Attend the Faculty of Education Showcase Panel on Tuesday May 30th starting at 10:30am!
York University’s Faculty of Education has organized four events during Congress, click here to see the full schedule. Please see below for information on the Faculty of Education panel taking place on Tuesday May 30th from 10:30am-12:15pm.
The panel titled Pedagogies Towards More Just Futures: Reckonings and Re-Imaginings in Education will be co-chaired by Professor Korina Jocson and Professor Warren Crichlow. The panel will feature four Faculty of Education members: Professors Vidya Shah, Molade Osibodu, Cristina Delgado Vintimilla and Mario G. DiPaolantonio.
The panel will explore the conference themes of reckonings and re-imaginings from a range of perspectives – including the humanities, philosophy, feminist, and Black studies – with a view to rethink pedagogies and relationships between the past and present, education and schooling, teaching and learning, and leadership and responsibility towards more just futures.
Attendees must register for Congress to attend.
Dr. Vidya Shah will be presenting "Faculties of Education: Paradox, Partiality, and Potentiality". Vidya is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University, and her research explores anti-racist and decolonial approaches to leadership in schools, communities, and school districts. She also explores educational barriers to the success and well-being of Black, Indigenous, and racialized students. Dr. Shah is committed to bridging the gaps between communities, classrooms, school districts and the academy, to re/imagine emancipatory possibilities for schooling. You can learn more about her work at https://www.yorku.ca/edu/unleading/.
The talk positions Faculties of Education as ecosystems of relations, imaginings, and structures situated in larger socio-political and ecological contexts. Faculties of education, like all institutions, are simultaneously places of paradox, partiality, and potentiality. In this paper, I consider three perspectives and frame my inquiries as a series of questions and tensions. In faculties of education as sites of study, I consider how our institutions act on us as faculty, staff, students, administrators, and community partners, and how we act on our institutions. In faculties of education as social movements, I consider the tension between struggle as a pedagogical project and struggle as an act of risk and relational accountability to address socio-material inequities. In faculties of education as epistemological imaginings, I consider how we might unsettle and destabilize the normative, the naturalized, and the taken-for-granted in our particular theoretical and methodological orientations. We might reconsider our conceptions of “scholarly”, “robust”, “excellence” and “rigour” especially when they share breath with concepts like decolonizing, equity, and justice. Perhaps these tensions invite a staying with the unknown and unfamiliar and a commitment to truth-telling and struggle. What if we were to dwell in our individual and collective failure, pain, and pessimism long enough to generate wonder, mystery, sacredness, surprise, and creativity in our research, theorizing, teaching, organizing, and administrating? This might be one of the most ethical and responsible promises we can make to ourselves, to all our relations, to our futures and to our present.
Dr. Molade Osibodu will be presenting "Alien Superstar: A Critical Examination of Black Representation in Mathematics Education through Fantasy, Fiction, and Africanfuturism". Molade is an assistant professor of education at York University. Her research critically examines the experiences of Black youth in mathematics education. Dr. Osibodu is specifically interested in examining ways to decolonize mathematics education for liberatory futures, engaging with social justice issues and exploring African Indigenous mathematics practices.
Over the past year, the casting of Black actors in fantasy-based contexts, such as The Lord of the Rings: The Ring of Power, House of the Dragon, and The Little Mermaid, has caused significant controversy. The issue raises the question of where Black people are allowed to exist, as some find it challenging to conceive of Black people simply existing in the realm of fantasy and fiction. Katherine McKittrick’s (2006) Demonic Grounds delves into how physical and material spaces reveal the non-neutral nature of spatiality, particularly for Black people. McKittrick queries, “what is it about space, place, and blackness—the uneven sites of physical and experiential ‘difference’—that derange the landscape and its inhabitants?” (p. 3). This talk examines how coloniality has contributed to this derangement and analyzes the representation of Black people in mathematics education through two counterstories in fiction and Africanfuturism. The first counterstory is Dwayne Wayne’s character in the late 80s/early 90s sitcom, A Different World, where he is portrayed as a university student passionate about mathematics, in a way that feels normal rather than the exceptional. The second counterstory is Nnedi Okorafor’s novella, Binti, which tells the story of a young Black girl who defies societal expectations and becomes a skilled mathematician. By presenting these counterstories, the entrenched colonialist notions that govern knowledge, being, and power in the portrayal of Black people in fantasy and fiction are brought into question. Further, these counterstories offer the necessity for re-imagining spaces and considering the conditions where Black people not only exist but thrive in mathematics education.
Dr. Cristina Delgado Vintimilla will be presenting her paper titled “Some Considerations on Worn out Concepts, Pedagogical Thinking and The Making of Otherwise Educational Worlds”. Cristina is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at York University and a pedagogista within the Italian tradition. Her research creates conditions for pedagogical experiences that weakens the logics of late capitalism to reconfigure the limits of what is possible within such experiences. She is particularly interested in the intersection between pedagogy and the arts as catalyst for new genres in education.
In this paper I draw on my work as a pedagogista to discuss the pedagogical promise of critique, estrangement, and what I call speculative envisioning. I argue that these concepts are themselves modes of engagement, practice, and thinking that are pedagogical and that they can help educators engage with the nondeterministic work of creating conditions for otherwise educational worlds. Particularly, I highlight speculative envisioning as a mode of pedagogical thought that works as a necessary supplement to the renewal value of critique and how this constitutes a pedagogical and ethical move toward other possibilities in education.
Dr. Mario Di Paolantonio will be presenting his paper titled “No Time for Thinking: Education and the crisis of thinking at the end of time”.
Mario is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education. He publishes in the area of philosophy of education, cultural theory, and memory studies. His international award-winning research explores how memorial sites attempt to pedagogically reckon with historical wrongs. Professor Di Paolantonio is an International Research Associate at the Centro de Estudios en Pedagogías Contemporáneas and the Escuela de Humanidades at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
While the “crisis of thinking” has been rehearsed throughout the destitution and horrors of 20th century, there is a different accent on the catastrophic today. The eclipse of thinking besetting the public today is symptomatic of a time marked by multiple planetary catastrophes, political-social impasses, and a surge of psychic-social maladies arising from the techno-economic overstimulation of the nervous system. These forces are currently aligning together with a never-before-seen world-defying ferocity. Admittedly we are living amid unnerving times that give no time for the time required for thinking, no time for cultivating the sociality that sustains it, no time for sensing the weight and pull of those things between us that can bring us together in a more hopeful world. Without the possibility of sensing something more than the present-same, the senselessness of the futurability of the future depresses thinking and sickens the soul. My paper is concerned with exploring what’s at stake in the very possibility of education in these unnerving times. For, education is nothing if not what can give us the time and place to think: to think profoundly about our thought-provoking times. While not all mental activities fostered in education are worthy of being called thinking, there is a vested hope – however elusive – that education might be well placed to attune our senses and spark the thinking necessary to respond to the world. What is it about education that can prompt and cultivate thinking, particularly a thinking through the impasses of these panic-stricken times?