Julia R. Daniels and Heather Hebard
Discourses of racism have always circulated within US classrooms and, in the current sociopolitical climate, they move with a renewed sense of legitimacy, entitlement and…
Abstract
Purpose
Discourses of racism have always circulated within US classrooms and, in the current sociopolitical climate, they move with a renewed sense of legitimacy, entitlement and violence. This paper aims to engage the consequences of these shifts for the ways that racism works in university-based classrooms and, more specifically, through the authors’ own teaching as White language and literacy educators.
Design/methodology/approach
This teacher narrative reconceptualizes moments of racialized violence in the courses, as constructed via circulating discourses of racism. The authors draw attention to the ways that we, as White educators, authorize and are complicit in this violence.
Findings
This paper explicates a praxis of questioning, developed through efforts to reflect on our complicity in and responsibility for racial violence in our classrooms. The authors offer this praxis of questioning to other White language and literacy teachers as a heuristic for sensemaking with regard to racism in classrooms.
Originality/value
The authors situate this paper within a broader struggle to engage themselves and other White educators in work for racial justice and invite others to take up this praxis of questioning as an initial step toward examining the authors’ complicity in – and authorization of – discourses of racism.
Details
Keywords
Purpose – This chapter examines the complex, multilevel barriers low-income women of color in a medium-sized Midwestern city face when trying to achieve economic self-sufficiency…
Abstract
Purpose – This chapter examines the complex, multilevel barriers low-income women of color in a medium-sized Midwestern city face when trying to achieve economic self-sufficiency and homeownership. The aim of this study was to determine whether women attempting to achieve self-sufficiency and/or homeownership face different barriers than men as a result of multiple and intersecting social locations.
Design/methodology/approach – The study sample includes 24 low-income women of color, all of whom participated in in-depth interviews in Fall, 2008. Low-income women also completed short demographic surveys. Intersectionality represents the conceptual framework for this study, and data analysis followed phenomenological inquiry.
Findings – Some barriers low-income women of color face are unacknowledged and are gendered and racialized. Many women in this study faced personal barriers (e.g., low-income, lack of savings, poor credit, lack of mentors) and system-level barriers (e.g., banking account requirements and lenders’ downpayment requirements) to obtain economic self-sufficiency and/or homeownership simultaneously.
Research limitations – This study only examined 25 women's experiences in one location. These findings can only be generalized to low-income women of color in this study.
Originality/value – This study addresses the gaps in existing literature about low-income women's journeys toward economic self-sufficiency, and highlights that many women have goals of homeownership as well. Data analyzed here also illustrated the complex nature of barriers.
Anne Crampton and Cynthia Lewis
This study aims to discuss the ethical and political possibilities offered by the presence of teaching artists (TAs) and visual artwork in racially and culturally diverse high…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to discuss the ethical and political possibilities offered by the presence of teaching artists (TAs) and visual artwork in racially and culturally diverse high school literacy (English Language Arts) classrooms.
Design/methodology/approach
This study explores episodes from two separate ethnographic studies that were conducted in one teacher’s critical literacy classroom across a span of several years. This study uses a transliteracies approach (Stornaiulo et al., 2017) to think about “meaning-making at the intersection of human subjects and materials” (Kontovourki et al., 2019); the study also draws on critical scholarship on art and making (Ngo et al., 2017; Vossoughi et al., 2016). The TA, along with the materials and processes of artmaking, decentered the teacher and literacy itself, inviting in new social realities.
Findings
TAs’ collective interpretation of existing artwork and construction of new works made visible how both human and nonhuman bodies co-produced “new ways of feeling and being with others” (Zembylas, 2017, p. 402). This study views these artists as catalysts capable of provoking, or productively disrupting, the everyday practices of classrooms.
Social implications
Both studies demonstrated new ways of feeling, being and thinking about difference, bringing to the forefront momentary possibilities and impossibilities of complex human and nonhuman intra-actions. The provocations flowing from the visual artwork and the dialogue swirling around the work presented opportunities for emergent and unexpected experiences of literacy learning.
Originality/value
This work is valuable in exploring the boundaries of literacy learning with the serious inclusion of visual art in an English classroom. When the TAs guided both interpretation and production of artwork, they affected and were affected by the becoming happening in the classroom. This study suggests how teaching bodies, students and artwork pushed the transformative potential of everyday school settings.
Details
Keywords
The term “intergenerational relations” is often used to refer to quite distinct phenomena (Kertzer, 1983). For example, the term may connote relationships across generations…
Abstract
The term “intergenerational relations” is often used to refer to quite distinct phenomena (Kertzer, 1983). For example, the term may connote relationships across generations within the family context, or, it may connote societal‐wide relations across age strata such as the old and the young. The focus of the papers in this volume is on the first meaning of the term, on intergenerational relationships in family lineages. However, as we will note in our concluding remarks, the nature of family intergenerational relationships may have implications for age strata relations in the society.
The purpose of this paper is to identify the spiritual and economic reasons behind Homo sapiens' misuse and destruction of the biotic web. Through the argument that we are a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify the spiritual and economic reasons behind Homo sapiens' misuse and destruction of the biotic web. Through the argument that we are a self‐seeking, opportunistic species that now acts out our domination of the planet without restraint, attention to given to the motivations for such actions. To counter the downward spiral of rampant exploitation, consumption and poverty, by presenting the religious environmental perspectives that can be used to stem the process of global environmental devastation.
Design/methodology/approach
The methodologies utilized are ecosophical, ecofeminist, comparative religious discourse, and structural functionalist.
Findings
The issues are overwhelming without a strong moral, environmental foundation. The power to effect the practical, widespread changes necessary can be derived from the ancient concepts of the sacred, or the concept of inherent worth, within all life forms. These concepts can and do combat the exploitive materialism of our global economies and could change the way the “system” works.
Practical implications
The paper identifies the root causes of our environmental dysfunction and presents the potential within the religious environmental perspectives. These perspectives can be used as a means to create a practical modus operandi for the practitioner of religion and the policy maker.
Originality/value
The paper presents the reality of environmental degradation and, through environmental spirituality, offers a valid alternative to the maximum trade growth and systemic global consumer mentality. Using ancient concepts, it establishes a viable avenue of dialogue between religious communities and business for the benefit of all.
Details
Keywords
Renee Feinberg and Rita Auerbach
It is customary these days to denounce our society for its unconscionable neglect of the elderly, while we look back romantically to some indeterminate past when the elderly were…
Abstract
It is customary these days to denounce our society for its unconscionable neglect of the elderly, while we look back romantically to some indeterminate past when the elderly were respected and well cared for. Contrary to this popular view, old people historically have enjoyed neither respect nor security. As Simone de Beauvoir so effectively demonstrates in The Coming of Age (New York: Putnam, 1972), the elderly have been almost universally ill‐treated by societies throughout the world. Even the Hebrew patriarchs admonished their children to remember them as they grew older: “Cast me not off in time of old age; when my strength fails, forsake me not” (Psalms 71:1). Primitive agrarian cultures, whose very existence depended upon the knowledge gleaned from experience, valued their elders, but even they were often moved by the harsh conditions of subsistence living to eliminate by ritual killing those who were no longer productive members of society. There was a softening of societal attitudes toward the elderly during the period of nineteenth century industrial capitalism, which again valued experience and entrepreneurial skills. Modern technocratic society, however, discredits the idea that knowledge accumulates with age and prefers to think that it grows out‐of‐date. “The vast majority of mankind,” writes de Beauvoir, “look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.” That the United States in the twentieth century is not alone in its poor treatment of the aged does not excuse or explain this neglect. Rather, the pervasiveness of prejudice against the old makes it even more imperative that we now develop programs to end age discrimination and its vicious effects.
Presents suggested titles for libraries to obtain, selected from the 2001 Poets House Showcase at which 1,300 books of poetry from various publishers were displayed. Suggests a…
Abstract
Presents suggested titles for libraries to obtain, selected from the 2001 Poets House Showcase at which 1,300 books of poetry from various publishers were displayed. Suggests a further source of information in this field.
Details
Keywords
Diseases due to nutritional deficiencies might well be considered something from the poverty and grime of Victorian times and unknown to the people of this affluent society. It…
Abstract
Diseases due to nutritional deficiencies might well be considered something from the poverty and grime of Victorian times and unknown to the people of this affluent society. It may come as a shock to many people, therefore, to learn that the rising incidence of rickets among the young in some of our big cities is causing grave concern; that iron deficiency anaemia, not altogether uncommon in women and in the undernourished but rarely of any great severity, is being found in a much more severe form in a great many West Indian infants, the hæmoglobin frequently not amounting to 50%; and that among the many skin lesions of coloured children there is at least the suggestion of riboflavin and perhaps other vitamin deficiencies. All this despite the blessings of the welfare state and a half‐century of local authority personal health services. It casts no reflection on these services, however; their work has resulted in vastly improved child health in this country, which speaks for itself.
Examines the issues arising from the enforcing of a Western form of accountability on the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) peoples. Aboriginal organizations…
Abstract
Examines the issues arising from the enforcing of a Western form of accountability on the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) peoples. Aboriginal organizations such as the ATSI Commission (ASTIC) are set up under a policy of self‐determination. Policy makers need to balance the tension between the policy of self‐determination and the need for accountability. This tension may be expressed as a conflict between Aboriginal organizations’ (or agents’) accountability to governments (or principals) and their responsibility to “higher principals”, their “Dreaming Law”. Seeks an understanding of Aboriginal culture and highlights areas of conflict between systems of financial accountability and Aboriginal culture. Unless systems of accountability applied to the Aboriginal context take into account Aboriginal culture, they can be disempowering and alienating. Recommends further dialogue with the ATSI peoples to develop a more enabling form of accountability.