Education Commons^™

The Shining School Upon The Hill: Teacher Subjectivity In A "Successful" Charter School, Gareth David Connor Mitchell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation adds to the growing body of literature on charter school reform. Through the use of double insight, this paper details the tensions between school structures and teacher experience at a “successful” urban charter school. How do teachers construct their subjectivities in relation to a charter school’s mission and guiding philosophy? What are the inter-actions between these teacher biographies and the school’s prominent structures? This paper problematizes common discourse on charters, often reduced to identifying schools as either “good” or “bad,” to contribute to a more nuanced discussion between charter advocates and opponents.

This research utilizes a theoretical framework …

Education As A Moral Responsibility: Foucault's Subjectivity And Confucian Cultivation, Wei Guan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The current state of education focusing on standards and assessment, according to Wu (2004), reduces education to “technical problems and individual deficiencies, subject to surveillance and quality managerial procedures” (p. 308). This work uses Foucault’s discourses of discipline and power to understand standardization as a political utility of control that makes children docile subjects through “a set of practices by which one can acquire and assimilate” (Foucault, 1988, p. 31). The process of standardization provides an ineffective grounding for achieving a worthwhile life as children are shaped as results-driven individuals (Shun & Wong, 2004). Baker (2008) believes that only through …