Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education

“Education is constantly used as a divisive political battlefield. Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education: Pathways and Possibilities shows us that critical solidarities are the only way forward in these troubling and polarized times. This is an excellent book that will help educators more deeply understand the issues they are facing on a daily basis.”

Wayne Au, Professor, University of Washington School of Educational Studies, Editor, "Rethinking Schools"

“Rudnick has put together a fine collection of authors in Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education: Pathways and Possibilities, whose chapters complicate the unicausal theories of oppressions and instead call for capacious and engaged intersectional work in resistance. At a time when CRT bans are instituted by the same forces that constrain curriculum on language diversity and LGBTQ + issues and restrict transgender people’s access to medical care and women’s access to reproductive freedom, it is all the more important for educators to keep the multiple vectors of oppression and resistance clearly in mind and action: this collection provides important educational impetus for that work.”

Cris Mayo, Professor and Vice Chair, Dept. of Education, Director, Interdisciplinary Studies in Education M. Ed., University of Vermont

“This is a timely and important book essential to understanding our growing authoritarian and fascist political environment and how to resist it. Dennis Rudnick’s edited volume offers an array of scholars who provide thoughtful, real-world examples of how divide-and-conquer strategies further balkanize America. Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education: Pathways and Possibilities provides a critical framework for helping us understand the multifaceted ways in which division and exclusion are legally institutionalized in American society while offering counternarratives for enhancing a more inclusive, intersectional, and socially just democracy. This is a must-read for anyone interested in education, the social sciences, cultural diversity, and policy.”

Brian W. Dotts, Professor, University of Georgia

“The initial power of Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education: Pathways and Possibilities is in contributors’ analyses of the political moment, of the hold anti-justice crusaders and their divisive ideologies have today. They paint devastating, instructive pictures of how educational justice efforts are strategically undermined—in some cases, how people committed to those movements are lulled into the undermining. The enduring power of this book is in its turn toward resistance and liberation, in the ways contributors urge and equip to struggle on without compromise. This is the book I needed, arriving precisely when I needed it.”

Paul Gorski, Founder, Equity Literacy Institute, Co-author (with Katy Swalwell) of "Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership"

“Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education: Pathways and Possibilities is a fiery, unapologetic, and sometimes terrifying text. Rudnick’s carefully constructed volume hits readers hard with the searing realities of education and schooling in these strange and divisive times; yet as a good teacher he is also mindful of the need to encourage, inspire, and assist readers in affirming that they have the courage and capacity to work in the service of peace, justice, and even joy, both individually and in solidarity to fight the good fight.”

Pamela J. Konkol, Executive Director, American Educational Studies Association, Professor of Foundations, Social Policy, and Research, Concordia University Chicago

“Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education: Pathways and Possibilities provides a much-needed intervention in the discourse moving P-20 education towards contemporary reproductions of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy. Drawing on a number of critical frameworks and methodological approaches, the authors tell rich stories that situate the context of divide and conquer ideologies and practices manifest in schools while also providing important counter-stories of resistance, refusal, and visions for something anew. This book is a must read for anyone interested in dreaming about more equitable and just educational worlds by understanding the contours of its current form and function.”

Asif Wilson, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“Dennis Rudnick’s edited collection, Resisting Divide-and-Conquer Strategies in Education: Pathways and Possibilities, illustrates how repressive modes of power mutate, adapt, and conspire for their survival, and how resistance in educational contexts can and must follow suit. With conceptual rigor, the featured authors meticulously unravel the intersecting and taken-for-granted logics of whiteness, Christian nationalism, anti-communism, xenophobia, and other strategies of domination that undermine the democratic possibilities of American schooling. This volume is a standout addition to scholarship on educational repression and transformation in the first quarter of the 21st century.”

Ed Brockenbrough, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

Part I -- Ideological and Sociopolitical Contexts

Chapter 1. The Emotionalities of Whiteness and the Anti-CRT Frenzy in Education
Jaylene Patterson and Cheryl E. Matias

Chapter 2. Christian Nationalist Ideology and the Crusade Against Public Education
Jamie C. Atkinson

Chapter 3. School “Choice” as a Method of Division: Leveraging Fear to Promote White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism
T. Jameson Brewer

Chapter 4. Florida and the Right’s Counter-Revolution: A nti-Communism as Divide and Conquer in Education
Isaac Gottesman

Chapter 5. How Ideology Stifles Equity: Analyzing the Sociopolitical Context of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric and Its Impact on Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogy
Violet Jiménez Sims and Luana Y. Ferreira

Part II -- Policies and Practices

Chapter 6. Educational Redlining: Bridging Historical Contexts to Contemporary Practice
Kelvin E. Rutledge and David W. Robinson-Morris

Chapter 7. The Fight for Black and Indigenous Languages: A Recollection of America’s Exclusionary Educational Policies and Practices
Chelsea J. Jimenez

Chapter 8. Plessy, Brown, and Persisting Divide: A Truncated Historicism of Equity in Education
William Holderfield

Chapter 9. Critical Race Theory in Education: The Hero’s Journey
Gloria McDaniel-Hall and Keisha Rembert

Chapter 10. A Path For Equity: Postcolonial Theory and Cosmopolitan Critical Literacy Intersections in Adolescent Literacy Instruction
Elizabeth Davis Jones and Charity Gamboa Embley

Part III -- Resistance and Liberation

Chapter 11. Resistance, Refusals, and Reframings: A Duo-Ethnography of Epistemic and Pedagogical Commitments to Intersectional Justice
Shawn Savage and Julia Lynch

Chapter 12. Intersectional Friendships Against White Supremacy: A Critical Conversation Between a Gay Latino and a Gay Black Man
Christian A. Bracho and Cleveland Hayes

Chapter 13. We Take Your Game and Flip the Script: Rasquache Resistance Against Divide and Conquer
Tim Monreal and Saul Barrera

Chapter 14. Resisting Hegemony Through Liberatory Pedagogies: Unraveling Virginia’s Executive Order One
Karin Kaerwer

Chapter 15. Weaving Praxis: Facilitating Student Examination of Identity and Culture Through the Intentional Modeling of Collaborative Practice
Jadyn Laixely, Sarah Nagle, and Cydni Robertson

Appendix

About the Authors

Index

Dennis L. Rudnick

Dr. Dennis L. Rudnick is an Assistant Professor of Education at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He has over 25 years of experience as an educator, researcher, administrator, facilitator, program developer, consultant, and public speaker on multicultural, civil rights, and social justice issues. Dr. Rudnick formerly served as an Assistant Professor and Dean's Diversity Fellow at Missouri State University, and Associate Director of Multicultural Education and Research at Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis. Dr. Rudnick's research focuses on the relationships between identity, ideology, socialization, knowledge construction and their impacts on White anti-oppressive teacher identity development. Recent scholarship includes “The Least Racist White Person in the Room,” published in Unhooking from Whiteness (3rd ed.); “Dilemmas in Asynchronous Multicultural Teacher Education From a Relational Pedagogy Perspective,” published in the Handbook of Research on Opening Pathways for Marginalized Individuals in Higher Education; and “Walking on Egg Shells: Colorblind Ideology and Race Talk in Teacher Education,” published in Multicultural Education Review.