Kevin R. Magill – författare

In this book, Kevin Magill and Arturo Rodriguez examine ideas about culture, cultural resonance, and difference that teachers often miss when working with students. The authors argue that teachers often enact excellent work with students but do not always see or understand various power dynamics, ideologies, and realities that situate teaching and learning. The book begins with a broad overview of the educational ecology and the authors identify several elements that obscure how teachers perceive students' realities. Next, they discuss how common historical interpretations ensure narrowly defined perceptions of culture, educational experience, and possibility. Then, Magill and Rodriguez provide specific classroom examples which result from these often-narrow interpretations, identifying several issues that limit educational exchange. These examples illustrate and complexify some of the challenges teachers face when mediating frustrating schooling experiences. The authors help readers tangibly reconsider these interactions and understand how different forms of power affect classrooms. Next, they present certain educational tools that can be used to promote creativity and acceptance of culture and agency while also supporting formal and disciplinary learning. Lastly, Magill and Rodriguez argue for understanding teaching as intellectual solidarity. To them this means working with and for students to cultivate the relationships and interpretation needed to apply the ideas, experiences, and exchanges presented in this book.

In this book, Kevin Magill and Arturo Rodriguez examine ideas about culture, cultural resonance, and difference that teachers often miss when working with students. The authors argue that teachers often enact excellent work with students but do not always see or understand various power dynamics, ideologies, and realities that situate teaching and learning. The book begins with a broad overview of the educational ecology and the authors identify several elements that obscure how teachers perceive students' realities. Next, they discuss how common historical interpretations ensure narrowly defined perceptions of culture, educational experience, and possibility. Then, Magill and Rodriguez provide specific classroom examples which result from these often-narrow interpretations, identifying several issues that limit educational exchange. These examples illustrate and complexify some of the challenges teachers face when mediating frustrating schooling experiences. The authors help readers tangibly reconsider these interactions and understand how different forms of power affect classrooms. Next, they present certain educational tools that can be used to promote creativity and acceptance of culture and agency while also supporting formal and disciplinary learning. Lastly, Magill and Rodriguez argue for understanding teaching as intellectual solidarity. To them this means working with and for students to cultivate the relationships and interpretation needed to apply the ideas, experiences, and exchanges presented in this book.

Given the current social climate this book interrogates capitalism’s relationships to and influence on education. More importantly, this book is part of a greater effort to re-humanize society by generating dialogue, encouraging solidarity and providing analyses of power and avenues for agency in supporting a life beyond the logic of the state and its implied structure, global neoliberal capitalism. The authors speak to the conceptual and material manifestations of neoliberalism that order education.Imagining education is an informed public working against what is understood as self-interest, a reconsideration of a world beyond ideology; popular education aiding social transformation for community, a move away from divisiveness and social struggle. We do not offer easy answers to the problems of global neoliberal capitalism in education, instead the authors in this book offer frameworks for contextualizing neoliberalism, its history, and what education might be on the day after the end of capitalism. This is the rupture of the rationality of global neoliberal capitalism where we examine the potentialities of a world beyond the capitalist organization of consciousness.