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Articles 1 - 25 of 25
Full-Text Articles in Education
Crowding New Public Management Off The University’S Horizon Of Expectations, Michael Schapira
Crowding New Public Management Off The University’S Horizon Of Expectations, Michael Schapira
Journal of Educational Controversy
This article is a response to Asger Sørensen’s vivid example of how neo-liberal university reform has subjected Danish universities to New Public Management. Sørensen effectively shows the noxious effects of NPM by discussing the infamous Koldau case, where newly empowered rectors, who served as centralized arbiters of university affairs, superseded academic decision-making. He concludes that one reason these cases have not been met with resistance by faculty is that they are paralyzed by radically conflicting normative visions of the university. In this article I respond to Sørensen by suggesting that conflicting normative visions need not be a disempowering condition and …
Urban Teachers Engaging In Critical Talk: Navigating Deficit Discourse And Neoliberal Logics, Heidi Pitzer
Urban Teachers Engaging In Critical Talk: Navigating Deficit Discourse And Neoliberal Logics, Heidi Pitzer
Journal of Educational Controversy
This article examines urban teachers’ critiques—their critical talk—as moments of agency, and as potential, but tenuous, avenues for transformation. The article draws on data from a qualitative interpretive study examining the complexities of urban teachers’ work. This research begins from a perspective that is attentive to and critical of both (a) the racialized deficit discourse, a predominant framework in urban schools—often taken up by urban teachers—that constructs poor urban youth and youth of color as deficient, as objects in need of control and correction; and (b) neoliberal approaches to education, particularly the market-based, audit culture logics and …
Challenging The Deficit Model And The Pathologizing Of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models, Lorraine Kasprisin
Challenging The Deficit Model And The Pathologizing Of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models, Lorraine Kasprisin
Journal of Educational Controversy
This issue of the Journal of Educational Controversy focuses on a theme that has been touched on in some of our earlier issues as well as discussed on our blog. See especially the article by Curt Dudley-Marling, “Return of the Deficit,” in our winter 2007 issue of the journal. Curt later engaged in a conversation on this topic with another author, Paul Thomas, in an exchange on our blog that extended from November 2014 to January 2015. Because we conceive this journal as a conversation over time, we thought that it was time to return to the topic and devote …
To Patricia F. Carini: A Dedication, Susan Donnelly
To Patricia F. Carini: A Dedication, Susan Donnelly
Journal of Educational Controversy
When I first visited the Prospect Center in North Bennington, Vermont in 1984 and met Pat Carini, there were several things that struck me right away about the setting: The children were active and engaged in making things; the Center was a lively community of thinkers involving children and adults in a variety of ways; and I was welcomed as an active participant from the outset. It was a bustling place in which to observe and listen and contemplate. At that point, Prospect was two decades old; it had already matured into an organization with a recognizable philosophy and outlook; …
Resisting The “Single Story”, Ellen Schwartz
Resisting The “Single Story”, Ellen Schwartz
Journal of Educational Controversy
I first came in contact with The Prospect School and Center in 1984. I had just completed my first year of teaching and, at the recommendation of a professor from graduate school, I signed up for a Summer Institute. I had little idea what I was getting into, and when I arrived I discovered that many of the other participants had connections to Prospect’s methodology through participation in local inquiry groups. We read and discussed books like Ernest Schachtel’s Metamorphosis (1959) and Edith Cobb’s The Ecology of the Imagination in Childhood (1977). Though my grasp of this material was tenuous …
Surpassing Sisyphus: The Tenacious And Promising Struggle To Push And Support A Strengths-Based Ideology And Practice In Education, Sara Truebridge
Surpassing Sisyphus: The Tenacious And Promising Struggle To Push And Support A Strengths-Based Ideology And Practice In Education, Sara Truebridge
Journal of Educational Controversy
Yes, yes, yes. That is my quick response to the three questions posed by Lorraine Kasprisin, editor of The Journal of Educational Controversy to authors seeking to contribute to the 2014 fall issue embracing the theme, Challenging the Deficit Model and the Pathologizing of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models. “Has this deficit model begun to surreptitiously creep into our educational discourse for all children?” Yes. “Have we become too focused on needs and deficiencies and forgotten that children also have capacities and strengths?” Yes. “Does the current emphasis on accountability and standardized testing contribute to the pathologizing of children?” Yes. Knowing …
How We Are Complicit: Challenging The School Discourse Of Adolescent Reading, Andrea Davis
How We Are Complicit: Challenging The School Discourse Of Adolescent Reading, Andrea Davis
Journal of Educational Controversy
The call for submissions for this edition of the journal is titled, “Challenging the Deficit Model and the Pathologizing of Children: Envisioning Alternative Models.” In the following essay I will make clear, I hope, how alive and well is the practice of viewing readers, in this case, adolescent readers, through an extremely narrow and inaccurate lens of deficit, explore the why behind the narrow measure and close with some suggestions for expanding our lens for understanding adolescent readers and providing some specific examples of classroom practices that encourage and support such an expanded view.
Against Rubbish Collecting: Educators & Resistively Ambivalent Youth, Tracey Pyscher
Against Rubbish Collecting: Educators & Resistively Ambivalent Youth, Tracey Pyscher
Journal of Educational Controversy
As a researcher whose childhood and adolescence were socially and culturally shaped by domestic violence, I am dedicated to challenging the multiple disparities/identities reproduced on the bodies of youth with histories of childhood domestic violence in public schools. This article evokes Bauman (2004), Bakhtian analysis (1984), post-colonial, critical sociocultural, and (dis)ability theory to offer the argument that youth with histories of domestic violence resist violating/violent practices in public schools. Educational practices and discourses that create disordered identities for such youth are re-envisioned in this article.
Bottom-Line Choices: Effects Of Market Ideology In Florida’S Voluntary Preschool Policies, Angela C. Passero, Roderick J. Jones
Bottom-Line Choices: Effects Of Market Ideology In Florida’S Voluntary Preschool Policies, Angela C. Passero, Roderick J. Jones
Journal of Educational Controversy
The purpose of this paper is to uncover systems of reasoning and taken-for-granted assumptions embedded within Florida’s Voluntary Preschool Education Program (VPK) policies and their implications on matters of social justice. Systems of reasoning based upon market ideology and assumptions of good economic actors, resulting from influences of conservative modernism, are identified and found to facilitate policies failing to ensure children’s constitutional right to “high quality pre-kindergarten” (Florida Constitution [Fla. Const.] art. IX, § 1(b), 2002). The authors argue that these policies intensify exclusion through institutionalized problematizing of students and act to perpetuate discriminatory and unjust practices of schooling, in …
Breaking The Mold: Thinking Beyond Deficits, Elyse Hambacher, Winston C. Thompson
Breaking The Mold: Thinking Beyond Deficits, Elyse Hambacher, Winston C. Thompson
Journal of Educational Controversy
In an attempt to understand widespread school failure among children of color and children from low-income backgrounds, dominant discourse points to pervasive deficit ideologies that blame a student’s family structure, cultural and linguistic background, and community (Dudley-Marling, 2007; Valencia, 2010; Weiner, 2006). By accepting such a simplistic explanation of blaming the child for a lack of successi without examining systemic inequities, deficit thinkers ignore real and complex issues of structural inequity. We agree with Pearl (1997) who argues that deficit thinking ignores “external forces— [i.e.], the complex makeup of macro- and micro-level mechanisms that help structure schools as inequitable …
“Everyone Should Feel So Connected And Safe”: Using Parent Action Teams To Reach All Families, John Korsmo, Miguel Camarena, Andrea Clancy, Ann Eco, Bill Nutting, Basilia Quiroz, Azucena Ramirez, Veronica Villa-Mondragon, Stacy Youngquist, Anne Jones
“Everyone Should Feel So Connected And Safe”: Using Parent Action Teams To Reach All Families, John Korsmo, Miguel Camarena, Andrea Clancy, Ann Eco, Bill Nutting, Basilia Quiroz, Azucena Ramirez, Veronica Villa-Mondragon, Stacy Youngquist, Anne Jones
Journal of Educational Controversy
This article discusses efforts underway through a university-community partnership to engage parents in the educational experiences of their children at a rural elementary school in the Pacific Northwest. There is a well-established literature base on the power of engaging parents in the school experience of their children (Chavkin & Williams, 1993; Dunsmore & Fisher, 2010; Henderson & Mapp, 2002; Hong, 2012; Warren, Hong, Leung Rubin & Sychitkokhong Uy, 2009). However, within this literature is rather unsettling insights into the lack of doing so. Study after study points to the relative ease of incorporating middle-class and affluent parents and caregivers into …
Precarity And Pedagogical Responsibility, Ann Chinnery
Precarity And Pedagogical Responsibility, Ann Chinnery
Journal of Educational Controversy
Despite good intentions, No Child Left Behind (2002) and other initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field in American society have arguably had more harmful than positive effects on children’s learning in schools. According to some critics (e.g., Au, 2004; Glass, 2007; Orfield & Kornhaber, 2001; Wotherspoon & Schissel, 2001), if we scratch beneath the surface of these initiatives, we often find discourses that pathologize certain children or groups of children, and a reluctance to look critically at the social, political, and economic conditions (such as hunger, homelessness, and lack of adequate health care) under which some children struggle to …
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, And The Hidden Power Of Character By Paul Tough, Sarita Y. Shukla
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, And The Hidden Power Of Character By Paul Tough, Sarita Y. Shukla
Journal of Educational Controversy
In an effort to help students succeed we steep them in homework, emphasize the importance of grades, and, to some extent, convey that test scores are the only goal that students should aspire for. There is probably an underlying assumption that somehow test scores will translate into an ability to navigate difficult life circumstances and also lead to a happy life. Paul Tough questions these well-intentioned assumptions in his book How Children Succeed. He grapples with questions that we as educators, policymakers and parents constantly struggle with: “Which skills and traits really (italics added) lead to success? How do …
School’S Out: Lessons From A Forest Kindergarten - Directed By Lisa Molomot; Produced By Rona Richter, Rachel Severson
School’S Out: Lessons From A Forest Kindergarten - Directed By Lisa Molomot; Produced By Rona Richter, Rachel Severson
Journal of Educational Controversy
Every day, rain or shine, children in the Forest Kindergarten in the Swiss town of Langnau am Albis tromp into the woods for the school day. The 36-minute documentary, School’s Out: Lessons from a Forest Kindergarten (2013), directed by Lisa Molomot and produced by Rona Richter, chronicles the experiences of these children as the seasons change from autumn to winter to spring. Forest Kindergartens emerged in Sweden in the 1980s and have since spread to many countries, including Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the United States. Outdoor kindergartens provide children with the opportunity for unstructured …
Resilience Begins With Beliefs: Building On Student Strengths For Success In School By Sara Truebridge, Rolla E. Lewis
Resilience Begins With Beliefs: Building On Student Strengths For Success In School By Sara Truebridge, Rolla E. Lewis
Journal of Educational Controversy
In her foreword to Resilience Begins with Beliefs, Bonnie Benard passes off the resilience torch for supporting her life work to Sara Truebridge. Now retired, Benard was a key advocate for resilience theory and practice for over two decades (e.g., Benard, 1991, 2004; Benard & Slade, 2009). Benard’s strengths-based, human development, and health promotion perspective framed resilience as a process promoted by three “protective factors” found in family, school, and community environments: 1) caring and supportive relationships, 2) high expectations, and 3) opportunities for meaningful participation and contribution. A treasure trove of wisdom about resilience theory, practices, and the …
Reinventing Schools: It’S Time To Break The Mold By Charles Reigeluth And Jennifer Karnopp, Marilyn Chu
Reinventing Schools: It’S Time To Break The Mold By Charles Reigeluth And Jennifer Karnopp, Marilyn Chu
Journal of Educational Controversy
Making the argument for fundamental change in the U.S. educational system due to inadequate preparation of our students in relation to global measures of performance isn’t new. Comparing and contrasting the different assumptions underlying the outdated industrial age model of schooling versus the current information age needs of learners, has also been explored in more depth elsewhere. The contribution of Reinventing Schools to current thinking about educational change efforts begins with a reminder of the obvious core areas that have the possibility of refocusing schools on student learning.
“Multiplication Is For White People” Raising Expectations For Other People’S Children, By Lisa Delpit, Sue-Lin Toussaint
“Multiplication Is For White People” Raising Expectations For Other People’S Children, By Lisa Delpit, Sue-Lin Toussaint
Journal of Educational Controversy
As a senior in college, no other book affirmed my decision to become an urban teacher like Other People’s Children by Lisa Delpit (1995). Delpit gave words to experiences in pre-dominantly Black K-12 schools like my own, where cultural conflict thrived as one of the intangible elements driving underperformance among African American students. In Other People’s Children, Delpit uncovered the reality felt by so many Black students like myself about how they are treated by White teachers. Rather than place blame or evoke guilt, she provided strategies for how to bridge cultural gaps and misunderstanding in classrooms. Not only …
Open Access Publishing In Higher Education: Charting The Challenging Course To Academic And Financial Sustainability, Mark I. Greenberg Mls, Ph.D.
Open Access Publishing In Higher Education: Charting The Challenging Course To Academic And Financial Sustainability, Mark I. Greenberg Mls, Ph.D.
Journal of Educational Controversy
The benefits, pitfalls, and sustainability of open access publishing are hotly debated. Commercial publishers dominate the marketplace and oppose alternative publishing models that threaten their bottom line. Scholars’ use of open access remains relatively limited due to awareness and perceived benefits to their professional goals. Readership of open access publications is generally strong, but some people disagree that more readers leads to increased citations and research impact. Libraries have grown their influence by supporting and promoting open access, but these efforts come with significant financial costs. Today, open access has flourished most significantly as a philosophy: the belief that the …
Visiting The Neo-Liberal University: New Public Management And Conflicting Normative Ideas. A Danish Case., Asger Sørensen
Visiting The Neo-Liberal University: New Public Management And Conflicting Normative Ideas. A Danish Case., Asger Sørensen
Journal of Educational Controversy
At Danish universities, the governance structure is regulated by law. This structure was radically changed in 2003, abolishing the republican rule of the senate consisting of academics, students, and staff in favour of an authoritarian system assigning all executive power to the vice-chancellor, or as we say in Denmark, the rector. To introduce the current situation at Danish universities, in the first two sections of this article I will compare them with more well-known counterparts in other countries. This situation is reflected in exemplary cases, and in the third section I focus on the most dramatic controversy ever encountered at …
Keeping The Flames At Bay: The Interplay Between Federal Oversight And State Politics In Tucson’S Mexican American Studies Program, Leslie A. Locke, Ann E. Blankenship
Keeping The Flames At Bay: The Interplay Between Federal Oversight And State Politics In Tucson’S Mexican American Studies Program, Leslie A. Locke, Ann E. Blankenship
Journal of Educational Controversy
In the wealth of literature discussing Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) Mexican American Studies program (MAS), the focus has remained primarily on the political events surrounding the elimination of the highly successful MAS program. The federal desegregation case still pending in Tucson is rarely mentioned and never discussed in depth. In this article, we aim to address this gap in the literature by presenting two stories. First, we look at the story of the TUSD desegregation case originally filed in 1974 and its progress toward unitary status. Next, we look at the story of political scheming and maneuvering in Tucson …
Critical Thinking, Nel Noddings
Critical Thinking, Nel Noddings
Journal of Educational Controversy
Ten years ago, I wrote an article for the Journal on helping students to think. The topic is even more important today because critical thinking appears as an important educational aim all over the world. Yet we rarely spend much time talking about what it means to think critically and the difficulties we experience trying to teach it. In this article, I will explore four facets of critical thinking and its purposes: developing a critical eye, searching for meaning, reasons why we engage in critical thinking, and the need for moral commitment as we think critically.
Grit: A Short History Of A Useful Concept, Ethan W. Ris
Grit: A Short History Of A Useful Concept, Ethan W. Ris
Journal of Educational Controversy
The character trait "grit" is a much-discussed and debated topic, both among education researchers and in public forums. Employing longitudinal discourse analysis, this paper examines the history of grit over more than a century, paying special attention to the ways in which adults have attempted to inculcate it in children. The author finds that current discussion of grit’s salience for the education of disadvantaged students ignores the rich historical context of a long-sought trait, which in fact has usually been the focus of anxiety from middle and upper-class parents and educators. Grit functions as a proxy for a type of …
Higher Education Under The Islamic Republic: The Case Of The Baha’Is, Mina Yazdani
Higher Education Under The Islamic Republic: The Case Of The Baha’Is, Mina Yazdani
Journal of Educational Controversy
This article explores the Islamic Republic of Iran’s campaign to deny Baha’is, members of Iran's largest religious minority, access to higher education. It outlines the contours of this campaign: in the early 1980s, the newly established Islamic government began dismissing Baha’i students from universities; later and up to the early 2000s, it forbid them from even participating in the nation-wide university entrance exam; finally, in order to divert growing international attention from its campaign, it began admitting a small number of Baha’i students into universities, though in more recent years, it has expelled the majority of these students before they …
Some Reflections On The Tenth Year Anniversary Issue Of The Journal Of Educational Controversy, Lorraine Kasprisin
Some Reflections On The Tenth Year Anniversary Issue Of The Journal Of Educational Controversy, Lorraine Kasprisin
Journal of Educational Controversy
Welcome to our 10th Year Anniversary Issue and the first issue to be published exclusively on our new website. We have now completed the transfer of our nine earlier volumes to this site. Over the last ten years, the Journal of Educational Controversy has created a dynamic conversation around some of the most challenging dilemmas and controversies that arise in the education of citizens for a pluralistic, democratic society. For this special issue, we decided it was time to let our authors select their own controversies rather than ask them to respond to our scenarios. We have divided the articles …