SOULS

A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society

 Dear Colleague,

On behalf of Dr. Manning Marable, Director of the Center for Contemporary Black History and Editor of Souls, I am writing to invite you to submit an article or essay for a special issue of Souls that will be committed to providing a critical examination of the politics of public education in the United States.  I am currently Assistant Professor of Adolescence Education - Language and Literacy - at Brooklyn College – City University of New York. Pursuant to my intellectual and professional interests, I currently serve as a member of the Editorial Working Group of Souls and will serve as the Guest Editor of this special issue of Souls entitled: The Politics of Public Education.  Souls is a quarterly interdisciplinary journal that maps the intellectual contours of the contemporary Black experience.  To learn more about Souls, please visit our website:  http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ccbh/souls/

African American Culture and History have deep symbiotic roots in American Culture and History.  Since that dark moment in the world’s history, occasionally referred to as the peculiar institution, but more commonly known as the African Slave Trade, Africans in America have had an extraordinary socio-cultural impact on the development of these United States of America.  This impact, originating from the genesis of African American Culture and extending through the 21st Century, has been catalogued and explicated in the works of some of African American Studies’ greatest scholars, including more recent reference-oriented projects by Molefi K. Asante[1] and Henry Louis Gates, Jr..[2]   Such impact appears to not so clearly and adequately resonate in the institution of public education. 

The Politics of Public Education issue seeks to confront the political, economic, cultural, and social conditions that exist in the United States public education school system that adversely affects African American children and youth’s academic achievement and performance.  Evidence suggests that a disproportionate number of African American students receive more disciplinary actions, perform poorly academically, have lower graduation rates than their white counterparts, higher rates of placement in special needs tracks, and low placement into non-gifted or non-academic tracks. [3]  Considering these figures, a critical examination of how the roles of politics and ideology impact the sphere of public education is necessary. Approaching such an analysis using a cultural studies approach deems it necessary to include African American knowledge that remains marginalized, subjugated, or untold and move it to the center of the cultural studies episteme.  Foucault (1980) reminds us that the process by which we select what will be considered knowledge (or history) is a power-saturated one. He goes on to define what he calls “subjugated knowledge”:

A whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity [sic]. It is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges and which involve what I would call a popular knowledge (le savoir des gens) though it is far from being a general commonsense knowledge, but on the contrary is a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it – that it is through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work[4].

Marginalized knowledge can be understood as subjugated, or indigenous, in that it has been erased or silenced through the colonization of academic space by language that “stories” the dominant culture while ignoring the knowledge of others.[5]  Foucault contends that knowledge that is subjugated, such as the ideas and knowledge of people of color, working-class people, women, and others who are considered “indigenous” or “naïve,” has been written out of history.

The subject matter of The Politics of Public Education may be marginalized by mainstream, dominant ideologies; however, the attention to subjugated knowledge, as well as the inclusion of contemporary African American voices, histories, and experiences, opens the door for a transformative, inclusive epistemology that places race, class, and gender, as well as relevant social, cultural, political, and economic issues at the forefront of education and the various disciplines of cultural studies. Ultimately, through this kind of episteme, this relevant and timely knowledge will resonate throughout the educational experience, transforming the traditional curriculum into one that is associated with cultural studies and critical theory – and its inter-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and counter-disciplinary force.

Contributors to The Politics of Public Education issue asserts that myriad expressions of cultural production should be analyzed, critiqued, and challenged in relation to other cultural dynamics and social and historical structures, including responsibility from the African American community itself.  Analysis of African American youth academic achievement through the exploration of how the politics of education influences identity formation, achievement, power and knowledge production in the context of school policy, curriculum content, classroom pedagogy, evaluation and assessment, and teaching purposes will be the central focus of this issue. 

The Politics of Public Education will reach an expansive audience base including those scholars and students in the fields of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and the Departments of Education and African American Studies to ask questions about what knowledge is of most worth, what it means to know something, and in what ways are students and teachers shaped by the world around them. Of equal importance is the awareness of the nature of the rules of inclusivity and exclusivity that guide academic evaluation in particular and the ways these rules shape and are shaped by relations of power and politics.

The Politics of Public Education rubric will explore contemporary (1945 – present) curriculum issues, academic debates, and various developments in the academy pertaining to the education or miseducation of African American youth, particularly in, but not limited to, the fields of African American Studies, Linguistics, and the various disciplines housed in Departments of Education.  Topics may include: 

·         Academic Achievement or Decline including Graduation Rates

·         Ebonics Controversy (Sociolinguistics and Literacy)

·         Multiple Literacies including Critical Media Literacy (Black & Brown Consumerism)

·         Athletics and Education

·         Prison Education (including Policy and Programming)

·         Criminalization of Students

·         “Best Practices” – What are they and according to whom?

·         Standardized Curriculum & Testing (i.e. – pre-packaged curricula; meaning and validity of quantitative statistics)

·         Head Start Program

·         School Tracking

·         The Challenges of Inner City Schools

·         No Child Left Behind Act

·         Brown v Board of Education – How far have we really come?

·         Poverty and the Impoverished Public School System

·         The Privatization and Corporatization of Public Schools

·         Black History Month Celebrations

·         Teacher Populations – Lack of Representation

·         Citizenship Education

Please send abstracts/proposals of about 300 words to Dr. Priya Parmar at priyaparmar_24@hotmail.com by June 30, 2009.  We will ask that contributors submit final articles no later than August 31, 2009 (manuscript review criteria will be sent upon acceptance of invitation or abstract).  Should you have any questions about the publication schedule or wish to discuss the scope of your proposed submission, please contact Dr. Priya Parmar at her email listed above or at 718.951.4377.  This special issue of Souls promises to be an important piece of what continues to be an important dialogue, debate and discussion about the impact of African American children and youth in the U.S. public education system.  .

Sincerely,

Priya Parmar, Ph.D.

Guest Editor - Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society

Brooklyn College – CUNY

School of Education

Adolescence Education –Language & Literacy Education

718.951.4377 (o)

priyaparmar_24@hotmail.com