This research draws upon interdisciplinary studies of childhood and young people's agency to present an ethnographic account of one group of young people in Nepal's lived experience of 'the global schooling project', a term used to describe the series of policy initiatives and the complex landscape of actors and institutions furthering the aim of getting every child, everywhere into school. Based on five months of fieldwork in which I intimately embedded myself in the everyday lives and social, emotional worlds of a group of young people living on Mansawar Street in Pokhara, I show how the global schooling project and its values impact upon their childhoods and everyday choices, shaping their aspirations, daily routines and self-conceptions, and those of their families and communities. I bring attention to how these flattening policy initiatives can have the effect of marginalising many of these young people's unique talents, interest and competencies, not accounting for the diversity of their learning and their agencies in moving through and making sense of their everyday material and immaterial worlds. I emphasise how schooling can act as an ambiguous resource for these young people, not only providing opportunity, knowledge and pathways towards employment, but also drawing them into systems of inequality and exploitation, both inside and outside of school. This research, then, provides an account of the lived experience of schooling on Mansawar Street and the profound ways in which schooling shapes local economies and ecologies, transforming family and community relationships and young people's childhoods.

Doctor of Education (EdD) / Increasingly the Australian educational environment in which schools find themselves is one where schools are expected to achieve successes for their students and furthermore allow their successes or lack thereof to be compared with ‘transparency’ against the successes of other schools. The overriding principle expected from the politicians and society in general is one of providing parents with the best information possible on which they will be able to base their decision as to which school will be the best for their children. This notion is noble and honourable, one at which little criticism can be levelled. However, as researchers in the ‘Effective Schools’ and ‘Improving Schools’ research fields have discussed for decades, measuring the effectiveness of schools is not an easily achievable goal. It is far too easy to fall into the trap of using simplistic and narrow measures that supposedly allow easy comparisons. This study takes the view, as does most research to date, that univariable measures of school effectiveness are fatally flawed. The current trend in many western nations to simply compare the academic success of schools, however that might be measured, does little to measure the effectiveness of schools. What is most concerning is the growing trend of creating league tables of comparison and in some educational systems to use such tables to determine school funding. Equally disturbing is the amount of research that seeks to examine what students consider important in an effective school. There is a great deal of research on what characteristics parents, teachers, politicians and other key stakeholders consider an effective school to have but extraordinarily there is comparably very little research on what students consider important. This study seeks to somewhat address this inadequacy by measuring what students in their senior years of schooling in a single independent school in New South Wales, Australia perceive to be appropriate and useful measures of effective schooling. In so doing this research also examined if in the students’ minds their current school is effective and most significantly examines why students hold the views they have concerning effective schools. In order to achieve this aim, this study took a qualitative research approach to discover Student Perceptions of Effective Schooling. The theoretical orientation adopted was to both verify current theory of effective schooling as well as suggest possible developments, modifications and improvements to current theory in light of the students’ perceptions. As such both inductive and deductive analysis of the data took place. The data was collected using a range of methods from traditionally quantitative research tools, such as surveys, through to the qualitative research tool of focus groups. The results of this study demonstrated that while the current research has developed a good multivariable approach to measuring school effectiveness there were significant areas the students believed needed greater or lesser emphasis. The importance of technically good teachers, separate from the need for good and caring teachers, as well as the need for schools to be safe places were all important measures of effective schools. The ability of the school to engage students outside the classroom and provide a relevant and diverse academic curriculum was also considered essential for effective schooling.

The title ‘Inclusive schooling: contexts, texts and politics’, names a thesis which critically analyses the development of inclusive schooling in the small Australian Island state of Tasmania between 1996 and 1998. The ‘Inclusion of Students with Disabilities’ policy, introduced in 1995 by the Tasmanian Department of Education, Community and Cultural Development, provides an opportunity to understand the cultural context and politics of change in schooling over this period. The qualitative methodology deployed here is informed by poststructuralism and captures the everyday experiences of university teaching as a research site. The teacher/researcher as the visible maker of the research use metaphors of fibre and textile practice, techniques of textual juxtaposition and her positioned subjectivity as a female academic to tell a 'big story'. The researcher develops a 'double method' as a possible model for Inclusive research practice and educational policy analysis. Using a critical ethnographic method, derived from the work of Carspecken (1996), 'data stories' (Lather & Smithies 1997, p.34) are produced from the narratives of five key informants – a parent, two teachers, a policy-maker and the researcher. Assembled as the data of the thesis the multi-voiced texts provide an account of the sociocultural, professional and systemic context of Inclusive schooling over a three-year period. In the analysis these data are interpreted from a feminist poststructural standpoint. A deconstructuive reading of the data stories interprets the discourse of inclusive schooling emphasising the dominant foundation of the special education knowledge tradition. The idea of author function (after Foucault 1975, 1984b and Grundy and Hatton 1995) is used to interpret the 'texts' of the key Informants as discursive constructions. The researcher theorises inclusive schooling as an entangled, multiple and contradictory discourse, embedded in the social, cultural and material contexts, rather than a singular unitary Idea of the progress within the special education knowledge tradition. The study contributes a fine-grained analysis of the constructed knowledge of inclusive schooling in one locality. The thesis advocates continuing engagement with questions of epistemology and social transformation in inclusive schooling, rather than persisting with technical rationality and the status quo. The researcher takes the position that the opportunities to theorise inclusive schooling lie within the multiple and disparate constructed texts of the micro world of everyday practice and the macro understanding of understandings of contemporary social justice. The poststructuralist writing/reading questions traditionalist theorising in the special education field. Central to the negotiations of power and truth inclusive schooling research and practice is a communicative theory that transforms populist conceptions of inclusion.

Children from different backgrounds, cultures and home environments attend school everyday. The educational system of today focus on the importance for every individual pupil to take responsibility, in order to gain knowledge. From an early age should the pupils learn how to work independant and take responsibility for their education. My questian, and what I have decided to discuss in this paper, is wether everyone has the same opportunity to gain knowlwdge and learn trough this method. In preperation for this essay I read litterature where the authors claims that this kind of educational system is not for everyone, but it benefits those pupils that comes from a middleclass background. So, is our school system fair and equal? Can everyone, no matter what social and cultural group they belong to, get the education thay have right to? In order to get a deeper understanding I interviewed three teachers that works in different schools. The conclusion in this paper is based on these interviews, so it is not to be generalized. The paper has three major hedings; The national curriculum and individual responsibility, those who benefits, how does one help? The results of the paper, and the conlclusion of the interviews, shows that it is crucial for the pupils to have been thaught from a very young age, to take responsibility for their own learning. The teachers also agreed that those who benifits from this kind of educational system has supportive parents that value the need of education. This despite which ethnic, social or cultural group they belong to. All pupils must be aware of the curriculum, and the teaching needs to be individualized.

This dissertation explores how rural young people imagine their futures in neo-liberal times. The analysis is based upon three months of ethnographic research with grade 7/8 students in ‘Fieldsville,’ a predominantly white and working-class rural community in Southeastern Ontario. I examine students' participation in a widely-used career-education program called The Real Game, in which they are encouraged to become entrepreneurial subjects capable of crafting productive futures in an uncertain world. My study asks: How do these young people produce and perform their imagined future selves, and what does this suggest about the opportunities and constraints that shape their current identities? Integrating insights from feminist poststructural theory and cultural geography, the project extends and challenges studies of the neo-liberal subject by integrating an analysis of place. The thesis builds upon, and contributes to, critical scholarship theorizing young lives as socially, spatially and temporally situated by exploring processes of location within subjectivity formation. Integrating classroom and playground observations with focus groups and interviews, the analysis reveals that young people draw upon diverse discourses in order to envision the person they hope to become. In addition to the subject positions on offer in The Real Game, popular culture provides a key resource in practices of self-making, as students invest in middle-class ideals of the “good life,” and distinguish their own rural location from racialized mappings of urban and global others. Although Fieldsville students are deeply invested in their rural community, tensions emerge where local attachments meet dominant narratives of mobility that encourage them to locate their futures elsewhere. These place-based tensions present particular challenges for girls, who must negotiate the gendered dynamics of rural social space alongside popular discourses of “girl power” that proffer unlimited possibilities for today's young women. Teasing apart the intersections of gender, race, class and space within students' narratives, I argue that studies of neo-liberal subjectivity must examine how dominant discourses are negotiated from particular social and geographical locations. Methodologically, the analysis demonstrates how school-based ethnography can shed light on broader socio-historical processes as they are lived in specific geographical and cultural spaces.

This dissertation explores how rural young people imagine their futures in neo-liberal times. The analysis is based upon three months of ethnographic research with grade 7/8 students in ‘Fieldsville,’ a predominantly white and working-class rural community in Southeastern Ontario. I examine students' participation in a widely-used career-education program called The Real Game, in which they are encouraged to become entrepreneurial subjects capable of crafting productive futures in an uncertain world. My study asks: How do these young people produce and perform their imagined future selves, and what does this suggest about the opportunities and constraints that shape their current identities? Integrating insights from feminist poststructural theory and cultural geography, the project extends and challenges studies of the neo-liberal subject by integrating an analysis of place. The thesis builds upon, and contributes to, critical scholarship theorizing young lives as socially, spatially and temporally situated by exploring processes of location within subjectivity formation. Integrating classroom and playground observations with focus groups and interviews, the analysis reveals that young people draw upon diverse discourses in order to envision the person they hope to become. In addition to the subject positions on offer in The Real Game, popular culture provides a key resource in practices of self-making, as students invest in middle-class ideals of the “good life,” and distinguish their own rural location from racialized mappings of urban and global others. Although Fieldsville students are deeply invested in their rural community, tensions emerge where local attachments meet dominant narratives of mobility that encourage them to locate their futures elsewhere. These place-based tensions present particular challenges for girls, who must negotiate the gendered dynamics of rural social space alongside popular discourses of “girl power” that proffer unlimited possibilities for today's young women. Teasing apart the intersections of gender, race, class and space within students' narratives, I argue that studies of neo-liberal subjectivity must examine how dominant discourses are negotiated from particular social and geographical locations. Methodologically, the analysis demonstrates how school-based ethnography can shed light on broader socio-historical processes as they are lived in specific geographical and cultural spaces.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

In recent years, considerable progress has been made towards understanding the genetic basis of the evolution of morphological traits. In contrast, relatively little is known about how behavioral traits evolve. Astyanax mexicanus, a species of fish that exists in both surface and cave forms, is an ideal system to study behavioral evolution. Surface and cave morphs of Astyanax mexicanus differ in a variety of morphological and behavioral traits. They are interfertile, allowing for genetic analysis of the evolution of these traits. Finally, Astyanax mexicanus exists in multiple, independently evolved cave populations, providing an excellent system for studying convergent evolution.

Through analysis of written texts produced by school districts and high schools with predominantly Mexican American populations, beliefs about Mexican American students that mediate attitudes and expectations can be exposed. In this work, I conduct comparative critical discourse analyses (CDA) of school district and high school mission statements from a total of 35 schools and 20 school districts in the Southwestern United States and Chicago, Illinois. The sites were selected because of their large to predominantly Mexican American students populations. Of the 35 school mission statements I researched, 19 were from predominantly Mexican American high schools and 16 were from predominantly White high schools. Of the 20 school district mission statements I collected, 11 were from largely to predominantly Mexican American school districts and 9 were from largely to predominantly White school districts.Analyses conducted in this study of the mission statements utilizing several `tools' of CDA revealed ideologies, or ideological discursive formations (IDFs), of low expectations and negative attitudes for Mexican American students when compared to White students. These IDFs materialize by way of frames and signs that are (re)created in the district and school mission statements. The IDFs serve to mediate the discourses that are utilized to describe Mexican American students and the districts and schools they attend. These discourses serve to mediate beliefs about Mexican American students that in turn reinforce the IDFs already in place.Understanding the types of discourses that (re)produce low expectations for and negative attitudes about Mexican American students is a first step in changing these schooling discourses that ultimately contribute to low academic achievement.

This work attempts to achieve two overarching objectives: firstly to trace the historical growth of Islamic schools in North America and secondly, to explore the ideological and philosophical values that have shaped the vision of these schools. The historical growth of Islamic schools in North America has been led by two distinct communities among Sunni Muslims: the indigenous and the immigrant. Specific to the North American Muslim diaspora “indigenous” represents the African American Muslim community of Imam Warith Deen Mohammed (1933-2008), and “immigrant” refers to the generation of Sunni Muslims who settled in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. Through oral history, this study attempts to capture the voices, sentiments, and aspirations of those that struggled to establish the earliest full-time Islamic schools. The study examines these voices for the ways Islamic education is defined differently based on generational, contextual, and ideological perspectives. Recognizing the diverse lived experiences of Muslim communities in North America, the findings are organized in four distinct, yet often overlapping historical phases that map the growth and development of Islamic schooling. The four phases of Protest, Preservation, Pedagogy, and Praxis also represent how the aims of Islamic education have evolved over time. From the Nation of Islam and their inherent vision of equality through resistance, the earliest attempt at establishing schools for Muslim children began in the 1930s. The transition of the Nation of Islam into a community redefined by the teachings of mainstream Islam coupled with the settlement of substantial immigrant Muslim communities altered the discourse from protest to identity preservation in the 1980s. Collaboration between the “indigenous” and “immigrant” communities defined a concerted effort to improve the quality of Islamic schools in the 1990s. And post 9/11, the discourse of inward-looking school improvement shifted once again to outward praxis. The historical mapping of the vision of Islamic schooling between communities also allows for the exploration of how interpretations of the Islamic tradition inform the pedagogy of schools. Through separate histories and religious perspectives, this study seeks to explore the complexities of the aims of Islamic schools, both between communities and within them.