A.C. Stark
-
By popular demand, I give you PhilosoTrumps!What to do: Two-sided colour print onto card, carefully cut, shuffle and play. Enjoy! How to play: Shuffle and deal all cards face down; players do not look; first player reveals a card and chooses a category; all reveal and compare the same category; highest (or stated lowest) wins;…
-
“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – Morpheus, in The Matrix Conspiracy theories have long existed and until recently were considered…
-
A few weeks after completing my A-Level exams, when my peers were partying hard and preparing for university, I wistfully returned to school to seek out my old sixth form tutor. Results day was way off but I knew with certainty that I had squandered the last two years and was becoming consumed by a…
-
Man up, sit down. Chin up, pipe down. Socks up, don’t cry. Drink up, just lie. Grow some balls, he said. Grow some balls… The mask of masculinity is a mask… that’s wearing me. The mask, the mask, the mask… This is why you never see your father cry. This is why you never see…
-
“One challenge facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. We must address education’s role in encouraging students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of…
-
Knowledge trickled down to us from the West and we paid respectful homage to every printed word that bore a Western name. When we did not understand something— and there was a lot that did not make sense— we blamed ourselves for our lack of knowledge. Thus a canon made mostly of ahistorical and apolitical…
-
Assuming that education should be emancipatory rather than dogmatic and dictatorial, below I present a case for why rebelling against yourself and the status quo is pedagogically valuable to both students and the teaching profession. What I say by the way of providing context may seem oversimplified and perhaps even radical in tone. Such is…
-
In a recent post I described critical literacy as ‘a radically interrogatory, disruptive approach to reading and listening’ and explored James Damico’s (2012) suggested methodology of reading with and against a risky stories to promote it. Though, it would be remiss of me to imply that Damico’s methodology alone functions to this end. Below I…
-
“[E]ducation is not about filling a bucket but about lighting a fire.” Gert Biesta paraphrasing W.B. Yeats. Freire’s call for teachers to engage their students in a process of conscientização— of awakening their ‘critical consciousness’ so that they might confront and react to the socio-political realities of themselves and others, the injustices in which they…
-
1. Introduction This essay attempts to answer the question: to what extent does the DfE’s (2022) ‘Guidance on political impartiality in schools’ (henceforth ‘the Guidance’) support de/coloniality? To this end, I divide the essay into four sections. To begin, I briefly detail a selection of pedagogical views on what is and when to treat an…
Megapedagogy 