, principal among them the fact that it casts Macpherson’s thought in what to many will be the unfamiliar light of Continental critical theory. Doing so could broaden Macpherson’s audience to include those working within this tradition. What is less clear is whether casting Macpherson’s thought in this light will yield any new insights into his historical interpretations or his democratic theory. I argue that there may be reasons to doubt that it will.

Between Radical Geography and Humanism: Anne Buttimer and the International Dialogue Project

AbstractThis paper argues for a rediscovery and reassessment of the contributions that humanistic approaches can make to critical and radical geographies. Based on an exploration of the archives of Anne Buttimer (1938–2017) and drawing upon Paulo Freire's notion of conscientização (awareness of oppression accompanied by direct action for liberation), a concept that inspired the International Dialogue Project (1977–1988), I explore Buttimer's engagement with radical geographers and geographies. My main argument is that Buttimer's notions of “dialogue” and “catalysis”, which she put into practice through international and multilingual networking, should be viewed as theory‐praxes in a relational and Freirean sense. In extending and putting critically in communication literature on radical pedagogies, transnational feminism and the “limits to dialogue”, this paper discusses Buttimer's unpublished correspondence with geographers such as David Harvey, William Bunge, Myrna Breitbart, Milton Santos and others, and her engagement with radical geographical traditions like anarchism, repositioning “humanism” vis‐à‐vis the fields of critical and radical geography.

Rethinking Utopia: Power, Place, Affect

Rethinking Utopia: Power, Place, Affect

Radical reform and reforming radicals in Australian schooling

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider historical shifts in the mobilisation of the concept of radical in relation to Australian schooling. Design/methodology/approach Two texts composed at two distinct points in a 40-year period in Australia relating to radicalism and education are strategically juxtaposed. These texts are: the first issue of the Radical Education Dossier (RED, 1976), and the Attorney General Department’s publication Preventing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation in Australia (PVERA, 2015). The analysis of the term radical in these texts is influenced by Raymond Williams’s examination of particular keywords in their historical and contemporary contexts. Findings Across these two texts, radical is deployed as adjective for a process of interrogating structured inequalities of the economy and employment, and as individualised noun attached to the “vulnerable” young person. Social implications Reading the first issue of RED alongside the PVERA text suggests the consequences of the reconstitution of the role of schools, teachers and the re-positioning of certain young people as “vulnerable”. The juxtaposition of these two texts surfaces contemporary patterns of the therapeutisation of political concerns. Originality/value A methodological contribution is offered to historical sociological analyses of shifts and continuities of the role of the school in relation to society.

Plant Justice: A Case Study in Radical Pedagogy and Food Justice in an Alternative Education Setting

Through interviews and college student journal data, this article assesses an interdisciplinary food justice education program in terms of a set of connected goals: to create a truly democratic classroom space, to build strong trusting relationships (social capital), to build a sense of community within the classroom and at the school, and finally to leverage all of these goals into political capital that empowers the community to engage in oppositional politics to address environmental and social inequities facing the students’communities. Our investigation of the program suggests it has had positive effects in terms of increasing the self-confidence of students and building a stronger sense of community at the school and the local community. These outcomes appear to hold despite the fact that the majority of college interns struggle to identify oraccept a clear mission for the program. We argue that it is in part this ongoing struggle that underscores the program’s democratic, engaging, and political nature and has contributed to its success.

Líf í fyllstu gnægð. Trúarlegt framlag Frans páfa og Walters Brueggemann til samtímaumræðu um réttlæti og almannaheill

Modern thought that situates faith and all religious interpretation in the private sphere assumes that it is best to keep religion and reason clearly separate. As a result of that, religion has little or no value in social discourse about justice and morality. The reasons for this view come from modernism, which holds religion either as a childish phenomenon, foolish, or at worst harmful to society. This article assumes a post-secular position in which the contribution of religion to social discourse on issues of justice and morality is both accepted and respected. Recent writings by two renowned theologians are taken as an example of this. Pope Francis and Walter Brueggemann address current world problems like poverty and climate change, demanding justice and fairness for the poor. Pope Francis urges that man-made economic systems of the world be transformed for the sake of humanity today and in the future. According to him these economies must meet human needs, promote human dignity, help the poor and get rid of the idolatry of money that creates a lot of suffering in the world. Brueggemann on the other hand, holds that now is an urgent time for neighborliness that will contradict our consumerism as well as our inordinate militarism. Referring to biblical narratives he holds that the most radical teaching in the Bible is that the haves are bound in neighborliness to the have-nots.

Radical educations in subjectivity: the convergence of psychotherapy, mysticism and Foucault’s ‘politics of ourselves’

ABSTRACTFoucault’s invitation to the subject is to become free of themselves by learning to think differently. Such a project has as its goal the mastery of the self, and can be understood as a Foucaultian ‘politics of ourselves’. Foucault’s ethical turn is an invitation for subjectivity to undertake its own radical education. Whilst this invitation has characteristics unique to Foucault’s philosophical discipline, I argue that it sheds light upon a diversity of practices of subjectivity from the psychotherapeutic and mystic traditions. By seeing these currently available technologies of self in the Foucaultian lens we are given the opportunity to appreciate their work on subjectivity as necessarily political and social, a radical education not limited to the realm of individualistic aspiration and narcissistic temptations. The paper concludes by drawing attention to some implications for education, and for a teacher education that embraces the ‘radical reflexivity’ of some psycho-spiritual practices.

Can Counter Histories Disturb the Present? Repohistory’s Street Signs Projects, 1992–1999

Summary This paper argues that where appropriations or invocations of the past have contributed to projects of social and political change, they have usually done so with little or no recourse to the historical past. Instead, activists and campaigners have used various forms of vernacular past-talk to unsettle those temporary fixings of ‘common sense’ that limit thinking about current political and social problems. The example of such past-talk discussed here is the work of the art-activist collective REPOhistory, which sought between 1989 and 2000 to disrupt the symbolic patterning of New York’s official and homogenized public memory culture by making visible (‘repossessing’) overlooked and repressed episodes from the city’s past. In effect, they challenged the ways in which history’s dominance of past-talk within the public sphere was constituted by exclusions of subjects on grounds of gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status. REPOhistory fused politically-engaged art practices with Walter Benjamin’s belief in the redemptive potential of dialectical encounters between past and present. To assess the value of their art-as-activism projects (“artivism”), this article will situate REPOhistory’s practices within a frame of ideas provided by Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. In a series of street sign installations that mixed visual art, urban activism, social history, and radical pedagogy, REPOhistory exemplified why the past is too important to be trusted to professional historians.

Leading with love and hospitality: applying a radical pedagogy to LIS

PurposeThis paper aims to suggest that classroom instructors should reflect and revise their pedagogy to lead a classroom designed to produce future information professionals who will be prepared to serve their communities in a radical way.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews the literature related to radical and humanizing pedagogies and then features an auto ethnographic case study which details how the author implemented some of the strategies.FindingsFormal study of pedagogy can improve the library and information science (LIS) teaching and learning process.Practical implicationsExamining pedagogy in a formal way yields concrete suggestions for improving classroom management and content delivery.Social implicationsUsing a radical pedagogy can improve relationships between teachers and learners, and learners will be able to model the classroom strategies in their own professional practice.Originality/valueThe study builds upon current examples of radical practice in the field and examines how such practices can be instilled even earlier in LIS graduate classrooms.

Misunderstanding duty: Vices of culture, ‘aggravated’ vice, and the role of casuistical questions in moral education

This paper considers the role of ‘vices of culture’ in Immanuel Kant’s account of radical evil and education. I argue that Kant was keenly aware of a uniquely human tendency to allow a self-centered concern for status to misunderstand or co-opt the language of dignity and equal worth for its own purposes. This tendency lies at the root of the ‘vices of culture’ and ‘aggravated vices’ that Kant describes in the Religion and Doctrine of Virtue, respectively. When it comes to moral education, then, it will be crucial that the developing agent have a clear understanding of the shared dignity of rational agents and the particular duties (e.g. gratitude and beneficence) that are defined, in part, by their tendency to alter (a different kind of) status among agents. I argue that the casuistical questions that Kant attaches to these discussions in the Doctrine of Virtue are an example of a pedagogical device that might help pupils to overcome this tendency so closely associated with radical evil.

The politics of neoliberalism and social justice: Towards a pedagogy of critical locational encounter

The neoliberalisation of higher education is gathering pace and momentum on a global scale, albeit with national differences. In this context, a number of challenges and conflicting politics are emerging especially in relation to pedagogical ethos of social justice. Our article analyzes the general characteristics of neoliberal policy and practices worldwide, looking in particular at their impacts on students and teachers alike mainly in relation to the license to exercise critical thinking and social justice. Subsequently, it suggests resisting neoliberal agenda by using radical teaching methods which consider diversity and difference as social and political assets which allow meaningful dialogue across social, ethnic, national and gender groups while working to promote equality and social justice. This theoretical background informs the five papers composing this Special Issue. The authors all introduce radical and critical research and pedagogies with a struggle for social justice and against inequalities at their core—as effective tools of resistance against the oppressive and unjust conditions created by the neoliberal agendas that are structuring education worldwide. Situated in a range of national contexts, the papers provide the ground for a pedagogy of critical locational encounter, recognizing this as a site of struggle while addressing multiple and complex relationships of power and their contestation.

A Decade of Radical Pedagogy: Barry McNeill and Environmental Design in Tasmania, 1969–79

ABSTRACTRecent scholarship on pedagogical experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s has identified a diverse field of practices brought to bear on architectural education and their influence on architectural discourse. A new Environmental Design programme in Hobart, Tasmania, led by Barry McNeill (1937–2014) from 1969 to 1979, sits among these projects. It was the first Environmental Design programme in Australia and the most complete and radical transformation of an architecture and planning curriculum in Australia at the time, proactively embracing the educational ideals sought by student activists regionally and globally. Employing records from McNeill’s private archive and related archives alongside interviews with former staff and students, this article examines and places McNeill’s critical social approach to architectural education within the wider field of experimental architectural educational practices of the era. It explores the specific constellation of conditions that enabled McNeill’s radical transformation of curriculum in Hobart, as well as its subsequent circulation and influence beyond Tasmania, highlighting the circuitous flows of ideas during the period. The article proposes McNeill’s Environmental Design programme as a space where international models from the USA, UK, and beyond were channelled, tested, contextualised, and transformed.