Radical Teacher #91: Miscellany

Introduction
By Frinde Maher and Linda Dittmar Manuscript Editors

As many of our readers know, in most issues of Radical Teacher the articles represent different approaches to a common theme. Our most recent "clusters," as we call them, have been on the themes of Teaching Against the Prison Industrial Complex; Jamming the Works: Art, Politics, and Activism; and Teaching With Technology. Several Board members, sometimes with others outside the magazine, edit each of these clusters and are responsible for soliciting and editing articles devoted to the theme. And sometimes cluster editors receive more articles than can be included in their single issue. We also regularly receive unsolicited manuscripts. Typically each issue includes at least one "out of cluster" article chosen from these unsolicited manuscripts, and occasionally we have enough articles ready to go to constitute, themselves, a whole issue.

Thus, every once in a while, it is time for a "Miscellany." This one happens to include three articles originally meant for one of the recent clusters mentioned above and three unsolicited articles. However, what is striking about the articles assembled here is that each one, in its way, illustrates the enormous range and breadth of context, form, and content engaged by radical teachers these days. Radical teaching practices—as engagements in social change, as alternative educational interventions, and as multiple challenges to taken-for-granted institutional structures—take place in the streets, in prisons, and in communities, as well as classrooms from K through 12, college, and beyond.

Perhaps the most typical setting, traditionally, for an article in Radical Teacher would have been a college humanities classroom. Not one of the articles in this issue takes place there. Continuing with the Teaching Against the Prison Industrial Complex cluster, Doran Larson shows us how he breaks down the boundaries between the prisoners he teaches at Attica and the undergraduates he teaches at Hamilton College. He describes his work to help prison inmates think of themselves as civil constituents and as citizens as a step along the road to prison abolition. Reebee Garofalo, in an article received too late for the recent Jamming the Works: Art, Politics and Activism cluster, shows how HONK! Alternative street bands have given rise to a new and inclusive school and community music pedagogy. As a continuation of our most recent cluster on Teaching With Technology, Francesco Crocco shows how computer games can be used "either as a technology of social critique or social reproduction" and explains how teachers can begin to work with "critical gaming pedagogy."

Our unsolicited articles have two pieces from elementary schools. Stephanie Baker discusses her relationships as a working class white teacher in a fifth grade classroom in North Georgia with a Mexican student named Angelica and her classmates. Jennifer Hayden-Benn teaches sixth grade in Montreal; she and her students started an after-school Social Justice Club which came to involve the whole school. In our final piece, Lisa Rabin goes outside her Spanish language classroom at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia to link her students with Spanish speaking adult learners in a nearby housing project.

Every one of these articles enacts radical teaching, at least as much by breaking down established notions of hierarchy and power outside classrooms as by classroom pedagogical interventions alone. Taken together, they show, perhaps in some ways more strongly than a "cluster" issue, the variety of paths teaching for social transformation can take today.