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Books by Kevin Burke

We write this book as a we - two scholars who are similarly interested in the challenges and oppo... more We write this book as a we - two scholars who are similarly interested in the challenges and opportunities that exist when “queer” meets “Christian” in teacher education. Both terms, we admit, immediately get complicated, potentially raising hackles and setting off warning bells for students and teachers alike. What good can come of exploring possible meetings between “queer” and “Christian” in teacher education when the terms, related histories and practices, are so often at odds? When so often this chiasmus is rooted in pain experienced by bodies that inhabit queer, inhabit Christian, and have different--and valid or not--claims to persecution at the hands of the other? We cannot and will not directly address such claims - real or perceived - as we suspect such claims need to be assessed in their contexts and conditions. For some, on either side, this might sound dangerous, perhaps ludicrous because: the evidence; the evidence they will say. But ours is not a concern to litigate such matters, although litigation will be explored in chapter four. Rather, ours is a concern with telling a different story about such meetings. Scholars - notably historians and theologians - have already illustrated that the stories that have been told about “homosexuality” and Christianity, for instance, are more complex than often popularly understood. Such scholarship is important to us since it lays the groundwork for recognizing different possibilities at the juncture point. Our concern, instead, is to think about how those terms - their histories and practices - meet in teacher education classrooms - sometimes quite visibly, other times less so. What is true, we want to suggest broadly, is that when they meet, more often than not, teacher educators and student-teachers are less than confident as to how to proceed. After all, both terms have a complex and intimate history within education. Christianity, always present in the bones, the structures, the practices that make up public schools. Queer, always feared for the ways the non-normative - shape shifting over time - is excluded from the work of creating “citizens” and “families.”

Routledge, 2020

By introducing a framework for culturally sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) praxis... more By introducing a framework for culturally sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) praxis, Harman, Burke and other contributing authors guide readers through a practical and analytic exploration of youth participatory work in classroom and community settings. Applying an SFL lens to critical literacy and schooling, this book articulates a vision for youth learning and civic engagement that focuses on the power of performance, spatial learning, community activism and student agency. The book offers a range of research-driven, multimodal resources and methods for teachers to encourage students’ meaning-making. The authors share how teachers and community activists can interact and support diverse and multilingual youth, fostering a dynamic environment that deepens inquiry of the arts and disciplinary area of knowledge. Research in this book provides a model for collaborative engagement and community partnerships, featuring the voices of students and teachers to highlight the importance of agency and action research in supporting literacy learning and transformative inquiry. Demonstrating theoretically and practically how SFL praxis can be applied broadly and deeply in the field, this book is suitable for preservice teachers, teacher educators, graduate students and scholars in bilingual and multilingual education, literacy education and language policy.

Routledge, 2019

Because spiritual life and religious participation are widespread human and cultural phenomena, t... more Because spiritual life and religious participation are widespread human and cultural phenomena, these experiences unsurprisingly find their way into English language arts curriculum, learning, teaching, and teacher education work. Yet many public school literacy teachers and secondary teacher educators feel unsure how to engage religious and spiritual topics and responses in their classrooms. This volume responds to this challenge with an in-depth exploration of diverse experiences and perspectives on Christianity within American education.

Authors not only examine how Christianity – the historically dominant religion in American society – shapes languaging and literacies in schooling and other educational spaces, but they also imagine how these relations might be reconfigured. From curricula to classroom practice, from narratives of teacher education to youth coming-to-faith, chapters vivify how spiritual lives, beliefs, practices, communities, and religious traditions interact with linguistic and literate practices and pedagogies. In relating legacies of Christian languaging and literacies to urgent issues including White supremacy, sexism and homophobia, and the politics of exclusion, the volume enacts and invites inclusive relational configurations within and across the myriad American Christian sub-cultures coming to bear on English language arts curriculum, teaching, and learning.

This courageous collection contributes to an emerging scholarly literature at the intersection of language and literacy teaching and learning, religious literacy, curriculum studies, teacher education, and youth studies. It will speak to teacher educators, scholars, secondary school teachers, and graduate and postgraduate students, among others.

Recent work, however, in resacralization and postsecularism suggests a different route. This seri... more Recent work, however, in resacralization and postsecularism suggests a different route. This series seeks to engage questions that have largely been ignored in the field of educational research. As such it takes the stance that public education is always and already religious education not only because of the historical remnants that persist in and around the educational project or because education is inherently a missionary endeavor, but also in the bodies and minds that enter schools on a daily basis, carrying with them strains of religious sentiment and experience that can’t help but shape a schooled life. The same applies to many of school’s procedures and vocabulary. The series is interested in studies that take seriously the ways in which religion shapes the educational experience and is equally concerned with thinking back through certain religious languages, discourses and practices that might make new kinds of critiques of the educational project differently possible. As such the series is, rhizomatically we might suggest, rooted in a number of social scientific fields including, but not limited to: education, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, political science. We think, though, and this is unique, that the work of the series ought also be extended into the humanities
to take into account issues and draw from traditions, methodologies, epistemologies, axiologies within, for instance, history, theology, and philosophy. The question, then, isn’t if religion is present in and relevant to education but how its relevance can be better understood, reworked, potentially challenged or fruitfully reinforced.

This book explores the usage and significance of the word "like" across a wide range of disciplin... more This book explores the usage and significance of the word "like" across a wide range of disciplines, focusing in particular on its influence in education and pedagogy. From the advent of the "like button" on Facebook to the common verbal tic, liking has become an integral part of our everyday lives. By drawing on feminist, queer, and other critical traditions, the authors evaluate this phenomenon in order to interrogate its history, its linguistic function, its role in labor and economics, and its ties to, and separation from, religion. As the notion of "like" becomes more and more ubiquitous, this critical volume demonstrates the need to consider like, liking, and likability when thinking about the institutions that impact us daily.

Using critical curriculum theory as its lens, this book explores the relationship between religio... more Using critical curriculum theory as its lens, this book explores the relationship between religion—specifically, Christianity and the Judeo-Christian ethos underlying it—and secular public education in the United States. Despite various 20th-century court decisions separating religion and education, the authors challenge that religion is in fact absent from public education, suggesting instead that it is in fact very much embedded in current public educational practices and discourses and in a variety of assumptions and perspectives underlying understandings of teaching, learning, and teacher preparation. The book reframes the discussion about religion and schooling, arguing that it remains in the language and metaphors of education, in the practices and routines of schooling, in conceptions of the "’child" and the "teacher" (and what happens between them in the spaces we call "learning," the "classroom," and "curriculum") as well as in assumptions about the role of schools emanating from such conceptions and in the current movement toward accountability, standardization, and testing. Christian Privilege in U.S. Education examines not whether Christianity has a place in public education but, rather, the very ways in which it is pervasive in a legally secular system of education even when religion is not a topic taught in school.

This collection of original research explores ways that educators can create participatory spaces... more This collection of original research explores ways that educators can create participatory spaces that foster civic engagement, critical thinking, and authentic literacy practices for adolescent youth in urban contexts. Casting youth as vital social actors, contributors shed light on the ways in which urban youth develop a clearer sense of agency within the structural forces of racial segregation and economic development that would otherwise marginalize and silence their voices and begin to see familiar spaces with reimagined possibilities for socially just educational practices.
Part I: Understanding Youth Perceptions of Civic Engagement and Resistance

1. Picturing New Notions of Civic Engagement in the U.S.: Youth-Facilitated, Visually-Based Explorations of the Perspectives of Our Least Franchised and Most Diverse Citizens Anthony Pellegrino, Kristien Zenkov, Melissa Gallagher, Liz Long
2. Speaking through Digital Storytelling: A Case Study of Agency and the Politics of Identity Formation in School Rebecca L. Buecher
3. "Truth, in the end, is different from what we have been taught": Re-centering Indigenous Knowledges in Public Schooling Spaces Timothy San Pedro
4. Publicly Engaged Scholarship in Urban Communities: Possibilities for Literacy Teaching and Learning Valerie Kinloch

Part II: Creating Safe, Creative Spaces for Youth through Community Partnerships

5. "We want this to be owned by you": The Promise and Perils of Youth Participatory Action Research Lawrence T. Winn, Maisha T. Winn
6. Writing Our Lives: The Power of Youth Literacies and Community Engagement Marcelle M. Haddix, Alvina Mardhani-Bayne
7. "It help[ed] me think outside the box": Connecting Critical Pedagogy and Traditional Literacy in a Youth Mentoring Program Horace Hall, Beverly Trezek
8. Where Are They Now? An Intergenerational Conversation on the work of the Llano Grande Center for Research and Development Miguel Guajardo, Francisco Guajardo, Mark Cantu Part III: Literacies as a Civil and Human Right
9. Black "Youth Speak Truth" to Power: Literacy for Freedom, Community Radio, and Civic Engagement Keisha Green
10. Bilingual Youth Voices in Middle School: Performance, Storytelling and Photography Ruth Harman, Lindy Johnson, Edgar Escutia Chagoya
11. When Words Fail, Art Speaks: Learning to Listen to Youth Stories in a Community Photovoice Project Stuart Greene, Kevin Burke, Maria McKenna

What follows is a text about the ways in which purported experts come to define the parameters of... more What follows is a text about the ways in which purported experts come to define the parameters of what counts as a discussion around school reform. In order to fully situate the text that will follow—this book filled with student research and writing about how we might think about schooling in the United States—we will break this introduction chapter into three sections. The first seeks to situate the text in theory that aims to re-allow student voices
into the process while also providing some description of the context for the student writing. The second examines the historical strands of our current system, suggesting that what we’ve lost is the public sense that the community is empowered to engage in educational policy debates. The final section will situate the text in the realm of pedagogy as we three seek to seriously think about the role of teaching and teachers in the realm of positing possibilities for education.

"We get our fixed - or malleable - notions of sexuality and gender from a variety of sources: fam... more "We get our fixed - or malleable - notions of sexuality and gender from a variety of sources: family expectations, a hypersexualizing media gaze, and through the dictates of those great monoliths, Faith and Obedience within a/the Church. However, gender is also being formed in the well-worn halls and the ordered environment of classrooms: schools are the great throughways where gender gets most articulated - bartered for and with - during adolescence.
This book documents a year-long autoethnographic study in an all-boys Catholic secondary school. It elucidates how schooling helps form both assumptions and practices about what it means to become a man, and examines how these discourses are reshaped by young men in their daily lives. In the process the book explicates how students come to make sense of and exercise their own identities amidst the discourses of the school around, through, and by religion and gender and, necessarily, sexuality."

Articles by Kevin Burke

Religion & Education, 2024

Here we offer an accounting of the exchange that has occurred across the pages of this journal ov... more Here we offer an accounting of the exchange that has
occurred across the pages of this journal over the course of
the last two years in Glanzer (2022); Small et al. (2022);
Glanzer and Martin (2023); Edwards et al. (2023) and Glanzer
(2024). As we don’t see there being any satisfactory conclusion–
to the parties engaged and the discourses and communities
of scholars we might assume they represent–coming
from our jumping into the fray. We choose to instead avail
ourselves of the queer practice of arguing to the side of
things (Burke & Greteman, 2022).

Philosophy of Education, 2021

The stuff of Teacher Education is the stuff of complex relationships. It is, in part, Teacher Edu... more The stuff of Teacher Education is the stuff of complex relationships. It is, in part, Teacher Education where students-becoming-teachers are introduced to a dizzying array of issues, theories, histories, and practices that are thought to be necessary to the work of teaching. Within that work—the work of Teacher Education—the complexities of teachers, students, and the ways in which they interact add another layer. How to contemplate one’s future work as a teacher while engaged with professors tasked with your formation as a teacher? How does one’s own complex personhood come to be seen and experienced as one thinks about one’s self entering an imagined future classroom no longer the student, but having become the teacher?

Educational Researcher, 2022

Despite the outsized influence the Catholic school sector in the United States has on policymakin... more Despite the outsized influence the Catholic school sector in the United States has on policymaking, research into the organization of Catholic schools has not kept pace with contemporary educational research trends. In this brief paper, we diagnose how conceptual and empirical decisions made within the field of Catholic education resulted in the field’s relative isolation from other research communities and highlight additional explanations for the diminished relevance of research into Catholic schooling in the United States in recent years. Following this diagnosis and synthesis, we argue that Catholic educational research would be enhanced by considering contemporary organizational and policy research trends and propose new directions that may allow U.S. Catholic school researchers to increase their field’s relevance.

Educational Studies, 2021

This work seeks to do two things. First to make an argument for a robust engagement with theology... more This work seeks to do two things. First to make an argument for a robust engagement with theology as a theoretical framework for critical educational research. And second, the piece draws upon contemporary queer and progressive Christian theology, in particular, theological interventions from Marcela Althaus Reid's Indecent Theology to think differently about how educational researchers might frame the way we say yes, as Jen Gilbert suggests, to the students who show up in the classroom. This intervention seeks to center theology as a way to think differently with LGBTQ issues in schooling by arguing with an epistemology that is often used to exclude rather than include marginalized populations. Indecent Theology is a theology which problematizes and undresses the mythical layers of multiple oppressions … a theology which, finding its point of departure at the crossroads of Liberation Theology and Queer Thinking, will reflect on economic and theological oppression with passion and imprudence (Althaus-Reid 2000, p. 2). Theology in educational research It is vital to note here, that there are, of course, a great many theologies that pervade both historically and of necessity, then, contemporaneously. My use of theology in the singular is to suggest that the field itself, though vastly heterogenous is one perpetually underconsidered in educational scholarship. Though we exist in something of a magpie's nest of pastiched traditions from philosophy, sociology, anthropology, law, feminisms, and increasingly, to ill effect often, economics, recent educational scholarship has tended to skirt around work with the theological-with happy exceptions (see: Pinar, 2019; Rocha & Burton 2017; Rocha & Sañudo, forthcoming)-for a number of reasons. This has much to do, one suspects, with the suspicious light in which religion is held, to the degree that it's considered at all in the field of educational research broadly: as a legal matter tied in with discourses around identity positions. There's much to say about the active position religion takes in continually shaping the educational (and research) experience, (see: Author, years) but in this case, while acknowledging the significant shading in the Venn diagram here, the paper works to disentangle, just a bit, the theos from religion. In this case, it's useful to think with Calasso who notes that theos "has

Sex Education, 2021

When we began to conceptualise the introduction to this themed symposium in Sex Education journal... more When we began to conceptualise the introduction to this themed symposium in Sex Education journal our initial instinct was fairly defensive. This came from, upon discussion and reflection, a bit of projection we later came to understand. Some background will be useful: our shared interest in the overlaps between sexuality, secularism, and theology in the field of sexuality education came about, as many collaborations do, at a conference. And the discussions with which we began were rooted in the various obliquely related projects upon which we three were working on, loosely organised around sexuality, gender, queer studies, religion, and education broadly conceived. The so-what for our purposes here, though, comes in the call for the special issue and the attendant response, which is to say the general lack of responsiveness. Theologians
we approached demurred from contributing because they saw themselves as not having the requisite expertise related to sexuality education; while colleagues within sexuality education clearly did not share our desire to root around in sexual theology. This is not a completely untrodden path for contributors to the journal, there have been a handful of papers in Sex Education in this space; see for example Lisa Isherwood’s (2004) engagement with feminist liberation theology where she imagines ‘Sex education in a Christian context has the duty of encouraging passionate lovers and justice makers’ (282) through to Alireza Tabatabaie’s (2015) discussion of Islam and adolescent sexuality Islamic traditions in
which ‘adolescents are mature enough to distinguish between good and evil and to be liable before God for their religious duties’ (285). Contributors to the journal are keen to discuss religion – there have been no less than 463 articles in the journal that include this term, compared to the 12 (including the contributions to this special issue) – that directly
engage with and interrogate theology.

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2020

Our aim in this conceptual work is to suggest, tentatively, some ways forward into the breach as ... more Our aim in this conceptual work is to suggest, tentatively, some ways
forward into the breach as teacher educators. Our hope is to make a few
things possible. The first is a reengagement with questions of sexuality and
religion in teacher education that neither begins with that which is legal
nor ends with that which is sacred, and thus untouchable. We use, by way
of illustration, a few suggestive anecdotes from our own scholarly experiences not as exemplars necessarily but rather as illustrations of possibility for the field which neither mark its limits nor trace its ultimate possibility. In some sense, we hope to write this conversation into existence and wish it so through our own successes and failures as teacher educators working to find ways to engage these particular risks educationally.

English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 2019

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to explore how critical literacy practices within a communit... more Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to explore how critical literacy practices within a community youth program opened spaces for restoration for youth. In turn, youth created civic conversations about race, juvenile justice and school discipline inequities to enact change within their community. Design/methodology/approach-This qualitative study used ethnographic methods such as interviews and observation to collect data from youth, community members and adults who run the youth center. Data were analyzed using constant comparative analysis. Findings-Youth created spaces of restoration by reclaiming historicized narratives about themselves, their families and their community. Youth engaged critical literacy practices to explore their own identity, critique inequality in their community and work as community organizers to lead adults in conversations for change. Originality/value-This paper explores how critical literacy practices have restorative value when youth use them in authentic ways to research community problems and work for change.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2020

This article is about evil and its function in educational discourse. The research posits, using ... more This article is about evil and its function in educational discourse. The
research posits, using work in postsecularism and particularly through
an historical, legal, and theological read of prophetic indictment and
the function of the jeremiad in educational policy, that the terms of
educational debate are rendered in a legal rather than a deliberative
discursive framework. This lends itself, then, to the creation of evil
others opposed to one’s own preferred policy prescriptions and renders
much of the discussion about and around the need for conversation
and comity moot. The authors propose attending to the function of evil
in education as well as positing an historical approach to thinking about
why we often can’t think differently about educational arguments.

The Journal of Educational Foundations, 2019

This analytic essay builds on recent work examining the ways religiosity in U.S. education is man... more This analytic essay builds on recent work examining the ways religiosity in U.S. education is manifest in the particular discourses that come to shape popular understandings of the possible in and through schooling. The authors analyze the function of four concepts, in light of recent constructions of religions and their relative positioning as 'true' or 'false,' in order to make a larger point about the ways in which religious understandings of difficult knowledge (Pitt & Britzman, 2003), falsehood, truth, and risk underline that which is im/possible in the U.S. educational project. Building from an "exorbitant moment" (Gallop, 2002) in a Catholic school, and putting it in conversation with recent discourses about ISIS/ISIL, Christianity, and the possibility of a true (and thus, false) religion, the work argues that ultimately schooling, averse to the risk of falsehood, continues to posit a single road to what is true and who has access to truth. This orientation, the authors suggest, is especially manifest in the ongoing moment of educational reform.

Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2019

We seek, in this analytical essay, to complicate the conversation around knowledge production in ... more We seek, in this analytical essay, to complicate the conversation around knowledge production in the academy by proposing “intellectual humility” as a mode for moving toward new avenues of knowledge-making, particularly as an epistemic stance against the kinds of “intellectual arrogance” (Lynch, 2017) that have made certain avenues of knowledge, especially in the social sciences, sparsely traveled in the last half century. Drawing on the conceptual frames of difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998; Garrett, 2017; Pitt & Britzman, 2003) and weak theology (Caputo, 2006), we turn to our own stories of faith and inquiry as ways in to thinking humility, through which we draw broader conclusions about what humility may offer that’s especially useful in this particular post-truth moment. We might unsettle the dangerous story that theology has no use for educational research, other than as a caution against the backwardness of faith in a patriotic god. If we’re to consider the possibility of evidentiary epistemologies as valuable in the work of combating ignorance and asserting certain values in and around education, then we’d do well to further diversify our sense of the possible in public education to include the difficult knowledge of theology as a rich framework for pursuing new ends.

The recent explosion of post-apocalyptic visions of zombie outbreaks, plague, and bio-engineered ... more The recent explosion of post-apocalyptic visions of zombie outbreaks, plague, and bio-engineered super viruses reveals the preoccupation that exists about the potential for future disaster and its link to our conceptions of health, the body, and the public good. Born from this same historical conjuncture, The New York State Public Health Manual: A Guide for Attorneys, Judges, and Public Health Professionals, published in 2011, outlines the powers of the state of New York during a time of catastrophe; i.e. plague, outbreak, natural disaster. This particular legal guide demonstrates a current manifestation of biopower and the affective potential States hope to capture and control that emanate from the collision and interaction of bodies. States harness affect through various ways, and in this particular study, through a text that mobilizes fear and the ever-present potential of a threat, ultimately justifying draconian social
measures in the name of “public safety”. Written texts provide a rich context in which to critique and better situate State policies within larger frameworks of discipline and control. States and bodies are inextricably connected to each other, and analyzing public policies help better contextualize these links specifically.

Routledge, 2020

Routledge, 2019

Part II: Creating Safe, Creative Spaces for Youth through Community Partnerships

Religion & Education, 2024

Philosophy of Education, 2021

Educational Researcher, 2022

Educational Studies, 2021

Sex Education, 2021

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2020

English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 2019

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2020

The Journal of Educational Foundations, 2019

Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2019

The High School Journal, 2018

The following article centers on involving youth in the process of community-based research—espec... more The following article centers on involving youth in the process of community-based research—especially using Youth Participatory Action Research as a methodology and frame—as a mode of literacy development for and in the direction of community change. The study makes an argument that community literacy centers—through the particular experience of research with youth in a mid-sized city in the southeastern United States—are uniquely positioned to take up multimodal critical literacy as a lever for intergenerational understanding, but particularly for driving policy making that is responsive to the needs of people in underserved and under-resourced communities.

Review of Educational Research, 2018

The purpose of this review is to expand understanding of the ways culturally, ethnically, and rac... more The purpose of this review is to expand understanding of the ways culturally, ethnically, and racially diverse youth have begun to reimagine urban and rural spaces using digital storytelling and photovoice, two methods that often fall under the broad field of youth participatory action research. To explain the conditions under which these methods favor movement toward socially just ideas and actions, we also build on and extend research in critical youth empowerment to call attention to the relational nature of the kind of work that positions youth as coresearchers and democratically engaged citizens. Of importance are the availability of safe, nurturing spaces that foster youth engagement, the quality of relationships between youth and adults, and the extent to which decisions and actions remain in the hands of youth. Finally, this review considers the implications for further research and what it could mean to reimagine schools and communities as spaces where youth have a voice as civically engaged citizens.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2018

Teaching as a profession can be read as an immortality project, a form of compensation to help re... more Teaching as a profession can be read as an immortality project, a form of compensation to help resolve a certain kind of existential terror. Terror management theory can help us understand the ways teachers might compensate for their limitedness as humans by imposing prescribed attributes on their students. In response to the freighted reality of teaching as quasi‐missionary work, we suggest a new orientation, namely that the profession embrace the terror of the future that it cannot know. Through a theoretical engagement with Weak Theology in the context of Eugene Thacker's philosophical ‘doomcore’, we hope to re‐orient the educational project into one with lower stakes, a shift from immortality to more ‘goodness’. The desired result is to refocus on the relationships we develop with other humans as well as with the planet.

Critical Studies in Education, 2018

According to the 2013 report by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), most teacher educ... more According to the 2013 report by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), most teacher education programs are failing in the United States. These programs, NCTQ insists, are not preparing new teachers with sufficiently ‘scientific’ methods and are, in the process, failing to properly train prospective teachers how to ‘lead the classroom’ (p. 2). In the deficit discourses employed by NCTQ, teacher education programs have become a cesspool of ‘mediocrity’ (p. 1) where the overall findings ‘paint a grim picture of teacher preparation in the United States’ (p. 17). We actually agree that things are grim, but for very different reasons and in very different spaces. Using NCTQ’s ‘Teacher Prep Review: A Review of the Nation’s Teacher Preparation Program’ as an entryway, the authors argue that the report typifies not only an alarmist approach usually found in conservative attempts at social policy and reform, but also further reifies quasi-empirically based research as the best (indeed the only) method by which to measure effective teacher education programs. The authors deconstruct the taken-for-granted assumptions within the NCTQ text, challenging quantification as a research/policy paradigm while arguing for the value of newly imagining educational possibility through risk and creation.

Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, 2017

This photo essay documents a community-based research project using photovoice methodology, an ar... more This photo essay documents a community-based research project using photovoice methodology, an arts-based form of inquiry relying on photography, with youth and an interdisciplinary community-based learning course for undergraduate students accompanying the project. Using the theoretical frameworks related to critical youth empowerment, critical race theory, and humanizing research, we focus on unpacking the conditions under which young people are willing and able to engage in deep inquiry and articulate and share thoughts on identity and community with one another and the outside world. Our work also aims to share important aspects of the pedagogical processes related to work with multiple affordances, including space, time, materials, and multi-age groupings. We outline the ways participating youth and university students act as co-researchers using photovoice methodology to explore various aspects of civic engagement and the ways they share what they come to know.

The New Educator, 2018

As part of a youth summer program—a partnership between a large Southeastern university and the l... more As part of a youth summer program—a partnership between a large Southeastern university and the local school district—middle-school-aged youth, preservice teachers, and doctoral candidates interested in arts-based literacy practices spent their mornings in June 2016 engaging in activities that both explored and expanded thinking around their communities, schools, and families. Whereas the youth were enrolled in a monthlong creative arts and tentative unschooling experiment that ran roughly the length of a typical school day, university faculty and graduate students were engaged in a course on the application of youth participatory action research (YPAR). This article is an examination of the experience of preservice teachers, through an analysis of their reflections on events within the course, to suggest ways forward through the promises and perils of project-based, clinical preservice teaching experiences. In our exploration of the experiences of focal preservice teachers when engaged with youth co-researchers in a monthlong YPAR project, we found the work to have been filled with contradictions, unexpected shifts, and moments of great understanding, community affiliation, and suffering.

The Urban Review, 2017

In this article, we tell the story of a changing urban landscape through the eyes of the youth we... more In this article, we tell the story of a changing urban landscape through the eyes of the youth we work with in an ongoing after-school program and community-based research project rooted in Photovoice methodology. In particular, we focus on the work that, over the 6 years of our time with youth, has ''ended up on the cutting room floor'' (Paris and Winn 2014, p. xix). This attention to the work that has fallen through the cracks is a move to engage the central tenets of Humanizing Research, but it's also a call to think critically with and through the failures that emerge in work with youth. We attend specifically to an ongoing failure in our work as a way to think about the kinds of promises that are often made and broken in participatory action research. In doing so, we tease out the implications of our work with youth and the steps community-based researchers can take to navigate the challenges that can impede the goals of fostering meaningful change.

Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Apr 2015

This article focuses on the possible ways in which the standards movement and the assessments and... more This article focuses on the possible ways in which the standards movement and the assessments and curricular interventions that come along with it, draw on inherently religious (Judeo–Christian) language and traditions. Contributing to a larger critical conversation about standards and impact on education, and building on an emerging scholarly engagement about the (both explicit and implicit) role of religion in public education, this article examines the language framing standards and its structures and makes the point that, while a given document need not reference religious texts explicitly, as in the case of standards, it may nevertheless be guided by undergirding theological histories and sensibilities as we explore the standards movement more broadly and the Common Core more specifically. We thus attend closely to the notion of Cardinal Principles and the concept of standards in American education, seeking to connect standardization as a program of learning, to long-standing notions about, for instance, testing and student possibility rooted firmly in religious—particularly Judeo–Christian—assumptions. We close by taking seriously a recent call to consider the resacralization of society and research, particularly education research.

Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2011

Much of the discussion regarding religion and schooling in the US has been limited to ideological... more Much of the discussion regarding religion and schooling in the US has been limited to ideological clashes surrounding the role of the courts and, ostensibly, the much litigated issue of prayer in schools. This comes at the expense of an examination of deeper curricular issues rooted in language and school mechanisms borne of historical consequences. The authors seek to reframe the discussion of religion and schooling arguing that to suggest that the removal of explicit prayerfulness equates to the cleansing of US public education of its religious character is facile and ahistorical. They suggest, instead, that religion remains in the language, practices, and routines of schooling but also in conceptions of the “child” and assumptions about the role of schools emanating from such conceptions. Evoking the notion of pentimento, the piece seeks to elucidate the Judeo-Christian character of schooling in the US as a way of reimagining discussions regarding the relationship between religion and/as curriculum. The piece concludes with a discussion of the implications of such an examination for curriculum studies and teacher education.

Encyclopedia of Queer Studies in Education, 2021

A treatment of Foucault's conceptualization of Confession, particularly as it relates to concepts... more A treatment of Foucault's conceptualization of Confession, particularly as it relates to concepts in queer studies and queer theory.

Ideas that changed literacy practices: First-person accounts from leading voices, 2021

IN HER BOOK JESUS and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation... more IN HER BOOK JESUS and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020) writes about Marabel Morgan, an evangelical proponent of gender complementarianism, particularly female sexual submission. Morgan's main message had to do with the need for women to sexually satisfy their harried husbands because "to be a man was to have a fragile ego and a vigorous libido" (Mez, 2020, p. 64). The main thrust of Kobes Du Mez's argument is the notion that evangelicals-and, in this case, we can emphatically add conservative Catholics as well-emerge as products and producers of a consumer culture manufactured through media which exceeds the bonds of "clear institutional authority structures" (2020, p. 9), which is to say that the violent masculinity, this fragility of ego that runs through a performative libido embraced by many Christian religious circles in American society, emerges out of the discursive possibilities made available to its adherents: It is a literacy practice. My work is deeply concerned not only with attending to these broadly conceived religious literacies but, over the years, has also become increasingly focused on wondering what it might mean to read literacies back through theological lenses, those that are critical, queer, and feminist. In other words, what might we regain as a field by reconsidering the sacred in new ways? This was not the work I entered graduate school to do. Midway through my second year of doctoral studies at Michigan State University (MSU), I switched advisors. This had nothing to do with dissatisfaction with my prior advisor; indeed, she and I have written together recently around the topic of religious literacies (Juzwik et al., 2019), and her work has been foundational in my finding a way toward scholarship in the field of literacy about and around religion. But I'd misread my admission letter to MSU and showed up a year early to enroll. Luck and privilege conspired to find me a spot in the cohort-good news since I'd already quit my job in Boston-which meant that I was sort of barnacled to the already-full advising load of a pretenure faculty member. Also, sometimes, repressed, passive-aggressive Irish Catholic kids who struggle with guilt and confidence issues get nudged by a guy behind them in line to get coffee on a frozen Michigan afternoon and their trajectory changes. Earlier in the day I'd been to a brown-bag talk on literacy issues and, as these were often crowded, plopped down on the floor and tried not to look uncomfortable for the hour and a half of things that went over my head. I'd been a high school English teacher and spent my first year as a PhD student taking classes in the rhetoric and writing department

Conservative philanthropies: Ideologies and actions shaping U.S. educational policy and practice, 2020

In this chapter, I chart the contours of a decline in Catholic K-12 enrollment over the last half... more In this chapter, I chart the contours of a decline in Catholic K-12 enrollment over the last half of the 20th and first half of the 21st centuries. Rather than a tour of the gallows, this chapter provides an (admittedly limited) accounting of this system and the rationale behind a decades-long movement within sectors of the Catholic educational establishment, that sought to save itself and its schools by leveraging ties to conservative activist think tanks and funders through a full embrace of neoliberal educational reform. This analysis was done through a case study of a single organization that can be made synecdoche for the most troubling instincts of a system flailing as it founders. There is danger in the threat that it might pull public education at the state and national level down with it. My sense is that, generally speaking, most scholars in the educational research and policy establishment pay little if any attention to Catholic education. Thus, a body of critical work about and around this system of schooling has remained largely unconstructed over the years. This chapter is an attempt to partially remedy that inattention. It is important to note, of course, that the story told here is partial; it’s self-evidently true that there are people in, and involved with, Catholic schools doing yeoman’s work in the service not only of students but of their highest religious ideals. As well, there are people within institutions dedicated to Catholic education who have not, wholly at least, drunk from the well of neoliberal education reform as savior-for-all-things educationally parochial. My strong assertion is that these people and the teachers they prepare as well as the students they teach are being done an active disservice by Catholic educational organizations that have wholeheartedly embraced marketized reform over the last thirty or so years. This is to say nothing of the collateral damage done to public schooling and public-school students and teachers as a result of Catholic education’s outsized public policy influence. There has been, in short, an abandonment of the catholic (the universal) in pursuit of a nostalgia over the particularized version of the Catholic that limps on in schools across the country.

Michel Foucault: Sexualities and genders in education: Friendship as ascesis, 2019

This chapter utilizes Foucault's interview, "Friendship as a Way of Life" to make an argument for... more This chapter utilizes Foucault's interview, "Friendship as a Way of Life" to make an argument for the value of schooling as a site for building fleeting, visiting friendships. The idea is not to lion-ize friendship, as such, but to suggest that the malleability present in the learning-of-friendship that can happen in schooled spaces, might be of value in a rethinking of relationality not only between students and teachers, but also how students access or are taught implicitly and explicitly about relationships. Can homosexuality as it tends toward friendship offer models of relationality that extend beyond the normalized models of relationality, notably marriage or celibacy, taught in schools? And if we can, what exactly might that mean for the educational project as it creates opportunities for becoming a subject? It is Foucault's curious interest in friendship that helps us think through this changing twenty-first century school landscape, a landscape and institutional space that still grapples with the problems experienced by LGBTQ youth and the problems LGBTQ youth raise for schools. If we're to reconsider the ways in which schools might become sites of resistance, persistence, and reinvention in becoming a sexual subject, then we'd do well to reconsider the possibility of friendship as a concept open among students and teachers to malleably become a self amidst others.

Legacies of Christian Languaging and Literacies in American Education: Perspectives on English Language Arts Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning, 2019

Western, Christian religious formulations of purity flow, initially, from Jewish purity laws “dev... more Western, Christian religious formulations of purity flow, initially, from Jewish purity laws “developed and systematized in ancient Judaism during exile” as a way to “re-establish . . . identity over against the foreign cultures and cults among which Israel was forced to dwell” (Cahill, 1996, p. 133). Because purity “societies” “are organized around polarized categories of pure and impure, clean and unclean” (p. 129) they are inherently concerned with the policing of intimate contact: the points at which boundaries between self and world come under threat of transgression. They are also, of course, fundamentally concerned with creating in-group solidarity—and out-group exclusion. The juridical in this case, then, forms around “caste, behavior, social position, and physical condition” (p. 129). Modern Christian conceptualizations of purity emerged, out of this long Judaic tradition, through later documents known as the Penitentials “which flourished in ecclesiastical use from about the sixth to the twelfth century C.E.” These documents were “designed to help confessors in their pastoral dealings with penitents in confession, providing lists of sins and corresponding penances” (Salzman & Lawler, 2008, p. 33). More than lists, however, the Penitentials were moral pedagogical documents—the first character
education curriculum(!)—that codified much of the subsequent Western
understanding of sexual impurity and sin.

This article includes an analysis of five areas that may be seen as hallmarks of NCLB, particular... more This article includes an analysis of five areas that may be seen as hallmarks of NCLB, particularly its efforts to disaggregate student achievement by examining the achievement of students of color, students placed in special education, and students with limited English proficiency (LEP).

Youth voices, public spaces, and civic engagement, Mar 2016

In this chapter, we address the conditions for creating spaces to foster youth's sense of agency ... more In this chapter, we address the conditions for creating spaces to foster youth's sense of agency as citizens in a democracy, particularly as youth learn to take on varied community, familial, and economic roles as we describe on our work with youth in a community-based research project of almost five years.

Beyond borders: Queer eros and ethos (ethics) in LGBTQ young adult literature, 2016

Uprooting urban America: Multidisciplinary perspectives on race, class & gentrification, 2014

Gender and pop culture: A text reader, 2014

Gender and sexualities in education: A reader , 2014

In the middle of 2017 as part of a response to the mass murder at the Pulse nightclub in Miami, a... more In the middle of 2017 as part of a response to the mass murder at the Pulse nightclub in Miami, a Jesuit priest, Fr. James Martin, released a short book aimed at rethinking the Church's orientation (pun intended) to the LGBTQ community. Because Martin has some measure of celebrity in the United States-he is the unofficial chaplain of Stephen Colbert's former show, The Colbert Report-the book was taken up as a cri de coeur in line with Pope Francis' very public "who am I to judge" approach to gay individuals. Still, the work was not radical theology and was more or less in line with the kind of mainstream approaches to ministry of LGBTQ individuals that persist in moderate religious circles.

Teachers College Record , 2022

Context: Rooted in the principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), this article exp... more Context: Rooted in the principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), this article explores how a team of youth community activists extended their coalition virtually to produce a bill of demands for structural social change in their city and its surrounding county. Focus of Study: Our inquiry focuses on how the youth's dialectic goal of arriving at consensus (through debate fiercely, and intentionally, tied to the country's own internal reckonings) loomed, uncomfortably at times, over the dialogic process of inviting youth from across the city to share experiences, exchange ideas, and build relationships. Setting: The youth's coalitional work extended outward from the Yamacraw Center, a community literacy center and social justice organization based in a historic coastal city in the southern United States. Participants: The primary team, reported on here, was made up of eight youth researchers and two adult allies/co-researchers responsible for supporting youth as they engaged in YPAR. Research Design: Our study is a reflexive thematic analysis of the interplay between youth during 11 planning and organizing sessions. Data Collection: The data collected for this study are video digital Google Hangout meetings recorded over a five-month period.

Urban Review, 2020

This article explores a 9-month process of youth research capacity-building, beginning with the t... more This article explores a 9-month process of youth research capacity-building, beginning with the training of high school and college aged researchers in qualitative methodologies and concluding with both tentative and comprehensive policy recommendations , at the behest of the youth, for altering the landscape of a major Southeastern city to ensure greater equity of opportunity in particular for minor-itized youth and their families. Our analysis led us to consider the ways in which community-engaged youth and their adult partners created a culture of reciprocity and respect as they worked together to train other youth to conduct their own justice-oriented inquiry projects.

Clinical Experiences in Teacher Education: Critical, Project-Based Interventions in Diverse Classrooms. 34-48., 2018

In the last twenty-five years, some studies have been analyzing the virtual reality potential for... more In the last twenty-five years, some studies have been analyzing the virtual reality potential for special education. They show the virtual environments as a valid communicative medium and a safe space where ASD people can experience new situations without limits of 'in vivo' experiences. Often, problems with space can complicate many aspects of everyday life. Referring to Hermelin and O'Connor's studies, the difficulties involving the autistic clinical frame are connected especially to perception deficiency, therefore the VR can become valid support, for people with ASD, improving relationships with space, with ourselves and with others. My study tries to provide a guideline tool for a humancentered VR design.

College Student Voices on Educational Reform, 2013