The ideal period for implementing environmental education or education for sustainability is during the early childhood years. The educational context of playgroups can be a platform for both children and their parents to learn together and together engage in early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS), however there is a paucity of literature examining ECEfS within Australian playgroup contexts. The Little Explorers Playgroup (LEP) is a facilitated playgroup located in a sustainable living centre in Sydney, Australia, and provides opportunities for children and their parents to engage in ECEfS. The study purpose was to evaluate the effect of the LEP on the participating children and parents’ environmental attitudes and behaviours. This qualitative study was designed as a single critical case study employing semi-structured telephone interviews conducted with twenty-three participants, including three LEP playgroup facilitators and 20 parents. The data generated by the interviews was analysed thematically and the findings indicated that the LEP empowered and positively transformed both the children and parents’ environmental attitudes and behaviours. This was evident through the children and parents’ adoption of more environmentally responsible attitudes and behaviours. The findings demonstrate that playgroups may be an untapped opportunity for facilitating community change towards sustainable living.

In the wake of the devastating second wave of the pandemic in India, I taught an elective subject called ‘A Politics of Frivolity? Feminism, Law and Humour’. I offered a subject that intellectually embraced frivolity, precisely for the purpose of responding to the serious anguish and hopelessness of the pandemic. That the study of law is serious business works as (almost) a truism. Understandably, laughter seldom goes with it. Feminists, and feminisms, have also attained a similar reputation or stereotype of being humourless and killjoys. Given this antithetical relationship that humour and laughter shared with both law and feminism, their friendship was not easily foreseeable, working to infuse their combined study with an element of surprise and incongruity. This essay offers an account of my experience of teaching the subject during these dark times. It is a reconstruction partly from my class notes and partly from scribblings and memory. I reflect on a selected set of materials that I taught in the class, how these were received, the questions they raised and how the context enlivened the materials.

Given the imperative to redress the education inequalities between Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and White students, this contribution explores advances and challenges from within Social Work education (SWE) in relation to the experiences of Black social work students. Drawing on critical race theories and the concept of racial battle fatigue, it explores the impacts of race and racism on students’ academic experience and wellbeing. It proposes the significance of relational wellbeing which has been a constant strand within Social Work education and comprises a valuable approach to the decolonisation process within higher education (HE). Linking this to critical pedagogy, it highlights the role of staff to build safety, confidence and trust to support students to overcome prior education experiences of under-attainment, disadvantage and social marginalisation. Despite the pervasiveness of managerialism within HE, which compromises the teacher-student relationship and emphasises measured changes in student ‘outcomes’, Social Work educators are invited to nurture safe and transformational learning environments.

In an article, ‘The Slaves were Happy’: High School Latin and the Horrors of Classical Studies, Erik Robinson, a Latin teacher from a public high school in Texas, criticises how, in his experience, Classics teaching tends to avoid in-depth discussions on issues such as the brutality of war, the treatment of women and the experience of slaves (Robinson, 2017). However, texts such as the article ‘Teaching Sensitive Topics in the Secondary Classics Classroom’ (Hunt, 2016), and the book ‘From abortion to pederasty: addressing difficult topics in the Classics classroom’ (Sorkin Rabinowitz & McHardy, 2014) strongly advocate for teachers to address these difficult and sensitive topics. They argue that the historical distance between us and Greco-Roman culture and history can allow students to engage and participate in discussions that may otherwise be difficult and can provide a valuable opportunity to address uncomfortable topics in the classroom. Thus, Robinson's assertion that Classics teaching avoids these sensitive topics may not be so definitive. Regardless, Robinson claims that honest confrontations in the classroom with the ‘legacy of horror and abuse’ from the ancient world can be significantly complicated by many introductory textbooks used in Latin classes, such as the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), one of the most widely used high school Latin textbooks in use in both America and the United Kingdom (Robinson, 2017). In particular, Robinson views the presentation of slavery within the CLC as ‘rather jocular and trivialising’ which can then hinder a reader's perspective on the realities of the violent and abusive nature of the Roman slave trade (Robinson, 2017). As far as he was concerned, the problem lay with the characterisation of the CLC's slave characters Grumio and Clemens, who, he argued, were presented there as happy beings and seemingly unfazed by their positions as slaves. There was never any hint in the book that Grumio or Clemens were unhappy with their lives or their positions as slaves, even though, as the CLC itself states in its English background section on Roman slavery, Roman law ‘did not regard slaves as human beings, but as things that could be bought or sold, treated well or badly, according to the whim of their master’ (CLC I, 1998, p. 78). One might argue, therefore, that there seems to be a disconnect between the English language information we learn about the brutality of the Roman slave trade provided in the background section of Stage 6, and what we can infer about Roman slavery from the Latin language stories involving our two ‘happy’ slaves.

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author’s first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures.

The article tells the story of a pedagogical experiment that the author conducted in collaboration with final year master’s students in Kolkata, India. The aim was to “open up the classroom,” adapting Brazilian educator Paolo Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy to an Indian context. The diverse group of students who participated in this experiment had a high degree of political consciousness regarding issues of gender, caste, sexuality, disability, and class due to the university’s history of student activism. Most students had already read a fair amount of postcolonial literature and theory. Postcolonial literature syllabus as it had conventionally been taught would not be able to engage these restive students or be relevant to their lived experiences. The experiment on classroom democratization and collaborative teaching would demonstrate to the future college teacher one kind of interventionist approach for raising student awareness in the Indian classroom.

Re-visiting the ideas of some key educational thinkers and critical management theorists, this paper re-affirms the need for a critical pedagogy of organizational power and politics to foster deeper levels of reflection and ethical attitudes among undergraduate management students. While prescriptive pedagogical approaches can impart knowledge that may be useful to future managers, they often encourage a shallow and instrumental view of power in which profits are placed above ethics, and expediency above morality. As argued here, a critical pedagogy will encourage a more productive analysis of power-related phenomena in organizations, and will nurture attitudes and behaviours that can humanize management practice. The first part of the paper examines the key theoretical concepts of the proposed approach, the second discusses a set of themes emerging from a critical analysis of organizational power and politics in a management subject, and the third discusses common challenges encountered by academics committed to critical approaches.

Being reflexive about the conditions and claims underpinning academic knowledge is a defining aspect of critical tourism and hospitality studies. In this article we explore how criticality has been conceptualised and consider the implications for addressing a major challenge in the field: that is, surfacing the power–knowledge relations that underpin mainstream or normalised ways of thinking. We aim to be reflexive about some of the dangers that exist in relation to the oppositional stance of critical perspectives. By drawing on examples from our own and others’ critical research and teaching practices we examine how a reflexive approach can enable different types of dialogue, spaces and relationships. We draw on related work in critical management studies and debates within tourism and hospitality to argue for a critical pedagogy that embraces reflexivity as a ‘practice’ — a way of doing, thinking and transforming knowledge as we live it.