SUNY series, Education and Culture: Critical Factors in the Formation of Character and Community in American Life – serie

Many factors contribute to the way individuals come to an understanding of what schooling is about and where it might be headed. This book explores the role of popular culture in that process.The authors illustrate how powerful and suggestive images and ideas about teachers, learning, and other aspects of schooling are constructed in the "texts" of various modes of popular culture. As a basis for further inquiry, the book describes important tendencies and patterns in the representation of aspects of schooling. It also provides examples of analytical approaches and strategies for thinking about the significance of patterns with respect to questions of meaning, power, and pedagogy in schooling practices. At the interface of educational and cultural studies, the book encourages inquiry into mainstream popular culture, and explores how this culture contributes to forms of discourse about the nature and direction of schooling.

This groundbreaking book analyzes contemporary education discourse in the light of curriculum politics and popular culture, using sources ranging from academic scholarship to popular magazines, music video, film and television game shows. Mathematics is used as an "extreme case," since it is a discipline so easily accepted as separable from politics, ethics or the social construction of knowledge. Appelbaum's juxtaposition of popular culture, public debate and professional practice enables an examination of the production and mediation of "common sense" distinctions between school mathematics and the world outside of schools. Terrain ordinarily displaced or excluded by traditional education literature becomes the pendulum for a new conversation which merges research and practice while discarding pre-conceived categories of understandingThe book also serves as an entertaining introduction to emerging theories in cultural studies, progressively illustrating the uses of discourse analysis for comprehending ideology, the implications of power/knowledge links, professional practice as a technology of power, and curriculum as at once commodities and cultural resources. In this way, Appelbaum effectively reveals a direction for teachers, students and researchers to cooperatively form a community attentive to the politics of curriculum and popular culture.

Shows how schools help people to cope with disasters and rebuild their communities.Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida early on Monday morning, August 24, 1992. Widely described as the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history, the storm left 38 people dead in South Florida, 80,000 homes destroyed, and damage estimates of at least $20 billion. The area devastated by the hurricane was approximately three times the size of Manhattan. Almost 250,000 people were left homeless by Andrew-roughly the population of the entire city of Las Vegas, Nevada. Garbage generated by the storm in a single night was equal to the projected landfill for Dade County for the next thirty years.Hurricane Andrew, the Public Schools and the Rebuilding of Community addresses the experience of the Dade County Public Schools-its teachers and students, administrators and staff-during the first school year following the storm. In particular, it examines the role of the schools in helping people cope with a disaster of the magnitude of Hurricane Andrew, and more specifically, with their role in rebuilding community.

Winner of the 1998 American Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice Titles Focusing on the cultural history of the origins of outcome-based education (OBE), this book investigates the social and economic culture of Johnson City, New York, schools. OBE has often been proclaimed the salvation for ailing American schools and has spread to thousands of school districts throughout the United States. The reform has also been the lightning rod for fierce challenges from community members who oppose OBE's dismantling of the bell-shaped curve and its promotion of secular humanism.The author uncovers the messy business of school change and its deep roots in the values of the local community and economy. Grounding the story historically and theoretically, Desmond analyzes the reshaping of the Johnson City schools from a production mill for blue collar workers to a development center of technologically minded, middle-class, well-educated citizens. She argues that the heart of successful, synergistic school reform lies in the consensus that children have unlimited learning capacity and a long-term moral leadership that is committed to caring, reciprocal relationships of power.

Explores, interprets, and critically analyzes various success ethics that have shaped American culture and education. It also formulates new forms of the success ethic in order to uncover overlooked models and to overcome the shortcomings of previous genres.The Success Ethic, Education, and the American Dream analyzes, interprets, and critically evaluates various success ethics and their impact on American culture and education. It also formulates new models of the success ethic for the future. The quest for success propels persons down diverse life paths as they seek the American Dream. In this quest, informal education follows the blandishments of self-improvement formulas that promise wealth, mobility, status, and respect.Self-improvement literature, which began in America with Benjamin Franklin, proliferated in the nineteenth century and has since developed a number of different genres. Earlier studies provided nineteenth- and early twentieth-century embodiments of the success ethic and biographical material, but neglected many important figures and offered largely uncritical presentations. This book identifies and explores the contributions of these neglected figures and critically assesses the different success ethics from three perspectives: psychological, philosophical, and social.