21st Century Scholar

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 [...]

Today’s post offers follow-up commentary on the IGNITE format I introduced in a previous post. To quote myself: IGNITE is… a [new] format for good ol’ fashioned PowerPoint. Nothing fancy, just some new rules. The parameters are simple: (a) presenters are limited to 20 slides, and (b) the time allotted to each slide is 15 seconds, no [...]

These are the two videos (click here and here) that preceded the AERA lecture. Many of you have asked for them. Leo Diaz made them. I’ll be thinking and writing about this past year after I catch my breath. Adieu.

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 [...]

Great relief swept over me when I saw the theme for this year’s AERA—finally, we are led by a team of scholars who recognize the intimate connections between our educational institutions and broader societal structures, and encourage us to talk about those connections without fear that we are downplaying the urgency that schooling requires. 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 [...]

Addressing questions of justice and inequality in educational research requires a deep understanding of the social, economic, and historical forces that connect us to one another and of the difficulties of intervening in complex and dynamic systems. For example, if people saw children drowning in the rapids of a river, their first impulse would probably [...]

Bill’s assignment was like coming face to face with a task that I had been putting off. Constantly having to put up with political and social rhetoric that wants to take the US back to the days of rugged individualism and “I got mine, you get yours” that has been a central component of this [...]

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a student I’m mentoring from my hometown of Detroit. This young man was an average high school student and bombed in his first attempt at community college. After dropping out he returned home to work at a nearby Burger King. He indirectly complained to me about the nature [...]