21st Century Scholar

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one of my favorite plays. At the beginning of the story, Faustus, surrounded by countless dusty tomes, declares that he has read everything about everything. I’m not sure what it says about me (especially given Faustus’ fate), but I frequently think about that scene. I read a lot. I eagerly [...]

Several weeks ago I had the honor of hosting a presidential session at AERA. Henry Jenkins, James Paul Gee, and S. Craig Watkins joined me to discuss how the conference theme—education and poverty— intersected with new media literacies. The session was designed around the premise that social media, the Internet, and online games have the [...]

How the higher ed world changes in such a short time. K–12 education has been in “crisis” much of my adult life, but usually higher education has been spared the Hollywood-like metaphors. “A nation at risk” paralleled other 20th century reports that forecast calamity because particular goals had not been reached in K–12 education. The [...]

As faculty members and co-directors of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California, we lead action research using CUE’s Equity Scorecard. The mission of our center is to create the “tools” needed for colleges and universities to bring about racial/ethnic equity in students’ collegiate experiences and outcomes. In the action [...]

AERA’s 2013 theme is centered on the issue of “poverty.” It is spurred by President Bill Tierney’s provocation that despite education’s ability to lift students out of poverty, schooling is often mired in economic relations surrounded by the debilitating effects of poverty. There are at least two senses of “poverty” invoked here, to which I [...]

I confess some ambivalence about a definition of poverty which encompasses the moral, intellectual, and material domains. Not because each of these domains is unimportant; rather, my concern is that defining poverty this broadly runs the risk of obscuring the ways in which they are intertwined. Impoverished material circumstances may heighten the risk of an impoverished moral or [...]

In this essay I argue the economic inequities of today carve out a very large social condition that is orders of magnitude greater than can be conveyed by the term “poverty.” This condition derives from a massive theft of public wealth and abandonment of the principles of representative democracy. There is a silver lining: on [...]

A monumental challenge facing scholars, researchers, and practitioners is in designing, implementing, and taking to scale powerful interventions that disrupt the synergism among education, racism, and poverty. This synergism is at the core of educational systems and practices that maintains and perpetuates racism, power, and privilege; that denies equitable access to education; and that frames and [...]

The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden. –Jay-Z There is a common myth that spans the globe about America, which presents us as the ultimate privileged country offering [...]

In capitalist societies such as ours, there are hidden contextual rules in our understanding of poverty and its relationship to education. They hide the fact that the struggle for better schools and the elimination of poverty must include the struggle for a democratic socialist alternative to capitalism. This is likely to sound provocative to the [...]