A challenge to traditional theory: Critical race theory,African-American community organizers,and education

The following article, through the tenets of critical race theory, seeks to investigate the relationship between theory and practice in school–community relationships. By investigating the views, values, and perceptions of three African-American community organizers in Chicago, Illinois, the following account offers a “challenge” to traditional theoretical constructs in addressing the needs of students of color in urban schools. The work of community organizers in schools highlights the necessity of viable relationships between schools and communities in the execution of viable approaches to critically analyze the world of young people while developing practical approaches to address their realities. In an attempt to challenge hegemony in public education the author offers critical race theory as a feasible construct in praxis development.     

Here I am Now! Critical ethnography and community service-learning with immigrant and refugee undergraduate students and youth

Here I am Now! is the title a multi-ethnic group of immigrant and refugee undergraduate students and neighboring urban Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee youth gave to their participatory photography installation. The exhibit was the culmination of undergraduate students’ participation in a series of Community Service-Learning (CSL) courses offered through CIRCLE (Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While CSL has become an established educational practice at most US universities campuses, little research has been conducted viewing the educational impact of this pedagogy on diverse student populations. The majority of the scholarship focuses on the experiences of white middle-class students engaged with communities from unfamiliar and different socio-cultural, racial, ethic and economic backgrounds.

This paper examines how immigrant and refugee undergraduate students understood their participation in a creative community service-learning experience where they mentored youth from familiar and similar ethno-cultural contexts. To understand this meaning-making process I employed critical ethnographic approaches and analyzed student narratives and interviews. Through the prisms of critical pedagogy, situated learning theory, and funds of knowledge concept, I viewed the higher education context, analyzed the situation under study and developed an emerging framework for CSL pedagogy with diverse communities. These theories inform the view that culturally relevant pedagogy emphasizing peer-learning, critical thinking, artistic potential and community resources offers diverse undergraduate students alternative and creative spaces of critique and possibility in their higher education and community service-learning experiences.     

One Goal,Two Institutions: How a Community College and 4-Year University Partner to Bridge Student College Readiness Gaps

ABSTRACT

Recent national attention on college completion poses unique challenges and opportunities for community colleges. Moving underprepared students through basic skills educational courses to degree attainment represents an ongoing challenge. With more than 60% of community college students enrolled in remedial education, 2-year institutions must explore innovative approaches aimed at underprepared student completion. One community college did just that and partnered with a 4-year institution to expand postsecondary pathway options for underprepared first-year students. By establishing the Tiger Gateway Program, these two institutions collaborated to address student college readiness gaps using a summer bridge model. Seventy-five percent of participants self-reported as Hispanic/Latino with the remaining 25% identifying as African American or Black. Outcomes indicate participants who completed the program, 23 of 26, made gains in intellectual, academic, and social development. Findings support scholarship attesting that highly structured, meaningful, well-defined collaboration particularly benefits students from low-socio-status and underserved populations.     

Moral development,transformative learning,and the dialogical self

Attempts to find positive new directions for moral education now face a number of well‐recognized challenges, including those relating to the rise of commodification and the virtualization of experience. It is argued that there is now a need for innovative approaches that move beyond the traditional frameworks of critical thinking and ethical reasoning, and that encourage the development of moral dispositions and personal conscience. One crucial limitation of traditional approaches lies in their reliance on a monological interpretation of self‐reflection that emphasizes objective impressions of the self. It is proposed that only a dialogical model of self‐reflection that recognizes the presence of competing self‐impressions is fully consistent with the kinds of authentic self‐reflection and critical questioning that are required for the develc pment of moral conscience. The emerging dialogical model of the self is also compatible with an approach to moral conduct grounded in the idea of an ‘ethics without ethics’ in which dispositions to act for the good of the community become the focal goals. It is argued that the dialogical model of the self supports a dynamic view of selfhood and identity through which the subject is encouraged to recognize its own complexity and vulnerability, rather than external principles, as the basis for moral responsibility and action. In practical terms, the dialogical model supports the idea of engaging students in activities in which they are encouraged to monitor their own thoughts, feelings, and actions, rather than in activities which perpetuate objective, monological modes of self‐thematization.     

Practicing What We Preach in Teacher Education: A Critical Whiteness Studies Analysis of Experiential Education

In this article I problematize the reasons for and methods through which I incorporated an opportunity for experiential learning, via a Community Inquiry Project, into my own teaching. I take the stance of a teacher-researcher to closely analyze the specific documents and tasks used to introduce pre-service teachers to the project. I draw on sociocultural approaches to teacher development and literature on experiential education in teacher education to provide a background for the project and the self-study and offer critical whiteness studies as an appropriate lens through which to analyze the various elements of the project. Findings from this study suggest that the project limited the pre-service teachers’ characterizations of community, understandings of sociocultural approaches to learning, relationships to the community, and perceptions of the role of community in teaching. I draw on these findings to suggest that teacher educators share their reflective practices with their students and learn about the diverse experiences of the pre-service teachers themselves to better prepare them to inquire into and draw on knowledge of communities as they work with diverse populations of students.     

教师个人教育哲学的创建:特级教师的视角

教师个人教育哲学是指教师个人对教育、所教的学科、教学、教师与学生等关键词的独立思考与个性回答。特级教师之所以是特级教师,不仅因为他们课上得好,而且因为他们拥有个人的教育哲学。通过呈现特级教师个人教育哲学的具体样态,探讨特级教师个人教育哲学形成的过程,则能够让我们洞悉教师个人教育哲学创建的一般路径,即增进职业认同,奠个人教育哲学之基;坚持研究创新,绘个人教育哲学之图;秉承自知无知,拓个人教育哲学之疆。     

In the Service of Self-Determination: Teacher Education,Service-Learning,and Community Reorganizing

Influenced by Third World Liberation social movements in the United States and abroad, this article applies a serve-the-people concept to service-learning in education. Rooted in pedagogies more traditionally associated with ethnic studies and community organizing, and informed by sociocultural and critical frameworks in education, this article offers insights from school community spaces that serve K–12 youth from different urban working-class neighborhoods. Transformative opportunities for grassroots collaboration, learning, agency, and community reorganizing are explored with implications for students, teachers, teacher educators, and community workers concerned with social justice.     

工程伦理教育:历史探索、现实困境与行动方略

工程伦理教育是我国高等工程教育系统的重要组成部分,深刻影响着新工科建设的水平。分析工程伦理教育的发展历史,可归纳为前工程伦理教育时期、基于实用主义的工程伦理教育和基于建制化的工程伦理教育三个阶段。我国工程伦理教育起步晚、经验少,其教育理念模糊、理论研究薄弱、实践应用不强的不足促使工程伦理教育要创新发展,以此构建出工程伦理教育的新模式,形成理论研究的新体系,拓展教育的实践空间。     

A review of critical literacies in preservice teacher education: pedagogies,shifts, and barriers

In literacy teacher education, a small but important group of studies have addressed how teachers can be prepared for enacting critical literacies pedagogies in K-12 classrooms. In this review, we argue that, more than ever, these efforts have a place in the field of teacher preparation. After providing a brief review of how critical literacies are conceptualized in the field, we review the approaches of teacher educators across the reviewed work. We identify approaches in coursework, including text-based and non text-based approaches as well as approaches to preparing teachers through experiences with students. We also identify the barriers that teacher educators face when preparing teachers for critical literacies pedagogy, and finally, provide recommendations for future studies.     

The critical policy discourse analysis frame: helping doctoral students engage with the educational policy analysis

This paper addresses an issue of increasing significance in the context of taught educational doctorates and argues that this may have wider applicability for doctoral students across a range of social science disciplines. It identifies the need to engage with policy analysis as a key element of such programmes and attempts to address students' concerns over a lack of practical approaches to do so by offering an analytical framework drawing on critical discourse analysis. This paper highlights the affordances of a taught doctorate context to consider the potential for more collaborative community approaches to doctoral pedagogies through reflecting upon the way the frame was introduced and used by one group of EdD students. In doing so, this paper offers both a practical analytical tool for doctoral students but also a pedagogical approach grounded in an invitation to dialogue and induction into the academic discourse community, through a notion of critical inclusion.     

The Relational Power of Education: The Immeasurability of Knowledge, Value, and Meaning

Recognizing the challenge of adequate evaluation in higher education, this essay introduces some of the critical, alternative-seeking conversation about educational measurement. The thesis is that knowledge, value, and meaning emerge in the relational dynamics of education, thus requiring complex approaches to evaluation, utilizing relational criteria. The method of the essay is to analyse two educational case studies – a travel seminar and a classroom course – in dialogue with educational literature and a process-relational philosophy of education. Building from this analysis, the essay concludes with proposals for relational criteria of evaluation: relations with self, community and culture, difference, earth, and social structures.     

The Effects of an Environmental Education Program on Students,Parents, and Community

Abstract

This study evaluated the impact of an environmental education program on students, parents, and the community. The program, in place for 5 years in 5th and 6th grade classes, was designed to help learners take an in-depth look at environmental issues in their community, make data-based decisions about those issues, and participate in resolving those issues. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies were employed (including student, parent, school personnel, and community member interviews). The authors discuss program connections to students' critical thinking, environmental literacy, and participation in the community; reading, writing, and speaking skills; student and teacher characteristics; and parent and community viewpoints.     

Introducing veteran critical theory

Research on student veterans is in an infant state. As veterans continue to enroll in institutions of higher education, researchers must explore new ways of knowing student veterans. It is not enough to only describe and model this growing demographic, researchers must also have a tool for criticism and question. The next in an important tradition of emancipatory paradigms, this article suggests a critical theory built on current critical conversations but adapted for the unique characteristics of the student veteran. The article defines the need for a critical theory (Veteran Critical Theory), explains 11 tenets for this new theory, and discusses how these tenets could be used by administrators, faculty, student affairs professionals, and students in the higher education community.     

Toward an Eco-justice Pedagogy

This paper will address three issues: (1) the nature and importance of an eco-justice pedagogy; (2) how an eco-justice pedagogy differs from the recommendations of critical pedagogy theorists who rely upon key root metaphors (e.g. emancipated individualism, linear view of progress, anthropocentrism) that co-evolved with the Industrial Revolution and are now the basis of the globalization process; and (3) the reforms that need to be undertaken in teacher education in order for teachers to balance critical inquiry with helping students recognize and participate in the non-commodified aspects of community life. The latter will involve giving special attention to what teachers need to understand about how the language of the curriculum is based on root metaphors that organize thinking in ways that ignore environmental racism and the marginalization of different cultural approaches to community not oriented toward dependency upon modern technology and consumerism.     

关于教育考试的立法工作

庞大的考试规模、信息技术的快速发展以及突发事件的产生对考试立法提出了客观要求,教育考试立法已成为教育考试事业健康发展、考试工作安全运行的必要选择,已经启动的考试立法工作将是教育考试事业健康发展的一项重要的基础性工作。     

异步在线交流中促进学生批判性思维的提问模型构建

文章基于对Paul批判性思维模型及其在线学习模型的改进,构建了一个用于异步在线交流的提问交互模型,以促进网络社区中学习者批判性思维的发展。该模型在批判性思维教学方面的有效性已经得到初步证实。     

Learning to be critically reflective: exploring fiction writing and adult learning

Many educators in adult, community and higher education contexts are concerned with fostering reflective learning amongst their students. This paper explores the concept of critical reflection and considers how engaging with fiction may be an innovative pedagogical approach to support critical learning opportunities. Drawing upon interviews with fiction writers, ways in which critical reflection may be encouraged in connection to reading and writing fiction are taken up by exploring three different thematic areas that relate to a Habermasian framework of knowledge constitutive approaches to learning. These different areas can be categorised as (a) technical-rational, (b) humanistic and (c) critical or emancipatory. The first of these considers critical reflection as a way to develop technical capacities as a creative writer. The next section takes up a humanistic framework to explore the value of individual and collective learning opportunities to enhance personal growth and critical reflection. The third area of discussion considers a deeper critical or emancipatory framework of learning through critical reflection which may lead to social change. The paper concludes by considering the value of arts-informed adult education approaches, such as those related to fiction writing, to enhance the development of critical reflection amongst adult learners.     

Openness and reciprocity: Indigenous community requirements for hosting university students*

ABSTRACT

Although there is a substantial literature critical of the colonising discourses of higher education in both teaching and learning and research, there has been relatively little commentary about work integrated learning (WIL) from an Indigenous perspective. Currently, the higher education discourse of WIL is dominated by a teaching and learning perspective, which focuses almost entirely on the benefits to the student and/or the educational institution. This leaves the Indigenous community experience invisible and continues to reinforce a neo-colonial relationship between higher education providers and Indigenous people. This article reports the findings of a study undertaken in partnership with the Aboriginal community of Cherbourg in Queensland, Australia, which sought to understand the community experience of students undertaking WIL within Cherbourg. Twenty yarns, undertaken by a research assistant employed from the community, provided the basis for identifying key meanings and requirements of the community in their hosting of higher education students. The recent experience of students by the community was found to be positive with reciprocity, openness and practical benefit over time being central concerns. The study concludes that WIL with Indigenous agencies and communities requires decolonising, temporal and relational frames to be employed in the process of negotiating the purpose and processes of higher education student engagement.     

Adult and community education in complex societies: reconsidering critical perspectives

In this contribution, I explore how critical pedagogical perspectives can inspire adult and community education practices. The central argument is that today, in contrast with the heydays of emancipatory practices and theories, the classical critical approaches need reconsideration. The paper explores how these approaches sometimes have a stultifying effect on the participants in practice. In line with the French philosopher Rancière, a perspective is explored that departs from emancipated participants rather than from participants in need of emancipation. The theoretical investigation is inspired by reflections on art practices that struggle with similar questions on emancipation as the field of adult and community education.