In 1976, June Jordan penned I must become a menace to my enemies, an earth-shattering poetic letter to Agostinho Neto, president of the People’s Republic of Angola, and a still-relevant liberatory message occasioned by the violent forces of hegemony. She asks, “How many of my brothers and my sisters will they kill before I teach myself retaliation?”, issuing a clarion call for oppressed people to wake up and act amid nation-state violence. The genocidal campaign in Gaza has exposed the political theater and hypocrisy of universities whose commitments to diversity, equity, decolonization, and justice are contradicted by their silence. In this manuscript, we narrativize our experiences as students at a large public urban university who organized insurgent decolonial educational interventions within a school of education. Amid the intensifying murder of Palestinians, we demanded curricular interventions that prepare future educators to understand the long struggle for Palestinian liberation and to practice educational solidarity. Drawing on Black and Indigenous knowledge traditions, we examine how university leadership neutralized genocide as “violence in the Middle East,” criminalized student organizing, and revealed its intellectual and moral bankruptcy. We conclude by envisioning insurgent educational praxis grounded in self-determination, courageous will-building, and anti-indoctrination pedagogy across K–20 education.
This auto-ethnographic paper explores the author’s process building anti-colonial anti-oppressive remote teaching practices in a social service worker diploma program at a downtown Toronto college. Differentiating between the crisis education implemented at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and intentional pedagogy designed for online spaces, the author demonstrates that remote teaching can inspire rebellious relationality and argues that the virtual classroom is not so much placeless as “multiply emplaced.” The paper provides practical suggestions for building an online learning community and calls for an expansion of remote options guided by the principles of accessibility, relationality and trauma-informed practice.
Proponents of critical pedagogy aim to liberate oppressed populations through emancipatory forms of praxis (Darder et al., 2017). This article draws on this pedagogy, in particular Freirean pedagogy, to explore refugee education offered by The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Drawing on interviews with UNRWA teachers and other educational staff, alongside document analysis, this paper examines how UNRWA in Jordan enact its mandate. In particular, the article focuses on a policy program, ‘Human Rights, Conflict Resolution and Tolerance (HRCRT)’ that UNRWA implements in their education. With an analysis shaped by core aspects of a Freirean pedagogy, the paper argues that the HRCRT program creates authentic possibilities for advancing Palestinian liberation. Despite the unknown future for both the Agency and the Palestinian refugees, findings from the interviews and other data materials reflected a shared consciousness of the purpose of the UNRWA-led education for Palestinian refugees, which is in accordance with both UNRWA’s mandate and fundamental principles within Freirean pedagogy.
In this article, we re/present our research alongside Palestinian Muslim students and families in Albert, focusing on research participants’ experiences of anti-Palestinian racism in k-12 schooling. To contextualize participants’ experiences, we explore literature around anti-Palestinian racism across Canadian and Israeli settler-colonial contexts. We elucidate two main narrative threads reverberating across research participants’ stories: participants experience(d) systemic anti-Palestinian racism in schools; yet they simultaneously engage(d) in education about Palestine in their homes and communities. Discussing ongoing anti-Palestinian racism in Canada, we conclude by offering several considerations and actions towards countering anti-Palestinian racism in Canadian schooling.
