Towards inclusion “If you can talk to me in ways that show you understand that your knowledge of me, the world, and ‘the Right thing to do’ will always be partial, interested, and potentially oppressive to others, and if I can do the same, then we can work together on shaping and reshaping alliances for…
Getting around the Circle of Learning
One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn’t belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others By the time I finish my song? Joe Raposo and Bruce Hart, Sesame Street (1969) Three of these things belong together Three of these things are kind of the same Can you guess which…
A Hippocratic Oath for education: First do no harm
Modernity’s illusion is that, for any understanding (traditional or progressive) to matter, it must be reconfigured into an actionable research product guaranteed to practically manage away difficulty, one challenge at a time. Yet such products have had a notorious history of failing to deliver on promised outcomes and/or, in fixing something in the immediacy, leaving…
“Pretend,” not pretence, is the proper context for sense-making
The strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and really made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time. Michael Taussig, 1993, p. xvii Consider bear cubs play-fighting. They are both playing and fighting and they are doing it in a safe-enough rehearsal…
The difficult things that matter most
I have come to the disconcerting conclusion that, pressed into the quick production of teachers, faculties of education cannot but gloss over (if even touching upon) the deeper difficult things that matter most. As it turns out, the powers that be in schooling continue to reductively interpret and minimally understand what we do well in…
Subjects & Objects
The trouble with words is you never know whose mouths they’ve been in. Social, economic, cultural, historical, and political differences find their way into the words we choose and the meanings they hold for us. The varying meanings of the words “subject” and “object” flag radical differences in the way we understand ourselves as in…
What I bring to the table
Beginnings matter. They shape unconscious habits and compose hidden biases. If you are ever going to take my word for anything, it’s fair you know where I am coming from. First, I believe that inclusive education, where all students find joy in learning and a sense of belonging in school life, remains a far too…
Schooling matters 