Texas Education Review

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2152/44503

https://review.education.utexas.edu/

The Texas Education Review is an independent, peer reviewed, student-run scholarly publication based at the College of Education at The University of Texas at Austin.

From Sweatt v. Painter and No Child Left Behind, to charter schools, curriculum policy, and textbook adoption, the State of Texas has played and will continue to play a critical role in shaping education policy in the United States.

The Texas Education Review (TxEd) is located directly on The University of Texas’s campus in the heart of downtown Austin. Its close proximity to the Texas Capitol, Texas Education Agency, and State Board of Education offers unparalleled access to the thought leaders, policy makers, and academics who are driving education policy in Texas. TxEd focuses on analysis of education policy and related issues, with non-exclusive preference given to issues affecting the State of Texas.

TxEd was founded and is operated by PhD students at The University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education, which consistently ranks as one of the best public university graduate education programs in the U.S.

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Measuring Two Constructs of Afterschool Activity Participation: Breadth and Intensity
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Palma, Jose R.; Van Boekel, Martin; Hufnagle, Ashley S.
The benefits of afterschool activity participation for youth development are well-documented. An interesting question dominating this field is whether there is a threshold at which point participating in too many activities (breadth) and spending too much time in those activities (intensity) is negatively associated with desirable outcomes. Using 9th grade student data (N=115,731) from three administrations of a state-wide school survey, we explore whether students’ breadth and intensity of afterschool participation is associated with GPA and perceived family and community support. Findings corroborate prior research in demonstrating the association between breadth and intensity. Importantly, we extend the discussion, with three important observations. First, a linear model is insufficient for modeling these complex associations with outcomes. Second, there is a threshold at which too much participation has a negative impact in these outcomes. Third, variations in activities, time windows and indices have small or no influence in the association with outcomes.
Navigating a Third Space to Support International Students in the U.S.
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Aziz, Jurana
The present article explores the experiences of two international graduate students who studied in the United States and how they dealt with the challenges of living in a new country. The researcher was inspired by Bhabha's (1994) third space theory and aimed to investigate how these students tried to create a space for themselves in the classroom to overcome cultural differences. The data has been collected through in-depth interviews and analyzed using Gee's (2011) discourse analysis method. The study concluded that providing international students with a designated space in the classroom to address their cultural challenges could greatly benefit them, and teachers can actively facilitate this space.
Deconstructing Deficit Orientation: Teacher Perceptions of Lived Experiences of Young Children
(Texas Education Review, 2022) Keller Nicol, Marilyn; Sherrod, Ambra
This conceptual paper explored the fundamental barriers to successful equity training and professional development for teachers. This was done to show the need for a professional development series, based on Ting-Toomey and Chung’s (2012) cultural value pattern analysis. Using the theoretical lens of post-colonial theory, the authors posit the need for professional development that begins with teacher positioning (Davies & Harré, 1990) for purpose of disrupting deficit-oriented epistemes of sociocultural differences. The conceptual framework contains activities for participants, as well as future recommendations for further training.
School-Based Policies to Identify Adversity in Childhood and Mitigate the Effects of Toxic Stress in Texas
(Texas Education Review, 2022) Palacios, Arelis; Reid Jr., Michael; Reventlow, Geneva; Ripma, Tye; Spitzer, Natalie
Drawing on evidence and example legislation, this policy research brief identifies school-based policy options for Texas to prevent and mitigate toxic stress caused by Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). The term ACEs refers to the 10 common categories of adversity included in a landmark study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente (Felliti et al., 1998). These include physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; physical or emotional neglect; and household challenges such as living with a person who is experiencing mental illness (Felliti et al., 1998). Of great concern is that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, ACEs were already widespread in the state, cutting across lines of race and income and potentially affecting constituents from every region and demographic group (Texas Department of State Health Services, n.d.). Over the past two years, COVID-19-related school and child-care center closures coupled with an economic recession have increased children’s risk of hunger, homelessness, and neglect (Welch & Haskins, 2020). The effects of ACEs are particularly concerning in Texas which is home to over 7.5 million children under 18—more than any state other than California—and children under 18 make up more than 25% of the population of Texas—more than any other state other than Utah (Population Reference Bureau, n.d.). Therefore, Texas’s school-based policies to mitigate the effects of toxic stress are particularly consequential now and in the future. The purpose of this policy research brief is to identify and describe nationwide legislative efforts to help Texas school district officials and Texas policymakers consider legislative remedies to reduce or mitigate the detrimental impact of ACEs.
Forward to the Special Issue: AFyL and the Reading of the Politics of Liberation
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Dussel, Enrique; Salazar, Gabriel
Politics of Liberation is part of the process of what could be called the Latin American revolutions of the second emancipation, which have been developing since the second half of the 20th century, as a philosophy it must express the theory that is being created in the praxis of multiple participatory experiences that are already taking place in various horizons of the continent, and that, for example, Boaventura de Sousa Santos has exemplified in numerous publications. This special issue is a small contribution to Latin American social movement, it is didactic and pedagogical, product of the seminar organized by the Asociación de Filosofía y Liberación (AFyL), which emerges as a proposal in 2010 in Mazatlán, where in a general assembly it was agreed to create spaces for the dissemination and development of the Philosophy of Liberation.
Confronting the Limits of this World: History, the Politics of Liberation, and Education
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Martinez, Adam
Filosofía de la liberación generates a sort of hope and energy that we are not meant to be in possession of. Postmodern reasoning, perfuse in critical spaces, tells us that grand narratives, now debunked relics of the past, are no longer accessible—concealing the fact that capitalism has generated and polices the “grandest” of all narratives. As Alicia Hopkins explains in her reflection in this volume: “Market fundamentalism has taken the place of the macro-narratives that postmodern thinkers had written off, strategically utilizing amnesia—which uproots—and the fetishization of history—which naturalizes domination—as ideological tools that are not easy to dismantle.” The confidence of naming and knowing the world—of generating a grand narratif—is meant to be the purview of whiteness. However, the work that is emerging from the global South, this collection of essays included, aims not only of de-structing the prevailing order of things, it is, in the positive, creative sense, laboring in the construction of a more just world from and for the outside—one where many worlds will fit as the neo-Zapatistas say. We are affirming our own categories and a new world is being born, with a new reason for which the affirmation of life—human and nonhuman—is its fundamental principal.
Archaeosystem, Urban Revolution and Rationalized Unification of the Political
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Hopkins Moreno, Alicia
The reconstruction of history from below retraces the path in search of what has been forgotten, it is a “history against the grain” that offers guidelines, which looks at the past from messianic categories and situates itself in a present that demands the concrete action of justice. Instead of holding up new events that might allow the hegemonic history to be dislocated, the task would be, rather, to find the ruins of any possible history to be narrated. From the archaeosystem to the Roman empire, which is the historical fragment this paper deals with, what are the faces of oppression, what structures were consolidating themselves in the relationship of domination with the rest of life on the planet? It is not a question to be fully answered in this brief text, but rather to point out ways in which we might approach Dussel’s text on the history of politics of liberation to find some clues.
The Rebellion of the Victims and the Slow Invention of the Secular State
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Padilla Rosas, Eric J.
To better understand section four in the first chapter of Política de la liberaición: Historia mundial y crítica, entitled “The rebellion of the victims and the slow invention of the secular State”, we must note that, for Enrique Dussel, history is a constructive, progressive movement, which can be categorized into four stages: 1) The Egyptian-Mesopotamian (from the IV millennium BC), 2) the Indo-European (from the II millennium BC), 3) the Asian-Afro-Mediterranean (from the IV century AD) and 4) the world-system (from 1492 AD). In this section of the first chapter, Dussel introduces us to the third stage, which is made up of a) the regions of Persia and of the Turán-Tarim, and later the Muslim world (from the 7th century AD), as the center of commercial connections; b) India, as a productive center; c) China, as the extreme east; d) Bantu Africa, as the extreme southwest; e) the Byzantine-Russian world, as the Occidental extreme and f) Western Europe, as the western extreme. In this paper, I pay particular attention to how the third stage differs from the second; thus, the transformations that occur in stage III will denote, not only the limits of stage II, but will also demonstrate the constructive-progressive movement of history.
The Context of Modern Politics
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Ayala-Colqui, Jesús
Under the guiding thread of a de-struction of world political history, and from the position of suffering living corporality, Enrique Dussel presents the context of modern politics in the fifth section of Política de la liberación: Historia mundial y crítica. Modernity is not in this case a merely intra-European phenomenon that belongs to a periodization of history enunciated from the West. It is, on the contrary, a moment that arose from the experience of colonization of the non-European Other. As Dussel argues, 1492 will be the moment of the ‘birth’ of Modernity as a concept, the concrete moment of the ‘origin’ of a very particular ‘myth’ of sacrificial violence and, at the same time, a process of ‘covering up’ of the non-European. Understanding the context of the emergence of this colonizing experience, that is to say, of the other worlds of life before and outside of this European Modernity, is the objective of this fifth section. For this, four moments are addressed in the text: China, the Ottoman Empire, pre-modern and eastern Venice, the Italian Renaissance.
Another first ‘Early Modernity’: Lusitanian Christianity in the face of the alterity of the African slave
(Texas Education Review, 2023) de Jesus, Rodrigo Marcos
I bring to the discussion observations based on the reading of sections 6 and 7 of Enrique Dussel’s Política de Liberación: Historia mundial y crítica and on personal reflections that arise from my research and teaching activities. This paper is divided into two parts. In the first, I highlight some fundamental aspects of the book under study. As each member of the seminar was able to read Dussel's work in advance, it seemed more pertinent to make a general comment directed mainly to the question of periodization and the conceptual and temporal landmarks of Modernity, without seeking to synthesize the positions of the authors discussed in the book. It is, therefore, more of a dialogue with Dusselian ideas than a brief exposition on these sections of Politics. In the second part, I analyze the implications of the "decolonizing turn" for the teaching of philosophy. Despite taking the Brazilian experience as a point of reference, I believe that the points raised, at least in part, are valid for other contexts in which philosophy is taught.
Poietics of the Second Early Modernity: Political Ontology of the Christianities of Northern Europe (1630-1789)
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Soazo Ahumada, Christian
In this paper I reflect on the political ontology configuration of early modernity in northern Europe in order to examine the production of reality and subjectivity involved in this process. We will analyze the theoretical and historical revision that Dussel proposes on the topic of the Christianities of northern Europe between 1630 and 1789. Indeed, in this post-Hispanic scenario, in which the incidence of the community as “consensus of the communities” becomes more and more distant, the influence of late feudalism persists in continental Europe, together with the growing importance of Dutch and British mercantilism. The instrumental need for political institutionalization is thus insurmountable according to the legitimacy of the nascent modern state and state rationality. Therefore, the pre-industrial mercantile bourgeoisie pushes ever harder for the unification of political and military power, around the sovereignty of the king, in order to organize an ever larger and more significant market for its unrestricted cravings for wealth and economic accumulation. However, behind the dominant economic liberalism and its formalistic, fetishistic (narcotic) political ontology, a potential of exteriority can be seen in hiding around the republican common and the idea of popular sovereignty that would be important to consider, through a political, critical and strategic translation, in the transmodern context present in our contemporary historical-political horizon.
The Dialectic Between the Two Faces of Political Discourse in Mature Modernity
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Díaz Guzmán, Diana Alejandra
In 1992, Dussel shook the Eurocentric academic world by presenting eight lectures at the University of Frankfurt—these will later be published under the title 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro. The thesis of this work was countercultural and novel since it exposed Modernity as a phenomenon with two faces. Dussel, in the nineties considered that modernity has on the one hand, an emancipatory side and, on the other hand, an irrational myth that justifies violence; the argumentative thread that supports this quality of myth is articulated with Eurocentrism whose concomitant component is the developmentalist fallacy. Subsequently, in 2007 Dussel published Política de la Liberación: Historia Mundial y Crítica, where he expounds a counter narrative, understood as a narrative of an anti-traditional tradition. The purpose of the text is to deconstruct political philosophy and the history of politics. In this order of ideas, it can be seen that there is an argumentative coherence in those mature works in which modernity is apprehended as a phenomenon composed of a duality, a phenomenon that must be overcome and, at the same time, one that cannot be denied because as Dussel describes, Latin America has been (for better or for worse) a principal participant in the world history of modern politics. The purpose of this paper is to understand how political discourse in mature modernity is conceptualized by politics of liberation in order to briefly glimpse both faces of modernity.
In the Dependency of ‘Mature Modernity:’ Some Themes for a History of Politics in Latin America
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Heredia, Nadia
At this point in the work, Enrique Dussel relates the texts and contexts of what he calls a history of Latin American philosophical thought in general, and of regional political philosophical thought in particular, in view of a political philosophy of Latin American liberation. The section begins by showing three theoretical-historical moments where the ambiguity that arises from reflecting on Latin American politics and political philosophy becomes an argumentative strength that accentuates the undeniable connection between these two dimensions. In the first place, the moment of the critique of the conquest was for Dussel the beginning of the ‘anti-discourse’ of Modernity, as such, and therefore, the first chapter of a political philosophy of liberation at the beginning of world globalization. The second moment is situated in 1808, when the arrest of King Ferdinand VII allowed and legitimized the formation of Government Boards in the most important American cities. The third moment began in 1959 with the Cuban Revolution, followed in 1979 with the Sandinista Revolution and in 1994 with the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Although these emancipatory attempts could have been a second emancipation, what they actually mark is the continuity of a certain Eurocentrism with its attending ideological and political systems of oppression.
Updating of World History and Criticism: Philosophy of Liberation and Decolonization…One More Step
(Texas Education Review, 2023) Colmenares Lizárraga, Katya
We come to the end of this Critical World History to discover what Dussel sees as bringing critical political reflection up to date. In this sense, the entire journey that is made throughout this work only takes on its true dimension in the final section, with a philosophy that seeks the critical voice of the people. This culminates in political thought of the Zapatistas that emerged at the end of the 20th century with the awareness of inaugurating a new moment in the history of world politics. Dussel places the origin of the Philosophy of Liberation in that Argentine decade between 1966 and 1976. Many things have happened since then, and the Philosophy of Liberation has received continuous attacks that have tried to question its coherence and political commitment, as well as to dismiss its relevance not only in the history of Latin American philosophy, but also worldwide. This essay tries to respond to these attacks and show how it is that thought, born in a political situation not without contradictions, may flourish due to its ability to articulate historical reality and a political commitment to the denied and excluded. Philosophy, when it is true philosophy, thinks about concrete reality. Therefore the critique of philosophy, Dussel tells us, must be done, not from thought, but from reality. In that sense, reality is the beginning and the end, the orientation and the course.
Afterword to the Special Issue: Reflections on the World History of the Politics of Liberation
(Texas Education Review, 2023) De Lissovoy, Noah
This remarkable special issue, which presents the collective work of the Asociación de Filosofía y Liberación and a selection of its investigations of the work of the great philosopher Enrique Dussel, is an indispensable intervention across a range of philosophical fields. In particular, the articles collected here, made available by the crucial editorship and careful translations of educational scholar Adam Martinez in coordination with AFyL, challenge the narrow disciplinarity and profound Eurocentrism of academic political theory. They bring the news of a collective rethinking of global history and knowledge that concerns us all, as intellectuals and educators, and presented here in the Texas Education Review they implicitly challenge (and invite) U.S.-based scholars to a scholarly conversation beyond the sanctioned bounds of what de Sousa Santos calls the West’s abyssal thinking.
Research on their Terms: Desmadrando(nos) el Ivory Tower
(Texas Education Review, 2022) Caldas Chumbes, Blanca
This special issue of Texas Education review showcases a snapshot of the most current pathways research is taking among emergent scholars from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the tensions that come with the new understandings of what it means to be trained as researchers in institutions that epitomize Western colonialism since their inception and to conduct research that attempts to recuperate onto-epistemologies that such training tries to invisibilize. This collection of transgressive articles speaks of a departure process at the intersections of the political, pedagogical, methodological, and personal levels that not only exemplifies the current issues in cultural studies but models praxical research as a contestation against the scarification process that academia inflicts on scholars that wish to research on their terms.
Picking Blue Dawns: Community Epistemologies, Dreams, and (Re)Storying Indigenous Autoethnography
(Texas Education Review, 2022) Montes, Pablo
As a Queer, Indigenous descendant, and first-generation doctoral candidate, I often write through autoethnography as a theoretical and methodological tool that contextualizes personal experiences through communal onto-epistemologies. In this paper, I share experiences, stories, and dreams in the academy and within my own communal knowledge systems to unsettle the continued settler coloniality of academia and how community-based epistemologies allow me to shape my relationship to knowledge, community, and research. There is often a pejorative view of auto-ethnography, usually referring to it as “me-search,” that argues how writing from personal experience is human-centric, uncritical, and subjective. This perspective further invalidates personal experience as a legitimate source of epistemology and simultaneously encourages hierarchies and superiorities of knowledge. I contribute to the growing field of literature that positions autoethnography as an Indigenous-based methodology, a move I call (re)storying Indigenous autoethnography, that is both generative and imperative in understanding social, cultural, and political worlds.
Towards a Transformative Curriculum: Critical Resources in a Social Studies Classroom
(Texas Education Review, 2022) Caddel, Cecile
The purpose of this research is in exploring how a critical curriculum in the social studies classroom leads to a transformative education. Since foundational narratives are deeply embedded in our educational curriculum, critical sources offer contradicting cultural and socio-political relevance within traditional works. As counternarratives, these become powerful tools for empowering both teacher and student identity. While traditional frameworks delegitimize other perspectives, critical interpretations center on citizenship and consciousness raising. Herein, critical sources deconstruct master narratives and contradict the power structures that lead to the unequal distribution of power. They prevent the educational curriculum from further contributing to the dangerous system of control, subordination, and White hegemony. As such, the pedagogical promise of critical resources is discussed.
Art Integration in Teacher Education: Aesthetic Tools to Foster Critical Reflection
(Texas Education Review, 2022) Link, Beth
Pre-service teachers often fixate on building their classroom management and lesson planning skills, but the job of teacher educators is to push them beyond the daily rituals and routines to consider deeper relationships of power and control at work in schooling. The arts can be a useful tool for making the covert ways power moves in curriculum and pedagogy visible for new teachers to identify and critique. I approach my work with pre-service teachers through arts integration to invite embodied and aesthetic ways of knowing and learning into the classroom and to help students visualize the hidden aspects of teaching. This article suggests three ways the arts can be used by pre-service educators, including aesthetic analysis, embodied exploration, and art making.
I Live in Nepantla; I live in the Borderlands
(Texas Education Review, 2022) Eufracio, Gricelda
This autobiographical research draws from testimonio inquiry exploring my lived curriculum as an emerging scholar and curriculum administrator of students who are living in historically marginalized areas. The questions are: How can testimonios inform the struggles of immigrant students in the Whitestream curriculum? How does my life in Nepantla inform teaching and learning in Aztlan? My framework is based on Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of Nepantla. More specifically, I use testimonio as a method of inquiry to critically explore my work to transform a curriculum designed from a White supremacist perspective into a more relevant curriculum. This study is important because immigrant educators will acquire conocimiento (knowledge) about the educational inequalities that still exist in education and they will learn to be agents of change in education.

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