Teaching

The class will examine the basic tenants of critical childhood studies and its intersection with feminist theories, critical race theory, disability studies and political economy. We will examine how different institutions, discourses and systems shape how childhood is experienced: including family, school, the juvenile (in)justice system, media and consumer culture. While attending to the force of structural inequalities in cultural and economic arrangements, we don’t want to risk rendering children or adults invisible. Thus we will look at adults with whom children are in relationship, including parents, teachers, police, and counselors; and we will together build an archive of children and youth-generated materials that exist within our particular fields (education, sociology, women’s studies, critical psychology, urban planning, etc.). Finally, we will consider methodological and pedagogical strategies used by various researchers and practitioners working with rather than on or about children.

This seminar focuses on schools as sites of social struggle and individual agency where children and young people learn about social and cultural differences, contend with social inequalities and injustices, navigate complex racial, ethnic, gender, class, and sexual relations, manage complex emotions, and create their own complex, multi-layered sense of subjectivity and social identities.The course has three goals:

1) to use contemporary ethnographic accounts of urban schooling as a means to interrogate and theorize about the connections between self, culture and society. We will not presume that society or culture precede or determine lives but that there are complex relations between personal meaning and cultural meaning, between individual lives and society that are made visible through these ethnographic accounts.

2) to consider the practice of ethnography – as an art, a science, and a craft. In an effort to learn about these habits of mind, you will be required to spend time outside of class engaged in some ethnographic observation and writing up field notes which you will share with classmates. Special attention will be paid to issues of representation and using ethnography in the context of educational evaluation and judgments. If you are not already involved in a research project where you are able to conduct fieldwork observations, then this may not be the course for you.

3) to consider educational ethnography – its past, present, and future – as a way of bridging theory and practice; analysis and advocacy on behalf of educational equity and social justice.

This course will introduce students to the uses of personal narratives in social science research across the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology and history as a way to better understand the links between individual life trajectories and collective forces and institutions. We will review the theoretical and epistemological foundations the analyses of personal narratives as applied to questions of identity, subjectivity, agency and social processes that are related, but not limited to urban schooling. Recent advances in narrative research methodologies will be examined, particularly those qualitative approaches that focus upon interview and other autobiographical sources of data. Students will be introduced to various interpretive analytic approaches and guided in applying such approaches to data. Topics will include locating theme, voice, plot, metaphor and audience in personal narratives; issues of performance, memory and consciousness; how we learn to tell stories in childhood; how “grander” narratives (e.g. popular cultural myths, social movements, media representations) shape personal narratives; and the intersubjective nature of storytelling and listening.

InQ13: Reassessing Inequality & Reimagining the 21st Century: East Harlem Focus was a participatory open online course (“POOC”) offered by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in partnership with the Ford Foundation in Spring 2013. The course utilized new technologies and activist-academic partnerships to explore current understandings of social inequality within the context of East Harlem. For more info, read the course summary.

This course focuses on the elements of qualitative research design as a vehicle to introduce students to different traditions, approaches and epistemologies that characterize qualitative research within the field of education. Thus, it includes an emphasis on formulating researchable questions; considering different strategies for data collection, analysis and the representation of findings; understanding and wrestling with ethical considerations; formulating strategies to ensure reliability, validity, and credibility; and preparing to engage the qualitative research process as a series of decisions in which some things are lost and some things are gained (i.e. being aware of both the limitations and strengths of one’s research design).

This course distills knowledge from the social sciences and humanities, presenting qualitative inquiry as an art and a science. You will learn to approach qualitative research as an iterative, “discovery” process, and one that requires reflexivity – broadly defined. The course is designed to deepen your thinking about your research topic, questions, and various epistemological and intellectual conflicts in doing social analysis.

In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of participatory visual research projects. This course aims to situate these projects within overlapping disciplinary traditions (education, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and psychology) and to consider what makes this research “critical” (i.e. feminist, de-colonial, reflexive, transformative). The course affords students the opportunity to read and review exemplary projects; and to work directly with visual data utilizing different analytic/interpretive strategies, including one I have designed called “collaborative seeing.” Students will have access to an audio-visual archive of data I have collected based on a longitudinal visual research project with children 10-18 or can utilize an archive of their own interest. We will consider issues of power and ethics in participatory visual research; how working with visual data can (but not necessarily) challenge traditional notions of knowledge production; the role of new technologies in disseminating and reaching new audiences; and how we align our work with the expectations and politics within the communities within which we work.

This course considers major discussions and debates about the role that (multiple waves of) feminisms and feminist theories have played in educational theories, practices, and policies. Topics include feminist critiques of knowledge production — how knowledge is produced, valued, and assessed, by whom, with what interests, for whose benefit, and with what costs; different epistemologies – “ways of knowing”; the relationship between gender, teaching and learning; the current stand-off between feminist educators and critical theorists over a number of issues, most notably power and representation; and various applications in feminist classrooms to account to difference—in gender, class, race, sexualities, and ability.