Trevor Aleo

I think human capital theory has become such deeply engrained “common sense” that a whole lot of people struggle to see beyond it. Even some incredibly well meaning people. It’s just the water we all swim in and has been for decades.

Thanks so much, Adrian!

The intentional thought that @mraleosays.bsky.social puts into designing his course is incredible! The concepts he’s exploring with students makes for deep and rich learning. #TeacherSky

Well, I started something new!

I hope you’ll join me and read along over on Substack 😊

open.substack.com/pub/declarat...

Is some intrepid, gumshoe journalist going to make a podcast about what a scandal this is? Or are they all too busy delivering keynotes, writing ed policy, or “selling a story” to curriculum companies?

Finally got around to writing up a reflection post detailing my process for building this course. It’s still ongoing, but I’m excited to share how it’s going and see what folks think about some of the questions we’re exploring.

open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

Call me crazy, but maybe kids are anxious and depressed for reasons other than iPhones, TikTok, and Snapchat? 🤷‍♂️

Imagine spending your whole education being like “Aw, shucks! I wish I had time to play and read and contemplate the universe, but I have to learn to code & pass tests so I’m employable in the future. I HATE school but at least I’ll be prepared!”

Wait. What’s that? No one needs coders anymore? Oh.”

What’s most annoying about this is it assumes economic insecurity is a product of individual “skills gaps” as opposed to a structural condition of our political/economic systems.

So now Ss are trapped in a system obsessed with job prep at a time when every company is gutting their future jobs.

Writing is thinking.

Radical Pedagogy Radical Pedagogy articulates a new theory of identity based on recent research in psychoanalysis, social psychology and cognitive science. It explains how developing identity is a prerequisite for dev...

Also, anything from Maxine Greene is amazing. Releasing the Imagination and Variations on a Blue Guitar are great. Also, Bracher’s “Radical Pedagogy” was really powerful for me as well. All would gel with the original work you shared.

link.springer.com/book/10.1057...

The Good Life of Teaching The Good Life of Teaching extends the recent revival of virtue ethics to professional ethics and the philosophy of teaching. It connects long-standing philosophical questions about work and human growth to questions about teacher motivation, identity, and development. Makes a significant contribution to the philosophy of teaching and also offers new insights into virtue theory and professional ethics Offers fresh and detailed readings of major figures in ethics, including Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams and the practical philosophies of Hannah Arendt, John Dewey and Hans-Georg Gadamer Provides illustrations to assist the reader in visualizing major points, and integrates sources such as film, literature, and teaching memoirs to exemplify arguments in an engaging and accessible way Presents a compelling vision of teaching as a reflective practice showing how this requires us to prepare teachers differently

A) That book sounds incredible. Buying instantly.

B) It’s unfortunate that seems to be a common gap in people’s training. I know it was in mine. I’ve likely already recommended it, but highly suggest checking out “The Good Life of Teaching!”

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10....

It’s always fascinating to see the “true believers” realize how many of their allies don’t actually believe in anything beyond their own self-interest and/or devotion to the supreme leader.

Zines | Notion Genre Overview

Passing is so good and they absolutely lose it at the ending!

If you’re looking for some resources for zine making, me and my #literacies crew have a resource we’ve compiled.

reminiscent-attention-b9e.notion.site/Zines-158620...

Education programs too! We read “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” in the one educational philosophy course we had to take in undergrad and a lot of people were annoyed that “it wasn’t practical.” I was the weirdo who loved it and was like “I don’t know, yall. Kind of feels important 😬?”

To be fair, I think a lot of teachers are trained to treat standards like they are chiseled into stone tablets and handed down from on high. IMO, it’s not the worst thing to publicly historicize/criticize their creation, especially when corporate overreach into education is worse than ever.

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

James Baldwin

posted today by @sjcerv.bsky.social

As it happens, I’m teaching Persepolis 2 in my “Texts, Tensions, and Globalization” course this semester. I’ve taught Persepolis 1 a number of times, but would welcome any tips, resources, suggestions on 2.

For context: My thematic framing for the course. ⤵️

youtu.be/ag5E1Xtq7lM?...

Going to post this over & over.

There are many ways to understand our current policy landscape, but an important & under-discussed one is a crisis of measurement.

We trust test scores the same way we trust we’re being charged fairly @ the gas pump—without a 2nd thought.

Maintaining robust public education will require us to hold "blue state" governors and legislators accountable for their crusade to "Make Literacy Technical Again" by turning classrooms over to corporations through curriculum mandates and testing requirements while failing to stand up to censorship.

David Lynch saying ‘One day, the sadness will end. But I don’t think today’s the day.’

Yeah, it’s wild that anyone could think it’s progressive to argue that we need to use art/literature to create a shared culture while also claiming there is an objective meaning of those cultural texts based on authorial intent.

Somehow that doesn’t feel very democratic…?

To be honest, this top-down view of education & learning was shot through his entire philosophy, going all the way back to his debates with Gadamer re: the “authority” of the text and the primacy of authorial intent.

There’s an odd subset of folks claiming he was “bAsiCaLLy a soCiAList!” as though his personal politics are relevant to the fact his writing is most frequently used to prop up reactionary/regressive views of culture & his curriculum is pushed as a market-based solution to educational inequality.

For thee but not for me!

One of the most insane things about ed-reform is that a very small collection of people are able to be wrong again and again and again with zero repercussions. In fact, every failure is a chance for them to come up with a new solution and write/sell a book about it.

The Commons w/ Peter Linebaugh Featuring Peter Linebaugh on the long histories of commons and commoning, connections between enclosures in Europe and imperial conquest abroad, and writing history from below.

extraordinary episode of the always great DIG podcast, on the history of the commons

thedigradio.com/podcast/the-...

a fan of this energy tbh, and ambitious politicos should be trying to outdo each other here