Issues
TCSE_Issue 1_FULL PDF.pdfWhat is a "critical social educator"?
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2021)
For our first issue, we begin by asking a fundamental question: What is a "critical social educator"? That is, how do classroom teachers, researchers, and others understand what it means to be critical?
This inaugural issue features five articles wrestling with what it means to be a critical social educator. In their article centering pre-service teachers, Christine Rogers Stanton and Hailey Hancock (2021) share how they used PhotoVoice as an avenue to examine their students’ developing identities and relationships to teaching social studies content. In their piece grounded in critical global education, Gerardo J. Aponte-Safe and Hanadi Shatara (2021) share an in-depth analysis of state-level standards to demonstrate how educators can bring global perspectives into their elementary social studies classrooms. Cassie Brownell and Anam Rashid (2021) unpack how a white, critical social educator provided children with the opportunity to engage in critical conversations around race using children’s literature. Similarly, Mary Adu-Gyamfi, Angie Zapata, and Sarah Reid (2021) richly describe how picturebooks provide an avenue for teachers to engage in critical discussions around race and racism with young students. In the final article, Ryan Oto, Ngan Nguyen, Megan Custer, Peder Ericson, and Nick Liebelt (2021) emphasize how building and strengthening a small teacher collective committed to critical practices is essential to sustaining critical social education in classroom teaching practice.
These authors in The Critical Social Educator’s first issue bravely engage in critical work with young children, classroom teachers, preservice teachers, and curriculum. We want to thank these authors not only for their wonderful ideas, but for their patience and support during the process of shepherding the inaugural issue to publication. We are grateful to middle school student Jaquelin Fernandez Zepeda for contributing this issue's beautiful cover art, and we also wish to thank you, our first readers, for turning the digital pages of this inaugural issue. Creating The Critical Social Educator is not an experience we take lightly, and we fully embrace the responsibility to continue building the journal where we can all be heard, valued, and where we can continue to learn.
TCSE_Play Issue 1_Full PDF.pdfPlay as a liberatory practice
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2024)
The Editorial Team included Drs. Tran Templeton & Harper Keenan, along with Nicole Fox and Akiea "Ki" Gross
What business do we (a bunch of adults) have writing about play? We’ve asked ourselves this question a lot. Our own opportunities for play are sorely restricted. “Adulting” seems to mean that one is expected to play less, if at all. Among adults, play is often seen as frivolous, unserious, unproductive (Yoon, 2023). The English language is littered with phrases dismissing play and playfulness, such as “that’s child’s play!” to mean something easy or simple. Yet, in a world where capitalism tries to force most of us to devote as much of our lives as possible to working, play is an important form of resistance. Perhaps, at its best, play is a way of practicing freedom. Here, we might reconceptualize young children as some of the best leading experts on play, even above and beyond the wealth of peer-reviewed research on the value of play in children’s lives. We’ll spend the rest of this introduction citing much of that research, but please know that we do so only out of our intention to act in solidarity with the countless children asking the adults in their lives, “Can we go play now?”
This is the first of a double issue on play as a liberatory practice. This issue provides us with some historical, social, and political context around play that primes us for thinking with children about potential ways out of constraint to be able to “boldly play” (Beneke & Love, forthcoming). The second issue, which will be released in the Winter of 2025, will bring us more squarely into the contexts of play: children’s homes, school playgrounds, and classroom curriculum (both of the past and into the future). Together we hope these issues allow us as adults to question our taken-for granted assumptions about play, to refuse dominant discourses around normalcy (Beneke & Love), and to become conscious of children’s play on children’s terms.