This paper uses the example of a two-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) -funded research project at a small regional college in Canada to discuss the difference that research assistant opportunities can make for undergraduate students. We begin by describing our specific project and discussing strategies for inviting and involving students to participate in an innovative, interdisciplinary, and inter-institutional digital humanities project. Student researchers on the team are trained to use digital tools and technologies in the service of humanities research questions. They are also trained in the practice of feminist research methodologies in the digital humanities. As feminist researchers working in a feminist research team environment, it is vital that the relationships that we build with student researchers are grounded in feminist ethics of care, or more specifically, what we are calling here feminist ethics of care pedagogies. In this paper, we consider how a feminist ethic of care is practiced by our research team, with special attention paid to the way that this ethical orientation has enabled us to develop an ethics of care pedagogy that informs the project’s approach to training student researchers. Student research assistants, who are co-authors on this paper, report that the team’s feminist collaborative practices enable meaningful and engaged learning. Ultimately, we argue that despite the instrumentalist orientation of many granting agencies, large research projects may still prioritize holistic development over transactional skills acquisition by emphasizing an ethic of care. In so doing, project directors may facilitate learning environments that value meaningful engagement with knowledge creation, fostering a deeper understanding of the collaborative and relational nature of research itself.
This paper highlights three films made in three New York City elementary school classrooms as teachers teach about social class and economic inequality to young children. Each of the teachers in these first, third, and fourth/fifth grade classrooms drew from their observations of how social class affected their children and mobilized an array of pedagogical decisions to create learning experiences that unpacked common capitalist-driven ideologies they had internalize years before entering their first days of school. While economics education often excludes elementary school, the aim is that teachers and teacher educators everywhere come away with a sense that broaching these topics with young children is not only possible, but that accounting for the study of economic inequality in elementary schools is necessary to any agenda that views education as a vehicle for social justice.
The past several years have seen significant political backlash against equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) frameworks in education. This backlash is designed to create an environment of fear for teachers and students alike. This essay explores what is involved in teaching public high school while afraid, and how the queer politics of persistence offer a guide.
At the university level there is a plethora of AI workshops or webinars to attend. These conversations and learnings are largely directed toward critical and ethical uses of AI in the classroom and how and if we integrate AI into courses. Less talked about are the public health implications for communities, often with the very communities universities are embedded in. These large data centers, whose massive physical and environmental footprints are essential to developing and maintaining large language models like ChatGPT, produce many adverse health impacts for people living near these sites. As a public health professor teaching a seminar in Rural Health, I found it pertinent to bring this discussion into the classroom. Rural areas are prime real-estate for data centers, with large swaths of land. While AI companies like Meta and Amazon make huge profits, communities may suffer. This vital public health issue must be brought into the classroom along with studying communities that are resisting new proposed AI sites and/or shutting down already existing centers.
In this article, I analyze over a dozen recent introduction to cultural anthropology textbooks and similar texts. I argue that such texts tend to disconnect processes of racial and gender oppression, along with the climate crisis, from the capitalist mode of production and imperialism. By doing this, they erase progressive struggles from below by movements of workrers, the oppressed, and the colonized. These erasures produce two effects: first, they limpoverish social theory and second, they lead to flawed or misguided practical politics. In the conclusion, I propose a "socialism from below"-inspired alternative.
The paths that immigrant and undocumented students will tread are perilously evolving, as the cutting-edge forces threatening their existence constantly morph. The perilous journey undertaken by educators to secure sufficient pedagogical independence also means that as much emphasis as possible should be placed upon ensuring that immigrant students feel safe. Recent studies emphasize that immigrant students live in constant fear due to pending legislation that jeopardizes their safety and stability (López Amézquita, 2025). The hearts and minds of these young victims are constantly under siege, leading to anxiety and trauma that significantly impede their learning and growth (Posnick-Goodwin & Sanford, 2022).
This article reflects on teaching couple and family counseling in Taiwan through a queer, trans-affirming, anti-oppression, and experiential pedagogical lens. Drawing on the author’s sabbatical teaching, family memoir, and long-term engagement with Taiwan’s LGBTQ+ movements, it explores how flipped classrooms, role play, and social justice prompts can deepen student engagement, expand counselor identity, and connect family counseling education to democracy, activism, mutual aid, and collective care.
This teaching note responds to what it means to be a creative writing facilatator for those who are incarcerated.
In this Dispatch, I weave my narrative of teaching beginning English as a Second Language course for adults with Paulo Freire's revolutionary humanization and bell hooks' love ethic to explore what a praxis of radical hope can look like in a space where shared language and communication are not a given.
Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art is a rare poetic meditation on loss that resists sentimentality, instead framing bereavement as a skill to be practiced. Its villanelle form, known for repetition and control, becomes an ironic container for emotions that ultimately break through. Teaching this poem in an Indian classroom—where success is emphasized and failure is stigmatized—was an experiment in unsettling normative ideas about loss, resilience, and control. How can poetry help students rethink loss in a rigid, success-driven educational culture?
Rejecting the reactive oscillation between hope and fear, the essay advances a pedagogy grounded in “action from principle,” drawing on Spinoza, Thoreau, Freire, and Baldwin. It develops four guiding principles: (1) create non-dominating spaces grounded in love and mutual respect; (2) analyze the present situation as the starting point for action; (3) resist fixation on dominant representations by cultivating peripheral attunement to material conditions; and (4) practice discussion, decision-making, and coordinated action. Examples from education and media courses illustrate how students move from pessimism and passivity toward practical preparedness. The article argues that education inevitably reproduces or contests its social order; thus, classrooms function as training grounds. A pedagogy of principled action offers not optimism, but capacity: the ability to change relations by transforming conditions such that action becomes possible.
This essay offers a reflective dispatch from the first day of the academic year amid overlapping crises in public higher education, including immigration precarity, political repression, and the erosion of academic freedom. Drawing on classroom practice in Africana Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Cultural Diversity, the author examines how these structural conditions materialize in students’ lives and shape the possibilities for teaching and learning. Centering student voices, trauma-informed pedagogy, and solidarity-based classroom practices, the essay situates Mutual Assistance and Defense Compacts (MADCs) within longer traditions of collective survival and resistance. Rejecting pedagogical neutrality, the piece argues that the first day of class is a political threshold where educators can either reproduce fear or cultivate collective hope, refusal, and possibility.
In this teaching note, I show how teaching with Rebecca Hall’s (2021) Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts subverts what undergraduate research design classes can do, showing how critical methodology courses – contrary to their reputation as scientistic exercises surveying a pre-packaged list of methods – are an especially apt place to teach about anti-racism, feminist theory, resistance, and social power.
“Palestine in Film: A Review Essay” examines a recent wave of documentaries and related films that foreground Palestinian dispossession, resistance, and testimony amid Israel’s assault on Gaza and continuing occupation of the West Bank. Centering on No Other Land and The Voice of Hind Rajab, the essay situates these works within a broader history of Palestinian and Palestine-focused cinema, arguing that their limited distribution and contested reception underscore their political force.
The Lehman Alternative Community School in Ithaca, NY, is a public, 6-12 alternative school that is democratically run by its staff and students. American Studies is a seminar for 11th and 12th graders that aims for relevant and empowering curriculum that is transnational, transdisciplinary, and intergenerational in its pursuit to raise up young people into collective leadership and creative voice.
