Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons^™

Study Of A Thematic Unit On Appalachian Cultural Heritage And Effect On Attendance And Attitude Toward School, Charlene Nunn

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

An applied project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Education Specialist at Morehead State University by Charlene Nunn on December 19, 1994.

A Follow-Up Study Of Students Exiting New Dominion School, Lillian M. Firestone-Johansen

Theses & Honors Papers

The research of the past two decades has resulted in a proliferation of information regarding the various reasons for dropping out of school and the characteristics of dropouts. Little has been done, however, to examine the life outcomes of those who have dropped out, or of how various treatments effect those outcomes . This is also true for those youth who are still in school, but who have become academically disengaged. The purpose of this study was to gain information regarding the life outcomes of students who attended a wilderness, residential treatment school called New Dominion. Questionnaires were mailed to …

General Education: Why Do We Need It, And Where Did It Come From?, Calvin Jongsma

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

General education is one of those things that everyone knows how to fix but no one is able to do anything about. Woodrow Wilson’s comment about changing the college curriculum, made while he was president of Princeton University, is particularly apt of general education: reforming it “is as difficult as moving a graveyard.” Committees can study the issue for ages and make numerous erudite reports, but when all is said and done, more is said than done. Many reforms meet the standard voiced by Groucho Marx: “there is less here than meets the eye.” It is far easier to resist …

Key Issues Facing The Boston Public Schools, Robert A. Dentler

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article is the third examination of the six issues the author identified in "Some Key Issues Facing Boston's Public Schools in 1984," following the November 1983 election of the first thirteen-member Boston School Committee. He revisited these issues in a 1988 report and now assesses how the policy leadership of the system fared in dealing with these challenges during the past decade. He discusses other issues at the close of this article. Writing from a sociological point of view, Dentler is primarily concerned with the question of how well the public school districts and their school staff are able …

Teaching African-American Children: The Legacy Of Slavery, Harold Horton

New England Journal of Public Policy

The pathetic state of urban public school education offered to African-American children stems from slavery, when it was against the law to educate slaves, who were regarded as chattel. This article traces the history of the blighting of their minds by stripping those slaves of their African culture, and its effect on African-American children, as well as other children of color, today. Horton offers suggestions for coping with the problems of modern schools as related to respecting and teaching these children, pointing out that the system is the problem, not the children.

Parent Involvement In Urban Schools: The View From The Front Of The Classroom, Frances Gamer, Kathleen Mccarthy Mastaby

New England Journal of Public Policy

American educational reform movements focus on efforts to restructure our schools to include all interested parties, especially parents, in the decision-making process. Nowhere is involvement more crucial than in America's inner-city urban neighborhoods. As parents are given a greater voice in their child's school, educators must join them as collaborators. This article identifies elements that impeded parental involvement and recognizes positive and encouraging techniques leading toward successful family-school-community partnerships. An alliance between groups too long seen as opponents rather than proponents must be established.

Better High Schools: What Would Create Them?, Theodore R. Sizer

New England Journal of Public Policy

The American desire to improve education has set off a flurry of activity to reform schools. In such a climate of restructuring, Sizer explores what better secondary schools might "look like" if indeed they existed. His consideration of the improved high school is based on five particular conditions — all of which support teachers and students in their engagement with the serious stuff of learning and all of which must exist in one form or another for schools to be effective. The conditions are cast as questions. Sizer locates the responsibility for school reform broadly, from the heart of a …

What's Wrong With Reform?, James H. Case

New England Journal of Public Policy

The conservative educational reform movement, which still, after more than a decade, is the dominant force in school reform, has had little success in improving schools because it is based on invalid and self-defeating theoretical assumptions. Taken together, these assumptions have the effect of substituting nostalgia — a longing for the schools the reformers themselves attended —for policy and for increasing standardization at the expense of individual growth and development. The reformers (Bloom, Hirsch, Ravitch, Finn, Bennett, et al.) have particular difficulty, given their assumptions, in dealing both with individual differences among students and with ethnic and racial differences among …

Lessons In The Common Good: Voluntarism On College Campuses, Jodi Raybuck

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article describes the current interest and activity in community service and the undergraduate educational experience. Many examples of campus-based voluntarism with a social reform twist set the stage for passage of the National and Community Trust Act of 1993. What is still necessary, however, is recognition by faculty, administrators, and agency officials that the community service experience must be structured properly, so that both service and learning take place. Drawing on the efforts at Babson College and direct involvement with the national scene, this analysis offers recommendations for implementing a program that helps to cultivate good citizenship and values.

Promising Practices: Perspectives Of Junior And Senior High At-Risk Students, Janet Dalman

Dissertations

This dissertation examined the “fit of school and Me” from at-risk students’ perspectives. The purpose of the study was to gain insight into at-risk students’ views on what school elements were necessary and helpful in their achieving success, in their seeing hope, and in their choosing to remain in school.

Promising practices of affective/nurturing and cognitive/learning gleaned from the literature review of success producing school components were examined within the context of most favorite and least favorite classrooms during focus group interviews with junior high school and senior high school at-risk and non-at-risk students. Students were asked to compare and …

The Founding Of A School: An Oral History Of The Abraham Joshua Heschel School, Joan Yotive Berland

Graduate Student Independent Studies

The Abraham Joshua Heschel School was founded in the early 1980's by Peter Geffen and other Jewish professionals and laypersons who were committed to a school that was independent of any synagogue or organization. A school where a wide range of Jewish beliefs and practices along with secular studies could be integrated through intellectual, academic, ethical, artistic, social and emotional realms.

By conducting interviews with 4 or the 8 people who taught or worked at the Heschel school when it opened in 1983, it was possible to collect an oral history that revealed aspects which were significant in founding and …

Attributional Style Of African-American Adolescents, Stephen B. Hillman, Paula C. Wood, Shlomo S. Sawilowsky

Theoretical and Behavioral Foundations of Education Faculty Publications

This study ascertains how positive and negative life events are viewed by stigmatized youngsters. The causal attributions of a sample of 139 at -risk AfricanAmerican adolescents are analyzed in a doubly multivariate repeated measures design. These students were participants in either the federally funded Summer Training and Education Program or the Student Academic and Leadership Enhancement Program funded by the Detroit Compact. Previous research on these students indicated that they have higher than norm global self-concepts and their locus of control is more external than would be expected for their age. The findings of the current study suggest that the …

An Analysis Of Individual Philosophical Foundations And Pedagogical Teaching Behaviors, Steven Charles Bailey

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

Character-Based Education: Its Place In The Elementary School Curriculum, Nancy F. Deloge

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

Antihomophobic Pedagogy: Some Suggestions For Teachers, Ian Barnard

English Faculty Articles and Research

Too often as teachers we feel that we are doing the right thing by assigning our students "open-ended" essay topics or by inviting students to argue "both" sides of a controversial current event. The ideologies and institutions of liberal pluralism tell us that this is the way to promote "free speech," "democratic" argument, etc. But these kinds of topics and discussions have the effect of privileging dominant power relations and of further silencing our queer students. For example, if we ask our students to debate whether homosexuality is "wrong" or not, we are expecting our queer students to justify their …

Volume 11, No. 2

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children

Compayre, Gabriel. “Montaigne’s Pedagogy of Judgment.” 2-­3.

De Puig, Irene. “Beyond Knowledge, Wisdom: A Revindication of the Practical Character of Philosophy.” 22-­24.

Godlovitch, S. “On Wisdom.” 14­-21.

Lim, Tock Keng. “The Philosophy for Children Project in Singapore.” 33­-37.

MacColl, San. “The Context of Reasoning and Teaching Reasoning.” 25-­29.

Malcolm, Norman. “Should a Philosophy Consist of Nothing but Jokes and Questions?” from Thinking and Literacy by Jane Roland Martin. 44­-51.

Martin, David. “Report from North America.” 38­-40.

Matthews, Gareth: “Thinking in Stories: Now Everybody Really Hates Me by Jane Read Martin and Patricia Marx.” 1.

Redshaw, Sarah. “Philosophical Applications: Cultivating Alternative …

The Emergence Of The New American College, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The story of the "New American College" is about the development of a new kind of institution embodying a set of ideals which may resonate across all of higher education. It begins, however, with the humble matter of institutional taxonomy. How we classify our schools and colleges may seem an unexciting issue, but our classification systems reveal our assumptions, our expectations, and ultimately our values. Recall that a conceptual revolution, a breakthrough, is often presaged by an accumulation of classification problems, an accretion of anomalies, a proliferation of misfits. [excerpt]

Volume 12, No. 1

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children

Anih, Stan. “Moral Education in a Multicultural World.” 11­-17.

Cosentino, Antonio. “Kant and the Pedagogy of Teaching Philosophy.” 2­-3.

Heinegg, James. “Computers and Education for Thinking.” 45­-46.

Holder, John J. Jr. “Philosophy for Children in the Philippines Project,” from “Final Report on Phase III Unistar Mission.” 41­-44.

Kamara, Mohamed. “Grade­School Philosophy: The Role of the Text.” 20­-21.

Laverty, Megan. “The Mill on the Floss: An Argument for Philosophy for Children.” 47­49.

Matthews, Gareth. “Thinking in Stories: ‘The Hour of Letdown’ by E.B. White.” 1.

Palsson, Hreinn. “Interpretive Research and Philosophy for Children.” 33-­40.

Silver, Ruth E. “Thinking Together with the …

Volume 11, Nos. 3 & 4

Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children

Arbones, Gloria. “Feminism and Philosophy for Children in Argentina.” 39-­42.

Cahn, Edmond. “The Right to be Young.” 41­-42.

Daniel, Marie­-France. “Women, Philosophical Community of Inquiry and the Liberation of Self.” 63-­71.

Bosch, Eulalia. “Primary School: Love Versus Knowledge 7.” 71­-72.

Carneiro de Moura, Zaza. “Seeds of Change, Seeds of Chance.” 33­-38.

De la Garza, Teresa. “Women’s Education in Mexico and Philosophy for Children.” 47­ 50.

Dudina, Margarita Nikolayevna. “Some Reflections on Our System of Education.” 44­47.

Glaser, Jen. “Reasoning as Dialogical Inquiry: A Model for the Liberation of Women.” 14­-17.

Hagaman, Sally. “Education in Philosophy and Art in the United …

"Education For Service": Gender, Class, & Professionalism At The Boston Normal School, 1870-1920, Ann Froines

Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty Publication Series

"Education for Service," and “The Truth Shall Make You Free,” are two aphorisms engraved in granite over doorways of the Boston Normal School (BNS) buildings on Huntington Avenue in Boston. One can argue that the history of women in the teaching profession, its paradoxical and conflicted reality, are reflected in the complex and contradictory meanings of these two aphorisms. Young women students at BNS were moving toward greater freedom or autonomy by taking advantage of the educational opportunity available to them in this city-supported, tuition-free teacher training institution. At the same time, they were providing a crucial social service sanctioned …

Promoting Collaborative Learning In The Early Childhood Classroom: Reggio Emilia, Italy, And Amherst, Massachusetts., Carolyn P. Edwards, Lella Gandini, John Nimmo

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

This chapter describes a study that was conducted in Reggio Emilia (Emilia Romagna, northern Italy), Pistoia (Tuscany, Italy) and Amherst (Massachusetts, USA) as part of a three study project investigating how teachers promote collaboration and community in their classrooms. The methodology involved a combination of teacher interviews with an adaptation of the “multivocal video-ethnography developed by Tobin, Wu, and Davidson (1989) for Preschool in Three Cultures. This paper describes the findings from the Collaboration Interviews with teachers in Reggio Emilia and Amherst, showing intersections and differences in their concepts of young children’s capacities for cooperation and teachers’ roles in …