The Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC) was a coalition of housing activists active in the years between 1998 and 2012 (Monsebraaten, 2012; Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, 1998, 2012). Their efforts bore witness to the rise of dehousing (Hulchanski, 2000, 2010), and the associated trauma and deaths of those forced to live without housing. Upon their closure, they donated their collective files to the City of Toronto Archives. This paper articulates how the curation and public provision of their collected material operates as a significant form of public pedagogy. First, the TDRC files are what I term a "counter-archive within." That is, nested within a conventional archive, often figured as a repository for colonial common sense, motivated by the preservation of state power (Stoler, 2002), lies a counternarrative that challenges the epistemic authority of neoliberal logic. Secondly, in tandem with monthly public events, such an archive resists the "re-scripting" (Edkins, 2003, p. xv) of trauma in commemorative practice; activists as archivists unveil the faults in state-managed temporal arrangements. And finally, the storing of such material in a public institution like the Toronto Archives ultimately foregrounds the archive as a public thing (Honig, 2017) that requires our contestation, care, and attention.
Listening is a familiar activity in education but has received less interest in the literature than speaking, matching its position in our popular culture, which focuses on freedom of speech and extrovert demeanor. Drawing on John Dewey to understand what characterizes creative listening in educational dialogue, this paper argues that creative listening initiates and prolongs explorations into a subject matter through creative tensions, here described as the interplay between originality and meaningfulness that triggers further inquiries and gives rise to ambivalent experiences within the teacher. Through these tensions, creative listening widens the subject matter and increases the opportunities for teachers and students to connect to the world of the subject matter. To achieve this form of listening, the teacher must artfully navigate the tangle of creative endeavors to facilitate enriched educational experiences for the students. By highlighting creative listening as a subtle but powerful force in educational dialogues, this paper strives to emphasize and expand the role of listening in education, promoting an understanding of the way silent communications aid complex forms of knowing.
Teachers engaged in moral education face a puzzle. We aim to bring children up to believe in and subscribe to basic moral standards such as prohibitions against harming others and requirements to help when we can. At the same time, there is widespread reasonable disagreement about the content and justification of morality, and teaching standards as justified when there is reasonable disagreement is wrongfully indoctrinatory. I analyze two answers to the puzzle, posed by Hand (2018a) and White (2016), defending White's education in altruism approach against Hand's criticisms by drawing from an analogy with the teaching of standards and principles in other subjects. Moral standards need not be metaethically justified to children all the way down, like how we need not teach children the metaphysical foundations of math and science in order to teach the standards of math and science in a way that does not wrongfully indoctrinate them. I conclude in favor of a pluralistic approach to teaching the reasons to abide by basic moral standards.
Drawing on our empirical study engaging focus groups of highly experienced educators and stakeholders (n = 12) in Ontario, Canada, we examine the cruel refiguration of educational worker care under neoliberalism in public education. Austerity policies have degraded conditions in the schools such that educators are unable to fulfill their attachments to education as a public good. In addition, the neoliberal individualization of responsibility asks workers to address worsening conditions as individuals, collapsing structures of solidarity. In this paper, we explore the phenomenological aspects of how neoliberal individualism structures educator moods, examining educators' affective interplays of grief, rage, despair, determination, and exhaustion as they struggle to independently uphold or repair a system under duress. We argue that neoliberal conceptions of care are insufficient-and indeed Sisyphean-as singular efforts cannot address the current widespread systemic problems. Instead, we suggest educational workers should disavow individualism, refusing to bear personal responsibility for systemic issues, and should instead seek broader, collective organization against further neoliberal education reforms.
