OK, I’ll play your silly game When we were kids and I approached my brother with a fantastical premise, he used to tell me, “OK, I’ll play your silly game,” What if we didn’t tell Mom that we broke the TV? OK, I’ll play your silly game. What if it just kept snowing…
In a high school where I taught about 15 years ago, a new principal started our school year by giving each of us a laminated poster we were to hang in our classrooms. The poster had a stark orange background with thick black print that asked: “When am I ever going to use what…
In many schools where I’ve worked, diversity is valued. This means that in conversations about the culture of the institution, choices about which students to admit and which potential faculty to hire, diversity is often sitting at the table. It makes itself known by logging how many people of color might be in the group,…
I recently changed cell phones (or mobile phones to all my folk in Oz), and like any break-up, there was a kind of a dance around the contract, with implicit and explicit appeals to preserve the agreement. You have been a customer of ours for quite awhile. Do you know about our special offer that…
In this post, I continue the foundation we have of the academy being a system of social reproduction and discuss the ways in which the academy is held and not held accountable. If Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel or Collapse concerned you, you’re about to have some flashbacks. Accountability: the state of being accountable,…
When I tell other academics that I am working on a project of decolonizing educational research, they are either very enthusiastic or understandably ambiguous, wondering if I’ve just implicated them as a colonizer. Echoing this age of Racism without Racists (see Bonilla-Silva’s book for a cogent treatise that defines this time before anyone had even…
We began our inquiry from a view of the system of educational debt and from there, I invoked Diamond’s work as a metaphor, to ask what educational research has to do with things are they way they are. Within the field of educational research, this inquiry will focus particularly upon the genre of research, how…
In her 2006 Presidential address to the American Educational Research Association, Gloria Ladson-Billings called upon educational researchers to shift their lenses from the achievement gap to the achievement debt. Through this one-word change, Ladson-Billings calls upon educational research to widen and deepen the ways in which educational disparities are framed. Ladson-Billings traces the path…
Why are things the way they are? In Jared Diamond’s, Guns, Germs, and Steel, the geographer and physiologist commences with a relatively straightforward question: why is it that some civilizations conquered others? Check out the Diamond’s collapse – the Anastazi somebody who didn’t know writing and the consequences. Then another culture that had writing but…
Leigh Patel 
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