This qualitative multiple case study conducted from an interpretive epistemological stance, focused on three novice social studies teachers decision making practices in regards to the use critical historical thinking. In seeking to understand teacher’s decision making practices, this research explored the bodies of knowledge that influence social studies teachers’ use of historical thinking in more critical ways. The theoretical framework guiding this research centered around three major frames: (1) the roots of teacher knowledge, including such things as teacher beliefs, teacher education experiences, and teacher content knowledge, (2) the bodies of teacher knowledge informed by these roots including official knowledge, and emancipatory or counter knowledge, and (3) how these bodies of knowledge lead to curricular enactment of critical historical thinking. Data analysis revealed four results that shaped teachers’ decisions and ability to use critical historical thinking in their classroom. The first three results highlight the bodies of knowledge teachers’ utilized in their decision-making practices, including their experiential knowledge, such as their familial and K-16 schooling experiences, content knowledge, both their knowledge of official and subjugated narratives, and pedagogical content knowledge. The final result explores how these bodies of knowledge interact with teachers’ schooling contexts. Findings suggest that historical positionality shapes not only the learning process, but the teaching process as well. A teachers’ historical positionality influences the way they are able to engage students in more critical renditions of the past. Teachers’ personal experiences inform their historical positionality, including their rationale and commitment to choose particular curriculum and pedagogical practices that address issues of race, class, and gender. Additionally, teachers’ critical content consciousness or the degree to which they are able negotiate the distance between their academic content knowledge and their beliefs about the past also shape their decisions to use critical historical thinking as a regular pedagogical practice. Finally, the last finding highlights the complex process teachers’ engage in as they navigate the external factors that press in on their daily teaching practice in ways that are critically ambitious. As such, the findings from this study have implications for both preservice and inservice teacher preparation. / text

Starting with the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam and framed by Critical Theory, this paper investigates business faculty perspectives of social justice in Israel and Canada. Eight purposefully-selected participants were interviewed. Their narratives form the basis of this qualitative study. The research participants revealed that there were ideological and structural forces present in the business programmes investigated that appeared to prevent social justice motives from being realized in the culture of business schools. The participants suggested that the hegemonic forces driving business programs were: profit-driven business ideologies, the particular character of MBA programs, and business programs’ quantitative research bias. These forces were found to be affecting the way in which the participants made-meaning of social justice, and the way in which they could teach and research within their respective business schools. The results of this study illuminate the types of cultural and asymmetrical relations that are affecting business pedagogical constructs and the future for social justice within them. This is important as how university faculty make meaning of social justice within business paradigms will not only shape how curricula and ideological changes evolve in business schools, they will have a significant impact on how and what students learn (Fernandez & Stiehl, 1995). The paper concludes with recommendations for Critical Communication and Critical Management Education to be employed within business schools as a process-oriented approach to social justice based on critical dialogue and communication: thus pursuing a Tikkun Olam in business pedagogy. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2009-05-26 14:50:22.335

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Using a phenomenological approach, this study examined the lived experiences of students and instructors in relation to culturally diverse classrooms in an urban Canadian post-secondary institution, and what meanings they ascribed to those experiences. Data were collected through individual interviews with nine students and seven instructors, who had experienced the phenomenon. Findings revealed that first, all participants, students and instructors, were keenly aware of differences in how they personally differed and how they observed differences in those around them. Second, participants’ social location impacted how they experienced differences. Third, in their fears and hopes, participants expressed a range of emotional responses to differences. Both students and instructors seemed to have similar hopes and fears. Emotional responses were dependent upon the nature of the critical events pertaining to difference which, in turn, prompted participants to adopt strategies to deal with these events. Fourth, the discussion about cultural diversity exposed a paradox and irony between what participants said and what they actually experienced. Although participants enthusiastically attested to the richness of diversity, when looking beneath the façade, a dystopian utopia emerged where participants were “surrounded by all these contradictions.” Participants experienced a form of every day culture shock every time they entered a university classroom, and they uniformly talked about valuing difference, but practice often demonstrated the opposite. This became evident when participants talked about the pressure to fit in and about wanting to belong. Fifth, most participants evidenced varying levels of ambiguity about their personal and public identity, demonstrated in seemingly self-deprecating language. Sixth, although the traditional academic system illustrated evidence of nontraditional methods, at times the impression of openness seemed paradoxical. The distinctive nature of this study revealed that when using Freire’s critical pedagogy and Mezirow’s transformative learning as theoretical frameworks, results showed a continuum on the spectrum of power sharing with some instructors still seeing themselves as vessel fillers, to instructors on the other side of the spectrum, willing to reevaluate traditional models. Such a study is important because cross-cultural competency and sensitivity, as Street (1984) says, are essential components in today’s culturally diverse work, academic, and social environment.

Chronic disease is the largest cause of death in the world. Yet little is known about how globalization forces affect the body and the experience of someone who is chronically ill. The need for specialized knowledge of subjective data is significant as it will assist us to improve our understanding and develop stronger nursing practices for people who are chronically ill. The purpose of this research is to understand the effect that globalization forces have on the personal experience of people living with chronic illnesses. People living with chronic illness from Canada and Colombia are participants in the study. The following research questions guided the study “What is it like to live with a chronic illness in the context of contemporary globalization forces? How do these political, economical and social forces affect the body of the chronically ill? Are experienced difficulties similar or different in a middle-income country as compared to a high-income country? The methodology for the study follows an interpretive inquiry approach using a critical hermeneutic phenomenological method. Hermeneutic phenomenology explores the various dimensions of human experience in human situations such as embodiment, spatiality, relationality and temporality. Critical pedagogy as a theoretical perspective invoking the work of Paulo Freire and Enrique Dussel is used to examine emerging findings in the context of globalization and resulting global inequities. This dissertation presents the experience of people who are chronically ill including access to health care, respect, compassion, social, political and legal exclusion, and calls for understanding and action on the part of health care professionals, policy makers and society. The findings urge us to move from merely acknowledging the difficulties people living with chronic illness endure in an age of globalization to action to bring about health care, social, and political reform through a process of conscientization and mutual transformation.

This study investigates the impact of the New Basics Project on teachers at a special school for students with intellectual impairments. The study is aimed at exploring the complex nature of the work of special educators as they enact the New Basics curriculum with a particular focus on the teachers’ opinions about challenges that arose for their curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices. Attention is also paid to how the principal’s leadership supported the enactment of the New Basics in respect to what he did and why he used particular strategies. The nine teachers and their principal were involved in a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews from one of only three special schools in phase one of the New Basics trial in Queensland, Australia. These interviews produced data from the special educators as they were confronted with a new curriculum that challenged their previous teaching practices. The enactment of the New Basics curriculum occurred within the context of a state-sanctioned mandate to provide alternative programs to those offered in mainstream schools, for students with special needs. This thesis explores these teachers' experiences using critical theory as a basis for analyzing their opinions on issues such as the role of the special educator, tensions between old and new curricula, pedagogical and assessment practices, and connections between the at-school learning experiences for intellectually impaired students and the realities of post-school life. The investigation also examines the leadership conduct of the principal in changing times at the school. The findings suggest that the New Basics has played a significant role in providing structures for developing communities of practice amongst teachers; in supporting special educators to focus more on the educational needs of the students (e.g., literacy, numeracy, financial planning) and less on their medical needs (e.g., toileting, feeding, personal hygiene); and supporting school leadership that empowers and listens critically to teachers as essential components of the successful enactment of curriculum reforms like the New Basics.

Thesis (MEd - Curriculum Leadership) -- University of South Australia, 1992

This study investigates the influence of popular culture texts on the subjectivities of young people and argues that critical pedagogical practices need to be further deployed by English teachers in response to the corporate driven nature of popular texts. Three levels of synthesized information are presented, using data analysis born of a quantitative survey and in-depth interviews with a group of secondary English students in Perth, Australia. Firstly, I argue that popular culture texts constitute the predominate form of consumed textual material for young people and that these texts are increasingly defined by corporate ideologies and branding. Secondly, I investigate the influence that these popular culture texts have on the subjectivities and everyday social experiences of young people. I argue that the ideologies and discourses in popular texts position young people to assume subjectivities that are increasingly defined by branding and corporate ideology, and that these texts often have a normalizing effect. Hence, I argue that young people’s social currency is often defined by the extent to which individuals demonstrate an alliance to the ideologies of popular media, and that individuals who deviate from such popular norms often experience subjugation and exclusion within peer and social settings. Constructivist notions of subjectivity and an analytical framework heavily influenced by Foucauldian theory inform this theorization. Thirdly, I finalize my argument by dealing pedagogically with subject English and areas of it that hold relevance in terms of the integration and analysis of ‘the popular’; including critical literacy, multiliteracies and critical pedagogy. I argue that a commitment to critically analyzing popular culture texts in the subject is lacking and that students feel many English teachers are “out of touch” with the everyday realities of young people and their popular culture influences. I argue that such failures risk producing students whose everyday experiences are silenced and who are unaware of the ways they are being positioned to adopt certain corporate driven subjectivities. Methodologically this study is informed by principles of critical theory, cultural studies, discourse analysis and a commitment to position the often-silenced student voice as a prime analytical tool. Aspects of autoethnography are deployed through punctuating personal narratives that feature within this text in order to illuminate the journey of self-realization and fundamental self reevaluation I have traveled throughout the production of this research work.

Thesis (Dr. of Education)--University of Cincinnati, 2007. / Advisor: Holly Johnson Includes abstract. Keywords: Teaching for Social Justice; Literature; Adolescent Literacy; Texts; Teacher Beliefs Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2005. / A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Education, May 2005. Includes bibliography.