Higher Education As Ignorance

Higher Education As Ignorance is a perspective not solely of education, but rather a cultural analysis based on the Mexican American. This book looks at the consequences of an Anglo Pedagogy and the clash it imposes on Mexicans who are from the U.S. and hence an American-born population, but are of a different race, culture, and mindset, and still living in Northern Mexico. This book compares and contrasts White and Mexican customs as a parallel story of how the home education of centuries based from a rancho culture is forcefully imposed by utilizing the cultural elements dear to a Mexican such as a mother, food, language, and history. All done in the name of education, but whose culture and edification is being progressed and digressed. The volume does not solely vilify Anglo hegemony, but also it examines the great divide that exists among Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants that hunger for some form of advancement, are allowed to do so, and then critique America's Mexicans as if they are to blame alone for their misfortune. Also, a critique of gender and the amalgamation of Latinos is included because for Mexican Americans who are desert U.S. born people to be merged and blended with new immigrants from Central, South America, and the Caribbeans demonstrates the racism visible in society. To piece a U.S. born population albeit desert brown with newcomers from other countries simply because they "look" the same is another indication of ignorance and blatant racism (that somebody like Julian Camacho even though born in California is still somehow related to people he has never met reveals the truth). An unwanted population within the U.S.! Book jacket.

Epistemologies of Ignorance provide educators a distinct epistemological view on questions of marginalization, oppression, relations of power and dominance, difference, philosophy, and even death among our youth. The authors of this edited collection challenge the ambivalence – ignorance – found in the construction of curriculum, teaching practices, research guidelines, and policy mandates in our schools. Further, ignorance is also considered a necessary by- product of knowledge production. In this sense, the authors explore not only issues of complicity but also issues of oppression in spite of educators’ liberatory intentions. While this is the first systematic effort to transfer epistemologies of ignorance to the educational scene, this movement has its roots in race, class, gender, and sexuality studies, particularly the work of Charles Mills, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shannon Sullivan, and Nancy Tuana. It is our unequivocal belief that, while this is transformative and powerful scholarship, the study of ignorance remains understudied and under-theorized in education scholarship, from curriculum studies and cultural foundations to science education and educational psychology. This collection highlights without apology why this dangerous state of affairs cannot continue.

Racism and ignorance churn on college campuses as surely as they do in society at large. Over the past fifteen years there have been many discussions regarding racism and higher education. Some of these focus on formal policies and dynamics such as Affirmative Action or The Dream Act, while many more discussions are happening in classrooms, dorm rooms and in campus communities. Of course, corollary to these conversations, some of which are generative and some of which are degenerative, is a deafening silence around how individuals and institutions can actually understand, engage and change issues related to racism in higher education. This lack of dialogue and action speaks volumes about individuals and organizations, and suggests a complicit acceptance, tolerance or even support for institutional and individual racism. There is much work to be done if we are to improve the situation around race and race relation in institutions of higher education. There is still much work to be done in unpacking and addressing the educational realities of those who are economically, socially, and politically underserved and oppressed by implicit and overt racism. These realities manifest in ways such as lack of access to and within higher education, in equitable outcomes and in a disparity of the quality of education as a student matriculates through the system. While there are occasional diversity and inclusion efforts made in higher education, institutions still largely address them as quotas, and not as paradigmatic changes. This focus on “counting toward equity rather” than “creating a culture of equity” is basically a form of white privilege that allows administrators and policymakers to show incremental “progress” and avoid more substantive action toward real equity that changes the culture(s) of institutions with longstanding racial histories that marginalize some and privilege others. Issues in higher education are still raced from white perspectives and suffer from a view that race and racism occur in a vacuum. Some literature suggests that racism begins very early in the student experience and continues all the way to college (Berlak & Moyenda). This mis-education, mislabeling and mistreatment based on race often develops as early as five to ten years old and “follows” them to postgraduate education and beyond.

A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying. Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education—the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the “dropout”) and value (the “graduate”)—emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making. Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an “alter-university” movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.

Now in chunky format, the funniest book ever written about the history of Western Civilization. Originally published under the title Non Campus Mentis, this book made four national bestseller lists—The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and BookSense; has 200,000 copies in print; and garnered praise from across the country: "Glorious . . . equal-opportunity idiocy for every era."—Philadelphia Enquirer. "A horrifically hilarious compendium . . . knitting together errors, assumptions, and creative fact-making that are shocking and hysterical."—Associated Press. "You'll laugh until you cry, shedding tears for the state of American education."—Baltimore Sun. Compiled by Professor Anders Henriksson from the term papers and blue book exams of students who clearly made it to college before the advent of "No Child Left Behind,"Ignorance Is Blitz is unput-downable. You won't believe what you just read, and won't want to wait to see what's coming next, from the Virgin Mary's Immaculate Contraption to Pericles' greatest erection, the Parthenonon to Custard's Last Stand to Hitler shooting himself in the Bonker and Martin Luther King's ground-breaking speech, "If I Had a Hammer." And who knew: Caesar was assassinated on the Yikes of March, when he is reported to have said, "Me too, Brutus." Rasputin was a pheasant by birth. Victims of the black plague grew boobs on their neck. Judyism had one big God named Yahoo. Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize for inventing the radiator. And "During the Dark Ages, it was mostly dark."

A revolutionary call for a new understanding of how people learn. The End of Ignorance conceives of a world in which no child is left behind—a world based on the assumption that each child has the potential to be successful in every subject. John Mighton argues that by recognizing the barriers that we have experienced in our own educational development, by identifying the moment that we became disenchanted with a certain subject and forever closed ourselves off to it, we will be able to eliminate these same barriers from standing in the way of our children. A passionate examination of our present education system, The End of Ignorance shows how we all can work together to reinvent the way that we are taught.

Pedagogical Partnerships and its accompanying resources provide step-by-step guidance to support the conceptualization, development, launch, and sustainability of pedagogical partnership programs in the classroom and curriculum. This definitive guide is written for faculty, students, and academic developers who are looking to use pedagogical partnerships to increase engaged learning, create more equitable and inclusive educational experiences, and reframe the traditionally hierarchical structure of teacher-student relationships. Filled with practical advice, Pedagogical Partnerships provides extensive materials so that readers don't have to reinvent the wheel, but rather can adapt time-tested and research-informed strategies and techniques to their own unique contexts and goals.

This book is an engaging and accessible collection that celebrates the nuance and depth of student-faculty partnerships in higher education. It aims to break the mold of traditional and power-laden academic writing by showcasing creative genres such as reflection, poetry, dialogue, interview, vignette, and essay. The collection has invited chapters from renowned scholars in the field alongside new student and staff voices, and it reflects and embodies a wide range of student-staff partnership perspectives from different roles, identities, cultures, countries, and institutions.