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Full-Text Articles in Education
Feel Free To Change Your Mind. A Response To "The Potential For Deliberative Democratic Civic Education", Walter Parker
Feel Free To Change Your Mind. A Response To "The Potential For Deliberative Democratic Civic Education", Walter Parker
Democracy and Education
Walter Parker responds to Hanson and Howe's article, extending their argument to everyday classroom practice. He focuses on a popular learning activity called Structured Academic Controversy (SAC). SAC is pertinent not only to civic learning objectives but also to traditional academic-content objectives. SAC is at once a discourse structure, a participation structure, and an instructional procedure; and it centers on Hanson and Howe’s autonomy-building fulcrum—exchanging reasons. At a key moment in SAC, students are invited to step out of an assigned role and to form their “own” position on the issue. Parker argues that SAC is one way to mobilize …
Race To The Top: An Example Of Belief-Dependent Reality. A Response To "Race To The Top Leaves Children And Future Citizens Behind", William J. Mathis
Race To The Top: An Example Of Belief-Dependent Reality. A Response To "Race To The Top Leaves Children And Future Citizens Behind", William J. Mathis
Democracy and Education
Although the federal government claims otherwise, Race to the Top is not research based. Rather, its foundation is in ideology and belief-based realism. The overall effort is fundamentally antiscientific and distracts valuable and needed attention, resources, and focus from the nation's real problems of social, economic, and educational deprivation.
Confronting Power: Success Isn’T Everything—But It’S Not Nothing Either. A Response To “Beyond The Catch-22 Of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward A More Pragmatic Approach For Dealing With Power”, Joel Westheimer
Democracy and Education
Fehrman and Schutz contend that the fine balance between having students experience real-world obstacles to social change and having them learn how to navigate around those obstacles can be achieved by having adults both pre-select community action projects that are both possible and meaningful to ensure a modicum of success, and jump in and redirect wayward efforts when necessary to get them back on a trajectory aimed at a positive outcome. I agree. I also suggest that other factors are significant as well, namely the purposeful nurturing of a sense of community and hopefulness. Finally, I point out that adult …
Buscando La Libertad: Latino Youths In Search Of Freedom In School, Jason Irizarry
Buscando La Libertad: Latino Youths In Search Of Freedom In School, Jason Irizarry
Democracy and Education
Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of Latino high school students engaged in youth participatory action research (YPAR), this article describes students’ quest for freedom in schools, locating their struggle within a larger effort to realize the democratic ideals of public schooling. Using Latino/a Critical Race Theory as a theoretical lens, the author demonstrates how popular discourse around the “achievement gap” often obscures the oppressive policies and practices implemented by educators that limit freedoms necessary for educational and personal development and profoundly influence the identities and life trajectories of Latino youth. The article concludes with an exploration of YPAR as …
Beyond The Catch-22 Of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward A More Pragmatic Approach For Dealing With Power, Darwyn Fehrman, Aaron Schutz
Beyond The Catch-22 Of School-Based Social Action Programs: Toward A More Pragmatic Approach For Dealing With Power, Darwyn Fehrman, Aaron Schutz
Democracy and Education
This study examines a two-year effort to engage groups of inner-city students in community engagement projects at Social Action Charter High School, SACHS, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In this project, graduate student volunteers coached small groups of students working on community change projects, collecting data on what happened over time. Kahne and Westheimer (2006) identified a key challenge to projects of this kind. On the one hand, social action projects seem able to enhance students’ belief in their own capacity to solve community problems only if adult allies make sure the students do not encounter any significant barriers to success, although …