I’ve published my first solo article, “The limits of pedagogy: diaculturalist pedagogy as paradigm shift in the education of adult immigrants”! Please find the prepublication “Accepted Manuscript” version of “…” here. Enjoy, share, and give feedback! the-limits-of-pedagogy_-diaculturalist-pedagogy-as-paradigm-shift-in-the-education-of-adult-immigrants PLEASE NOTE: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Pedagogy, Culture…
Of the people, by the people, for the people
Watching a video of an interview with Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower, fugitive and public intellectual living in Russia. I saw Citizen Four, the movie about his decision and actions to release information about the widespread NSA surveillance both in the United States and around the world, last night. The story impressed me, not in small…
“GOP Gov. Snyder’s office says Detroit school kids have no right to literacy”: an opportunity to develop media literacy
The post title comes from an article a friend of mine posted on my Facebook feed, alarmed and asking what I thought of this situation. Photograph by Herbert Russell Below is my response… It’s a very interesting proposition. Checked out the story on the CBS website and this is what was included: “The lawsuit says…
Rancière and the role of education in political conformity/contestation
Yesterday I read a paper by Gert Biesta, a professor of education drawing from philosophy and political science whose interdisciplinary thinking inspires those of us like myself who are unconvinced by the all-too-often superficiality and dilettantism of the field of education. (I will write about this this week, as it bothers me greatly that those…
Mobile learning
It is the time for us to educate ourselves, to read and connect ourselves to stories of triumph against ignorance and oppression. Seeing the Queens Library bus parked on my walk to the subway reminded me that we are all ALWAYS learning and can demand that the government support our education. When we stop…
Captain America: belonging and fear in Prospect Park
I was walking through Prospect Park near where I’m staying this month in Brooklyn. As I turned a corner, I spotted several small tents with American flag patterns: I thought to myself, oh god, it’s a Trump rally. I’d just volunteered for Hilary Clinton the night before…would that show on my face? With the news about…
The objects of our mission: disability and subjectivity in social media
A friend of mine wrote an article recently about an interesting phenomenon in the ubiquitous conversation about social media: the use of the Internet to access voice, subjectivity, and visibility in new virtual spaces. The article refers to a mildly ironic story of a Russian website, “Dvach,” which in the past has opened up space for misogynistic…
The eye in the sky and “low-status” domestic workers
Not long ago, I watched a PBS Frontline video called “Rape on the Night Shift,” an expose delving into the abuse of and violence, often by their own supervisors, against female immigrants who work as janitors for poor wages in buildings that I would wager the majority of Americans have frequented for one reason or another. One…
Hesitation and dehumanization in the Syrian refugee crisis
Pope Francis, a beacon of what many from various quarters hope could be a new trend in religious leadership, today has taken three families who are refugees from the Syrian Civil War with him to the Vatican. The war, which rages on into its fifth year and finds thousands of people continuing to flee the conflict, often ending…
Immigration and the question of assimilation
When I was in in masters program at UMass Boston, the word assimilation came up occasionally in conversations about how immigrants adapt — or not — to their new cultural, social, and political environments. The old model of assimilation (defined here on Wikipedia) gets a bad rep, in part because it implies that (1) immigrants who…
