Calls for Articles

Radical Teacher is a socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal grounded in radical left politics. We publish articles that focus on education written by educational workers at all levels, in traditional and nontraditional institutions. Since 1975, we have provided a forum for progressive and accessible voices, promoting peace, social justice, and equality. We encourage potential contributors to explore our politics, our submission policies, and our past issues at www.radicalteacher.org.

Radical Teaching Now

Radical Teacher solicits articles or proposals for an issue exploring the politics of pedagogy today. This magazine was founded in1975, a time when ideas and projects from 1960s movements were taking root in universities and schools. Multicultural, feminist, and left theory challenged academic orthodoxies. New texts and voices challenged old exclusions and canons. And new pedagogies challenged traditional relations of authority in the classroom.

Today we wonder to what extent radical pedagogy has survived. What has happened in forty years to student centered teaching, teaching about race and racism, the democratic classroom, feminist pedagogies, "relevance," collaborative methods, anti-"banking" pedagogies, and so on? What about newer radical pedagogies that focus on gender and sexuality and/or class in the classroom?

Are many radical approaches being pushed out of test-driven public schooling and commodified higher education? Are they being watered down or stripped of their political force by liberal educators fearful about maintaining neutrality? Where they persist, do they remain connected to new canons and progressive theories? Are they actually radical in the present context?

We invite contributions that address these large questions, either directly or by analysis of courses and teaching experiences that illuminate them. More specific questions include:

  • Where does progressive pedagogy thrive? Primarily in K-12, and in a few college areas such as women’s studies and composition? Only in "teaching" (v. "research") colleges? Elite schools and colleges? Or does it have a broad class base?
  • Is it a minor and semi-clandestine project in a few safe classrooms, or a still-lively movement?
  • Where progressive teaching is firmly established, has it become routinea set of techniques, drained of politics?
  • Or is it drawing new energies from movements in and outside of education? Which movements? Is it tied to activism?
  • How have progressive initiatives of forty years ago been critiqued, modified, strengthened?
  • What new approaches to radical teaching are coming forward, in K-12 or university education?
  • How has radical teaching adjusted to or been changed by immigration and diasporas?
  • What new obstacles loom? E.g., attacks from the right, resistance from career-oriented students, high stakes testing, No Child Left Behind . . . ?
  • What about old, durable professional structures and habits that drown out radicalism: the grading system, the teacher as cop, the lecture method, the primacy of research. . . . ?
  • What’s the future of radical pedagogy? How should we be trying to guide and test it? What can we expect from its enemies?

Send manuscripts or proposals to Jackie Brady at jeblonde@aol.com and Richard Ohmann at richardohmann@earthlink.net.

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Teaching About and With Alternative Media

Our media system, like our educational system, is in trouble. Indeed, an inescapable link may exist between the two. Information abounds through television, radio, the internet, magazines, and books, but the educational system often does little to help students or teachers interpret this media—to show how it influences our ideas and values, informs public opinion and debate, and shapes understanding of our political world.

By now many of us are familiar with the alarming list of statistics about the control and effects of the media on our students. The Media Education Foundation, for example, informs us that each year, the average American youth spends 1,023 hours watching TV and only 900 hours in school. This average American child sees 200,000 violent acts on TV by age 18.

Efforts are afoot, however, to create an alternative media to offset the years of corporate media indoctrination to which we have grown accustomed. This new alternative media can be defined in many ways: newspapers and magazines that do not depend on corporate support; radio and television broadcasts free of sponsors and mainstream sources of information; Web sites critical of the Iraq War and foreign policy; listservs that encourage and inform the public about political activism at home and international politics abroad; and new forms of sharing information like zines and blogs. But education will be essential both to create media reform and then to disseminate it to the growing number of students who distrust the mainstream media, yet urgently need reliable sources of relevant information in order to make sense of the often dangerous and upsetting world in which they live.

Radical Teacher is planning a cluster on Teaching About and With Alternative Media. Topics may include, but need not be limited to, the following:

  • The role of technology in using alternative media in the classroom
  • The effects of student blogs on understanding and using alternative media
  • What political or alternative media Web sites do your students use?
  • Teaching the politics of media ownership, including media merging and the concurrent loss of available information
  • Examples of student activism organized and managed through the internet
  • Teaching students to produce alternative media
  • New educational venues for discovering, discussing, and promoting media reform
  • How the understanding of global education, such as the Oaxaca teachers’ strike or the escalation of violence in the Middle East, is better understood through alternative media
  • Studies illustrating the differences in information offered between alternative and mainstream media

Proposals of approximately 250 words are due by June 15, 2007 and complete essays by October 15, 2007. Send proposals or papers to Leonard Vogt at vogtle@lagcc.cuny.edu, Bob Rosen at rosenr@wpunj.edu, or Jackie Brady at jeblonde@aol.com

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Teaching Post(?)colonialism in the Age of Empire

Radical Teacher invites contributions that examine approaches to teaching about current imperialist and colonizing developments globally, including ways colonial histories, geographies, and cultures illuminate the present. We welcome articles that focus on classroom experience, especially courses you have taught, that address the content and pedagogy of this subject matter.

Though a sharpened focus on "post-colonialism" is noticeable in college and some high school curricula, teaching this topic is fraught with challenges regarding content, qualified institutional support, and student resistance. All confirm the radicalizing potential of this subject matter as well as its current urgency. Our qualified title, too, suggests difficulties, notably the wishful hope that we have put imperialism behind us. For all the talk of "democracy" and "freedom" favored by the U.S. in particular, its geo-politics speak of hegemony, exploitation, and power, and are seen as such globally. While this may not be colonialism in the conventional sense, the "war on terrorism," covert operations, and global flows of labor, capital, and culture have effectively become coercive forms of colonization.

Topics may include classroom experience teaching about migration, exile, displaced populations, and the dissolution (or permeability) of boundaries as a colonizing effort; multinationals as virtual empire; the hegemony of American (and/or Western) culture; the role of technology in the ascendancy of the West and/or as a liberating force; the myths of the "global village" and "the family of man"; colonizing/reconstituting language; the role of cyberspace as a tool for resistance and/or means of homogenization; media and popular culture from National Geographic to King Kong; counter-media and counter-culture; grass roots resistance movements; bodies as sites of colonization and/or self-determination; spheres of influence as empire-building; nationalism, the nation state and a new world order; civil wars and military interventions; etc.

We welcome contributions about K-12 through post-secondary as well as non-traditional educational environments and from diverse subject areas. Special attention to region, heritage, class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and other aspects of group identity and/or differentiation are encouraged as they participate in the construction or dismantling of Empire.

Deadline: November 30, 2008. Send inquiries, proposals, and drafts to Linda Dittmar: lindadittmar@aol.com or Pepi Leistyna: pepi.leistyna@umb.edu.

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Teaching Notes

Is there a book, film, essay, poem, or story you've found particularly useful in the classroom and want to share with other Radical Teacher readers? We are especially interested in Teaching Notes on new materials not widely known, but we would also like to hear about newly rediscovered older works as well as new ways of teaching familiar ones. Contributions should be about 500 words and should include the following kinds of information: school, course, kinds of students, how you taught the work, difficulties as well as triumphs. Also, please supply the title, author, publisher, and current price (or comparable data for a film).

In an effort to expand this column, we would also like to invite submissions of another sort, namely brief descriptions of classroom experiences that challenged, encouraged, or frustrated you. Has something unexpected happened in class, something-whether you handled it well, handled it badly, or are still trying to decide-that you believe our readers can learn from? Again, please try to keep your Teaching Note to under 500 words. Please send a hard copy to Bob Rosen, Department of English, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, New Jersey 07470 - and also an e-mail, with the header "Teaching Note," to: bobrosen@radicalteacher.org.

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News for Educational Workers

Is there a news item, call for papers, upcoming conference, resource, teaching tool or other information related to progressive education that you would like to share with other Radical Teacher readers? Conference announcements and calls for papers should be at least six months ahead of date. Items, which will be used as found appropriate by Radical Teacher, cannot be returned. Send hard copy to Leonard Vogt, Department of English, LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), 31-10 Thomson Avenue, Long Island City, New York 11101—or email items to: nfew@radicalteacher.org.

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