Education Commons^™

Emergent Student Practices: Unintended Consequences In A Dialogic, Collaborative Classroom, Anne E. Crampton

Journal of Educational Controversy

It’s a commonplace to decry the folly of “best practices” in education. They make many practitioners and researchers twitch, fearing that the good-- or even just decent--practice will soon be setting the tempo in the steady march toward standardization. The argument against best practices, then, is the argument against one-size-fits-all pedagogy. Instructional practices must come with a necessary humility, based on situating students within the picture, with particular attention to with histories of institutional and societal othering and marginalization. Good practices cannot be delivered or imposed, and therefore, if successful, they become suggestions or starting points carried out with greater …

Good Intentions Gone Awry: Education Policy And Paradox Of Consequences In Rural Ethnic China, Jinting Wu

Journal of Educational Controversy

This paper provides a situated critique of how evidence-based, “best practices”-oriented research can result in unanticipated consequences and perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophesy at the expense of deeper understanding of educational problems. I structure the paper along two analytical steps. First, I explore the sociology of unintended consequences through German Sociologist Max Weber and his contemporary critic Mohamed Cherkaoui. Second, I draw from an ethnographic study in rural ethnic communities of Southwest China to illustrate how best intentions at providing free compulsory education go awry, and how the controversial policy both fails and succeeds in fabricating its intended outcome. The ethnographic …

Big Data And Technologies Of Self, Bernadette Baker

Journal of Educational Controversy

The entry of Big Data into the educational field has generated noticeable binary reactions and a recycling of criticisms already directed at the quantification of reality, datafication in the social sciences, standardization in education, and neoliberalism in the West. This paper reapproaches Big Data’s entry into education from a curriculum studies perspective, which deploys interdisciplinary approaches from philosophy, history, sociology and politics of knowledge and wisdom. The analysis of key definitional debates, binary reactions, and systematization are considered from the point of view of historically shifting technologies of self, as core conditions of possibility for the controversies that emerge when …

Introduction To The Special Issue Of The Journal Of Educational Controversy, John G. Richardson

Journal of Educational Controversy

This issue addresses the uneasy relation between 'best practices' in educational research and the consequences that often follow from efforts to implement practices deemed best. This relation is often complicated by the social phenomenon long recognized as "unintended consequences". It is proposed that controversies in education, as well as practices advanced as best, are shaped as the consequences -subsequently revealed as the very product of the good intentions that underlie prevailing theory and methods.

About The Authors

Journal of Educational Controversy

About the Authors

Is “Best Practices” Research In Education Insufficient Or Even Misdirected? An Issue Dedicated To John G. Richardson, Lorraine Kasprisin

Journal of Educational Controversy

Editorial and Dedication for Volume 11, Issue 1

Is “Best Practices” Research in Education Insufficient or even Misdirected?

AN ISSUE DEDICATED TO JOHN G. RICHARDSON

A Violence Of “Best Practice” And Unintended Consequences?: Domestic Violence And The Making Of A Disordered Subjectivity, Tracey Pyscher

Journal of Educational Controversy

Often, efforts by schools to standardize marginalized children with histories of domestic violence have alarming effects. More recent efforts of standardization typically find a sustained existence in the discourse of “best” practices predicated upon a religious-like adherence to behavioral data driven frameworks. This article traces how children and youth with histories of domestic violence (or HDV youth) navigate and resist deficit laden school subjectivities shaped by special education discourses of medicalization and pathologization. In one case study, I spell out how an elementary school created and maintained an HDV child’s EBD (emotional behavioral disordered) subjectivity with detrimental effects. The article …