Free Republic

Craig’s List Malcolm A. Kline, January 19, 2010 In Boston, an English professor is trying to sell his class on society’s collective guilt when said students are already believers in personal responsibility. “We must encourage students to access the antagonist class positions of texts in order to demonstrate how the oppositional voices contained in them identify evidence of class struggle,” Christopher Craig writes in the December 2009 issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “Through this critical process, we can show how the values and interests of the dominant class...

Bridges To Nowhere Malcolm A. Kline, January 14, 2010 Before reading between the lines, you should learn to read the actual sentences that make up those bridges. Unfortunately, too often they are bridges to nowhere. “How do we make class issues relevant for literature students in a way that is not just about what is inside a text, and thus conveniently distanced from their own lives and influences and choices?” Janet Galligani Casey asks in the December 2009 issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “This question has long troubled...

Radical Teaching Defined by: Bethany Stotts, February 17, 2009 In the effort to radicalize students willing to work for social change, “critical” teachers may be forgetting to let their students freely choose their own ideological positions in the first place. That’s what Gerald Graff concluded of a Modern Language Association special session on “The Dilemma of Critical Pedagogy.” “My complaint was not that radical pedagogy is political, my complaint is that it’s authoritarian, or at least it sounds authoritarian in some of the versions that [as you can see] I quoted from: “How can we turn our students into radicals?,”...

Boston Tea Party Avenged by: Malcolm A. Kline, January 22, 2009 More than two centuries ago, patriots reacted to levies from the British Crown by, literally, throwing the Boston Tea Party. Now, in the new millennium, at least one professor is trying to reverse the inevitable result of that insurrection—in the very state in which the original rebellion occurred. “In particular, we need to counteract the affirming, celebratory, and misleading message of nationalistic history,” Peter Vickery, who teaches at Westfield State College, declares. “For example, we can introduce students to the opinion that the founders of the United States, far...

The Bullying Pulpit by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 25, 2008 If you think that primary schools don’t spend enough time on education now, just wait. As a famous guy once said, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” “To achieve a gender-safe school, I think we need to employ several simultaneous strategies to ensure that sexual harassment will not have a presence there,” Wellesley’s Nan Stein writes in Radical Teacher. “I suggest that we call this ‘zero indifference,’ rather than ‘zero tolerance,’ which would mean that we plan to notice the behaviors, comment on them, intervene, and make corrections accordingly.” Stein is...

Rebel Without A Clue by: Malcolm A. Kline, December 04, 2007 It always mystifies the education-for-social-change crowd that no one is quite as excited about their pet causes as they are. “While there is no inopportune time to teach protest art, the present moment, marked by a perpetual ‘war on terror’ and the contraction of civil liberties, dramatic and growing inequality, and a remarkably narrow mainstream political spectrum, offers an especially compelling context in which to explore with students the tradition of artworks that seek to challenge injustice, promote oppositional thinking, and spark counter-hegemonic political activism,” Joseph Entin writes in...

If you wonder where the homosexual orientation in your local high, middle, or even grade school comes from, you might find part of the answer in the latest issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “In the spring of 2004, I solicited undergraduate students in the English education program I coordinate at The College of New Jersey to participate in an independent study on [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered and Queer] LGBTQ young adult literature,” Emily Meixner writes in RT. “For several years I had wanted to teach a course on...

College administrators may have inadvertently found a way to replenish the dwindling ranks on their campuses. “For the past ten years, I’ve been teaching along with other volunteers—college professors like myself, probation officers, judges and people from the community—in a program called ‘Changing Lives through Literature’ serving the Dorchester District Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Taylor Stoehr writes in Radical Teacher. “Our students are probationers of the Court, and after completing the ten-week course, they receive six months off their probation time.” “I work in the men’s group (there is a women’s group too), which averages twelve or fifteen...