Change Through Empowerment Processes: Women's stories from South Asia and Latin America

Using two case studies, one of a woman in South Asia, the other, a Latin American woman now living in the USA, the paper identifies both obstacles and facilitators that have shaped their lives and their paths to empowerment. The authors present a model for understanding the processes of empowerment and change, especially change facilitating gender equity. This model recognises a dialectic process involving people's subjective perspectives and the ideologies, policies, structures and institutions in their public environments. It extends and problematises discussion of empowerment and change that can create more gender equity. Data for the two case studies were gathered through qualitative strategies, informed by critical feminist theory, as part of two broader research projects.     

The Educational Imagination Revisited

(Eisner, Elliot W., 1979. The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs . New York: Macmillan.)     

School Leaders Facing Real Change: shifting geography,uncertain paths

A central problem for school leadership in the United States is to create settings in which success for students motivates teachers. Meeting this objective is becoming more difficult as teachers, except the most brilliant, struggle to cope with the diversity of students in a changing socio-economic climate and a context in which there is a ‘policy vacuum’, an unclear articulation of policy issues and choices, and inconsistency in policy initiatives. This is where school leaders must step in. Improvement in classrooms rarely occurs without strong leadership from building and district leaders. The fact that many school leaders in the USA were trained to exhibit authoritative rather than democratic leadership has often led to ‘democratic minimalism’, where the emphasis is on statutory fairness and majority rule, but not on full involvement of affected parties, such as teachers, students, and parents. The issues in contemporary leadership in areas of disadvantage are illustrated through the experience of one Minnesota elementary|spagf|ro|epagf| |spagf|it|epagf|school principal, and the wider implications for school leaders are discussed.     

Doing the Public's Business: Florida's Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers, 1959–1964

In this article, I argue the proposition that educators ought to be including a serious consideration of intelligent design as a counterexample to the scientific explanations of human origins. The article first distinguishes between three different ways people ask “why”: the Scientific Why, the Ultimate Why, and the Teleological Why. Although science answers the first Why with a high degree of confidence, it does not answer the second or third Why at all. An exclusive focus on questions with empirical answers reduces the education experience, eliminating much of value from it, especially a sense of wonder at unanswerable questions.     

Culturalizing Achievement Goal Theory and Research

This article is primarily designed to provide a cultural analysis of the literature on achievement goals. First, an overview of the four dominant approaches to the study of culture—namely, cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology, indigenous psychology, and psychological anthropology—is offered. Second, we analyze the extant body of research on achievement goals according to the three metatheoretical orientations of absolutism, relativism, and universalism and argue that cultural research on motivation should adopt a universalist approach as it is most consistent with a motivational science perspective. Finally, we conclude with concrete recommendations for how future research on culture and motivation should proceed in light of a universalistic perspective.     

Iris Murdoch, Liberal Education and Human Flourishing

Articulating the good of liberal education—what we should teach and why we should teach it—is necessary to resist the subversion of liberal education to economic or political ends and the mania for measurable skills. I argue that Iris Murdoch's philosophical writings enrich the work of contemporary Aristotelians, such as Joseph Dunne and Alasdair MacIntyre, on these issues. For Murdoch, studies in the arts and intellectual subjects, by connecting students to the inescapable contingency and finitude of human existence, contribute to the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtues and thus to human flourishing.