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Full-Text Articles in Education

What Kind Of Teacher For Our Citizens? A Book Review Of What Kind Of Citizen? Educating Our Children For The Common Good, Tony Decesare Nov 2016

What Kind Of Teacher For Our Citizens? A Book Review Of What Kind Of Citizen? Educating Our Children For The Common Good, Tony Decesare

Democracy and Education

Westheimer’s central argument in What Kind of Citizen? Educating our Children for the Common Good is that the current climate around public education—marked, in general, by standardization in our schools—is not conducive to the development of thoughtful and critically engaged public citizens. Westheimer demonstrated convincingly that schools—in response to recent education reform and, in some cases, pressure from parents and other education stakeholders—have increasingly emphasized individual goals at the expense of educating children for the common good. Furthermore and related, in this age of standardized testing, school curricula have become more narrowly focused on achievement in math and literacy at …


Media Literacy As Mindful Practice For Democratic Education. A Response To “Transaction Circles With Digital Texts As A Foundation For Democratic Practices”, Theresa Redmond Nov 2016

Media Literacy As Mindful Practice For Democratic Education. A Response To “Transaction Circles With Digital Texts As A Foundation For Democratic Practices”, Theresa Redmond

Democracy and Education

This essay is a response to Brown’s (2015) article describing her strategy of transaction circles as a student-centered, culturally responsive, and democratic literacy practice. In my response, I provide further evidence from the field of media literacy education (MLE) that serves to enhance Brown’s argument for using transaction circles in order to promote democratic discourse, specifically augmenting her ideas by connecting the purposes and processes of transaction circles with key implications of media literacy pedagogy. I invite Brown to consider how her concept of transaction circles may be extended in three ways: (a) through acknowledging the indispensable role of the …


Revolution And Education, Lilia D. Monzó, Peter Mclaren Nov 2016

Revolution And Education, Lilia D. Monzó, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Denied the right to recognize patterns of violence and their relationship to class and specifically to the capitalist mode of production through an institutionalized historical amnesia, we live our lives as mere passengers on a train that stops at death’s door. In the self-proclaimed greatest super power, the United States, the mythical alliance to democracy serves to obfuscate its systematic plundering of life and earth in service to the transnational capitalist class. We have been brainwashed through state and corporate-sponsored lies, myth, and a national zealotry to forget and continue to repeat the atrocities of our past. We have been …


Literacy And Citizenship: Helping Students Learn The Importance Of Being An Informed And Educated Citizen, Luke H. Schlegel Jul 2016

Literacy And Citizenship: Helping Students Learn The Importance Of Being An Informed And Educated Citizen, Luke H. Schlegel

English Summer Fellows

My project utilizes the concept of Understanding by Design, as outlined by education experts Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, to craft a 12-week curriculum for high school junior and senior English students. McTighe and Wiggins use backwards planning to create long-term learning goals for students. Rather than superficially trying to cover a wide range of material in class, which results in short-term acquisition of knowledge mostly forgotten in the long run, McTighe and Wiggins focus on “big ideas,” that generate conceptual understanding. Ultimately, students will be able to transfer this knowledge to settings outside of the classroom. To help them …


Critical Pedagogy And Participatory Democracy: Creating Classroom Contexts That Challenge "Common Sense." A Response To "The Political Nuances Of Narratives And An Urban Educator's Response", Lilia D. Monzó, P. Zitlali Morales May 2016

Critical Pedagogy And Participatory Democracy: Creating Classroom Contexts That Challenge "Common Sense." A Response To "The Political Nuances Of Narratives And An Urban Educator's Response", Lilia D. Monzó, P. Zitlali Morales

Democracy and Education

In this response to “The Political Nuances of Narratives and an Urban Educator’s Response,” the authors applaud Pearman’s critical approach to deconstructing and challenging narratives of heroic figures who single-handedly change the world and agree with him that these narratives restrict the sense of agency that may propel citizens to become actively involved in social change efforts. We argue that it is important to question why these narratives exist and to understand them in light of the hegemonic capitalist structure that exploits the masses in service to the capitalist class. Although we agree with Pearman that democracy is best served …


Spectators Or Patriots? Citizens In The Information Age, Amrita Dhawan Feb 2016

Spectators Or Patriots? Citizens In The Information Age, Amrita Dhawan

Publications and Research

In theory, a strong democracy rests on robust citizen participation. The practice in most democracies is quite different. This gap presents a challenge, which can be narrowed by augmenting civic education to bring it up to date with the current information environment and thus give citizens the opportunity to participate. Robert Dahl’s work on democracy provides a model that looks at this problem structurally. He writes about the ideals and the actual institutions necessary for a democracy and if we situate his model in the modern information environment we get a better idea of how to improve civic education. Successful …


Critical Pedagogy And Participatory Democracy: Creating Classroom Contexts That Challenge “Common Sense”, Lilia D. Monzó, P. Zitlali Morales Jan 2016

Critical Pedagogy And Participatory Democracy: Creating Classroom Contexts That Challenge “Common Sense”, Lilia D. Monzó, P. Zitlali Morales

Education Faculty Articles and Research

In this response to “The Political Nuances of Narratives and an Urban Educator’s Response,” the authors applaud Pearman’s critical approach to deconstructing and challenging narratives of heroic figures who single-handedly change the world and agree with him that these narratives restrict the sense of agency that may propel citizens to become actively involved in social change efforts. We argue that it is important to question why these narratives exist and to understand them in light of the hegemonic capitalist structure that exploits the masses in service to the capitalist class. Although we agree with Pearman that democracy is best served …