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.

Teaching With Technology

Teaching today, from K-12 through graduate school, is ubiquitously tied to digital technology. From K-12 through graduate school, today's classroom is increasingly digital, and the call to make it more so grows. Institutional resources are increasingly directed toward classroom digital initiatives, libraries are merged with academic computing departments, and the instructional technologist has begun to occupy a central role on many campuses. New degree programs are popping up, and digital humanities is a newly, yet nebulously, defined discipline. As economic crisis continues to hold the country in its grip for a second year (at least), teachers and students are subjected to additional pressure to make themselves "competitive" as workers in a narrowly defined marketplace that demands technological skills as an end rather than a means to education. Much has already been published about the use of technology in the classroom, including a 2002 cluster of articles in Radical Teacher. It is unlikely that we will see any real decoupling of technology from teaching and learning in our future or lifetime, any more so than it is likely that we see it in any other aspect of our society. or culture at large. Given the fact that ignoring or rejecting technology wholesale is not a viable or palatable option for most of us, we must therefore continue to actively think about use the its use, of it, insist on approaching it with a critical eye, and ask questions at every turn about whose interests are being served, who benefits from our implementation of technology, and why when we choose to engage with technology in teaching and learning.

Radical Teacher, the independent magazine for educational workers at all levels and in every kind of institution focusing on critical teaching practice, the political economy of education, and institutional struggles, solicits articles for an upcoming special issue devoted to teaching and technology. We welcome articles that focus centrally on critiques of teaching and technology, problematizations of technology, both in the classroom and at a macro, institutional level, and articles that contribute to an increasing understanding of how to use technology for radical political change and resistance in a range of settings. We are especially interested in discussions of ways such work, when addressed in educational contexts, deepens students' understanding of the social realities that affect their lives and shapes their willed ability to intervene in these realities. Focused on teaching and anchored in concrete examples, articles may concern an entire course, a unit within a course, or a project that takes place outside the traditional classroom. We especially invite submissions from contingent faculty, graduate students, librarians, and academic technologists who are often particularly marshaled in support of digital teaching initiatives. Possible topics might include:

  • Classroom deployments of digital tools such as blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), wikis, video, and other digital and new media technologies to enhance or encourage radical teaching.
  • The implications of changing forms of digital labor in the academic environment, including demands to build technology skills, learn software packages, contribute intellectual material to university-owned and/or commercial databases, creating and populating online learning environments, etc.
  • How to harness technologies for their empowering potential, including supporting and training students to be active users of technology.
  • Commodification of intellectual material, including the modularization and "just in time" delivery of teaching material via commercial courseware on university-owned servers.
  • The surveillance and control of teachers and students when learning takes place in digital environments.
  • The ethical implications of the underlying political and ethical logics we teach when we use technology in our instruction and research.
  • Limitations on material and other types of access; or when "One Laptop Per Child" is simply not enough.
  • Demands on instructors to provide vocational training for careers to students; training them to use commercial software packages and delivering a labor force that skilled in technology, as opposed to having support, space and resources for the teaching of academic material.
  • The lopsided funding of technology projects over all else in academic institutions over the past decade and a half, and the collusion of academic institutions with high-tech business on joint ventures and for-profit activities.
  • The relationship between contingent labor and on-line teaching.
  • The relationship between technology and assessment.
  • Classroom and institutional use of open source and noncommercial softwares (e.g., Drupal) as alternatives to privatized and for-profit technologies.

Inquiries, proposals, and drafts should be sent to Emily Drabinski, J. Elizabeth Clark and Sarah Roberts, editors, at emily.drabinski@liu.edu. Completed submissions are due September 15, 2010. Essays for Radical Teacher should be approximately 4,000 to 5,000 words and written in accessible prose. For more information, see "Submission Guidelines," http://www.radicalteacher.org/submit.asp. Radical Teacher is published by the University of Illinois Press.

Teaching Outside The Box: Activist Art and Other Cultural Interventions

Posters, caricatures, hip hop, graffiti, flags, banners, demonstrations, graphic novels, photography, bumper stickers, theater, drumming, break dancing, film and video, YouTube, blogs, rapping, T-shirts... art as activism is everywhere. With or without words, its artifacts assert a commitment to radical social change and belief in the ability of expression to challenge norms and bring about such change. This focus raises basic questions about how one may define "art" including the tensions between so-called high and vernacular art, advocacy and propaganda, revolution and change, etc. At issue is also the relationship between radical political will and action: how and when does art in fact translate into or generate social action? Addressing this question in turn raises issues of audience, of expressive medium, and of context: the face of Angela Davis on a T-shirt, a performance by the Bread and Puppets Theater, Dykes on Bikes at the head of a Pride parade, a museum exhibition of posters from the Spanish Civil War, or a home-made poster carried by an anti-war demonstrator—all of these artworks speak in different ways, through different media, to different (if at times overlapping) groups of viewers. How are progressive educators addressing these issues in (and outside) the classroom? How do teachers use radical art to engage students and to teach the history of social activism and the role that art and culture play in the transformation of political realities? And how do students respond to such teaching given their particular social inscription by gender, class, ethnicity, etc.? Radical Teacher invites essays that address these, and related, questions.

We welcome articles that focus centrally on teaching and engaging in diverse art forms that promote and/or contribute to radical political change in a range of settings. We are especially interested in discussions of ways such work, when addressed in educational contexts, deepens students' understanding of the social realities that affect their lives and shapes their willed ability to intervene in these realities. Focused on teaching and anchored in concrete examples, articles may concern an entire course, a unit within a course, or a project that takes place outside the traditional classroom. Possible topics might include:

  • courses focused on the production and/or discussion of radical art
  • teaching an activist art unit within a course
  • internships and apprenticing in the arts with radical individuals and/or groups
  • analysis of activist art work
  • activism as performance // performance as activism
  • controversies in the classroom regarding activist art

Inquiries, proposals, and drafts should be sent to jentin@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Joseph Entin and Linda Dittmar, editors. Completed submissions are due March 15, 2010

Essays for Radical Teacher should be approximately 4,000 to 5,000 words and written in accessible prose. For more information, see "Submission Guidelines," www.radicalteacher.org

Radical Teacher is published by the University of Illinois Press.

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Teaching Notes

Is there a book, film, essay, poem, or story that 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.

Or has something challenging, encouraging, or frustrating happened in class? If you think our readers can learn from your experience—whether you handled things well, handled them badly, or are still trying to decide—we'd like to hear about it.

Contributions should run about 500 words. If you'd like to see some sample Teaching Notes, check out "Recent Issues" on our web site.

Please send a hard copy of your Note 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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