On Building Islands of Decency

In this article, I argue that at its best, work in the foundations of education is about building islands of decency, borrowing from a metaphor originally used by Myles Horton. Horton suggests that in times of crisis and despair, we can work our way out of pessimism by surrounding ourselves with people who share some of our goals for a better world and working with them to create pockets of decency that are contagious. I begin by describing some of the commitments we share in the foundations field, focusing specifically on the ways we work toward social justice, diversity, and democracy. I then describe three tensions we must navigate in our work to be decent as scholars and people, unpacking the meaning of decency throughout the article. These are tensions between construction and critique, inquiry and advocacy, and humanist and instrumentalist rationality. I end by sketching some visions of hope and possibility, what the American Educational Studies Association can be in our next 50 years if we nourish the best of our habits and tendencies, and work to address some of our challenges.     

Articulating the Purpose of a Social Foundations of Education Course through Instructor Self-Interviews

Within contemporary political discourses that narrowly characterize learning in terms of high-stakes standardized examinations, the value of the social foundations of education for teachers is increasingly questioned and challenged by those within and outside programs of teacher education. Even more troubling, prospective teachers often struggle to identify the purpose and usefulness of social foundations for their work as teachers. In this self-study, I engaged in a form of self-interviewing that I adapted to the self-study context in order to better articulate the nuances, complexities, and tensions in the purpose of social foundations for teachers' practice.     

Social foundations of lifelong learning: a Habermasian perspective

ABSTRACT

The idea of learning rooted in behavioural psychology has become dominant in the field of teaching and learning for several decades. Even though it has been widely used in formal education it is inadequate for informing lifelong learning policies and plans. In this paper, first I critique the psychological foundation of learning and in the second part, drawing on Habermasian conceptualisation of three structural components of the lifeworld (culture, society, and personality), I conceptualise the three components as the social foundations of learning: learning as cultural reproduction, learning as social integration and learning as socialisation. In the context of the UN’s declaration of ‘lifelong learning’ as one of the Sustainable Development Goals, this paper will be useful for developing policies to address challenges faced by individual countries at cultural, societal and individual levels.     

Coercion,possibility, or context? Questioning the role of private foundations in American higher education

As an academic, I grapple with the role of private foundations in higher education; on the one hand, as a critical scholar-activist committed to radical social and economic change, and on the other hand, as a participant in foundation-funded academic projects. I recognize the contradictory position I occupy within an institution that has historically served the status quo. In this paper I attempt to deal with the question of whether foundation funds, historically made possible by our unjust social system, have the capacity to contribute to the systemic social and economic changes I – alongside like-minded colleagues – strive to realize. Specifically, I look at the role of foundations in American higher education for the purpose of agitating hegemonic ideas and challenging us to ask difficult questions about our day-to-day practices.     

Revitalizing the Field of Educational Foundations and PK–20 Educators' Commitment to Social Justice and Issues of Equity in an Age of Neoliberalism

In this article, we situate the imminent extinction of educational foundations within larger macro contexts, including the corporate control of knowledge production, the marginalization of critical academics who challenge the social, economic, and political status quos, and the global (United States in particular) economic recession. We also reaffirm why the field of educational foundations is important for this particular historical moment. In an effort to fight neoliberalism's stranglehold on PK–20 education, we provide guideposts for other like-minded critical educators. Specifically, these guideposts speak to why educational foundations are (despite their maltreatment and marginalization) an integral part to PK–12 teacher preparation and provide a call to action requiring educational foundations faculty members to inform those who still do not know that schools serve to reinforce the existing power, political, race, and economic relations.     

How (German) foundations shape the concept of education: Towards an understanding of their use of discourses

In this article I examine how foundations use the concept of education and how they try to shape its definition and implementation. In accordance with Steven Lukes’ notion, I argue that changes in social fields are mainly triggered by normative and semantic shifts. By drawing on techniques of discourse analysis, I explore the use of discursive strategies and the discursive interpretations of education, as both its definition and its operationalization have consequences on the identification of educational needs and outcomes. It is shown that foundations regard the use of education as an opportunity to influence values, traditions, and future generations. Furthermore, foundations take part in debates on education in order to increase social influence, to be accepted as legitimate actors in education, and to be perceived as competent and indispensable players in defining educational goals.     

Interpretive validity theory: mapping a methodology for validating educational assessments

Background:?Validity theory has evolved significantly over the past 30 years in response to the increased use of assessments across scientific, social and educational settings. The overarching trajectory of this evolution reflects a shift from a purely quantitative, positivistic approach to a conception of validity reliant on the interpretation of multiple evidence sources integrated into validity arguments. Moreover, within contemporary validity, interpretation has been emphasised as a central process; however, despite this emphasis, there have been few explicit articulations of specific interpretive methodologies applicable to the practice of validation.

Purpose:?To link contemporary theoretical foundations in validity to practical methods and structures to help guide the collection and analysis of interpretive validity evidence. By building upon existing validity theory, this paper aims to provide greater clarity on the practice of validation and contribute toward the larger developing framework for the validation of educational assessments.

Source of evidence:?An interdisciplinary, integrative review of over 60 research articles and sources related to the theory and practice of educational validation and interpretive inquiry approaches. Sources include literature from the fields of educational assessment and more broadly social scientific research.

Main argument:?As assessments in education increasingly aim to measure complex constructs that are value-laden and socially dependant, validity theory must keep pace and evolve in ways that address the inherent complexities associated with contemporary educational assessment. Through this paper, I assert that a greater understanding of interpretive methodologies represents one of the most promising areas for development of validation theory and practice. Specifically, I argue that dialectic, hermeneutic and transgressive forms of inquiry can be integrated within current argument-based structures for the collection, analysis and representation of validity evidence in several useful ways.

Conclusions:?Interpretive inquiry processes, namely dialectic, hermeneutic and transgressive forms of interpretation, serve to expand validation practice to include diverse evidences for the generation of multiple-perspective validity arguments. The paper concludes with specific implications for future research and practice within the field of interpretive validity theory.     

Racial Tokenism in the School Workplace: An Exploratory Study of Black Teachers in Overwhelmingly White Schools

The attempt to reform education using performance-based accountability may eventually be applied to teacher education. If so, it poses a potential challenge to those in social foundations as well as to other teacher-educators. Among other things, it requires that we think clearly about our mission and the kinds of effects we would like to have. Some difficulties involved in responding to this challenge are outlined in the following. A conception of the mission of social foundations that makes it easier to develop a coherent response is suggested. Central to the analysis is the notion that social foundations is dedicated to fostering adaptive reconceptualization of educational activity all the way down.     

Understanding the Philosophical Foundations of Disabilities to Maximize the Potential of Response to Intervention

In the United States and elsewhere in the world, disabilities are being studied by two different schools of thought: special education and disability studies. In the field of special education, analyses are often pragmatic and instrumental. In contrast, analyses in the field of disability studies are often historical and cultural, explaining disabilities as constructed by social value. This lack of agreement about disabilities leads us to ask: How can practitioners and researchers begin to address the issue of which students might need intensive interventions for their disabilities through the response to intervention (RTI) approach when disabilities are viewed so differently by scholars in the field? In this article I compare and contrast the philosophical foundations of disabilities in special education and disability studies and conclude that the dimensions of pragmatic, instrumental, historical, and cultural factors must be taken into account in order to achieve both the macro and micro levels of RTI implementation.     

Leaving Safe Harbors: Toward a New Progressivism in American Education and Public Life. Dennis Carlson. New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002. Pp. x, 200. $ 125.00 (hardcover).

The third edition of the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies (Standards) challenge us to envision what “a more holistic, inclusive and intellectually challenging approach to preparing educators” might look like. This article discusses how the operating principles of a teacher education program parallel the commitments for educators found in the Standards and explores why collaborative relationships between teacher education and social foundations matter. Given the current political and social climate surrounding the field of education, it is important for those of us in the field of social foundations to think outside the box.     

Researching Environmental and Sustainability Education Policy: Slumbers and Awakenings

This article offers a series of reflections based on a recent edited collection, Environmental and Sustainability Education Policy: International Trends, Priorities and Challenges. As one of its editors, here I bring together key features of the collection and themes pertinent to this emerging field of scholarship, to offer some way-markers for possible future research avenues. Taken together, I trust these observations might help others navigate what we encountered in policy studies and practice development, and illuminate various blank, blind, bald and bright spots for research and policy in both environmental and sustainability education, and related fields of inquiry.     

Using a Delphi study to clarify the landscape and core outcomes in environmental education

Abstract

When leaders in a field agree upon core outcomes for the field, connection, reinforcement, and a shared vision of change are synergistically strengthened. Even when the field is dynamic, theoretically wide-ranging, and dispersed, consensus around core outcomes can help develop strategic research agendas and priorities. Environmental education (EE) is an inherently interdisciplinary field drawing on diverse theoretical foundations and epistemological orientations, resulting in a broad conceptual and empirical landscape. To better understand and situate this within EE, we pursued a modified Delphi study, with participation from 44 professionals and leaders active in North America. Over three Delphi rounds, the panel came to agreement on five core outcomes that focus the EE field: (1) environmentally related action and behavior change, (2) connecting people to nature, (3) improving environmental outcomes, (4) improving social/cultural outcomes, and (5) learning environmentally relevant skills and competencies. Reflecting those commonalities, we propose the following encapsulating statement to describe the field’s core outcomes: Environmental education works to move people to action for the tangible benefit of the environment and humanity. To realize these benefits, people must connect experientially with the environment, learn needed skills, and understand the complicated social and cultural connections between humanity and the natural environment.     

社区基金会:地位与前景——对一个类社区基金会的个案研究

当下,社区基金会对于中国的学界和实践界仍然是个相当陌生的概念。但是转型中出现的一些回应本土问题的草根性组织已渐具社区基金会的雏形——“类社区基金会”。在探索和实践的过程中,类社区基金会积极激活并建构社区社会资本,整合社区资源,满足着一些弱势群体通过官方正式救助渠道不能及时接纳或者不能充分满足的福利需求,并在一定程度上促进了社会整合。在国家单中心福利供给模式迈向福利多元主义的进程中,福利取向的非政治威胁/危险的类社区基金会有可能会转型为社区基金会,成为社区建设和可持续发展一个有潜力的切入点和支撑点。     

市场经济、道德建设与构建和谐社会

经济发展、道德建设与社会的和谐发展是密不可分的。在社会主义初级阶段,要构建和谐发展的社会,必须靠大力发展市场经济为其提供物质基础,大力加强社会主义道德建设为其奠定思想基础。同时,正确处理好市场经济和社会主义道德建设的关系,也是建设和谐社会的客观需要和重要保障。     

Signature Pedagogies for Social Foundations: Negotiating Social Foundations Teaching Practices in the Field of Education

The conflicts arising between the pedagogical preferences of the fields of instructional design and technology (IDT) and social foundations of education are substantial. This conflict is primarily one of pedagogical values separating the Social Foundations with its emphasis on critical and creative thinking and the presumption of value and theory neutrality inherent in IDT. This is a serious issue because, increasingly, educators use IDT models to translate Social Foundations courses with social justice and equity outcomes into online formats. Much is lost. This article offers a discussion of the theoretical grounding of IDT (task-analysis) versus social foundations in regards to implications for the instructional social organization of online social foundations classrooms. This article uses the notion of signature pedagogy to describe sociocultural literacies as a basic tenet in social foundations of education. By doing so, it is demonstrated how these important theoretical positions are currently playing out in online instruction and space, to extend their relevance by introducing newer concepts such as Digital Cartesianism and copresence, and to provide a concrete example of what these concerns look like in the current push towards digital formats. In the current context of the use of electronic, social, communication, and mobile technologies in education, we find a new site to continue challenging the assumed neutrality of the technological model for education.     

The Social Foundations Classroom

In this article, we promote the use of autobiography in the social foundations of education classroom as a means of connecting education to real life experiences, history, and fostering epistemological development of college students. Autobiography involves students' awareness of the relation between theory and lived experience. As a form of reflective knowing, autobiography may help students understand complex terms such as "learning," "knowledge," and "education" by exploring various contexts that influence such understandings. Reflective knowing explores some of the experiential and purposive contexts that influence knowledge creation. Intellectual maturity and self-awareness may arise from circumstances that can lead students to be more confident critical thinkers and problem solvers. We describe how we have used autobiography in our social foundations of education classrooms and explore how influencing the pedagogy of teacher education critiques traditional epistemologies toward a redefinition of education for a democratic society.

Now reflecting on my educational history, I realize that everything I have learned in the past has taught me something about myself. Whether I was aware of my development at the time [hinges] on individual circumstances. I have thrived on learning, brought about by major changes impacting my life. These variations and my necessary adaptations have taught me the most important skill I need to know. Because of changes in my life, I have succeeded in learning how to learn. (Rita, Bucknell University, learning autobiography, September 1999)1

If I can make present the shapes and structures of a perceived world, even though they have been layered over with many rational meanings over time, I believe my own past will appear in altered ways and that my presently lived life - and, I would like to say, teaching - will become more grounded, more pungent, and less susceptible to logical rationalization, not to speak of rational instrumentality. (Greene 1995, 77-78)     

ARTICLES

Since publication of the 1986 Carnegie Commission report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, the professional teaching standards movement has gained noticeable momentum. The professional standards movement in teaching has been fueled by national organizations such as the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the Interstate New Teachers Assessment and Support Consortium, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, and by close collaboration among these four entities. Further, nearly all of the fifty states are embracing the professional standards movement through formal participation in the work of one or more of these organizations. Although the professional standards movement in teaching is strong and growing stronger, its implications are not clear for instructional programs in social foundations of education, either at the teacher preparation or the advanced graduate levels. In response to the standards movement, social foundations educators have a number of options before them, three of which are to (1) largely ignore these developments, as "this too shall pass"; (2) critically interpret and resist these developments through scholarship and collective professional action, as social foundations scholars did with Competency Based Teacher Education in the 1970s; and (3) critically interpret these developments while working to strengthen the potential of the professional teaching standards movement to achieve its stated goal of providing caring and qualified teachers for every classroom in the nation. Of these three options, the last is most advisable, but it presents a considerable challenge to social foundations educators. Although the absence of social foundations skills, perspectives, and understanding should make it very difficult for teacher candidates and teachers to perform well on standards-based teaching assessments, there is no guarantee that these assessments will hold candidates accountable for social foundations learning. Implications for social foundations educators and activists are significant.     

Young children,gender and the heterosexual matrix

In this paper I consider the adult focus of current mainstream gender theory. I relate this to how the concept of the heterosexual matrix originates in a social contract which excludes children from civil society. I argue that this exclusion is problematic both for theoretical reasons and from the perspective of children themselves. I start by discussing the nature of the heterosexual matrix and its foundations. I consider the implications for participation which arise from being named as a child, how that affects children's attempts to claim participation in civil society, and how this is related to children's naming of themselves as gendered. I then briefly consider the possibility that, because of their exclusion, children might also be considered to be exempt from the heterosexual matrix. However, I argue, there is considerable evidence that children are actively sexual beings who also work hard to claim inclusion in local practices of heterosexuality. I end by suggesting that there are three key reasons for this: that the discourses of normative sexuality provide children with a language to express sexual feelings; that self-insertion in the heterosexual matrix is a way for children to claim rights to participation; and that taking up heterosexual formations is a means whereby children can experience the power of naming themselves as part of the social world.     

Social Foundations of Education as an Unwelcome Counter-Narrative and as Educational Praxis

I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on the field of Social Foundations of Education (SFE), in part because it affords an opportunity to advance an historical analysis of the trajectory of the field different from what we provided when my colleagues and I sent to press the Handbook of Research the Social Foundations of Education in 2009 (Tozer, Gallegos, Henry, 2011 Tozer, S. E., & Butts, R. F. (2011). The evolution of social foundations of education. In Tozer, S., Gallegos, B., & Henry, A., (Eds), Handbook of research in the social foundations of education (pp. 1–14). New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). I also welcome the opportunity to acknowledge a particular activist tradition established by earlier generations of Social Foundations scholars who have influenced my work. To quote Stuart Hall, these men and women engaged Social Foundations “as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect” (in Tozer et?al., 2011 Tozer, S., Gallegos, B., & Henry, A. (2011). (Eds.). Handbook of research in the social foundations of education (p. 11). New York, NY: Routledge. [Google Scholar], p. 11). Finally, this occasion invites a perspective on the equity work in Chicago Public Schools that we have pursued since I introduced it in my AESA Presidential Address in 2006.     

A Path Worth Taking: The Development of Social Justice in Outdoor Experiential Education

This article examines the influences promoting social justice in the field of outdoor experiential education. The philosophical foundations of outdoor adventure including the work of John Dewey and Kurt Hahn are considered in light of social justice education. The historical evolution of social justice activism within the professional community is analyzed. Other influential trends including the development of outdoor programs sensitive to social justice concerns, the cross fertilization from other related fields, and the demographic and economic imperatives to transform the field are described. The methodological fit between outdoor experiential education and social justice education is the final influence presented. The article concludes that potentials for social justice education within the outdoor experiential education field create an imperative for inclusion.