Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series – serie

The single most important educational theory in schools and universities today is not derived from Dewey, Piaget, R. S. Peters, or an other significant researcher or theorist in education. It is public choice theory, which is derived from neo-classical economics. This work describes public choice theory in its component parts and as a coherent and potent contemporary factor influencing education today. It is this theory that licenses talk of accountability; provider capture; outcomes; and delivery as the most significant aspects of education, and thereby sets aside the discourses of responsibility; professionalism; social justice; and learning.Public choice theory is defined by its proponents as the application of economics to politics. It is based on the assumption that economics is the paradigmatic social science that can provide answers to all social questions. By reducing all political and social questions of a particular form of economics it reduces society to a market that is subject to the forces of supply and demand. Citizens become consumers rather than members of a civil society entitled to certain rights. This work describes public choice theory in its component parts and as a coherent and potent contemporary factor influencing education today.

a book for all practitioners and all members of the greater community. Giroux demands reader involvement, transformation, and empowerment. He helps us understand that the political relationship between schools and society is neither artificial nor neutral nor necessarily negative. Rather, school personnel have a positive and dynamic political role to play. Educational Leadership We are fortunate to have these ideas expressed so clearly and in one place. It is a very useful book. . . . Choice Offers educators ways for reflecting critically on their own practices and the relationship between schools and society. The Educational Digest

This book is a unique collection of new and existing articles about progressive architectural teaching and learning. It is about restructuring architectural education--a project that defines itself within a transformative definition of society. Dialectically linking architectural education and society, the book presents authors who conceptualize architectural pedagogy within a critical analysis of the larger society, and who construct forms of teaching and learning experiences that reveal and contest professional and societal directions. The authors present a multiplicity of voices, including women, people of color, and students; voices often marginalized but crucial to a remapping of the cultural-political terrain in their struggle to make issues of gender, race, class, etc. central to a reconceptualization of architectural education and pedagogy. This anthology, then, is more than a mere list of projects and pedagogies--it is a theoretical investigation of critical practices in architectural education that engage the world in order to change it.This book will challenge architectural educators to think consciously of their work and experiences in political and cultural terms. Insofar as architectural teachers plan instruction, determine readings, and select programs and building types for studio investigations, they are implementing a theory. The question, of course, is whether teachers are fully aware of the theoretical base of their actions. Since theory usually embodies interests grounded in societal forms of power, it has political consequences. This book sees education and pedagogy as forms of cultural politics--constructing a new terrain that will invigorate architectural pedagogy and focus discussion toward a needed architectural/educational/political project. Voices in Architectural Education will be invaluable to professors and students of architecture in both graduate and undergraduate education, as well as to practitioners of the architecture profession.

This book calls for a new type of teacher education that empowers teachers to be self-directed professionals. Joe Kincheloe believes that the current trend of teaching teachers to learn an empirical knowledge base which they then implement in their classrooms is demeaning to teachers and teaches them not to think. He cites, for example, the emphasis on lesson plan format, the writing of behavioral objectives, and pre-packaged activities. One way to achieve thoughtful empowerment is through critical action research, or teaching practitioner thinking.The author illustrates the roots of his theory in Deweyan learning through action and in the more modern active learning approach. He then applies Piagetian constructivism and critical hermeneutics to develop a post-formal model of practitioner thought, which he labels critical constructivism. Kincheloe theorizes on the ways such a model would impact teaching and learning in a college of education. Autonomous, self-reflective, critical thinking teachers who take their profession seriously must understand the political consequences of this approach, states the author, as it will change the face of the school and elicit a backlash of opposition. While the book develops a unique vision of practitioner thinking, it is also firmly grounded in the realities of school life and is written in an accessible style that is not geared to one specific group.

Believing that transformation is possible and that it must come from within, Clar Doyle illustrates the vital connection between drama and critical pedagogy. Presuming that a practice informed by the theory of critical pedagogy is essential to achieve an emancipatory education, Doyle shows how well drama and aesthetic education can encourage a pedagogy that is critical. He explores the real as well as the perceived values and understandings given to the aesthetic in school settings, how tastes and awareness are produced and how students' backgrounds inform the way in which art and drama are experienced. Furthermore, Doyle shows the ways in which the dominant cultural agencies rob both teachers and students of creativity through their reproductive policies.The book explores such critical questions as: the nature of culture; the historical place of drama within education; and the debate between drama and theatre as it applies to schooling. With a critical perspective, he reviews the current status of drama education and suggests ways in which educators can redefine their mission and refine their practice. By examining the influence of the culture industry and the issues surrounding style choices, Doyle highlights the challenge that teachers must meet in order to use performance skills to tease out attitudes and understandings. He concludes by showing how drama can help students, not only to bring about change in their own lives, but to effect change in the world around them.

The translation of Lyotard's work into English in 1984 marked an important stage in the globalization of the modernity/postmodernity debate involving the central thinkers of the late 20th century, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and others. This collection of 10 essays brings together for the first time a number of contributions on Lyotard's work made by philosophers, educationalists, and sociologists in the English-speaking world around the special focus of education. The intent behind the essays from scholars in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is to examine Lyotard's notion of the postmodern condition and its relevance and special significance for the field of education. Lyotard's work, first published in Paris in 1979, was important in that it developed a particularly original interpretation of the state of knowledge in the most highly developed societies, reviewing and synthesizing a wide range of material on contemporary science, the sociology of postindustrial society and studies of postmodern culture. Lyotard brought together diverse threads and separate literatures in a prophetic analysis that signalled an epochal break with the so-called modern era.

This book addresses an area that is theoretically undeveloped in educational studies—the constitution of the human subject. The author uses psychoanalysis to explore this gap in critical studies of education. Educational progressivism overestimates the power of rationality and represses any understanding of unconscious mental processes. What is needed is the development of a psychodynamic 'social psychology of classes.' According to the author, we need to investigate the differential relations between institutional and self-formative processes.

Poststructuralism—as a name for a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, a kind of writing—has exercised a profound influence upon contemporary Western thought and the institution of the university. As a French and predominantly Parisian affair, poststructuralism is inseparable from the intellectual milieu of postwar France, a world dominated by Alexandre Kojève's and Jean Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud, Gaston Bachelard's epistemology, George Canguilhem's studies of science, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. It is also inseparable from the structuralist tradition of linguistics based upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, and the structuralist interpretations of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and the early Michel Foucault. Poststructuralism, considered in terms of contemporary cultural history, can be understood as belonging to the broad movement of European formalism, with explicit historical links to both Formalist and Futurist linguistics and poetics, and with aspects of the European avant-garde, especially André Breton's surrealism. Each essay in this unique collection by and for educators is devoted to the work and educational significance of one of ten major poststructuralist philosophers.

This critical ethnography of school libraries contributes to the study of the politics of literacy at the elementary school level as well as provides an interesting case study of border crossing. The book interrogates two accounts of social reproduction and proposes a third. Students at working-poor Chavez Elementary resisted attempts to get them hooked on reading fiction, but while many were socialized to the labor of a piecework economy, many also found ways to use texts as they chose. At professional-managerial Crest Hills, students managed their discourse practices in ways that reproduced those of their office workplace, but their success was achieved at the expense of great anxiety about the future. At working-class Roosevelt, the librarians attended to the rhetoric of librarianship, but students reassembled knowledge on their own terms. A second project theorizes the school library as a geopolitical space, and critiques children's fiction and the social order that its texts help construct through a semiotic analysis of text classification within school libraries. An investigation of the origins of that system and of the ways of reading that it promotes—with particular attention to the history of the popular novel—describes the gender- and class-based politics of leisure reading.

College students and graduates have fond memories of campus events such as commencement, founder's days, convocations, and baccalaureate. These events, defined as rites of passage, secular ceremonies, or cultural performances, create a special feel to a campus remembered for years to come. Borrowing from interpretive anthropology, the author spotlights the following ideas: culture is revealed and forms of life are expressed through the actions and words of community members; human communities are dynamic, complex, and ever-changing environments revealed though analysis of cultural events; and commonplace rituals and ceremonies play a central role in the cultural work of human meaning. The purpose of the book is to explore campus culture as revealed through rituals and ceremonies.While rituals are unique to each campus, this book discusses higher education ceremonies and traditions and offers explanations about the roles they play in building and maintaining campus culture. Dr. Manning combines educational research methodology, higher education and anthropological theory to vividly describe college rituals. In a readable fashion, case studies describing the rituals are interspersed between chapters discussing the theory of rituals. The cases include convocation, presidential inauguration, junior show, charter day, founder's birthday celebration, baccalaureate, and laurel chain and alumnae parade.

Africa has internal cultural resources that have positively influenced its development. Community in Motion explores the relationship between theatre and Freirian pedagogy. It underscores the urgency of refocusing development strategies on human rather than technical resources by showing how culture has traditionally played an important role in African development, and demonstrates the similarities between traditional African cultural paradigms and Freirian pedagogy.The author describes selected significant Theatre for Development programs in diverse parts of Africa and determines the extent that these programs find congruence with the teachings of Paulo Freire. Case studies of Botswana, Zambia, Nigeria, and Kenya explore in detail the ongoing work in Zimbabwe, specifically the Zimbabwe Association of Community Theatre (ZACT). ZACT's work is analyzed in the context of Freirian pedagogy in order to highlight the development of a community-based theatre operation that is national in its scope and international in its influences.

Armitage taught for one year in a British grammar school from 1971 to 1972 when the school amalgamated with a secondary modern school to form a comprehensive school. He followed the political practices and episodes of the amalgamation in relation to their political and educational significance.The amalgamation seemed to result in an ineffective and underperforming school and he tried to introduce practical and constructive changes. His narrative describes his political struggle to reform the school in the face of an anti-democratic and authoritarian culture. The causes of failure are analyzed, and the real, complex, and messy functioning of a school system uncovered. The need to understand the politics and culture of schooling is advocated. A model of micropolitical action and responsibility is demonstrated that could help result in improvement of educational institutions.

In today's vernacular, Marx outed capitalism well over a century ago, but his explanation has been both ignored and misinterpreted by not only his detractors but also by many socialists and even a considerable number of Marxists as well. Today we are experiencing the full impact and suffering the repercussions of capitalism's inherent need to become, more than ever before, a fully internationalized and integrated system of socio-economic control and domination--the global system that many commentators have suddenly remembered Marx and Engels (1848) presciently forecasted in the Communist Manifesto.When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy was triumphantly proclaimed. The Cold War was over, and we were promised a lasting peace. But as we enter the third millennium, we are facing escalating social divisions, injustice, and oppression, with an environment in varying stages of ecological decay. Daily we are bombarded by the schizoid media images of capitalism's extremes on television news: the ravaged faces and wasted bodies of some of the thousands suffering famine, or the millions living in the world's slums, and then the gleaming, yet vacuous smile and sumptuously adorned figure of some extravagant, wealthy individual who is one of the select members of the global upper-class. Are we becoming conditioned to accept such contrasts and regard them as normal and inevitable at a time when we have the potential to eliminate scarcity and eradicate human deprivation? The author argues that critical education is needed to form a movement capable of challenging and then transforming capitalism. She also offers an accessible account of Marx's dialectical critique and exposé of capitalism, clearly demonstrating the real enemy that should be the focus of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization struggles. This is an account that explains why our main focus should not be on greedy, individual capitalists or particular multinational corporations, or even their handmaiden institutions, such as, the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc. but instead the global network of capitalist social relations and consequent habituated human practices in which we are all involved. These together with the historically specific form of capitalist wealth are the real enemy--the essence of capitalism--that must be abolished in order for humanity to have any hope of social and economic justice in the future.

At the beginning of the new millennium, educators, parents, and others should reevaluate what it means for adults and young people to grow up in a world that has been radically altered by a hyper capitalism that monopolizes the educational force of culture as it ruthlessly eliminates those public spheres not governed by the logic of the market. Giroux provides new theoretical and political tools for addressing how pedagogy, knowledge, resistance, and power can be analyzed within and across a variety of cultural spheres, including but not limited to the schools. A new introduction adds much to the well received first edition.The time for radical social change has never been so urgent, since the fate of an entire generation of young people, if not democracy itself, is at stake. Giroux argues that challenge gives new meaning to the importance of resistance, the relevance of pedagogy, and the significance of political agency.