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The urban process encompasses vast structures and practices engaged in creating, extracting, and accumulating value in and from the urban landscape. But what is value and how does it attain its coercive power over urban life? The unreflective deployment of axiomatic assumptions regarding the source and substance of value constitutes a form of magical thinking conjuring something out of nothing and transforming an immaterial abstraction into a material force that is real in its consequences. Unpacking the concept of value reveals a contentious debate regarding the ontological status of value as a driver of the urban process. Alternative formulations posit value as intrinsic or extrinsic, objective or subjective, residing in the world or constructed in the mind, driven by universal law or spatially and temporally contingent. Transcending all such dualisms, a transactional approach drawn from Deweyan pragmatism understands value as a co-constitutive interrelation among a valuing subject, an object of valuation, and the enveloping context in which valuation occurs. The delineation of value's ontology is fraught with political consequences for reproducing or altering the urban status quo. The move toward desired outcomes begins with articulating the foundational assumptions that underlie the value practices propelling the urban process in specific situations. Pluralizing value assumptions focuses the problem on the political question concerning whose value(s) prevail in a given situation. This redefinition shifts the focus from ameliorating current practices of extracting value to politically contesting the value commitments at work in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this postformal co-autoethnographic research, the authors explore the changing landscape of American research universities from their respective locations as mid-career, post-tenure critical pedagogy scholars. By using autobiographical narratives in parallel with a running discussion of rodent habits and habitats, they explore the influence of Enlightenment humanism and Western epistemology in (a) forming 'the academy' as an institution, and (b) regulating how research and knowledge production are taken up within a rapidly neoliberalizing context. They recalibrate their 'theories of change' to recast critical researchers and critical pedagogy in relation to a volatile and hostile institutional context. By moving away from progress narratives of education for social change, the authors posit that critical pedagogy and critical research can be thought of as akin to 'wayfinding,' providing guidance, direction and reprieve while within the disorienting and violent flux of neoliberalization.

Through a co/auto/ethnographic approach informed by a theoretical bricolage of critical pedagogy, place-based education, science education, human geography, feminism, and indigenous ways of knowing, the authors demonstrate the power of place in and as pedagogy. Using rich personal narratives, they reclaim their stories as an urban island-dweller and nomadic music-dweller, and they illuminate place as an epistemological, ontological and axiological anchor for the Self in the neoliberal wasteland. Specifically, the authors attend to their familial lineages and reasons for migrating from Southern Europe to the USA's Northeast section, the Northern Mid-Western and to the Southeast. They examine their and their families' connections with place in relation to the ideological fictions embedded within their shared narrative of "for a better life," which is the story that was told to them about their families' migrations. They probe under the surface by asking, "better than what," "according to whom," and "why?" In doing so, they peel back the veil of hegemony and expose the ways that economic disadvantage impacted their families' relationships with their homelands. The article concludes by conceptualizing critical connoisseurship as a means for guiding students to tap into the embodied knowledge of place in order to notice, question, appreciate and critically reflect upon curricular content and subject matter and resist neoliberalism's removal of person from place and local knowledge.

Identification of college students' attitudes about diversity issues is an important part of the assessment of student development across many fields of study. This article discusses an action research approach and classroom application strategies stemming from a survey of 88 pre-service teacher candidates on their attitudes toward homosexuality, race, social class, and women's equality, following a university course on diversity. Data were examined using a Rasch model approach to determine and compare linear attitude measures and resulting change from pretest to posttest. Findings included endorsement difficulty changes among diversity issues as well as changes in student attitudes, primarily though not exclusively in concert with the course curriculum. Teaching approaches including the use of personal narratives were considered relative to findings. Areas for enhancement of instructional strategies were identified. Implications for teacher-scholars on examining linear measures of student attitudes and improving instruction on diversity issues in higher education were discussed. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)

Numerous recent media accounts indicate that teachers are being fired, put on probation, or otherwise censured because of information found on their social networking sites (SNS). While the literature in business, psychology, and pharmacy shows initial investigations of the impact of SNS information on hiring decisions, this area has not been investigated in the field of education. Data from pre-service teachers' SNS were compiled into a 51-item questionnaire and K-12 school principals rated each statement on its likelihood to influence a hiring decision if it were found on the SNS of a teacher applying for a position at his or her school. The statements included on the questionnaire included sexual talk, swearing, violent language, references to drugs and/or alcohol use, and language that could be considered pejorative to individuals with disabilities, persons of color and/or homosexual individuals. The findings of this preliminary study indicate that of the 51 statements, 28 had average ratings in the moderate-to-significant impact on hiring decision range and 22 had average ratings in the minor-to-moderate impact on hiring decision range. Only one item of the 51 fell in the no impact-to-minor impact on hiring decision range. Findings are discussed in relation to professional dispositions, categories of information that may influence hiring decisions, and internet use policies. Implications based on the data from this study include the need to develop state and university policies for SNS use. Finally, the results of this study indicate that further research into hiring administrators' use of data from SNS in hiring decisions is warranted. (Contains 6 footnotes and 4 tables.)

Like so many other concepts in education, multiculturalism is a term that has lost its potency because of miseducative examples that serve to maintain Whiteness as the cultural norm. At first it offered great promise, but now as a "social science" quite often one is just exchanging one type of essentialism for another. The "packet" approach that lumps all the people under one racial, ethnic, or religious heading, as a way to learn about other cultures, is an example of this. The demographics of the United States are rapidly changing. If the fallacy of Whiteness as the "normal" background is to be kept in place, it will require an even greater propagation of historical and cultural "White lies" than what already exists in the present. Challenging the myth of a racial norm of any kind must be a vital and ongoing part of the field of education and one of the best ways to approach this is through personal stories. Every human is unique. Each one is the product of their own biological and cultural journey, with a unique schemata and capacity for personal and public ways of knowing, being, and self-expression. Both essentialism and extreme relativism miss the mark insofar as offering an adequate representation of personal signature and voice. When applied to identity, essentialism refers to "the notion that individual groups have an immutable and discoverable "essence"--a basic, unvariable, and presocial nature." The most obvious examples are categories of race, class, and gender. The concept of ethnicity breaks things down further, but still comes short of a full account of individual difference and personal story. Extreme relativism, on the other hand, treats biological differences as a socially constructed myth, and personal identity as a completely fluid concept. The inner landscape of each human is as varied as his or her outward physical features, and is the result of both genetic and cultural influences. It is through the power of personal story that people are able to move out of the essentialist/relativist dichotomy, out of abstraction and into the domain where each individual path of experience is incomparable and immeasurable in one aspect, but also universal in terms of sharing human life. It is one's personal story that provides the dynamic of teaching and learning. Students are more likely to notice ways of knowing for which one is passionate, that generate motivation to move beyond every barrier, into personal and public spaces of being. The author contends that true multicultural education is so much more than a social science. It is a release from inarticulate stasis through metaphoric connections expressed in personal story.

Background: Two major conceptions of learning exist: reproducing new material and transforming material to make meaning. Teachers' understandings of what learning is probably influence their teaching practices and student academic performance. Aims: To validate a short scale derived from Tait, Entwistle, & McCune's (1998) ASSIST inventory and to determine and compare the strength of agreement New Zealand and Queensland primary and secondary teachers had for both conceptions. Samples: Two survey studies with three populations provided valid data: 235 NZ Primary teachers in 2001, and 784 Primary and 614 Secondary Queensland teachers in 2003. A survey of 81 NZ secondary teachers in 2000 did not have enough participants to generate stable estimates. Methods: Five items defining learning were administered using a six point, positively-packed agreement rating scale. Data were analysed with MMLE confirmatory factor analysis with oblimin rotation. Multiple models were compared and results from the best fitting model (CFI and TLI greater than 0.90; RMSEA less than 0.08) for all three samples are reported. Cohen's "d" effect size was used to determine significance of differences in conceptions mean scores. Results and Conclusions: Psychometric properties of the two scales were good. Conceptions of learning were structured as two inter-correlated factors related to transforming and reproducing conceptions of learning. All samples agreed more with the transforming than the reproducing conception of learning; however, there were small group differences in mean scores. The response scale and items generated sufficient variation to detect differences in teachers' attitudes towards transforming and reproducing conceptions of learning. (Contains 2 tables, 3 figures, and 2 footnotes.)

Within the current U.S. sociopolitical context of rampant violence, increasing levels of racism and xenophobia in society and the rise of authoritarianism in schools, a new and fresh confluence of Maxine Greene and Paulo Freire's work revitalizes and expands the concept of radical hope. Their educational philosophies enable one to see beyond "what is" into more democratically just and humane worlds of "what might" be. This article focuses on ways that these two scholar-activists' key contributions converge to release a much needed melody that exposes exploitation and falsehood while inspiring wide awakeness, personal reflection, and directed action. Inspired by the metaphor of playing music on the blue guitar, it takes a "call and response" approach to examining these key ideas from the works of Greene and Freire that are parallel and complementary to each other. Sounds of Maxine Greene's (1995, 2001) and Freire's (1970, 1992) harmonic pairings of wide-awakeness and critical consciousness, aesthetic education and "reading the world," social imagination, and radical hope will resound anew, with particular attention paid to ways that both Greene and Freire define hope above and beyond passive and wishful thinking. The authors conclude by reframing radical hope as a "theory of change" (Tuck and Yang 2014) in which imagination can be understood as an insurgent praxis useful for destabilizing the contemporary global neoliberal order that is more concerned with creating workers and consumers than democratically minded citizens.