Paul Thomas | Furman University (original) (raw)

Books by Paul Thomas

New introduction by Rick Wormeli Revised Edition A century of education and education reform, a... more New introduction by Rick Wormeli Revised Edition

A century of education and education reform, along with more than three decades of high-stakes testing and accountability, reveals a disturbing paradox: education has a steadfast commitment to testing and grading. This commitment persists despite ample research, theory, and philosophy revealing the corrosive consequences of both testing and grading in an education system designed to support human agency and democratic principles. This revised edited volume brings together a collection of updated and new essays that confronts the failure of testing and grading. The book explores the historical failure of testing and grading; the theoretical and philosophical arguments against testing and grading; the negative influence of tests and grades on social justice, race, class, and gender; and the role that they play in perpetuating a deficit perspective of children. The chapters fall under two broad sections. Part I, Degrading Learning, Detesting Education: The Failure of High-Stake Accountability in Education, includes essays on the historical, theoretical, and philosophical arguments against testing and grading. Part II, De-Grading and De-Testing in a Time of High-Stakes Education Reform, presents practical experiments in de-testing and de-grading classrooms for authentic learning experiences.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has achieved incredible popularity in his native country and worl... more Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has achieved incredible popularity in his native country and world-wide as well as rising critical acclaim. Murakami, in addition to receiving most of the major literary awards in Japan, has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize. Yet, his relationship with the Japanese literary community proper (known as the Bundan) has not been a particularly friendly one.

One of Murakami’s central and enduring themes is a persistent warning not to suppress our fundamental desires in favor of the demands of society at large. Murakami’s writing over his career reveals numerous recurring motifs, but his message has also evolved, creating a catalogue of works that reveals Murakami to be a challenging author. Many of those challenges lie in Murakami’s blurring of genre as well as his rich blending of Japanese and Western mythologies and styles—all while continuing to offer narratives that attract and captivate a wide range of readers. Murakami is, as Ōe Kenzaburō once contended, not a “Japanese writer” so much as a global one, and as such, he merits a central place in the classroom in order to confront readers and students, but to be challenged as well.

Reading, teaching, and studying Murakami serves well the goal of rethinking this world. It will open new lines of inquiry into what constitutes national literatures, and how some authors, in the era of blurred national and cultural boundaries, seek now to transcend those boundaries and pursue a truly global mode of expression.

Democracy can mean a range of concepts, covering everything from freedoms, rights, elections, gov... more Democracy can mean a range of concepts, covering everything from freedoms, rights, elections, governments, processes, philosophies and a panoply of abstract and concrete notions that can be mediated by power, positionality, culture, time and space. Democracy can also be translated into brute force, hegemony, docility, compliance and conformity, as in wars will be decided on the basis of the needs of elites, or major decisions about spending finite resources will be the domain of the few over the masses, or people will be divided along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, religion, etc. because it is advantageous for maintaining exploitative political systems in place to do so. Often, these frameworks are developed and reified based on the notion that elections give the right to societies, or segments of societies, to install regimes, institutions and operating systems that are then supposedly legitimated and rendered infinitely just because formal power resides in the hands of those dominating forces.

This book is interested in advancing a critical analysis of the hegemonic paradigm described above, one that seeks higher levels of political literacy and consciousness, and one that makes the connection with education. What does education have to do with democracy? How does education shape, influence, impinge on, impact, negate, facilitate and/or change the context, contours and realities of democracy? How can we teach for and about democracy to alter and transform the essence of what democracy is, and, importantly, what it should be?

This book advances the notion of decency in relation to democracy, and is underpinned by an analysis of meaningful, critically-engaged education. Is it enough to be kind, nice, generous and hopeful when we can also see signs of rampant, entrenched and debilitating racism, sexism, poverty, violence, injustice, war and other social inequalities? If democracy is intended to be a legitimating force for good, how does education inform democracy? What types of knowledge, experience, analysis and being are helpful to bring about newer, more meaningful and socially just forms of democracy?

Throughout some twenty chapters from a range of international scholars, this book includes three sections: Constructing Meanings for Democracy and Decency; Justice for All as Praxis; and Social Justice in Action for Democracy, Decency, and Diversity: International Perspectives. The underlying thread that is interwoven through the texts is a critical reappraisal of normative, hegemonic interpretations of how power is infused into the educational realm, and, importantly, how democracy can be re-situated and re-formulated so as to more meaningfully engage society and education.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments. Introduction: Where There Is Democracy, Should There Be Decency? Framing the Context, Notion, and Potential for a More “Decent” Democracy, Paul R. Carr, Paul L. Thomas, Julie Gorlewski and Brad J. Porfilio. SECTION I: CONSTRUCTING MEANINGS FOR DEMOCRACY AND DECENCY. What Is Decency Within the Context of Democracy and Education? Katie Zahedi. Democracy, Education, and a Politics of Indignation, Dalene M. Swanson. Social Justice: Seeking Democracy That Eschews Oppression in Any Form, Sheron Fraser-Burgess. Social Justice Requirements for Democracy and Education, Carlos Riádigos Mosquera. The Ascendance of Democracy: David Purpel’s Prophetic Pedagogical Path to Democracy, Richard Hartsell and Susan B. Harden. Writing and Restoring Democracy: Empathy, Critique, and the Neoliberal Monoculture, Chris Gilbert. What Are Icelandic Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Democracy in Education? Ingimar Ólafsson Waage, Kristján Kristjánsson, and Amalía Björnsdóttir. Ripples of Change: Redefining Democracy and Fostering Resistance in the Classroom, Emily A. Daniels. SECTION II JUSTICE FOR ALL AS PRAXIS. Education, Democracy, and Decency: Which Curriculum Ideology Best Addresses a Child’s Education for Democracy?, Richard H. Rogers. “Whose Democracy Is This, Anyway?” Teaching Socially Responsible Literacies for Democracy, Decency, and Mindfulness, Joseph R. Rodriguez. Unschooling for Citizen Creation, Kristan Morrison. Democracy and Decency Supporting Science Teaching, Michael Svec. Educating To Act Decently: Can Human Rights Education Foster Socially Just Democracy? Stefanie Rinaldi. SECTION III SOCIAL JUSTICE IN ACTION FOR DEMOCRACY, DECENCY, AND DIVERSITY: INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES. Responsible Citizens and Critical Skills in Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Democratic Deliberation, Arlene Holmes-Henderson. The Isolated Irish and Education for Democracy: Acknowledging Our Responsibility to Ourselves in Social Sciences Education, Aoife B. Prendergast. Beyond the School Of Greece and Into Baltimore: Education in Undemocratic Democracies, Pamela J. Hickey and Tim W. Watson. Case Study: A Suburban High School’s Courageous Conversations of Democracy and Diversity, Jacquelyn Benchik-Osborne. Pedagogies of Democracy and Decency in a Religiously Diverse Society, Rawia Hayik. Mobilizing Citizenship Education in the Arab World: Toward a Pedagogy for Democracy, Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar. About the Contributors.

Pedagogies of Kindness and Respect presents a wide variety of concepts from scholars and practiti... more Pedagogies of Kindness and Respect presents a wide variety of concepts from scholars and practitioners who discuss pedagogies of kindness, an alternative to the «no excuses» ideology now dominating the way that children are raised and educated in the U.S. today. The fields of education, and especially early childhood education, include some histories and perspectives that treat those who are younger with kindness and respect. This book demonstrates an informed awareness of this history and the ways that old and new ideas can counter current conditions that are harmful to both those who are younger and those who are older, while avoiding the reconstitution of the romantic, innocent child who needs to be saved by more advanced adults. Two interpretations of the upbringing of children are investigated and challenged, one suggesting that the poor do not know how to raise their children and thus need help, while the other looks at those who are privileged and therefore know how to nurture their young. These opposing views have been discussed and problematized for more than thirty years. Pedagogies of Kindness and Respect investigates the issue of why this circumstance has continued and even worsened today.

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance was born out of blogging as an act of social ju... more Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance was born out of blogging as an act of social justice. Over a period of about two years, many posts built the case against market-based education reform and for a critical re-imagining of public education. This book presents a coordinated series of essays based on that work, using a wide range of written and visual texts to call for the universal public education we have failed to achieve. The central image and warning of the book—“beware the roadbuilders”—is drawn from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The book presents a compelling argument that billionaires, politicians, and self-professed education reformers are doing more harm than good—despite their public messages. The public and our students are being crushed beneath their reforms. In the wake of Ferguson and the growing list of sacrificed young black men—Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner—the essays in this book gain an even wider resonance, seeking to examine both the larger world of inequity as well as the continued failure of educational inequity. While each chapter stands as a separate reading, the book as a whole produces a cohesive theme and argument about the power of critical literacy to read and re-read the world, and to write and re-rewrite the world (Paulo Freire). Supporting that larger message are several key ideas and questions: What are the confrontational texts we should be inviting students to read, that anyone should read? Instead of reducing texts to the narrow expectations of New Criticism or “close reading,” how do we expand those texts into how they inform living in a free society and engaging in activism? How do traditional assumptions about what texts matter and what texts reveal support the status quo of power? And how can texts of all types assist in the ongoing pursuit of equity among free people?

The recognition and study of African American (AA) artists and public intellectuals often include... more The recognition and study of African American (AA) artists and public intellectuals often include Martin Luther King, Jr., and occasionally Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.DuBois, and Malcolm X. The literary canon also adds Ralph Ellison, Richard White, Langston Hughes, and others such as female writers Zora Neale Hurston, MayaAngelou, and Alice Walker.

Yet, the acknowledgement of AA artists and public intellectuals tends to skew the voices and works of those included toward normalized portrayals that fit well within foundational aspects of the American myths reflected in and perpetuated by traditional schooling. Further, while many AA artists and public intellectuals are distorted by mainstream media, public and political characterizations, and the curriculum, several powerful AA voices are simply omitted, ignored, including James Baldwin.

This edited volume gathers a collection of essays from a wide range of perspectives that confront Baldwin’s impressive and challenging canon as well as his role as a public intellectual. Contributors also explore Baldwin as a confrontational voice during his life and as an enduring call for justice.

Currently, both the status quo of public education and the "No Excuses" Reform policies are ident... more Currently, both the status quo of public education and the "No Excuses" Reform policies are identical. The reform offers a popular and compelling narrative based on the meritocracy and rugged individualism myths that are supposed to define American idealism. This volume will refute this ideology by proposing Social Context Reform, a term coined by Paul Thomas which argues for educational change within a larger plan to reform social inequity—such as access to health care, food, higher employment, better wages and job security.

Since the accountability era in the early 1980s, policy, public discourse, media coverage, and scholarly works have focused primarily on reforming schools themselves. Here, the evidence that school-only reform does not work is combined with a bold argument to expand the discourse and policy surrounding education reform to include how social, school, and classroom reform must work in unison to achieve goals of democracy, equity, and opportunity both in and through public education.

This volume will include a wide variety of essays from leading critical scholars addressing the complex elements of social context reform, all of which address the need to re-conceptualize accountability and to seek equity and opportunity in social and education reform.

"Why did Kurt Vonnegut shun being labeled a writer of science fiction (SF)? How did Margaret Atwo... more "Why did Kurt Vonnegut shun being labeled a writer of science fiction (SF)? How did Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin find themselves in a public argument about the nature of SF? This volume explores the broad category of SF as a genre, as one that challenges readers, viewers, teachers, and scholars, and then as one that is often itself challenged (as the authors in the collection do). SF, this volume acknowledges, is an enduring argument.

The collected chapters include work from teachers, scholars, artists, and a wide range of SF fans, offering a powerful and unique blend of voices to scholarship about SF as well as examinations of the place for SF in the classroom. Among the chapters, discussions focus on SF within debates for and against SF, the history of SF, the tensions related to SF and other genres, the relationship between SF and science, SF novels, SF short fiction, SF film and visual forms (including TV), SF young adult fiction, SF comic books and graphic novels, and the place of SF in contemporary public discourse.

The unifying thread running through the volume, as with the series, is the role of critical literacy and pedagogy, and how SF informs both as essential elements of liberatory and democratic education."

A century of education and education reform along with the last three decades of high-stakes test... more A century of education and education reform along with the last three decades of high-stakes testing and accountability reveals a disturbing paradox: Education has a steadfast commitment to testing and grading despite decades of research, theory, and philosophy that reveal the corrosive consequences of both testing and grading within an education system designed to support human agency and democratic principles.
This edited volume brings together a collection of essays that confronts the failure of testing and grading and then offers practical and detailed examinations of implementing at the macro and micro levels of education teaching and learning free of the weight of testing and grading. The book explores the historical failure of testing and grading; the theoretical and philosophical arguments against testing and grading; the negative influence of testing and grading on social justice, race, class, and gender; and the role of testing and grading in perpetuating a deficit perspective of children, learning, race, and class.
The chapters fall under two broad sections: Part I: «Degrading Learning, Detesting Education: The Failure of High-Stake Accountability in Education» includes essays on the historical, theoretical, and philosophical arguments against testing and grading; Part II: «De-Grading and De-Testing in a Time of High-Stakes Education Reform» presents practical experiments in de-testing and de-grading classrooms for authentic learning experiences.

This volume unmasks tensions among economic, political, and educational goals in the context of b... more This volume unmasks tensions among economic, political, and educational goals in the context of becoming and being a teacher. Chapters frame becoming and being a teacher within commitments to democracy and political literacy while confronting neoliberal assumptions about American society, universal public education, and education reform. A wide variety of teachers and scholars discuss teacher preparation and teaching through evidence-based examinations of complex problems and solutions facing teachers, education policymakers, the public, and students. Teaching is embraced as a political act, and critical subjectivity is endorsed as a rejection of objectivity and traditional paradigms of teaching designed to create a compliant teacher workforce. The book honors and celebrates voice and collective voice, both of which speak to and from the inexorable fact of becoming and being a teacher as one and the same.

"Ignoring Poverty in the U.S.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Education examines the divide bet... more "Ignoring Poverty in the U.S.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Education examines the divide between a commitment to public education and our cultural myths and more powerful commitment to consumerism and corporate America. The book addresses poverty in the context of the following: the historical and conflicting purposes in public education—how schools became positivistic/behavioral in our quest to produce workers for industry; the accountability era—how A Nation at Risk through NCLB have served corporate interest in dismantling public education and dissolving teachers unions; the media and misinformation about education; charter schools as political/corporate compromise masking poverty; demonizing schools and scapegoating teachers—from misusing the SAT to VAM evaluations of teachers; rethinking the purpose of schools—shifting from schools as social saviors to addressing poverty so that public education can fulfill its purpose of empowering everyone in a democracy; and reframing how we view people living in poverty—rejecting deficit views of people living in poverty and students struggling in school under the weight of lives in poverty.

This work is intended to confront the growing misinformation about the interplay among poverty, public schools, and what schools can accomplish while political and corporate leadership push agendas aimed at replacing public education with alternatives such as charter schools. The audience for the publication includes educators, educational reformers, politicians, and any member of the wider public interested in public education.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements. Introduction. Chapter 1: "Universal Public Education:'Two Possible—and Contradictory—Missions'." Chapter 2: "Politicians Who Cry ‘Crisis’: Education Accountability as Masking." Chapter 3: "Legend of the Fall: Snapshots of What's Wrong in the Education Debate." Chapter 4: "The Great Charter Compromise: Masking Corporate Commitments in Educational Reform." Chapter 5: "The Teaching Profession as a Service Industry." Chapter 6: "'If Education Cannot Do Everything...': Education as Communal Praxis." Chapter 7: "Confronting Poverty Again for the First Time: Rising above Deficit Perspectives." Conclusion. Note. References. Author/Editor Bio."

"Education has rarely been absent from local and national public discourse. Throughout the histor... more "Education has rarely been absent from local and national public discourse. Throughout the history of modern education spanning more than a century, we have as a culture lamented the failures of public schooling, often making such claims based on assumptions instead of any nuanced consideration of the many influences on teaching and learning in any child's life—notably the socioeconomic status of a student's family.

School reform, then, has also been a frequent topic in political discourse and public debate. Since the mid-twentieth century, a rising call for market forces to replace government-run schooling has pushed to the front of those debates. Since A Nation at Risk in the early 1980s and the implementation of No Child Left Behind at the turn of the twenty-first century, a subtle shift has occurred in the traditional support of public education—fueled by the misconception that private schools out perform public schools along with a naive faith in competition and the promise of the free market. Political and ideological claims that all parents deserve school choice has proven to be a compelling slogan.

This book unmasks calls for parental and school choice with a postformal and critical view of both the traditional bureaucratic public school system and the current patterns found the body of research on all aspects of school choice and private schooling. The examination of the status quo and market-based calls for school reform will serve well all stakeholders in public education as they seek to evaluate the quality of schools today and form positions on how best to reform schools for the empowerment of free people in a democratic society.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface. Introduction. 1. “Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain”: A Critical Guide to Education, Research, and the Politics of It All. 2. Education as Political Football: What We Know (and Don’t Know) About School Choice and Accountability. 3. Seeing Education Again for the First Time, Or School Isn’t What It Used to Be...Or Is It? 4. The Child in Society, the Child at Home, the Child at School. 5. Caught Between our Children and Testing, Testing, Testing. 6. Parental Choice?—A Postformal Response. Conclusion. References. About the Author."

Comic books achieved almost immediate popularity and profitability when they were first introduce... more Comic books achieved almost immediate popularity and profitability when they were first introduced in the U.S. throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. But comic books soon suffered attacks concerning the quality of this new genre/medium combining text and artwork. With the rise of graphic novels in the mid-1980s and the adaptation of comics to films in the twenty-first century, comics and graphic novels have gained more respect as craft and text—called "sequential art" by foundational legend Will Eisner—but the genre/medium remains marginalized by educators, parents, and the public. Challenging Genres: Comic Books and Graphic Novels offers educators, students, parents, and comic book readers and collectors a comprehensive exploration of comics/graphic novels as a challenging genre/medium. This volume presents a history of comic books/graphic novels, an argument for valuing the genre/medium, and several chapters devoted to examining all subgenres of comics/graphic novels. Readers will discover key comics, graphic novels, and film adaptations suitable for the classroom—and for anyone serious about high quality texts. Further, this volume places comics/graphic novels within our growing understanding of multiliteracies and critical literacy.

This book offers a call to all who are involved with literacy education. It explores the prescrip... more This book offers a call to all who are involved with literacy education. It explores the prescriptions that hinder authentic and effective approaches to literacy instruction. The scripts identified here include the Bureaucratic Script, the Corporate Script, the Student Script, the Parent and Public Script, and the Administrative Script. The authors bring their classroom teaching experiences (over thirty years combined) along with their research base to a discussion of literacy spanning elementary through high school. The discussion offers the reader practical and research-based lenses for identifying and overcoming the barriers to best practice while avoiding the inherent pitfalls found too often in our schools. The implied answer to the subtitle is a definitive "No," but the text goes beyond criticizing the current state of the field and seeks to empower both teachers and students seeking literacy growth beyond the scripts that plague twenty-first century commitments to accountability and testing.

Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explo... more Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explores the writing of African American author Ralph Ellison, who offers readers and students engaging fiction and non-fiction that confront the reader and the world. Here, teachers will find an introduction to Ellison's works and an opportunity to explore how to bring them into the classroom as a part of the reading and writing curriculum. This book attempts to confront what we teach and how we teach as instructors of literature through the vivid texts Ellison offers his readers.

Literature that confronts our students' assumptions about the world and about text is the lifeblo... more Literature that confronts our students' assumptions about the world and about text is the lifeblood of English classes in American high schools and colleges. Margaret Atwood offers works in a wide variety of genres that fulfill that need. This volume introduces readers, students, and teachers to the life and works of Atwood while also suggesting a variety of ways in which her works can become valuable additions to classroom experiences with literature and writing. Furthermore, this volume confronts how and why we teach English through Atwood's writing.

Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explo... more Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explores the writing of contemporary American author, Kurt Vonnegut, who offers readers and students engaging fiction and nonfiction works that confront the reader and the world. Here, teachers will find an introduction to the life and works of Vonnegut and an opportunity to explore how to bring his works into the classroom as a part of the reading and writing curriculum. This volume attempts to confront what we teach and how we teach as English teachers through the vivid texts Vonnegut offers his readers.

"In a world gone mad with standardized curricula and the degradation of the profession of teachin... more "In a world gone mad with standardized curricula and the degradation of the profession of teaching, P. L. Thomas and Joe Kincheloe attempt to bring sanity back to the discussion of the teaching of some of the basic features of the educational process. In Reading, Writing, and Thinking: The Postformal Basics the authors take on the “rational irrationality” of current imperial pedagogical practices, providing readers with provocative insights into the bizarre assumptions surrounding the contemporary teaching of reading, writing, and thinking. The authors are obsessed with producing an accessible book for multiple audiences—parents, teachers, scholars of education—that moves beyond critique to a new domain of the social and educational imagination. Readers of Thomas’ and Kincheloe’s book embark on a mind trip beginning with “what is” and moving to the realm of “what could be.” In this context they introduce readers to a critical theory of thinking—postformalism—that moves the social and educational conversation to a new terrain of individual and social consciousness.
Tired of the same educational policies and “solutions” in the teaching of reading, writing, and thinking, the authors become socio-psychic explorers who move readers past the boundaries of contemporary pedagogical perception."

Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explo... more Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explores the writing of contemporary American author, Barbara Kingsolver, who offers readers and students engaging fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that confront the reader and the world. Here, teachers will find an introduction to the works of Kingsolver and an opportunity to explore how to bring those works into the classroom as a part of the reading and writing curriculum. This volume attempts to confront what we teach and how we teach as English teachers through the vivid texts Kingsolver offers her readers.

Until a few decades ago, student writing stood as a distant third in the three R's. Since the lat... more Until a few decades ago, student writing stood as a distant third in the three R's. Since the late 1970s, however, students have been asked to write more, and teachers have been expected to teach writing more specifically. In spite of this mandate, however, little has been done to prepare teachers for this shift in the curriculum. This primer provides a brief history of the field, as well as an exploration of what we now know about teaching. Teachers entering the field as well as seasoned veterans will find how to foster student writers, and to grow as writers themselves.

New introduction by Rick Wormeli Revised Edition A century of education and education reform, a... more New introduction by Rick Wormeli Revised Edition

Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explo... more Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explores the writing of contemporary American author, Kurt Vonnegut, who offers readers and students engaging fiction and nonfiction works that confront the reader and the world. Here, teachers will find an introduction to the life and works of Vonnegut and an opportunity to explore how to bring his works into the classroom as a part of the reading and writing curriculum. This volume attempts to confront what we teach and how we teach as English teachers through the vivid texts Vonnegut offers his readers.

Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explo... more Our English classrooms are often only as vibrant as the literature that we teach. This book explores the writing of contemporary American author, Barbara Kingsolver, who offers readers and students engaging fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that confront the reader and the world. Here, teachers will find an introduction to the works of Kingsolver and an opportunity to explore how to bring those works into the classroom as a part of the reading and writing curriculum. This volume attempts to confront what we teach and how we teach as English teachers through the vivid texts Kingsolver offers her readers.

The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives, 2014

The accountability paradigm for reforming public schools began in the U.S. as a state-based initi... more The accountability paradigm for reforming public schools began in the U.S. as a state-based initiative grounded in establishing state standards for core content and developing high-stakes tests and schedules to hold schools, teachers, and students accountable (Hout and Elliott, 2011). This essay examines the test-based patterns of that paradigm over the past thirty years by confronting testing as a mechanism of surveillance (Foucault, 1984) and then examining the accountability era in South Carolina as an example of the power and failure of accountability based on tests. Tests remain powerful, I contend, because they reinforce the investment-and-return vernacular that reflects and reinforces Americans’ faith in capitalism over democracy.

Journal of Social Policy, 2007

Community Cohesion', and the apparent lack of it, was rapidly offered as the explanation for... more Community Cohesion', and the apparent lack of it, was rapidly offered as the explanation for the 2001 disturbances across northern England, and has since become a cornerstone of government approaches to race relations policy. This article explores what Community Cohesion means to welfare practitioners in Oldham, one of the affected towns. Academic discussion of Community Cohesion has been largely hostile, focusing on the language and assumptions of the government reports. While highlighting important issues, these debates have been virtually free of empirical evidence on how Community Cohesion is actually being understood and operationalised by welfare practitioners. Drawing on in-depth research with youth workers in Oldham, I argue that the Community Cohesion analysis of the state of race relations is largely accepted, and supported, by those youth workers, and that it has enabled a significant shift in the assumptions and operations of their professional practice. Within this...

Currently, both the status quo of public education and the "No Excuses" Reform policies... more Currently, both the status quo of public education and the "No Excuses" Reform policies are identical. The reform offers a popular and compelling narrative based on the meritocracy and rugged individualism myths that are supposed to define American idealism. This volume will refute this ideology by proposing Social Context Reform, a term coined by Paul Thomas which argues for educational change within a larger plan to reform social inequity—such as access to health care, food, higher employment, better wages and job security. Since the accountability era in the early 1980s, policy, public discourse, media coverage, and scholarly works have focused primarily on reforming schools themselves. Here, the evidence that school-only reform does not work is combined with a bold argument to expand the discourse and policy surrounding education reform to include how social, school, and classroom reform must work in unison to achieve goals of democracy, equity, and opportunity both in...

The election of Barack Obama appeared to signal a shift in U.S. policy toward the Left, particula... more The election of Barack Obama appeared to signal a shift in U.S. policy toward the Left, particularly since Obama has been framed as a “socialist,” but the education discourse and policy pursued under Obama and voiced by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has shown that education reform remains in the midst of a powerful corporate model. This essay examines the corporate model for education reform against Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, Foucault’s (1984) confronting “the present scientifico-legal complex” (standardized testing), and the corrosive call for improving teacher quality—all of which work to replace public education with free-market competition and teachers as service workers. The piece ends with a call for educators and professional organizations to raise their voices against these reforms.
Key words: education, education reform, Michel Foucault, U.S. Department of Education, corporate reform

Historically, comics and graphic novels have been marginalized as quality texts and significant m... more Historically, comics and graphic novels have been marginalized as quality texts and significant mediums for study. However, in the past decade comics have found their place in educational establishments. This essay offers a brief literature review of attitudes toward comics/graphic novels as a medium and then explores the use of comics/graphic novels within multigenre units of study that challenge student’s assumptions about genre and text. These unit examples include interrelated works by William Blake and Alan Moore and by Tori Amos and Neil Gaiman. The piece ends by examining the range of subgenres within comics/graphic novels, including traditional views of genre literature (mystery, western, etc.) and considerations of text as adaptation (graphic novel adaptations of traditional literature, film adaptations, etc.).
Keywords: comic books; graphic novels; genre; multigenre; text adaptation; canon

Journal of Educational Controversy, 2012

The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives, 2013

Peace Studies Journal, Jan 2013

The traditional public school classroom reflects and perpetuates a patriotic norm that embraces t... more The traditional public school classroom reflects and perpetuates a patriotic norm that embraces the permanent state of war as well as supporting a pro-U.S. perspective on those wars. This essay examines the need for texts that promote peace and reject the permanent state of war. As well, the discussion couches the peace-based curriculum within the need for critical pedagogy and critical literacy to drive that curriculum in order to confront the norms of schooling and society.

Educational reform in the USA is traditionally grounded in mechanistic assumptions about accounta... more Educational reform in the USA is traditionally grounded in mechanistic
assumptions about accountability paradigms and narrow concepts of assessment; those
reforms tend to ignore the burden of poverty and other external factors on student and
school success. Focusing on accountability and testing strategies in the United States during
the post-Nation at Risk era (1983), this article argues that mechanistic assumptions about
school reform are inherently destined to fail because they are aiming at the wrong goals and
ignoring the inherent imbalance of power among the stakeholders of teaching and learning;
these patterns identified in US practices parallel dynamics and policies found internationally
(standardized national tests in the United Kingdom, outcomes-based education in South
Africa, and bureaucratic policies and corruption in Mexico, for example). Further, the
discourse and tone of the discussion is a parallel argument about the nature of our scholarly
discussions of education, often bound themselves by traditional (and mechanistic)
assumptions about the nature of academic writing.

Historically and currently, education discourse and policy are impacted by crisis rhetoric and ut... more Historically and currently, education discourse and policy
are impacted by crisis rhetoric and utopian expectations for public education. Schools are failing, the narrative goes, but that failure is measured against a standard of success by all students without regard to the impact of socioeconomic conditions on student outcomes. Further, our educational approaches to children living in poverty are corrupted by deficit assumptions and practices as characterized by the workbooks and programs presented by Ruby Payne. Educational reform should be guided by a commitment to social reform and by a shift away from deficit perspectives and toward nuanced and realistic understandings of children living in poverty. The lives and education of children of color are disproportionately impacted by inequity and reduced
practices, both reinforced by social assumptions driving educational discourse and policies that are doing more harm than good for an educational system designed to support free people.
Keywords: accountability, crisis rhetoric, critical pedagogy, diversity poverty, utopian expectations

Journal of Educational Controversy, 2013

The Wilson Quarterly, 2013

Teachers College Record, Jan 10, 2014

This is the complete Spring 2015 Volume 11 Issue 1 of JoLLE (http://jolle.coe.uga.edu). This a th... more This is the complete Spring 2015 Volume 11 Issue 1 of JoLLE (http://jolle.coe.uga.edu). This a themed issue: Embodied and Participatory Literacies