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Author: Amy Binder
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825458
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
This book compares two challenges made to American public school curricula in the 1980s and 1990s. It identifies striking similarities between proponents of Afrocentrism and creationism, accounts for their differential outcomes, and draws important conclusions for the study of culture, organizations, and social movements. Amy Binder gives a brief history of both movements and then describes how their challenges played out in seven school districts. Despite their very different constituencies--inner-city African American cultural essentialists and predominately white suburban Christian conservatives--Afrocentrists and creationists had much in common. Both made similar arguments about oppression and their children's well-being, both faced skepticism from educators about their factual claims, and both mounted their challenges through bureaucratic channels. In each case, challenged school systems were ultimately able to minimize or reject challengers' demands, but the process varied by case and type of challenge. Binder finds that Afrocentrists were more successful in advancing their cause than were creationists because they appeared to offer a solution to the real problem of urban school failure, met with more administrative sympathy toward their complaints of historic exclusion, sought to alter lower-prestige curricula (history, not science), and faced opponents who lacked a legal remedy comparable to the rule of church-state separation invoked by creationism's opponents. Binder's analysis yields several lessons for social movements research, suggesting that researchers need to pay greater attention to how movements seek to influence bureaucratic decision making, often from within. It also demonstrates the benefits of examining discursive, structural, and institutional factors in concert.
Author: Amy Binder
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400825458
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
This book compares two challenges made to American public school curricula in the 1980s and 1990s. It identifies striking similarities between proponents of Afrocentrism and creationism, accounts for their differential outcomes, and draws important conclusions for the study of culture, organizations, and social movements. Amy Binder gives a brief history of both movements and then describes how their challenges played out in seven school districts. Despite their very different constituencies--inner-city African American cultural essentialists and predominately white suburban Christian conservatives--Afrocentrists and creationists had much in common. Both made similar arguments about oppression and their children's well-being, both faced skepticism from educators about their factual claims, and both mounted their challenges through bureaucratic channels. In each case, challenged school systems were ultimately able to minimize or reject challengers' demands, but the process varied by case and type of challenge. Binder finds that Afrocentrists were more successful in advancing their cause than were creationists because they appeared to offer a solution to the real problem of urban school failure, met with more administrative sympathy toward their complaints of historic exclusion, sought to alter lower-prestige curricula (history, not science), and faced opponents who lacked a legal remedy comparable to the rule of church-state separation invoked by creationism's opponents. Binder's analysis yields several lessons for social movements research, suggesting that researchers need to pay greater attention to how movements seek to influence bureaucratic decision making, often from within. It also demonstrates the benefits of examining discursive, structural, and institutional factors in concert.
Author: Juliet Williams
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520288963
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Rethinking gender equality -- Single-sex education in historical perspective -- "We've got to try something" : the male academy initiatives -- What about the girls? -- Single-sex public education and the popular neuroscience of sex difference -- Different but equal? : reflections on the future of gender discourse
Author: International Debate Education Association
Publisher: IDEA
ISBN: 9780972054164
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
"An invaluable resource for debaters, The Debatabase Book provides background, arguments and resources on more than 125 debate topics in areas as diverse as business, science and technology, environment, politics, religion, culture, and education. All topics have been updated and 15 new topics added for the revised edition." "Each entry presents: an introduction placing the topic in context; arguments pro and con; sample motions; and Web links and print resources for further research. Organized in a handy A-Z format, the book also includes a topical index for easy searching."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Catherine Hands
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1617354015
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
The work of school, family and community partnerships is complex and messy and demands a thoughtful and deep investigation. Currently, parent and community involvement does not draw on school reform and educational change literature and conversely the school change literature often ignores the crucial role that communities play in educational reform. This edited volume focuses on structural considerations regarding education and the school communities, school-level and family culture, and the interrelationships between the agency and actions of school personnel, family members, community citizens and students. This book extends the dialogue on school reform by looking at parent and community engagement initiatives as part of the school reform literature. The contributors illustrate the negative impact on students and their education when assumptions made by school personnel regarding the organization of education, the nature of families, and the contributions they should make to their children’s education are not challenged.
Author: Cheris Shun-ching Chan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199875219
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Marketing Death is the first book to offer an analysis of the emergence of a life insurance market outside of a Western context. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, it documents the processes and politics through which local cultures shape the way a market is formed and thereby sheds light on the dynamics through which modern capitalist enterprises diffuse insurance to regions with different cultural traditions.
Author: Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019935846X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
The schoolhouse has long been a crucible in the construction and contestation of the political concept of "family values." Through Spanish-bilingual and sex education, moderates and conservatives in California came to define the family as a politicized and racialized site in the late 1960s and 1970s. Sex education became a vital arena in the culture wars as cultural conservatives imagined the family as imperiled by morally lax progressives and liberals who advocated for these programs attempted to manage the onslaught of sexual explicitness in broader culture. Many moderates, however, doubted the propriety of addressing such sensitive issues outside the home. Bilingual education, meanwhile, was condemned as a symbol of wasteful federal spending on ethically questionable curricula and an intrusion on local prerogative. Spanish-language bilingual-bicultural programs may seem less relevant to the politics of family, but many Latino parents and students attempted to assert their authority, against great resistance, in impassioned demands to incorporate their cultural and linguistic heritage into the classroom. Both types of educational programs, in their successful implementation and in the reaction they inspired, highlight the rightward turn and enduring progressivism in postwar American political culture. In Classroom Wars, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela charts how a state and a citizenry deeply committed to public education as an engine of civic and moral education navigated the massive changes brought about by the 1960s, including the sexual revolution, school desegregation, and a dramatic increase in Latino immigration. She traces the mounting tensions over educational progressivism, cultural and moral decay, and fiscal improvidence, using sources ranging from policy documents to student newspapers, from course evaluations to oral histories. Petrzela reveals how a growing number of Americans fused values about family, personal, and civic morality, which galvanized a powerful politics that engaged many Californians and, ultimately, many Americans. In doing so, they blurred the distinction between public and private and inspired some of the fiercest classroom wars in American history. Taking readers from the cultures of Orange County mega-churches to Berkeley coffeehouses, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela's history of these classroom controversies sheds light on the bitterness of the battles over diversity we continue to wage today and their influence on schools and society nationwide.
Author: Neil Fligstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199977143
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Finding ways to understand the nature of social change and social order-from political movements to market meltdowns-is one of the enduring problems of social science. A Theory of Fields draws together far-ranging insights from social movement theory, organizational theory, and economic and political sociology to construct a general theory of social organization and strategic action. In a work of remarkable synthesis, imagination, and analysis, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam propose that social change and social order can be understood through what they call strategic action fields. They posit that these fields are the general building blocks of political and economic life, civil society, and the state, and the fundamental form of order in our world today. Similar to Russian dolls, they are nested and connected in a broader environment of almost countless proximate and overlapping fields. Fields are mutually dependent; change in one often triggers change in another. At the core of the theory is an account of how social actors fashion and maintain order in a given field. This sociological theory of action, what they call "social skill," helps explain what individuals do in strategic action fields to gain cooperation or engage in competition. To demonstrate the breadth of the theory, Fligstein and McAdam make its abstract principles concrete through extended case studies of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise and fall of the market for mortgages in the U.S. since the 1960s. The book also provides a "how-to" guide to help others implement the approach and discusses methodological issues. With a bold new approach, A Theory of Fields offers both a rigorous and practically applicable way of thinking through and making sense of social order and change-and how one emerges from the other-in modern, complex societies.
Author: Lisa M. Nunn
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813563631
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
The key to success, our culture tells us, is a combination of talent and hard work. Why then, do high schools that supposedly subscribe to this view send students to college at such dramatically different rates? Why do students from one school succeed while students from another struggle? To the usual answer—an imbalance in resources—this book adds a far more subtle and complicated explanation. Defining Student Success shows how different schools foster dissimilar and sometimes conflicting ideas about what it takes to succeed—ideas that do more to preserve the status quo than to promote upward mobility. Lisa Nunn’s study of three public high schools reveals how students’ beliefs about their own success are shaped by their particular school environment and reinforced by curriculum and teaching practices. While American culture broadly defines success as a product of hard work or talent (at school, intelligence is the talent that matters most), Nunn shows that each school refines and adapts this American cultural wisdom in its own distinct way—reflecting the sensibilities and concerns of the people who inhabit each school. While one school fosters the belief that effort is all it takes to succeed, another fosters the belief that hard work will only get you so far because you have to be smart enough to master course concepts. Ultimately, Nunn argues that these school-level adaptations of cultural ideas about success become invisible advantages and disadvantages for students’ college-going futures. Some schools’ definitions of success match seamlessly with elite college admissions’ definition of the ideal college applicant, while others more closely align with the expectations of middle or low-tier institutions of higher education. With its insights into the transmission of ideas of success from society to school to student, this provocative work should prompt a reevaluation of the culture of secondary education. Only with a thorough understanding of this process will we ever find more consistent means of inculcating success, by any measure.
Author: John H. Evans
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190608099
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
What is a human? Are humans those with human DNA, those in possession of traits like rationality, or those made in the image of God? The debate over what makes human beings unique has raged for centuries. Many think that if society accepts the wrong definition of what it is to be human, people will look at their neighbor as more of an animal, object, or machine-making maltreatment more likely. In the longest running claim, for over 150 years critics have claimed that taking a Darwinist definition results in people treating each other more like animals. Despite their seriousness, these claims have never been empirically investigated. In this groundbreaking book John H. Evans shows that the definitions promoted by biologists and philosophers actually are associated with less support for human rights. Members of the public who agree with these definitions are less willing to sacrifice to stop genocides and are more supportive of buying organs from poor people, of experimenting on prisoners against their will, and of torturing people to potentially save lives. It appears that the critics are right. However, Evans finds that few Americans agree with these academic definitions. Looking at how most of the public defines humanity, we see a much more nuanced picture. In a fascinating account, he shows that the dominant definitions are unlikely to lead to human rights abuses. He concludes that the critics are right about the definitions of a human promoted by academic biologists and philosophers, and are therefore justified in their vigilance. However, because at present few Americans agree with these definitions, the academic definitions would have to spread much more extensively before impacting how the general public acts. Evans' book is a major corrective to the more than century-long debate about the impact of definitions of a human.
Author: Melissa J. Wilde
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691118291
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Part I. Explaining the Council: -- 1. Collective effervescence and the Holy Spirit: the eventful first session -- 2. Who wanted what and why at the Second Vatican Council?: toward a theory of religious change -- 3. How culture mattered at Vatican II: collegiality trumps authority in the councils's "social movement organizations" -- Part II. Case Studies: -- 4. The declaration on religious freedom: ceding power, gaining legitimacy -- 5. The Blessed Virgin Mary: the toughest fight of the council -- 6. The council's failure to liberalize birth control: lackluster progressive effort meets a hesitant pope.
