Toward a cosmic sociology of education

We old warriors of ideology critique and wissensoziologie should not be too hard on ourselves for having forgotten reflexivity and the labors of putting paradigms, including our own, back into the context of history and social movement. Normal science is our necessary bread and butter. We achieved a lot by shaking the liberal foundations of sociology of education, although in America, despite a mandatory ‘inclusiveness’ in educational studies, in the higher science of sociology of education, liberalism still holds sway, underneath the triumphant pyrotechnics of advanced multivariate analyses. You may have some qualitative research, however, even focused on studies of race and gender. Still, class analysis did, and again now, does, make a dent, accumulating careful empirical research, both in ethnographies and models of statistical causality. Likewise, when postmodernism took the stage, curriculum studies added new light and meaning to understanding the school text. More recently and less prominently, ‘spirituality’ now revitalizes interest in ‘holistic’ education, even ‘transcendental learning’, as Miller calls his revival of the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist movement, in education.     

论高等教育民主化的基本原则

高等教育民主化是社会政治民主在高等教育上的体现。高等教育民主化，无论是作为一种信仰或理想，还是作为一种制度或改革行动或过程，都必须要遵循一些基本原则。这些原则包括平等原则、学术自由与宽容原则、自主与自治原则和民主参与原则。     

Towards a sociology of teacher labour markets

The existing sociological literature on teachers has tended to either centre on reified concepts of the teacher's role, the processes of becoming a teacher or the status of the profession and the determinants of its pay. There is very little discussion of the structure of the profession as such and the implications of that structure for the professional identity of the teacher. It is the argument of this paper that a model of the teacher labour market is of importance both to a theoretical understanding of the teaching profession and to an appreciation of the structural changes that face teachers in what appears will be the dismal decade of the eighties.     

The tradition of sociology and the sociology of tradition

The role of the researcher's self and social relations in the construction of the ethnographic fieldwork experience is considered. The social trajectory through fieldwork, the researcher's distribution of time and energy, in different places, with different people, and at different times, needs to be carefully and skilfully produced by deliberate choices and reflexive decision‐making. Reflexivity provides the mechanism for relating social relations to the technicalities of data collection, and thus it is the basis of rigour in ethnography. The social skills and creative intelligence of the fieldworker are emphasized in contrast to technical competence.     

Education and sociology

International Review of Education -     

An International Call for Democratizing the Academic Journal Culture From a Community of Editors

In our reflective essay from our multiple perspectives as journal editors, peer reviewers, and published authors, we present ideas about editorial support, democracy, and innovation in the publishing process. As four tenured professors who work in universities in the states of Illinois, Virginia, Texas, and Kentucky, we are a community of editors who are committed to a transparent, service-oriented support process. Our collective experience has allowed us to shape numerous academic bodies of work, culminating in an experiential point of view that reflects a political take on the support role of editors. We include lengthy, databased statements from journal editors in the form of vignettes that underscore the importance of community-based, democratic editorial practices that are themselves simultaneously personal testimonials and political statements. Our call is intended to foster large-scale social change within the academic editorial culture through global understanding about the sensibilities of editors and reviewers as well as authors and publishers engaged in the complex work of publication review. Our academic goal is to enhance fair practices and inclusive opportunities, worldwide, through more relational, equitable, and supportive editorial practices.     

Toward a sociology of participation in adult education programmes

Membership in voluntary associations and participation in adult education programmes have long been recognized by researchers in the fields of adult education and sociology as closely related forms of participatory behaviour. This inquiry realizes the potential of this relationship for the study of participation in adult education programmes through the reformulation of a sociological construct called personal influence. It is argued that personal influence in the form of face‐to‐face contact with primary and secondary influentials is at the heart of recruitment strategies targeted at adults, is often an important component of an adult's decision to participate in formally organized learning activities, and may play a critical role in retention and instruction of the adult learner. Secondary analysis of research on voluntary associations, social movement organizations, and adult education programmes, together with data on two populations of adult learners from ar ongoing large scale study of Adult Basic Education participants, underscores the importance of personal influence for explaining the entire range of participatory action and interaction.     

Democratizing Children's Computation: Learning Computational Science as Aesthetic Experience

In this essay, Amy Voss Farris and Pratim Sengupta argue that a democratic approach to children's computing education in a science class must focus on the aesthetics of children's experience. In Democracy and Education, Dewey links “democracy” with a distinctive understanding of “experience.” For Dewey, the value of educational experiences lies in “the unity or integrity of experience.” In Art as Experience, Dewey presents aesthetic experience as the fundamental form of human experience that undergirds all other forms of experiences and that can bring together multiple forms of experiences, locating this form of experience in the work of artists. Particularly relevant to the focus of this essay, computational literacy, Dewey calls the process through which a person transforms a material into an expressive medium an aesthetic experience. Farris and Sengupta argue that the kind of experience that is appropriate for a democratic education in the context of children's computational science is essentially aesthetic in nature. Given that aesthetics has received relatively little attention in STEM education research, the authors' purpose here is to highlight the power of Deweyan aesthetic experience in making computational thinking available and attractive to all children, including those who are disinterested in computing, and especially those who are likely to be discounted by virtue of location, gender, or race.     

Constructing an Inquiry Orientation from a Learning Theory Perspective: Democratizing Access through Task Design

Abstract

It is widely accepted in the mathematics education community that pedagogies oriented toward inquiry are aligned with a constructivist theory of learning, and that these pedagogies effectively support students’ learning of mathematics. In order to promote such an orientation, we first separate the idea of inquiry from its conception as a collection of methods. Then, by grounding those methods in a generally accepted theory of learning, we construct an inquiry-oriented pedagogy from a constructivist perspective. We then discuss the implications of this pedagogy for the design of mathematical tasks that democratize student access to inquiry. This work has implications for educators who wish to enact an inquiry-oriented pedagogy in their classroom in order to support their students’ problem solving and problem posing.     

Democratizing knowledge of teaching and learning through student leadership projects

ABSTRACT

The central focus of this multilayered educational action research project was three-fold: (1) to provide opportunities for public school student leadership activities grounded in participatory and youth participatory action research; (2) to support a group of teacher-researchers in practicing and innovating in participatory action research frameworks; (3) to practice linking an educational action research project in a local region to the larger movement for democratizing education knowledge production and dissemination. Project participants included 11 teacher-researchers, a staff-developer, a consultant, a university-based faculty member, and students in K-8 schools in the Lehigh Valley region of Eastern Pennsylvania USA. To move from a traditional top-down administrative and curricular decision- making model to a distributed and more democratic model of leadership, the team argues that (1) children must be permitted to play a leading role in their own learning, leading, and researching; (2) teacher offers significant advantages over traditional in-service based professional development models; and (3) in an era of increased deskilling and deprofessionalization, teachers must have the opportunity to reclaim their profession as they conduct research, create new knowledge, and share their findings publicly.