Curriculum charts and time in undergraduate education

This paper examines the organization and representation of time in certain kinds of undergraduate programs, here represented by a sociology program in a US university. Written requirements for the major are analyzed as constituting a ‘chart’ that defines academic time in terms of units of before–after relationships. The paper shows how students ‘reuse’ these temporal units when charting paths through the university and reckoning their academic work to specific futures.     

Networks and Contexts of Reform

Reforms and their contexts have unsettledboundaries. Actors construct themselves ascontexts for reforms in part by advancingdefinitions of those reforms: Reformsthemselves both presuppose and createcontextual frames. Drawing on actor networktheory and related approaches, this paperexamines the play of context and reform interms of efforts to construct and stabilizeeducational networks of differentconfigurations and scale. The fall and rise oftwo attempts at statewide curriculum reform inVirginia (USA) provide illustrations of how thenature of reform artifacts and the networksthrough which they circulate shape the politicsof reform.     

Wizards and witches: parent advocates and contention in special education in the USA

Drawing on interviews with parents of children with significant disabilities, as well as administrators and special education consultants, between the early 1990s and 2008 in a mid‐Atlantic US state, this paper examines the work of parental advocates as they translate special education policies to negotiate concessions for parents, bring issues into public debate, or attempt to incite other parents to activism. Advocates, we suggest, act as bridging agents in generating networks, connecting parents with others, articulating their knowledge with other parents’ knowledge, and bringing additional communicative resources to encounters. The paper illuminates approaches to advocacy work and traces the tensions and shifts from adversarial/participatory constructions of advocacy work toward more professionalizing/meditational constructions as the articulations of local institutional arrangements and national disability law and politics evolve.     

Schooling for the long-term: elite education and temporal accumulation

How do we make sense of educational strategies that stretch across decades and generations? Taking the case of elite bankers in the US, this article argues that part of the strength of their education is its ability to accumulate and protect learning over the long-term, through long-term education strategies and structures. Synthesizing key recent texts on banking, the article describes four of these strategies—institutional wormholes, biographically entrained field structures, quasi-school structures, and inter-generational folding. These are tentative identifications: the article is a conceptual foray, an effort to define a problematic of the long-term in elite schooling, with implications for education in general.     

Strangers and Professionals: Positioning Discourse in ESL Teachers’ Work

English Language Learners (ELLs) usually spend most of the school day with regular classroom teachers. The ability of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers to help these students, then, depends in part on their ability to influence how the classroom teachers think of ELL students and ESL itself. One way ESL teachers do this is through “positioning discourses”—discursive practices that connect the children in certain ways to neighborhood reputations, political imagery, policy priorities, and professional responsibilities. This paper examines how ESL teachers in two contrasting school systems produce different kinds of positioning discourses in responding to different contextual constraints and pressures. Drawing on interview data, we show how teachers in an urban setting use elements of neighborhood reputation to position their students, while teachers in a more affluent suburb use discourses of expertise and professional knowledge to reshape the way ESL is understood. Our goals are to explicate how these discourses are produced and used.     

School field trips and the curriculum of public spaces

Drawing on material from an ethnographic study, I examine transformations in the nature of public spaces for children, and the school's role in producing those spaces. Space is treated as a product of social practice, not simply a frame for it. I contend that, as young children are increasingly immobilized in urban landscapes, school field trips become critical occasions for introducing them to, and framing their participation in, public spaces. I focus primarily on a field trip to an art museum in a redeveloped downtown, and then look briefly at a different type of trip, illustrated by a visit to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.     

EDUCATION AND PLACE: A REVIEW ESSAY

Abstract In this review essay, Jan Nespor uses three recent contributions to place‐based education, Paul Theobald’s Teaching the Commons, C.A. Bowers’s Revitalizing the Commons, and David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith‘s edited volume Place‐Based Education in the Global Age, to examine some fundamental conceptual and practical issues in the area. One is how “place” is defined in place‐based education theory, and in particular how moralizing idealizations of place woven into problematic distinctions (place/nonplace, urban/rural, local/global, and so on) may actually make it harder for us to understand education and place. A second is how class, ethnicity, gender, and other forms of difference are addressed — or not — in the field’s theoretical formulations. Finally, Nespor explores problems of articulating the visions of place‐based education in these texts with larger social or political movements to transform schooling and environmental practices.