Critical Geographies of Education

Robert J. Helfenbein is Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs and Professor of Curriculum Studies in the Tift College of Education at Mercer University. His current research interests include curriculum theorizing in urban contexts, cultural studies of education, and the impact of globalization on the lived experience of schools.

• 1. Critical Geography and Education—An Introduction; 2. Space, Place, and Power ; 3. Spaces of Possibility; 4. Geographies of School Reform; 5. The Global City—Taking Space Seriously; 6.The City as Curriculum: The Baltimore Uprising and Spaces of Exception; 7. Conclusions/Connections; 8. Notes on Method

Critical Geographies of Education: Space, Place and Curriculum Inquiry examines how critical geography is necessary to disrupt Western colonial assumptions of space and time within the scope of education, in favor of radically repositioning of both. Helfenbein makes it clear that there can be no useful theoretical critique of racial history in and around curriculum theorizing without situating oneself critically within relative position to events (time) and places (space). The book redraws lines of knowing and being with a theoretical "hand" of Black and Indigenous feminist curricular scholars from the global majority. With each page, Helfenbein traces the ruptures and fissures, revealing layers of systemic denial and erasure in schooling. This text is a necessary text given our current sociopolitical moment in which any discourse that challenges hegemonic power in public schools is subject to attack. Through a sequence of powerful narratives, Helfenbein reminds us that all knowledge is local. History is personal. So is geography. Chapter after chapter in Critical Geographies in Education reveals how time and space are interwoven performative curricular maps of violence ... and hope. Of despair .... and transformation. The book calls for a cultivation of intentionality of being-ness that invokes action. Forgive the bad pun, but A Critical Geographies of Education is a "map" in itself for readers to a "spaciocurricular" geography for radically reimagining our collective educational landscape. It does not suggest. It insists. Morna McDermott McNulty, PhDProfessor, College of EducationTowson University