This paper presents the relationship between pedagogical content knowledge and political/ideological clarity as a framework for understanding the nuanced interpretations and applications of critical social studies pedagogy and practice. Using a qualitative case study research design, this study explores the decision-making process of two novice social studies teachers as they decide if and how to utilize critical historical inquiry within their classrooms. Findings indicate that teachers’ use of critical historical inquiry is informed by their subject area consciousness and political and (...) ideological clarity which is cultivated through personal, schooling, and communal experiences. However, we also find that a teacher's pedagogy is significantly strengthened when political and ideological clarity are coupled with pedagogical content knowledge to ensure a more developed enactment of critical historical inquiry is reached within the social studies classroom. (shrink)

This article addresses relations between concepts of ‘self’, ‘other(s)’ and ‘othering’ through a reading of the revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s psychoaffective phenomenological and pedagogical narrative approach, reading his work as phenomenological and educational as well as critiquing phenomenology, psychology, education and (of course) psychiatry. While most—especially educational—commentators base their engagement with Fanon’s revolutionary materialist phenomenology of racialised embodiment and consciousness on his first book, Black Skin White Masks and attend to his final book, Wretched of the Earth as expressing his (...) core political and philosophical analyses, this article focuses in particular on Fanon’s second and middle book, A Dying Colonialism, evaluating the political possibilities of the specific narrative temporalities elaborated there. Notwithstanding its rather dismissive reception, it is argued that this, middle, book—written during, and as a document of, the Algerian liberation struggle—expresses and develops Fanon’s psychopolitical and performative philosophy of subjective and objective transformation from alienation to emancipation. This philosophy works pedagogically, in imagining the transformation of relations between others, as well as between self and others, including relations between coloniser and colonized, as also between and within selves. (shrink)