Argumentation and debate in high schools

Viewing the American Dream as two myths, both essential to the identity and destiny of America, this essay argues that the 1972 presidential election required an endorsement of Nixon who represented a materialistic myth or of McGovern who personified a moralistic myth, that the outcome of this quadrennial ritual signified the way Americans want presently to conceive of themselves and suggests the way the American experiment may be going.     

Teaching history in schools: A Canadian debate

This paper examines the debate over the teaching of Canadian history that has been in progress in Canada since the early 1990s. It considers four criticisms: schools do not teach enough Canadian history and students, therefore, do not know it; the history that is taught is no longer sufficiently national; social history has destroyed the old nation-building narrative and dwells on the negative rather than the positive aspects of Canada's past; and child-centred teaching and other pedagogical fashions have led teachers to devalue factual knowledge. Finally, it examines the proposals that have been advanced for the reform of history teaching in Canada.     

Faith,phonics and identity: reading in faith complementary schools

Thousands of UK school children spend considerable time during a lengthy period of their youth learning to read, or decode, a ‘religious classical’, the liturgical language connected to their faith. Drawing on recent theories of reading, identity and literacy practices, this paper briefly describes and seeks to share tentative thoughts about some common issues around the teaching and learning of religious classicals within minority ethnic faith settings. It presents a comparative textual analysis of a central teaching resource used in three Jewish, Muslim and Sikh complementary schools in the United Kingdom. It is concluded that, regardless of any relative effectiveness of method or resource, what may be more interesting for researchers is the symbolic value of learning to read the religious classical. This may be more important than the eventual outcome in terms of reading competence. Here, ‘successful reading’ is understood primarily as ‘successful decoding’. The tenacity of this literacy practice in the face of spoken community language attrition is testimony to the importance placed upon it both individually and collectively.     

Faith schools and pupils' progress through primary education

The impact of faith schools on the performance and progress of their pupils has been studied using data from the National Pupil Database (NPD). The value‐added analysis was carried out using multilevel modelling, controlling for prior attainment as well as a range of background variables, including ethnicity, sex, eligibility for free school meals (FSM), alternative measures of deprivation based on census information, special educational needs (SEN) and English as an additional language (EAL). The analysis confirmed that all faith schools, in particular, Roman Catholic and Church of England schools, made slightly more progress with their pupils than non‐faith schools. It also showed that pupils with SEN attending faith schools performed better at key stage 2 than pupils with SEN in non‐faith schools.     

Debating debating: a reflection on the place of debate within secondary schools

This article is based on the authors' reflections on observations and interviews with students and staff involved in a debate competition in London secondary schools. Taking the data we collected as our starting point, we seek to draw on research from a range of perspectives, including political education, political philosophy and debate as a teaching method, to clarify the role of debate within a pedagogy for democracy. We consider the case for promoting debate in general terms, and then go on to discuss the role and form debate should take in such a pedagogy. Here we contrast models based on adversarial and deliberative democracy and consider the need for teachers to be aware of the benefits and shortcomings of each. We then draw on the concept of students' public voice to discuss some of the issues that need to be borne in mind when developing these strategies in class. Finally we pose a number of questions for future investigation, which may help teachers reflect on their own practice as well as inform our own ongoing research in this area.     

The memorial ceremony in Israeli schools: between the State and civil society

Exploring memorial ceremonies conducted in Israeli schools over the past decade, this paper discusses the school memorial ceremony as a potential site for struggle over national identities, and schools as the social arena of an encounter between the State and civil society. Analysis of 50 ethnographies (elicited from semi‐structured observations) revealed that school memorial ceremonies constitute a diversified interpretative field, which includes both canonic characteristics and elements of innovation and resistance. This ceremonial field is characterized by a tension between expressing ‘other voices’ of civil society and the process of cooptation into the national collective.     

Contours of the emergent knowledge society: Theoretical debate and implications for higher education research

The idea of the knowledge society is becoming increasingly dominant in various public and scholarly writings. Several governments have reacted by advocating a further expansion of higher education in order to provide a highly skilled workforce. This seems at odds with views regarding the underutilisation of skills of employed graduates. This paper sketches some major characteristics of the emergent knowledge society from sociological, epistemological and economic viewpoints. Next, it discusses current research on the incidence of overeducation. It is pointed out that measures on overeducation are inaccurate and do not take into account changes in the emergent knowledge societies. The paper concludes with implications for future research on the nature and change of knowledge-based occupations.     

Schooling the Mobile Generation: The future for schools in the mobile-networked society

Mobile technologies such as palmtop computers and mobile telephones represent a new breed of technological innovation--offering easier and quicker access to information and communication on an 'anytime, anywhere' basis. These networks are seen to lead to temporal and spatial re-definitions of young people's lives, with notions of time and space centred around the individual rather than shared societal norms or expectations. Such changes are now prompting some educationalists to predict that mobile technologies will radically change students, and therefore the nature of schools and schooling. Set against a lack of considered academic debate, the present paper offers a detailed consideration of the theoretical and practical implications of mobile technologies such as phones and handheld computers on schools and schooling by contrasting the 'fixed' nature of schools against 'mobile' technologies' freeing up of the key symbolic forms of power of information and communication. After considering the strengths and limitations of both these viewpoints, this paper then outlines a framework for future research and discussion in this area.     

Authoritative schools: A test of a model to resolve the school effectiveness debate

School effectiveness research has fueled debate on the importance of a press for academic excellence versus communal values. Research on parenting styles offers a theoretical framework that may resolve the debate. We hypothesized that dimensions of parenting styles—demandingness (academic press) and responsiveness (communal values)—predict students’ mathematics achievement, engagement, and locus of control. HLM analyses of NELS: 88 data on 19,435 eighth-graders partially supported the hypothesis: Students’ perceptions of school responsiveness predicted their engagement and internal control. In addition, students in responsive schools had smaller differences in mathematics achievement and internal control attributable to SES, suggesting that responsive schools may increase equity. We offer suggestions for further investigation of the model in hope of resolving the debate.     

Future teachers debate charter schools on Facebook: analysing their political subjectivities

We argue that Garrett and Segall’s concepts of ‘doing school’ and ‘pushing back’ are valuable tools for analysing pre-service teachers’ political views of neoliberal education reforms such as the introduction of charter schools. We extend Garrett and Segall’s conceptualization by hybridizing ‘doing school’ and ‘pushing back’ in order to move beyond a simplistic celebration of student resistance, which often overlooks forms of resistance that are compliant with the status quo, in this case the neoliberal status quo. We analyse participants’ political views as they emerged in a debate about charter schools in New Zealand. Garrett and Segall’s concepts, in conjunction with poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, are deployed as analytical tools for understanding the complexity of students’ political subjectivities in a debate conducted on a Facebook page set up for that purpose.     

Faith schools,social capital and academic attainment: Evidence from TIMSS‐R mathematics scores in Flemish secondary schools

Social capital theory, recent developments in the theory of identity and a small econometric literature all suggest positive attainment effects from faith schooling. To test this hypothesis, the authors use a unique data set on Flemish secondary school students from the 1999 repeat of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study to estimate an education production function. The results suggest modest attainment benefits in mathematics when schools are influenced by faith communities but not when they are influenced by trade unions or business groups. The authors estimate models with exogenous and endogenous switching to investigate the robustness of this result to school selection policy and parental/student self‐selection. These additional results not only suggest that the positive attainment effects of faith schooling do not reflect selection bias but also provide evidence suggesting that such attainment effects reflect forms of social capital that are more readily available in faith schools than in non‐faith schools. However, the limitations of social capital theory and evidence caution against radical policy conclusions.     

The seduction of common sense: how the Right has framed the debate on America's schools

Abstract

Teachers in England have always been watched; only more recently have they been surveilled, with senior leaders, peers, students and stakeholders all collecting performance data. Yet surveillance in schools and colleges increasingly relies on watching the self, with teachers voluntarily participating in their own surveillance, making their practice visible for easy consumption by interested parties. This article builds on previous work on the surveillance of teachers to argue that this ‘conspicuous practice’ represents a convergence of surveillance and consumerism, with teachers being recreated as commodities and their own marketing agent, embodying the entrepreneurial self to maximise employability. Through social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn to exploiting open plan learning spaces, teachers engage in conspicuous practice for three main reasons: from fear, to avoid sanction; as a result of acculturation into commodified environments; as a means of routine resistance, employing the dramaturgical self for personal gain, to avoid work or re-appropriate professionalism.     

Teaching morality in schools in Utah's Religion-based society

More and more school districts in the United States are enacting morality or character education into their schools' curricula to address what they see as their students' declining moral behaviour. Utah, a state that was a homogeneous religion-based culture for 100 years, has not been immune to this need. However, the contrast between the programs being used in the now-diversifying and undiversified areas of Utah reveals what can create the sense of need to which Utah is responding. This article examines the moral environment in three school districts in Utah--one highly diversified, one in the process of diversifying and one as-yet undiversified. It reviews the various moral and character education programmes being used in these three environments and compares and contrasts their methods in terms of literature, textbooks and activities. The article concludes with an evaluation of these programmes' relative effectiveness in their specific environments.     

Social justice leadership in multicultural schools: the case of an ethnically divided society

This paper reports on the results of an exploratory study focusing on the perceptions of elementary school principals who espouse a critical multicultural approach and show signs of a social justice leadership style. The study has taken place in an ethnically divided society (Cyprus) in which the political situation seems to influence the ways in which school leaders perceive issues of justice and multiculturalism. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 principals who espoused a critical multicultural approach and subscribed to values of social justice leadership. The analysis of these principals’ interviews reveals two important findings—one concerning the conceptualization of critical multiculturalism in a society that suffers from ethnic division and the other concerning the contextualization of social justice leadership in this setting. The paper discusses the implications for leadership preparation programmes and for future research on social justice leadership and critical multiculturalism.     

学校作为社会子系统的阐释

学校是历史的产物,是培养人的机关,是教育发生的场所;学校是在社会政治、经济、文化、科学诸因素决定下的教育发生发展的社会子系统。“非学校化”对学校的发展起了催化作用,更加促使人们关注学校如何发展。