Effects of preschoolers’ storybook exposure and literacy environments on lower level and higher level language skills

Reading and Writing - The development of preschoolers’ language skills is influenced by literacy environments and individual differences in storybook exposure. Extant research is limited as...     

Pedagogy of the anxious: rethinking critical pedagogy in the context of neoliberal autonomy and responsibilization

Critical pedagogy, and the work of Paulo Freire in particular, understands the struggle for emancipation as involving the emergence, as historical subjects, of those who have been marginalized. In this regard, this tradition could be said to foreground a politics of the subject as central to its philosophy. However, scholars of critical pedagogy have not adequately attended to the reorganization of subjectivity that neoliberalism itself proposes. In the context of a pervasive anxiety produced by contemporary processes of precarity and fragmentation, neoliberalism asks us to understand ourselves on the basis of principles of individual responsibility, autonomy, and competition. Starting from the Foucauldian notion of governmentality and the Lacanian notions of drive and desire, I describe how this neoliberal recomposition of the subject poses a challenge to key principles in critical pedagogy. Thus, Freire’s account of the paralysis that characterizes the oppressed stands in contrast to the particular autonomy and hypermobility that neoliberalism demands. Likewise, the privileging of the sphere of consciousness in Freire overlooks the structure of libidinal investments within neoliberal circuits of consumption and communication. This interrogation has implications for critical education in the present, which I argue should invite students to betray the compulsions of their anxious autonomy in favor of a collective commitment and enlivened agency.     

‘To honor and glorify God’: the role of religion in one intercollegiate athletics culture

Numerous events have provided evidence that the cultural values and assumptions of intercollegiate athletic departments are often incongruent with those of their host institutions. This discrepancy has even been evident in Christian institutions which seek to integrate faith into the learning experience. Using the organizational culture perspective, this study sought to determine how religion influenced the culture of one intercollegiate athletics department. The study took place at a highly selective evangelical Christian college with a nationally competitive athletic department. Data were collected through interviews with 19 campus leaders, observation of cultural events and document analysis. Analysis occurred qualitatively through a process of theorizing. The results indicate that evangelical Christianity played a significant role in the athletic department's culture by constraining its membership, influencing its pedagogy and guiding department decisions. As a result, its values and assumptions were consistent with those of the overall campus culture. The reasons underlying this cultural integration offer coaches and administrators of all institutional affiliations the possibility that the organizational culture perspective can be used to create athletic programs that are more consistent with institutional values.     

Classroom Activities and Areas: Regularity of Use and Perceptions of Adaptability by General Early Educators

This report describes a mail survey of general early educators from Head Start, public school pre-kindergarten, public school kindergarten, and community preschool/child care programs. The purposes were to secure information about the availability of classroom activities and areas, and to obtain the respondents' perceptions of the ease with which activities and areas could be adapted to accommodate children with disabilities. Of the 893 mailed questionnaires, 483 (54.1%) were returned and coded. The respondents reportedly used a wide range of classroom activities and areas, and they rated those activities and areas as moderately easy to adapt. Also, respondents from mainstreamed programs used slightly more activities and perceived the activities as easier to adapt than did respondents from non-mainstreamed programs. The findings appear to indicate that placement of children with disabilities in segregated programs cannot be justified on grounds that integration will restrict the range of activities available to typically developing children, or on the grounds that the adaptations are perceived by program staff as too difficult to be accomplished.