How COVID-19 Has Exacerbated Inequality in Higher Education in Brazil

Drawing on educational census data and a review of news articles and higher education policies in Brazil, this article examines the impact of COVID-19 on the access and retention of the low-income Brazilian population in higher education. Guided by the question, “What is the impact of COVID-19 on the most vulnerable population in Brazil in terms of access to, and retention in higher education?”, the paper is structured in two sections: the first offers a short historical overview of Brazilian higher education; the second examines the impact of the pandemic on student retention in higher education, looking at factors such as social isolation, job and income precarity, use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), internet access, and technological resources. I argue that distance education offered by private higher education institutions benefits the privileged students and that the effects of the pandemic are detrimental to the socially disadvantaged students since those who are in public universities do not always have access to technology, and those who study in private universities feel the impact of not being able to pay tuition fees, besides the loss of several jobs in different sectors. In conclusion, I recommend policy initiatives to improve access to higher education.

Living at the Margins: Black Feminist Pedagogy as Transformative Praxis During the 1980s-1990s and Epistemic Exclusion in the 21st Century—Where Do We Go Now?

In this essay I argue that Black women who teach Black feminist pedagogy experience “epistemic exclusion” (Buchanan, 2020) while advocating for the intersections between three disparate contexts: their activism in their communities, the women’s movement, and their work as educators in postsecondary settings. The period examined is the 1980s–1990s. I consider the institutional challenges and limitations Black women have undergone as knowledge producers and teachers. While pushing the boundaries erected between university settings and the Black liberation movement taking place in their communities (Joseph, 2003), they were limited to a precarious status as Black women teaching within White-male dominated institutions. The trailblazing theoretical pedagogical insights Black feminists have advanced in their work as educators in postsecondary settings is discussed at length. Additionally, connections are made to the present-day struggle among Black feminists for inclusion within contemporary educational contexts (Evans-Winters & Piest, 2014; Mogadime, 2002, 2003; Wane, 2009, 2011).

Intersections between Human Trafficking and Education: Toward New Research Agendas

Human trafficking is a social issue that has gained attention in the media and in scholarship. A growing number of anti-trafficking organizations and actors have begun to use education to diverse ends. Although not often associated with human trafficking, education is a common tool used by anti-trafficking organizations, whether as a prevention tool to reduce the vulnerability of people at-risk of trafficking, or as a service to trafficking survivors to improve their lives. Lack of access to education, or to quality education, is also a factor in exposure to human trafficking, whether that be in terms of debt bondage, domestic servitude, forced labor, child marriage or other issues related to human trafficking. More explicit connections need to be made between the work being done in anti-trafficking spheres and the scholarship of education in order to better understand how to improve the quality and effectiveness of education-related efforts. This essay explores the connections between human trafficking and education.

Between the Tides: Developing an Indigenous-Informed Cultural Safety Training Impact Assessment Survey Tool for Post-Secondary Institutions on Vancouver Island, BC

This paper highlights the development of an Indigenous Cultural Safety Training (ICST) impact assessment survey tool working in collaboration with Indigenous leaders, Elders, faculty, staff, and students from across four post-secondary institutions on the traditional lands of the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ Peoples on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. What emerged from a series of Indigenous-led workshops was the development of an ICST impact assessment survey tool to measure the impact of the training as well as for ICST participants to reflect on their own cognitive and behavioural change within their practice over a 12-month period. In addition, a validation process with ICST experts, facilitators, staff, faculty, Elders, and participants was carried out to help refine the proposed co-constructed assessment variables, statements, and questions underpinning the survey tool. The finalized ICST impact assessment survey tool will not only improve the quality of ICST in post-secondary settings, but will also enable staff, faculty, and leaders to reflect on how the ICST improves their personal and professional practice working with Indigenous students in these settings.

Activating and Actualizing the Third Space in Syrian Diasporic Realities: An Autoethnographic Interpretation

This essay, part of a larger study, speaks to the Syrian Diaspora’s lived reality in Canada, a complex topic that delves into issues of dislocation, displacement, loss, exile, identity, resilience and a desire for belonging (Alatrash, 2019; 2020). The study seeks to better understand these issues and the lived experience and human condition of the Syrian Diaspora in Canada. I engage autoethnography as a research methodology and as a method as I think and write from my own personal experience as a Syrian immigrant so that I could better understand the Syrian refugee’s lived experience (Alatrash, 2019). My research participants were three Syrian refugee families in Calgary, in addition to myself as an autoethnographer. As I autoethnographically analyzed, presented, and interpreted the stories of the three families, I identified a number of themes (Alatrash, 2019; 2020); this essay addresses one of these themes: On creating new possibilities: Activating and actualizing the Third Space (Alatrash, 2019).

English Language Learners, Labels, Purposes, Standard English, Whiteness, Deficit Views, and Unproblematic Framings: Toward Southern Decoloniality

This paper argues for revisiting ways in which English Language Learners (ELLs), and the learner labels attributed to them, are negatively, racially, and pathologically framed and constructed based on, putatively, their English language competence, or their lack of it. It contends that this framing tends to give rise to a raciolinguistic profiling of these learners, as they end up being classified by their race, pan-ethnicity, nationality, immigrant/refugee status, regionality, and at times, by their skin color, in addition to their language abilities. This raciolinguistic framing often engenders other framings such as White, deficit, and poverty framings, and sub-framings like an othering framing (e.g., the racial others and the linguistic others). These framings, together with the normative ways in which ELLs’ language problems are constructed, have been characterized in this paper as misframings. Additionally, employing southern decoloniality, the paper problematizes and critiques the way ELLs are constructed and labeled, and the appropriation of Standard English (SE) as the sole touchstone of acceptable English in the midst of the other varieties of SE and of pluriversal speakers of English. Finally, the paper calls for the provincialization/localization or the deparochialization of English in keeping with its southern decolonial approach.

The Emergency of Satellite Schools and Access to Education in Zimbabwe: Leveraging the Human Rights Agenda

While the Land Reform Programme (LRP) in 2000 and beyond was camouflaged as a distributive justice schema aimed to better the socio-economic status of the Indigenous people in Zimbabwe, it precipitated educational injustices for students arising from the creation of an education landscape marked by inequitable access to education. The study, undertaken after 20 years since the inception of the LRP, sought to check the progress made thus far by the Government of Zimbabwe to enhance access to education by children of the new farmers. Informed and guided by the international normative frameworks of the right to education, of which Education For All (EFA) and the Zimbabwean Education Act (1987) are part, the case study cast in the qualitative approach, presents constructed narratives of three primary school learners and their three teachers at one purposively selected satellite school. The study finds that as much as the advent of the LRP worked to bring equal access and redress in land appropriation between the settlers and natives, a new form of injustice has resurfaced as reflected by challenges of equitable access to education.