InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies

At a time when we should be focused on establishing a heliocentric view of identity that sees us all fighting to protect life on this planet and whatever miracles we may find in our solar system, we continue to find our institutions of higher learning entrenched with the interests of warmongers, war criminals, and human rights violators. The UC has failed to call for a ceasefire or review its investments and support of Israel's war effort. The UC has spent over $30 billion towards genocide. No longer can we, as students and staff, stand behind our University contributing to the demolition of dozens of educational institutions in Palestine. Our work as educators is compromised when we stand by those who kill children, students, teachers, and administrators. It compromises our values when our research is used to whitewash a land, and erase a people’s cultural and historical heritages and histories from the face of the Earth. We cannot sit idly by while our University resources continue to contribute to apartheid and genocide, the murder of thousands of her students and teachers, and the massacre of tens of thousands of children and their families. How can UCLA keep its motto, Fiat Luxe, Let there be light, when the administration attempts to obfuscate, deny, and conceal the violence being committed in collaboration with our administration? Let there be shame.

In celebration of our 20th Anniversary as a journal, the InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies editorial team opted to put forth a call on the work of Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy, and culture circles. It’s hard not to continue to see why critical pedagogy, a praxis of nurturing critical consciousness toward humanization and society towards justice, continues to be an essential aspect of education in P-20 settings in a healthy democracy. This issue was an opportunity to showcase contemporary work and research inspired by the legacy of Paulo Freire. Humanizing education is a collective practice in partnership with students and communities, redresses structures that maintain social inequalities and hierarchies of human life, and repairs the harm they have inflicted (Freire, 1970; Paris & Alim, 2017). The call to humanize education is especially urgent given our ongoing crises in education: unceasing youth gun violence and school shootings (Schildkraut & Muschert, 2019); the defunding divestment of public instruction and closures of public schools (George, 2024); the varied emergences COVID-19 variants and other looming pandemics (Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021); corresponding deterioration of working conditions and livable wages for those working for our nation’s education systems (Schmitt & deCourcy, 2022; Souto-Manning & Melvin, 2021); book bans and bans misconstruing interpretations of Critical Race Theory, and acceptance and kindness towards LGBTQIA students, teachers, and their families (Morgan, 2022); proposed and implemented legislation to dehumanize queer, trans, nonbinary, and intersex children and parents (Goldberg & Abreu, 2024); and ongoing racialized hate and terror harming Black, Asian, and other nonwhite students, teachers, and their families, among others (Gillborn, 2006; Gover et al., 2020 ; Tuchinda, 2023; Wun, 2014). The urgency of critical pedagogy remains as relevant as ever. 

Kendi’s answer to the question of ‘How to be an Antiracist” is simple and succinct: to become an antiracist you must be an activist, advocating antiracist policies that engender racial equity and reduce comparable racial inequity. But the real solutions are more complex than that. He claims that the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it and then dismantle it, yet he abandons their descriptions for historically inaccurate narratives, and poorly supported autobiographical vignettes, and offers no way to identify racism, racialization, or how they manifest. The taxonomy he offers is disconnected from prevailing theories. It equates ‘anti-White racism’ and ‘Black racism’ to anti-Black racism and white supremacist violence, apprising equal validity to the terms for racial analysis. Racialized ‘whiteness’ is left unquestioned and omitted, and functionally maintains ‘race,’ ‘racisms’ and ‘antiracism,’ racialization, and their mystification.

This paper begins with the introduction of online education development in U.S. higher education. It examines the challenges of online learning, highlighting that online education often yields poorer outcomes, with lower completion rates and fewer educational learning outcomes. It identifies key determinants impacting online learning outcomes: student agency, the level of interaction within online courses, and digital literacy. The study emphasizes the importance of professional development (PD) for online instructors, especially in community colleges.

Critical pedagogy serves as the conceptual framework for the PD, advocating for educational systems that empower students and teachers to challenge oppressive structures and to contribute to educational equity. It stresses the need for instructors to be facilitators of learning, promoting active dialogue and collaborative knowledge construction. The paper discusses scaffolding strategies, promoting student agency, enhancing interaction, and integrating technology-enhanced learning (TEL) as essential components of PD for online instructors.

The paper concludes by arguing for the necessity of humanizing online education, aligning it with the principles of critical pedagogy to create more inclusive and empathetic online classrooms. It suggests that as online education evolves, there is a responsibility to ensure that PD programs reflect these humanizing principles, contributing to a more equitable and reflective education system.

I raise the questions: How does nemachtili encompass a Freirean and critical Indigenous methodology to address learning spaces? How is nemachtili articulated in an online learning space? This study engages nemachtili through a critical case study of an online course for Chicano youth as a research approach responsive to the racialized settings that Chicanos inhabit.  

The facilitation of culture circles should be seen as part of this necessary expansion. Despite being an integral component of critical pedagogy, culture circles are frequently excluded from conversations about liberatory praxis. The following reports showcase the design and implementation of culture circle-based, human development, co-curricular programs for middle and high school students. These programs paired larger project for liberation, with play-, game-, and design-based pedagogical approaches, that cultivated value-creative, critical, local, and global citizenship.

Four games were designed as part of an autoethnographic, teacher research study conducted from 2013-2017 on the implementation of play-, game-, and design-based teaching and assessment. The study was conducted at two urban, independent, K-12 day schools with fewer than 500 and 100 students, respectively, and supported as part of a certification program in Serious Game Design & Research. Pirate Oasis, a six-week ecological engagement, human development game, and the first developed for the Games for Social Justice Course (G4J). Friendship Is Magic, a  Alternate Reality Game that was never played. #SaveOurGirls is a 3-hour forum game, simulation & workshop on combating human trafficking through public pedagogy. The experience is meant for 10-15 players and 30-60 audience members. Xplore LA, a location-based, geocaching,  two-dimensional fighting game, designed by students to inspire young people to explore their local parks and other green- and play-spaces in park-poor communities in Los Angeles, like Boyle Heights. Xplore LA was designed as one of three projects organized to engage youth to access recreational sites near them via public transportation in the park-poor community of Boyle Heights. Through the campaign, students also developed a Ross Valencia Park Redesign, a Pocket Park Manual and the foundations for Xplore LA.

The advent of AI-generated news as a novel form of content demands renewed attention toward modes of understanding reader perceptions. This research sought to answer: What evaluative criteria do readers use to perceive automated news content? To answer this, the study employed a two-phase survey methodology designed to elicit reader perceptions of AI-generated news. Phase 1 yielded 26 dynamic descriptor words and reflected broad social perceptions of AI. In Phase 2, a series of exploratory factor analyses (EFA) was conducted on results of a survey using the 26 items obtained in phase 1 to uncover underlying factors contributing to differences in how readers ranked articles based on the aforementioned descriptor words. In both phases, readers were informed at the beginning of the survey that the articles were generated using AI. The first set of exploratory factor analysis results were obtained using varimax rotation, which revealed five salient factors underlying the 26 descriptors labeled Quality, Engagement, Alienation, Effort, and Coherence. The second exploratory factor analysis used oblimin rotation, which contrastingly revealed nine salient factors, which were labeled Credibility, Prolixity, Engagement, Substance, Clarity, Alienation, Complexity, Effort, and Neutrality. When compared with the results of factor analyses for human-generated news content, the findings offer new constellations of terms that reflect the dimensions that readers attend to in articles attributed to artificial intelligence.

In Western society, schools have largely been designed to reproduce capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, colonial systems and values. Numerous structural elements—from redlining and modern segregation to scripted curricula and high-stakes testing—work to ensure that schools solidify existing social inequalities, produce good workers, and keep hegemonic powers in place. Shaped within these forces of reproduction, our schools are fraught with grave problems: racism and discrimination in every form, physical and emotional bullying, hunger and food insecurity, technology addiction, sexual harassment, teen suicide, conflicts and gang violence, drug use, mindless consumption, and ecological destruction. The modern school is a perfect microcosm and reflection of an unhealthy society.

How might we redesign schools such that they become sites of social transformation, rather than reproduction? How might we cultivate kind, ethical, empowered global citizens within our classrooms? In this paper, I will explore how Michael Apple, Paulo Freire, and bell hooks might address these questions. I will explore each scholar’s theories in an attempt to imagine what a school based in their pedagogical philosophy might look like—one that nurtures kind, ethical, and empowered global citizens.