Friday, April 28, 2006

Political litmus test for math teacher

A Chicago public school is seeking a math teacher who needs to have a "social justice background" (whatever that is) of all things to qualify. Political indoctrination at taxpayer expense.

Cluster/Area 04/25
School Name/Address Greater Lawndale / Little Village School for Social Justice
3021 S. Kostner
Chicago, IL 60623 (or GSR #37)
Grade or Subject Mathematics
Certificate Requirements (Type 09) 6-12 w/Mathematics Endorsement

Other Information: Progressive educators with social justice background. Must be willing to create alternative assessments and work collaboratively.
School uses IMP curriculum.

UPDATE: See Darren's analysis of social justice math in the Comment section.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Farther shores

In Silly Season for the School Scholars, Frederick Hess and Laura LoGerfo report on the doings at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Will this organization drown in its own irrelevance?

Here is a sampling:

One scholar of multiculturalism showed how to do away with injustice and racism, while promoting compassion and wisdom, in “Resisting Resistance: Using Eco-Justice and Eco-Racism to Awaken Mindfulness, Compassion, and Wisdom in Preservice Teachers.”

Other work promised to promote proper multicultural teacher attitudes: as with “Teaching White Preservice Teachers: Pedagogical Responses to Color-Blind Ideology” and “Overcoming Odds: Preparing Bilingual Paraeducators to Teach for Social Justice.” Breakthrough research on this front included “Discovering Collage as a Method in Researching Multicultural Lives” and “Artistic Code-Switching in a Collaged Book on Border Identity and Spanglish.”

Among the panels tackling the pressing questions of “queer studies” (formerly “gay and lesbian studies”) were “Queering Schooling and (Un)Doing the Public Good: Rubbing Against the Grain for Schooling Sexualities,” “The Silence at School: An Ethnodrama for Educators About the School Experiences of Gay Boys,” and “Working Against Heterosexism and Homophobia Through Teacher Inquiry.” Unfortunately, this work may have felt a bit conventional to those researchers fortunate enough to catch the 2004 analysis of ableist oppression in homoerotic magazines: “Unzipping the Monster Dick: Deconstructing Ableist Representations in Two Homoerotic Magazines.”