Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons^™

Attitudes Toward Using Social Networking Sites In Educational Settings With Underperforming Latino Youth: A Mixed Methods Study, Keith Howard, Margaret Sauceda Curwen, Nicol R. Howard, Anaida Colon-Muñiz

Education Faculty Articles and Research

The researchers examined the online social networking attitudes of underperforming Latino high school students in an alternative education program that uses technology as the prime venue for learning. A sequential explanatory mixed methods study was used to cross-check multiple sources of data explaining students’ levels of comfort with utilizing a social networking site platform as a supplemental communication tool in connection with their schoolwork. Students were found to be significantly less comfortable using social networking sites than other online communication tools in connection with their schoolwork, and females were significantly more uncomfortable than males using such sites in school.

Con Respeto: A Conceptual Model For Building Healthy Community-University Partnerships Alongside Mexican Migrant Families, Miguel Zavala, Patricia A. Pérez, Alejandro González, Anna Díaz Villela

Education Faculty Articles and Research

In this paper we grapple with the question of how healthy community and university partnerships can be formed in order to support migrant students’ access to higher education. Employing autoethnographic and narrative research, and drawing from our work within the context of the migrant family conference at California State University, Fullerton from 2011 to 2013, we outline a conceptual model for building healthy partnerships. The first section of this paper offers a general overview of the literature on community-university engagement and collaboration as well as provides background information about the migrant farmworker community. The next section puts forward a new …

Cultivating Democracy At One High School Intervention Program For Latinos At Risk Of Dropping Out, Margaret Sauceda Curwen, Keith Howard

Education Faculty Articles and Research

In California, where this study takes place, it is estimated that 85,000 students drop out of high school annually. Consequences are often linked to economic and social issues including long term economic costs to the state and the likelihood of lesser participation in voting and civic engagement (Rumberger, 2012). This account documents one high school’s alternative intervention program that includes online academic credit recovery and socio-emotional guidance leading to graduation for Latino students who are at risk of dropping out. Findings highlight the program’s support for these students in gaining confidence in self, envisioning themselves in the community and, for …

Culturally Responsive Methodologies At Work In Education Settings, Mere Berryman, Suzanne Soohoo, Ann Nevin, Te Arani Barrett, Therese Ford, Debora Joy Nodelman, Norma Valenzuela, Anna Wilson

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe culturally responsive methodology as a way to develop researchers. The aim is to illuminate the dimensions of culturally responsive methodology such as cultural and epistemological pluralism, deconstruction of Western colonial traditions of research, and primacy of relationships within culturally responsive dialogic encounters. An overarching question is: “How can we maintain the original integrity of both participants and researchers and their respective cultures and co-construct at the same time something new?”

Design/methodology/approach – Five case study narratives are described in order for readers to understand the range and types of studies …

Random Assignment Of Schools To Groups In The Drug Resistance Strategies Rural Project: Some New Methodological Twists, John W. Graham, Jonathan Pettigrew, Michelle Miller-Day, Janice L. Krieger, Jiangxiu Zhou, Michael L. Hecht

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Random assignment to groups is the foundation for scientifically rigorous clinical trials. But assignment is challenging in group randomized trials when only a few units (schools) are assigned to each condition. In the DRSR project, we assigned 39 rural Pennsylvania and Ohio schools to three conditions (rural, classic, control). But even with 13 schools per condition, achieving pretest equivalence on important variables is not guaranteed. We collected data on six important school-level variables: rurality, number of grades in the school, enrollment per grade, percent white, percent receiving free/assisted lunch, and test scores. Key to our procedure was the inclusion of …

Adapting School-Based Substance Use Prevention Curriculum Through Cultural Grounding: A Review And Exemplar Of Adaptation Processes For Rural Schools, Margaret Colby, Michael L. Hecht, Michelle Miller-Day, Janice L. Krieger, Amy K. Syvertsen, John W. Graham, Jonathan Pettigrew

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

A central challenge facing twenty-first century community-based researchers and prevention scientists is curriculum adaptation processes. While early prevention efforts sought to develop effective programs, taking programs to scale implies that they will be adapted, especially as programs are implemented with populations other than those with whom they were developed or tested. The principle of cultural grounding, which argues that health message adaptation should be informed by knowledge of the target population and by cultural insiders, provides a theoretical rational for cultural regrounding and presents an illustrative case of methods used to reground the keepin’ it REAL substance use prevention curriculum …

Organizing Against The Neo-Liberal Privatization Of Education In South Los Angeles: Reflections On The Transformative Potential Of Grassroots Research, Miguel Zavala

Education Faculty Articles and Research

This auto/ethnographic study narrates how members of the Association of Raza Educators (ARE), a grassroots teacher-led organization, came together in undertaking action-research within what eventually became a stalled campaign to defend South Los Angeles Elementary from corporate takeover. Most of the work within the campaign involved action-research, including what I term organic popular education. In this paper I analyze the ways in which action-research functions as public pedagogy, further arguing for studies conducted from the vantage point of people immersed in grassroots organizations.

A Critical Patriotism For Urban Schooling: A Call For A Pedagogy Against Fear And Denial And For Democracy, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"I intend to reflect upon the tragic irony of the current crisis of education that leads to Stan Karp (2011) to characterize it as follows: “If you support testing, charters, merit pay, the elimination of tenure and seniority, and control of school policy by corporate managers you’re a ‘reformer.’ If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining, and control of school policy by educators, you’re a ‘defender of the status quo.’” Largely as a result of huge marketing campaigns in the corporate media, it is the ideological right wing who now claims the mantle of reformer and progressive teachers and …

Seeds Of Resistance: Towards A Revolutionary Critical Ecopedagogy, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

The death throes of mother earth are imminent unless we decelerate the planetary ecological crisis. Critical educators, who have addressed with firm commitment topics of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other social justice issues are casting their eyes to the antagonism between capitalism and nature to ask themselves how we can rationally regulate the human metabolic relation with nature. As the global power complex reduces human life and mother earth to mere production and consumption, critical revolutionary ecopedagogy is developing new, unalienated forms of selfpresence. Ecopedagogy is inspired by and inspires a new social arc, rooted in practices of …

Education As Class Warfare. An Interview With Scholar/Author Peter Mclaren, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

An interview with Peter McLaren about educational reform and how his work is influenced by Marxist theory.

Photographs And Stories: Ethics, Benefits And Dilemmas Of Using Participant Photography With Black Middle-Class Male Youth, Quaylan Allen

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Drawing upon research conducted with Black American middle-class youth in a secondary school, this article highlights the use of participant photography with Black male youth. Participant photography is a visual method that places the power of photo documentation in the hands of research subjects, empowering them to document and reflect on social issues and cultural phenomena important to them. This article highlights the significance of the method when exploring the understudied lives of Black middle-class males, ethical considerations of using visual methods with youth populations, as well as the benefits and dilemmas of engaging Black male youth in participant photography. …

Authorial Intent In The Composition Classroom, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

This article examines the disjunction between, on the one hand, critical theory’s critique of the privileging of authorial intent in protocols of textual interpretation, and, on the other hand, continued obeisance to authorial intent in composition textbooks and pedagogy. By unpacking the implications of this disjunction, I show the limitations that the reification of authorial intent creates for composition pedagogy and student writing. I conclude by suggesting how bracketing authorial intent in the composition classroom might enhance composition pedagogy and student writing, while also challenging fundamental epistemologies of the field.

Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy For A Socialist Society: A Manifesto, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"As advocates of revolutionary critical pedagogy, we stand at the turning point in this process. Critical pedagogy is an approach that we have chosen as a necessary (albeit insufficient) vehicle for transforming the world. The work that we do has been adapted from the pathfinding contributions of the late Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, whose development of pedagogies of the oppressed helped to lay the foundations for approaches (feminist, post-structuralist, Marxist) to teaching and learning that utilizes the life experiences of students in and outside of traditional classrooms to build spaces of dialogue and dialectical thinking. We have renamed our critical …

The Difficulties Of Teaching Non-Western Literature In The United States, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

"My goal in this article is to build on Priya Kandaswamy’s discussion of students’ response to difference in Radical Teacher #80 by unfolding the pitfalls of teaching and responding to “non-Western” literature in the United States as embodied in my own experience teaching non-Western literature to a group of racially and ethnically diverse, mainly working-class students at a large urban comprehensive public university."

“Applied” Aspects Of The Drug Resistance Strategies Project, Michael L. Hecht, Michelle Miller-Day

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

This paper discusses the applied aspects of our Drug Resistance Strategies Project. We argue that a new definitional distinction is needed to expand the notion of “applied” from the traditional notion of utilizing theory, which we call “applied.1”, in order to consider theory-grounded, theory testing and theory developing applied research. We label this new definition “applied.2” research. We then explain that our descriptive work describing the social processes of adolescent substance use, identity and use, and drug norms, as well as the subsequent development and dissemination of our keepin’ it REAL middle school substance use curriculum are examples of “applied.1” …

Harvesting Victory: Education, Student/Farmworker Solidarity, And The Growth Of An Organizing Model, Melody González, Natasha Noriega-Goodwin, Marc Rodrigues, Jorge Rodríguez, Marina Sáenz-Luna, Sean Sellers, John-Michael Torres, Kandace Vallejo

Education Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"On May 23, 2008, farmworkers and student activists gathered with corporate executives, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont), and dozens of members of the local and national media for a standing room-only press conference under the dome of the U.S. Capitol announcing an accord between the Burger King fast food corporation and a Florida farmworker organization, the Coalition of lmmokalee Workers (CIW). Weeks earlier, Burger King made headlines when a spate of malicious Internet postings defaming the CIW and its supporters were traced back to a company executive, and news surfaced that the company hired an unlicensed private investigator to infiltrate …

A Wink Or A Nod, Mr. President? A Call For The President’S Consideration Of Race, Lilia D. Monzó, Suzanne Soohoo

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"Dear Mr. President... We ask now that you pour some attention to race and racism in America, and we submit that your leadership in this area is critically important for people of all colors."

Guided By A Red Star: The Cuban Literacy Campaign And The Challenge Of History, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"I had waited a long time for a doctoral degree in critical pedagogy to be established somewhere in the US, and when I heard about the program at the University of St. Thomas, a prestigious Catholic university, I was sure that more degree programs would be in the making."

Twenty-First-Century Writing/Twentieth Century Teachers?, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

"My students are writing in their everyday lives—indeed, their everyday lives are written—but we (teachers—writing teachers, in particular--and education administrators, no doubt nudged by politicians and “the public”) have to a large extent failed miserably in embracing and capitalizing on that writing: email, text messaging, instant messaging, blogging, twittering, responding, video gaming, Second Lifeing. Andrea and Karen Lunsford’s recent longitudinal study of Stanford students has shown the lie to the given that students today don’t write as much as they used to (they are writing much more). Are we becoming the stodgy, ungenerous, rigid English teachers that we ourselves were …

Issues In-Depth: Advancing Understanding Of Drug Addiction And Treatment, Roxanne Greitz Miller

Education Faculty Articles and Research

While most school districts utilize a drug abuse resistance curriculum, as science teachers, it is our responsibility to understand the science behind drug addiction in order to most effectively educate our students against drug abuse. In the last two decades, increases in scientific technology have permitted significant discoveries surrounding the neurobiology, genetic components, and treatment of drug addition. This article addresses the latest scientific knowledge about drug addition and treatment with information that can be used in the middle school setting, focusing on cocaine addiction to illustrate the points discussed. (Contains 2 online resources.)

Disciplining Queer, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

This article analyzes a particular set of disciplinings by students and colleagues that coalesced around my teaching of a university course in ‘Queer Theory.’ I use these regulatory discourses and practices as a springboard to investigate how academic and other disciplines (English, in particular) enable and reproduce certain stylizations, epistemologies, and methodologies, and what they implicitly and violently conceal and demonize; how style functions as politics and what the politics of style are; how queerness—queer inquiry and intervention, queer methodologies and epistemologies, queer activisms and insubordinations—might activate, exacerbate, and expose some of these questions and mechanisms. The form of the …

Politics, Pragmatics And Passion: Three Markers On The Teacher Research Journey, Suzanne Soohoo, Chris Strople

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Th is article captures the rich collaboration between a fifth-grade teacher and a university professor in their search for the value and significance of teacher inquiry in public school classrooms. Within this action research, both individuals modified their respective classroom practices so as to accommodate each other in the pursuit of a legitimate and justifiable research question. The end result is that both parties are able to more fully engage in theorizing about the politics, pragmatics, and passion both needed and desired in order to ask relevant research questions.

Fire And Dust, Peter Mclaren

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Drawing upon a Hegelian-Marxist critique of political economy that underscores the fundamental importance of developing a philosophy of praxis, the author theorizes a revolutionary Freireian critical pedagogy which seeks forms of organization that best enable the pursuit of doing critical philosophy as a way of life. The authors argues that the revolutionary critical pedagogy operates from an understanding that the basis of education is political and that spaces need to be created where students can imagine a different world outside of capitalism’s law of value (i.e., social form of labor), where alternatives to capitalism and capitalist institutions can be discussed …

We Change The World By Doing Nothing, Suzanne Soohoo

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"The focus of this essay is on what I refer to as 'bystander apathy.' Bystanderism is the response of people who observe something that demands intervention on their part, but they choose not to get involved. I write this piece to shed light on this issue for others as well as for my own self-reflection - to understand more deeply why some people act against abuses of power and others don't; why sometimes I act and sometimes I don't. What are the forces, both internal and external, that work to keep us all from speaking against and standing up to …

Teaching In And Against The Empire: Critical Pedagogy As Revolutionary Praxis, Peter Mclaren, Gregory Martin, Ramin Farahmandpur, Nathalia Jaramillo

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"All across the country, critical educators are fighting on dozens of fronts, searching in both form and content for a coherent pedagogical expression that captures their opposition to what they perceive as major developments of world-historical importance... Whilst we will mention some of these fronts in our discussion, our focus will be on expanding the concept so that it addresses both the urgency and the scope of the current crisis of capitalism in relation to the crisis of educational reform, and takes as its central aim the struggle against capitalism and imperialism."

Critical Pedagogy As Organizational Praxis: Challenging The Demise Of Civil Society In A Time Of Permanent War, Peter Mclaren, Nathalia E. Jaramillo

Education Faculty Articles and Research

The writers criticize the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ensuing military and political occupation of the country. They suggest a link between aggressive U.S. military posture and neoliberal globalization and contend that the current situation in Iraq is a metaphor for globalized capitalism across the world. The writers then consider issues surrounding the politics of organization in the search for a socialist alternative to free market capitalism and discuss how critical educators can reinvigorate the civil societarian left at a time when elites are less accountable to civil society than ever before.

Class, Cultism, And Multiculturalism: A Notebook On Forging A Revolutionary Politics, Peter Mclaren, Ramin Farahmandpur

Education Faculty Articles and Research

The writers examine the globalization of capitalism and its implications for class, cultism, and multiculturalism. They cite the need for a revolutionary multicultural pedagogy that would connect the social identities of the marginalized and oppressed with their reproduction within capitalist production relations.

Pedagogy For Revolution Against Education For Capital: An E-Dialogue On Education In Capitalism Today, Peter Mclaren, Glenn Rikowksi

Education Faculty Articles and Research

This dialogue between Peter McLaren (UCLA) and Glenn Rikowski (University of Central England, Birmingham) was conducted by e-mail during January - February 2001. References added.

The Revolutionary Legacy Of Paulo Freire, Peter Mclaren, Valerie Scatamburlo

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"With every line, Freire's writings emanate a spirit, a sense of urgency, and an intensity which is as rare as it is refreshing. He was a passionate pedagogue and activist--someone who too the theory/practice nexus seriously, someone who was engaged in struggle all his life, someone who was much more than an armchair academic."

Reclaiming Hope: Teacher Education And Social Justice In The Age Of Globalization, Peter Mclaren, Gustavo Fischman

Education Faculty Articles and Research

"Our overarching position is unashamedly and avowedly criticalist: we believe that unless teacher education locates the pedagogical education of future teachers within the context of an examination of the current glorification of global corporatism and the capitalist economy's ability for self-valorization, teacher education will remain delinked from necessary and urgent political conversations and practices."