Constructing Critical Consciousness

Virginia Lea received her PhD in social and cultural studies in education from the University of California, Berkeley. Virginia tries to live a commitment to greater socioeconomic, political, cultural, and educational equity, recognizing the educultural power of music, the visual and performing arts, narrative, and dialogue to bring this about. She sees her teaching, research, and scholarship as a contribution to the construction of networks of consciousness that recognize how hegemony contributes to global inequalities and develop practical ideas for transforming the institutional structures and cultural norms and values that reproduce injustice, cruelty, and inequality.

Paul R. Carr is a Sociologist and a Full Professor in the Department of Education Chair-holder of the UNESCO Chair in Democracy, Global Citizenship and Transformative Education (http://uqo.ca/dcmet/) at the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO), Canada. His research is broadly concerned with political sociology, with specific threads related to democracy, media literacy, peace studies, intercultural relations, and transformative change in education. He has sixteen co-edited books and an award-winning, single-author book (Does your vote count? Democracy and critical pedagogy). He is the Principal Investigator of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) research project entitled Democracy, political literacy and quest for transformative education, and is co-founder of the Global Doing Democracy Research Project.

Darren E. Lund is a Professor in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, where his research examines social justice activism in schools, communities, and professional education programs. Darren was a high school teacher for 16 years, and formed the award-winning Students and Teachers Opposing Prejudice (STOP) program. Darren co-founded the Service-Learning Program for Pre-Service Teachers, winner of the national 2012 Award of Excellence in Education from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. Darren has been recognized with a number of awards and honors, including the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s 2015 Educational Research Award, the inaugural 2013 Alberta Hate Crimes Awareness Award, the 2012 Scholar-Activist Award from the American Educational Research Association (Critical Educators for Social Justice), and was named a Reader’s Digest National Leader in Education.