Over the past few years, a number of media reports and popular articles have reported at length on the idea of generational tensions—focusing largely on what divides generations, not on what unites them. The spring 2013 issue of Our Schools/Our Selves, Re:Generations: A primer for all ages, looks at a number of different campaigns where several generations are working together to promote progressive social change: from Shark Truth, to food co-ops, to Idle No More, to climate justice, to the union movement. It's an engaging, exciting look at how activists of all ages are finding new opportunities to work together, learn from each other, reconfigure differences as strengths, and achieve shared goals.
Click here to preview and order the latest issue of OS/OS, Re:Generations: A primer for all ages.
This issue of Our Schools/Our Selves, co-edited with Lyndsay Poaps and Kevin Millsip, represents a departure from our usual format(s). It’s structured as a sort of an “issue within an issue," and is focused—specifically and more generally—on working together across generations for progressive change.
With mass mobilizations like Idle No More re-imagining how we work together for progressive, just and caring communities, standing up against bullying and calling out and naming oppressors is taking on an even greater resonance these days.
The winter 2013 issue of Our Schools/Our Selves focuses on standing up to oppression. Two key articles explicitly look at the topic bullying in our schools, provide thoughtful analysis about the impacts on students and adults, and propose a number of solutions for identifying and working through oppressive situations that victimize the most vulnerable.
Other articles look at ways in which educators, parents and students can and are working together to create safe, creative, accessible and nurturing school environments that meet the needs of more kids and more communities. In many cases, creating these multifaceted, dynamic models of education require a rejection of more corporate, private models of school structure and finance that do little but reinforce existing socioeconomic inequities and power dynamics, as illustrated by a number of important contributions to this issue of Our Schools /Our Selves.
Click here to preview and order the latest issue of OS/OS, Bullying: Working together to break the silence.
The Fall 2012 issue of Our Schools/Our Selves is about the links between education and activism, but it focuses extensively on issues raised before, during and since the Québec student strike.
The strike provides us with a superb case study of how the Charest government labeled student resistance as evidence of an outmoded, entitled ideology, and then used the negative public sentiment towards students that it had itself helped fuel to distract public attention from the wider debate the students were trying to have on the effects of an austerity agenda and, more immediately, a construction/corruption scandal. In this case, it backfired. Spectacularly. And resulted in a pretty remarkable victory for progressives.
This does not mean that the struggle is over, but it is nonetheless a very potent example of what organization, research, and a clear message can do, particularly when amplified by brilliant arts and culture, and social media campaigns.
We do not move forward by “making do.” We move forward by making our voices heard, making our actions count, and demanding and fighting for a legacy we can be proud to leave — not one we hope the most privileged of us can live with. And this is the most profound of all the lessons learned from the Québec strike.
Click here to preview and order the fall 2012 issue of Our Schools/Our Selves, Ne Lâche Pas! Striking shifts in education and community activism.
The CCPA Monitor is the only place I know that one can go to for accurate and honest reporting on the state of the world. I would hate like hell to ever be without The CCPA Monitor; it would be like losing my sight and my hearing. I heartily recommend it to anybody who gives a damn about the condition of the world.
— Farley Mowat