In this article, the author argues that Method sections in social science research reports, particularly those that employ qualitative methods, often lack sufficient detail to make any results that ...follow from the analytic method trustworthy. The author provides a brief review of the evolution of the Method section from the 1960s to the present, makes a case for a more robust reporting of research method, and then outlines one way to achieve the end of providing a detailed, specific account of research methods that enable readers to understand unambiguously the means by which data are rendered into results. This consideration includes attention to the reporting of data collection, data reduction, data analysis, and the context of the investigation to make it clear why an illustrative presentation of data supports the claim that it offers.
This volume explores the literacy education master's degree program developed at Universidad de Guadalajara in Jalisco, Mexico, with the aim of addressing the nation's emerging social, economic, ...technological, and political needs. Developing the program required taking into account the cultural diversity, historical economic disparities, indigenous and colonial cultures, and power inequities of the Mexican nation. These conditions have produced economic structures that maintain the status quo that concentrates wealth and opportunity in the hands of the very few, creating challenges for the education and economic life for the majority of the population. The program advocates providing tools for youth to critique and change their surroundings, while also learning the codes of power that provide them a repertoire of navigational means for producing satisfying lives.
Rather than arguing that the program can be replicated or taken to scale in different contexts, the editors focus on how their process of looking inward to consider Mexican cultures enabled them to develop an appropriate educational program to address Mexico's historically low literacy rates. They show that if all teaching and learning is context-dependent, then focusing on the process of program development, rather than on the outcomes that may or may not be easily applied to other settings, is appropriate for global educators seeking to provide literacy teacher education grounded in national concerns and challenges. The volume provides a process model for developing an organic program designed to address needs in a national context, especially one grounded in both colonial and heritage cultures and one in which literacy is understood as a tool for social critique, redress, advancement, and equity.
In this book Peter Smagorinsky and Joel Taxel analyze the ways in which the perennial issue of character education has been articulated in the United States, both historically and in the current ...character education movement that began in earnest in the 1990s. The goal is to uncover the ideological nature of different conceptions of character education. The authors show how the current discourses are a continuation of discourse streams through which character education and the national purpose have been debated for hundreds of years, most recently in what are known as the Culture Wars--the intense, often passionate debates about morality, culture, and values carried out by politicians, religious groups, social policy foundations, and a wide range of political commentators and citizens, in which the various stakeholders have sought influence over a wide range of social and economic issues, including education. The centerpiece is a discourse analysis of proposals funded by the United States Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). Discourse profiles from sets of states that exhibit two distinct conceptions of character are examined and the documents from particular states are placed in dialogue with the OERI Request for Proposals. One profile reflects the dominant perspective promoted in the U.S., based on an authoritarian view in which young people are indoctrinated into the value system of presumably virtuous adults through didactic instruction. The other reflects the well-established yet currently marginal discourse emphasizing attention to the whole environment in which character is developed and enacted and in which reflection on morality, rather than didactic instruction in morality, is the primary instructional approach. By focusing on these two distinct regions and their conceptions of character, the authors situate the character education movement at the turn of the twenty-first century in the context of
Purpose This study aims to consider the role of emotions, especially those related to empathy, in promoting a more humane education that enables students to reach out across kinship chasms to promote ...the development of communities predicated on a shared value on mutual respect. This attention to empathy includes a review of the rational basis for much schooling, introduces skepticism about the façade of rational thinking, reviews the emotionally flat character of classrooms, attends to the emotional dimensions of literacy education, argues on behalf of taking emotions into account in developmental theories and links empathic connections with social justice efforts. The study’s main thrust is that empathy is a key emotional quality that does not come naturally or easily to many, yet is important to cultivate if social justice is a goal of education. Design/methodology/approach The author clicked Essay and Conceptual Paper. Yet the author required to write the research design. Findings The author clicked Essay and Conceptual Paper. Yet the author required to write the research design. Research limitations/implications The author clicked Essay and Conceptual Paper. Yet the author required to write the research design. Originality/value The paper challenges the rational emphasis of schooling and argues for more attention to the ways in which emotions shape thinking.
Because literacy is not just the English teacher's job Think literacy is just for English teachers? Not anymore. Nor should it be when you consider that each discipline has its own unique values and ...means of expression. These days, it's up to all teachers to communicate what it means to be literate in their disciplines. Here, finally, is a book ambitious enough to tackle the topic across all major subject areas. Smagorinsky and his colleagues provide an insider's lens on both the states of their fields and their specific literacy requirements, including: * Reviews of the latest issues and research * Scenario-based activities for reflection and discussion * Considerations of the textual forms and conventions required in all major disciplines
This article provides a reconception of what is known as Vygotsky's “zone of proximal development,” particularly its improper conflation with the notion of “instructional scaffolding.” The article ...introduces the essay's purpose and motivation; reviews and critiques Vygotsky's description of the ZPD and explains how it has come to be misinterpreted; summarizes Wood, Bruner, and Ross's introduction of the scaffolding metaphor; and provides a different, more accurate translation of the ZPD as the zone of next development, based on the documentary film The Butterflies of Zagorsk. Through this analysis, the author contends that the conflation of scaffolding with the ZPD has produced a trivialization of Vygotsky's greater body of work, reducing it to a briefly-mentioned pedagogical idea and resulting in the neglect of his more important project of generating a comprehensive cultural-historical-social theory of mediated human development.
This article emphasizes the importance of understanding local contexts to provide appropriate education for teachers about literacy instruction. The author reviews general problems that follow from ...extrapolating from unrepresentative research samples and the errors and deficit conceptions that follow from assuming that all cognition takes place within the human skull, irrespective of the contexts that shape human development and immediate textual exchanges. The author then demonstrates challenges to his own thinking when he used a book he coedited for U.S. educators in the context of a literacy education program at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. This narrative relates how the book was rewritten by the teachers in his seminar to have relevance, with extensive adaptations required. The author emphasizes the contextual facets of literacy development, and the need to think in terms of the settings of teaching and learning in university teacher education programs.
This article contrasts two beliefs about the relation between the emotions and the intellect. Each sees emotional responses as fundamental and primary sources of thinking. Each sees a different role ...for the intellect following emotional responses to worldly phenomena. L. S. Vygotsky, articulating a belief common at his time, sees the intellect as a disciplining force, one that, after a pause or interlude, serves to temper emotions to produce a “catharsis” and what he calls “intelligent emotions,” those subjected to rational thought and a higher plane of cognition than either emotion or intellect could produce alone. Jonathan Haidt, following Vygotsky by nearly a century, asserts that emotions control cognition, rather than as Vygotsky conceives, being subordinated by reason. Haidt, in the tradition of David Hume and with more empirical data than Vygotsky provides for his view, sees the passions ruling human thought and action. Any accompanying reason serves to rationalize gut feelings rather than to control them; reason, Haidt argues, is a “rationalist delusion” that gives emotional thinking the veneer of reason. This article outlines both positions and attempts to reach a synthesis of their views.
This article reviews Vygotsky's writings on arts (particularly logocentric art including the theater) and emotions, drawing on his initial exploration in The Psychology of Art and his final ...considerations set forth in a set of essays, treatises, and lectures produced in the last years of his life. The review of The Psychology of Art includes attention to the limits of his analysis, the mixed Marxist legacy that is evident in the book, the cultural blinders that affect his vision of the relative value of different artistic productions, the content of what he elsewhere refers to his "tedious investigations" into extant views, and the gist of what he considers to be the essence of art. Attention to his late work falls into two areas: Emotion in formal drama and emotion in everyday drama, each of which involves perezhivanie, roughly but incompletely characterized as emotional experience. The article concludes with an effort to situate Vygotsky's writing on art and emotion both within his broader effort to articulate a comprehensive developmental psychology of socially, culturally, and historically grounded individuals and social groups, and within scholarship that has extended and questioned his work as his influence has expanded beyond the clinics of Soviet Moscow.
This essay compares and contrasts the educational movements of three nations--the United States, Mexico, and the Soviet Union--established according to Eurocentric cultural values. In each country, ...mass education was undertaken to help produce an assimilative national culture during formative periods characterized by instability. In two of these nations, the U.S. and Mexico, this foundation eventually required an accommodation to address multiculturalism. This latter-day perspective is designed to recognize, respect, and appreciate a variety of cultures. This essay examines the ways in which these two oppositional goals--monoculturalism and multiculturalism--have intersected in schools. KEYWORDS: Multicultural education, educational history, inequity, national culture, standardization
