Teaching for Global Community

Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategies

By:
César Augusto Rossatto, The University of Texas at El Paso

Published 2011

Education has long been viewed as a vehicle for building community. However, the critical role of education and schools for constructing community resistance is undermined by recent trends toward the centralization of educational policy-making (e.g. racial profiling new laws in the US—Arizona and Texas; No Child Left Behind and global racism), the normalization of “globalization” as a vehicle for the advancement of economic neo-liberalism and social hegemony, and the commodification of schooling in the service of corporate capitalism. Alternative visions of schooling are urgently needed to transform these dangerous trends so as to reconstruct public education as an emancipatory social project.

Teaching for Global Community: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategies of the Oppressor examines these issues among related others as a way to honor and re-examine Freirean principles and aim to take critical pedagogy in new directions for a new generation. The goal is to build upon past accomplishments of Paulo Freire’s work and critical pedagogy while moving beyond its historical limitations. This includes efforts that revisit and re-evaluate established topics in the field or take on new areas of contestation. Issues related to education, labor, and emancipation, broadly defined and from diverse geographical context, are addressed. The theoretical perspectives used to look at these emerge from critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critiques of globalization and neoliberalism, marxist and neo-marxist perspectives, social constructivism, comparative/international education, postmodernism indigenous perspectives, feminist theory, queer theory, poststructuralism, critical environmental studies, postcolonial studies, liberation theology, with a deep commitment to social justice.

CONTENTS
Preface : Teaching for Global Community: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategies of the Oppressor. PART I: NEOMARXIST PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATION AND CULTURE. Studying Youth Cultures: Some Reflections, Douglas Foley. What About the Children?: Benjamin and Arendt: On Education, Work, and the Political. Jules Simon. Around Ideological- Discursive Mechanicals of Social Consent and Power, Miguel de la Torre Gamboa. Education for Emancipation Education for Emancipation: An Analysis of Gramscian Formative Educational Theory, Benjamin Thomas Osborne. PART II: TRANSNATIONAL STUDIES AND BORDER PEDAGOGIES. The Ruminations of a Neighbor: Mexican Educators and Their Teaching of Current United States Policies, Timothy Cashman and Rene A. Rubio. Between Fate and Destination, Drifting and Traveling When Interrogating Globalization’s Fluidity: Critical Pedagogy in the Everyday, Rudolfo Chávez Chávez. PART III: TEACHING A GLOBAL COMMUNITY, WHITENESS, AND CRITICAL RACE THEORY. A New Paradigm for Global Schooling, Joel Spring. Schooling Future Oppressors: Teaching Global Communities about White Privilege, César Augusto Rossatto. What is “Whiteness”? A Cognitive Semantic Analysis of the Metaphors and Prototype Features Framing the Notion of “Whiteness”, Christopher Shank. PART IV: DEVELOPING CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES IN TEACHER EDUCATION. Reconsidering the Role of Faculty in Neoliberal Societies of Information and Knowledge, Jurjo Torres-Santomé. Teaching for Student Agency: A Praxis Inquiry Approach to Teacher Education, Brenda Cherednichenko and Tony Kruger. Juxtaposing Cultural Artifacts to Peel the Onion of Hegemony, Roberto Bahruth. PART V: CLASSROOM APPLICATIONS ACROSS DISCIPLINES. Towards Combining Freirean Ideas and Russian Experience in Mathematics Education, Olga Kosheleva. Technicism and Transformation: Vocational Adult Learning in International Development, Blane Harvey. Critical Science Literacy in Rural Northeastern New Mexico, Diane Walker. PART VI: PEDAGOGY FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE: AGENCY AND ACTIVISM. Educational Governance, Teachers’ and Leaders’ Work: Some Feminist Observations, Jill Blackmore. Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice: The Role of Emotion and Emotional Energy, Robert F. George. Revolutionary Environmentalism: An Emerging New Struggle for Total Liberation, Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella, II