Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

There are few empirical studies exploring the alleged conflict between the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

The purpose of this study was to examine what impact the No Child Left Behind Act has had on students with disabilities.

Specifically, using large data sets from three different states, this article examines how the students with disabilities subgroup has fared under the No Child Left Behind Act. Under NCLB, there are four different subgroups: race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, limited English proficiency, and students with disabilities. If any one of these subgroups fails to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under NCLB, the entire school fails.

This study found that schools fail to make AYP most often because of the students with disabilities subgroup. The failure of the special education subgroup to make AYP occurs mainly because the students with disabilities subgroup is expected to maintain the exact same proficiency levels as their general education peers—a standard that has proved to be problematic because special education students often start out with lower average test scores than general education students. In addition, the students with disabilities subgroup is the only subgroup in which actual limitations on ability to learn might come into play. The existence of these limitations calls into question the wisdom of trying to close the general education–special education “achievement gap” at the same pace as the race- or class-based achievement gaps. In addition to quantitative methods, this study also used legal research techniques to examine the legal impact that the two laws are having on students with disabilities.

The study found that although judicial challenges may be one route to try to change the law, pressure at the state and local levels by educators and parents of students with disabilities working together with the U.S. Department of Education may have an impact as well.

This study draws on the voluminous research on teachers’ workplace orientations and especially on Dan Lortie's documentation of conservatism, individualism, and presentism among teachers.

This study investigated a school reform network of over 300 secondary schools entitled Raising Achievement Transforming Learning (RATL) to explore the role of the network's interventions in increasing or diminishing presentism.

England.

Quantitative performance data were analyzed for all 300 schools. Site visits were made to 10 RATL schools in which educational administrators and teachers were interviewed individually and in focus groups. Additional phone interviews were conducted with administrators in 14 RATL schools.

RATL provided a combination of interventions and supports for schools in the network, including data analysis and capacity enhancement; partnering mentor schools with low-performing schools; regional conferences; a Web portal for schools in the project; and a menu of short-, medium-, and long-term strategies for change.

Qualitative interviews and focus groups of educators in RATL schools, along with secondary analysis of pupil performance data.

In Dan Lortie's seminal research on teachers’ workplace orientations, he identified “presentism,” or short-term thinking, with conservatism and individualism. This research indicates that in the RATL project, individualism among teachers diminished, but this did not diminish either conservatism or presentism. The research identifies three kinds of presentism—endemic, adaptive, and addictive—that have amplified educational conservatism while altering its nature to fit the current culture and political economy of fast capitalism.

For over two decades, the boundaries between the social sciences and the humanities have become blurred, and numerous articles and books have been written about the infusion of the arts in qualitative research as a means to collect and analyze data and to represent findings. Yet these arts-based research processes, although present in the social sciences, are still largely invisible in a research climate that privileges (e.g., through publication, funding, and recognition) work claiming to be exclusively scientific.

To fully develop the potential of the arts for a transformative educational inquiry, the synthesis of scientific and artistic methods must be fully explicated through clear examples that address theoretical and empirical concerns. This article focuses on explicit arts-based approaches that the authors employed in a 3-year teacher education study of professional conflicts experienced by novice bilingual teachers. Authors describe how they used the arts and to what end, addressing questions of artistic processes, expertise, and research validity.

The research design included theatrical and literary techniques alongside more traditional qualitative methods of inquiry (e.g., participant observation, audio- and video-recorded focus group interactions, interviews, and surveys). Authors initiated performative focus groups based on the work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal in which participants share and act scenes from power-laden experiences of conflict, rehearsing strategies for personal and social revolution. This embodied data enabled the research team to focus empirical and pedagogical attention on both participants’ physical and verbal “scripts” or trans/scripts: compressed renderings of original transcripts that utilize techniques from poetry and the dramatic arts to highlight the data's emotional “hot points” and heightened language from the original discourse.

This study illuminated the range of experiences and emotions involved in novice bilingual teachers’ professional lives, signaling the value and validity of research that is both artistic and scientific. Such hybridity may at first appear to make for unexpected and potentially haphazard methodological mergers. The authors do not claim to have resolved these epistemological tensions, but to have exploited both traditional and artistic research methods to broaden the notion of what counts as “research” in teacher education and to conduct research that is engaging to researchers and participants alike.

Although much research has evaluated children's books for depictions of gender, little has centered on the portrayal of immigrants and social class. This investigation utilizes Bourdieu's theory of capital reproduction in education, Durkheim's conception of collective conscience and morals, and Bowles and Gintis's critique of schooling to evaluate these depictions and to investigate the functions of English language learner (ELL) education.

This analysis investigates the representation of immigrants and class in children's books read aloud in ELL classrooms.

Using lists provided by a leading school of education, the investigation uses a content analysis of 50 books often read aloud to ELL students based on five economic and cultural capital indicators. Additionally, the research included a content analysis of the morals presented by these books and by the past 20 Caldecott Medal-winning books.

Findings suggest strong differences in class portrayals and morals between ELL classroom and Caldecott Medal-winning books. Additionally, the evidence shows that the ELL books portray various ethnic immigrant groups differently, often supporting popular stereotypes about these ethnicities.

The study provides possible implications of the findings on the educational and career aspirations of ELL students and suggests that future researchers focus on participant-observation to expand these findings.

The current national debate over the purposes of civic education is largely tied to outdated notions of citizenship that overlook its changing nature under globalization. Civic education is based on a legalistic understanding of citizenship that emphasizes patriotism and the structures and functions of government. This study examined adolescents’ civic beliefs and affiliations, drawing on theories of transnational and global citizenship.

The purpose was to examine diverse adolescents’ vocabularies of citizenship, a concept that captures the tensions in their civic beliefs and affiliations. Their vocabularies were explored in terms of two topics at the intersection of national and global affiliations: universal human rights and global citizenship. The central question asked was: How do adolescents from immigrant backgrounds understand the tensions between national and global civic affiliations, and do they differ from dominant-culture adolescents’ understandings?

The research setting was the Pennsylvania Governor's School for International Studies, a 5-week summer program for high school students that emphasizes current scholarship and skills in international affairs, cultural studies, and foreign language.

A mixed-method case study design was employed to collect detailed and rich data on the students’ beliefs about citizenship.

The findings showed that the students from immigrant backgrounds favored universal positions and were the only students to call attention to national economic inequalities. In contrast, a majority of the dominant-culture students gave a more central role to national affiliations. However, over half of the students switched between universal and nationally oriented positions for the issues of global citizenship and human rights. It is argued that these switches represent a strong indication of the tensions in civic affiliations in light of globalization.

The findings presented here suggest that the question of either national- or global-oriented civic education makes little sense. This research suggests that differentiated forms of civic education are needed if all youth will have access to full citizenship and the range of civic affiliations needed in the world. Two approaches for reconceptualizing civic education are proposed: Civic education curricula should focus on the intersection of national with global issues and affiliations, and civic education should address, in addition to civic attitudes, skills, and knowledge, a conscious effort to help adolescents build flexible and multiple civic identities.

Our article develops insights from Paul Woodruff's book, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2001), to discuss reverence in teaching. We show how reverence is both a cardinal and a forgotten virtue by situating it within the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics, which involves traits of character as embodied predispositions to act in certain ways in concrete contexts. Virtue ethics sometimes conflicts with abstract, rule-governed ethics, much as the ethics of care does. Virtue ethics appeals to emotional conviction in ways that rule-governed ethics does not. This article looks specifically at the emotions of shame and respect that are associated with reverence for the high ideals that may bind together an otherwise diverse, even diverging, schooling community.

The purpose of this article is to understand spiritual dimensions of teaching by elucidating the cardinal and forgotten virtue of reverence. Reverence has a power beyond a typical understanding of it as something religious. The article shows reverence in a wider context that does not diminish its spiritual connotations, but rather shows its importance and relevance to teaching in today's classrooms. The study considers how the virtue of reverence is supported by appropriate classroom ritual and ceremony and discusses several examples of reverence and irreverence in classroom teaching.

Philosophical analysis combined with qualitative case study analyses as illustrations.

To be reverent is to realize that we as humans are limited and imperfect, and the proper reaction to this state is humility, awe, and wonder. In subsequent articles, we will examine reverence in educational leadership and in a school's community. Our goal in this article and those to follow is to restore reverence to its rightful place in the ordinary daily activities of teachers in relation to administrators, students, and parents in school and in the community.

Geography education typically appears in school curricula in a didactic or disciplinary manner. Yet, both the didactic and the disciplinary approach to geography education lack a serious engagement with society, politics, and power, or democratic theory. We suggest, from Dewey, that most students, the social studies, and indeed society are not well served by these approaches, particularly as we confront global challenges that demand geographic knowledge and insight.

We propose that geography can and should reflect the interests of students and society and thus be what Dewey calls psychologized through a democratic vision of global citizenship education (GCE). Toward that end, we develop a typology of global education to identify those types most congruent with democratic citizenship (cosmopolitan, environmental, and critical justice) and those less congruent (disciplinary, neoliberal, and human relations). Drawing on our typology, we show how GCE can be a point of synthesis in practice, bringing together global education and reconstituted geographic knowledge.

The method of this article is a secondary analysis of literature in democratic theory, global citizenship education, and geography education that synthesizes points of overlap.

Based on this analysis, we recommend that geography curriculum should be remade within a vision similar to GCE so that space and place can be socially understood.

Teaching, leading, and learning are inextricably connected to emotions. Yet, the significance of emotions is rarely addressed in educational settings, and when it is, the relationship between emotions and curricula is most often framed by of an overly individualistic behavior model that focuses on the management and regulation of emotions. This model obscures, if not denies, the structural-collective aspects of students’ and teachers’ emotions and thereby fails to recognize that emotions are culturally based, with patterns of selectivity deeply embedded in social and cultural structures. These patterns of selectivity operate to influence decisions that can lead to educational and social (in)equities. This article focuses on an imperative to understand how emotions function as sites of knowledge to create cultural rules of interactions that promote and/or hinder the preparation of teachers to act as agents of change.

In seeking to better understand both individualistic behavior models and structural-collective aspects of teachers and students’ emotions as sites of knowledge within the classroom, the authors focus on the role of emotions in preparing preservice and in-service teachers to confront educational and societal inequities.

The authors conducted a retrospective qualitative case study of 14 graduate students—reflecting a diversity including age, gender, and race—enrolled in a course on urban education. Using multicultural feminist theories, they analyze students’ understandings of a critical incident in the course about gender inequities through individual semistructured interviews, focus group interviews, and document analysis.

Students enter classrooms with “pretexts” of how teachers and students will interact in the classroom. These pretexts are integrally related to the negotiation of power in the intersections of race, gender, and class and underlie emotional selectivity. In these pretexts, a pedagogy of discomfort and a pedagogy of challenge simultaneously exist. The blurring and blending of these two pedagogies create a unique third space in which emotions serve as sites of struggle and contestation, and possibilities for changing the status quo of inequities. Four prevalent patterns of emotional selectivity emerged within the specific context of gender inequity in educational contexts: (1) denial of emotions, (2) mere existence of emotions, (3) simultaneous acceptance and denial of emotions, and (4) emotions-reason informing knowledge, identities, and actions. The fourth of these patterns offers pedagogical possibilities for challenging personal, educational, and societal inequities as it situates the focus of teachers’ roles as active agents of change.