Education Commons^™

Making Sense Of Academic Failure. Dissertation, Leena Her

Leena N. Her

This dissertation is an ethnography of first, how school participants in America make sense of academic failure and second, the consequences of their work. I study the methods they use and the explanations they invoke while engaged in this activity. I focus primarily on two groups of school participants in the American cultural landscape: educational researchers who are designated as the diagnosticians of the maladies of a "broken" educational system; and, students and school staff, who often have to explain the failure that they are confronted with. The analysis of how educational researchers traditionally make sense of academic failure utilizes …