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My dissertation addresses the future of academics, intellectuals, and education itself in terms of the effectiveness of our attempts to carry out one of the few responsibilities we agree on: to teach students the critical skills necessary to negotiate humanely and intelligently the decisions of their culture-soaked everyday lives. Examination of the rhetorics of our criticism, teaching, and omnipresent visual media plays a fundamental role in my assessments of the usefulness and relevance of our work. The first chapter advocates a realignment of critical priorities through a practical and populist approach to intellectual history. I then focus in the second chapter on teaching strategies and styles, identifying the classroom as a crucial arena for philosophical inquiry, personal expression and interpretation, and explorations of the empowering responsibilities of critical thinking and citizenship. My third chapter proposes a common critical and pedagogical grounding in ethics and rhetoric, jettisoning the phantom notion of "disinterestedness" in favor of an honest, solid defense of liberal democratic education. In the fourth chapter I prescribe a Brechtian aesthetic for our time, advancing chapter three's identification of the crucial roles of pleasure and entertainment in the learning process, and articulating my investment in, to use Roland Barthes's superb phrase, "the thrill of meaning." In the final chapter I offer a curricular vision, focusing on postmodern and metafictional texts which surprise, subvert, and entertain, while foregrounding formal disruption and the blurring of identities and serving as models of constructedness, strategy, and co-created meanings. Our students must be given the skills to read, and thus write, the broadest range of cultural texts. This dissertation affirms the need for balance in the profession: to balance the creation of knowledge with a more democratic dissemination of knowledge; to balance a valuing of distinctions and difference with a blurring of borders and categories to produce a more fruitful concept of what we have in common; to balance an aesthetics of affirmation with an aesthetics of disturbance; and to balance the diverse but often incompatible proliferation of epistemologies with a Rortian call for "agreements."

This study seeks to re-present the experiences of a group of secondary English teaches in what I argue is a postmodern situation. I have utilized Seidman's (1998) model of in-depth interviewing as a primary means of data collection, supplemented by informal interviewing, journal writing, and participant observation. In invoking a postmodern orientation with these approaches to data collection/analysis/interpretation/ presentation, I have attempted to resist the inclination to view the stories of participants as representative of some essential experience that is more “real” than each story, itself. I view these stories as the product of inquiry rather than as simple and direct representations of participant's experience. At the same time, in crafting the representation of these stories, I have also imagined and created another, neither more nor less real, story of what it is to be an English teacher. This re-presentation takes the form of an imagined dialogue between the Discourses of Teacher Mythology and the Social Science Profession and is crafted entirely from the verbatim data (as I have defined it). The central “question” that informs this study is: what is it like to be an English teacher? This question was used, throughout the research process, as a guiding principle for data collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation—elements of the process that I have come to see as inseparable. In using phenomenological interviewing as a model for the methodology of this study, I have sought to re-create or re-imagine the experiences of the participants in way that is accessible to readers and have avoided, to the extent possible, characterizing my “take” on this re-presentation as “the findings” of this study. In re-presenting the participants' stories, I offer a text that I hope can be useful to others in seeking new problems in their familiar settings, and I include responses to this study offered by several people working in secondary education as models for that sort problem-posing. I also provide suggestions for further use of these research and representation methods.

This study examines the nature of disciplinarity as the institutionalization of faculty work, utilizing academic activism as an entry point for analysis. Through a case study of 14 faculty participants that merges in-depth ethnographic interviews and historical document analysis, this study interrogates the intersection of faculty daily practices and larger social structures. In such intersections, social space and material place are identified; the ways physical environments are shaped and have a hand in shaping individual interpretations of the world are suggested. Data analysis overlaid thematic examinations of participant interviews and historical documents with interpretations based on a framework of conceptual metaphor. Findings from this study confirm that professional identities are shaped through disciplinary processes that occur within social spaces and material places. Further, the data demonstrate how institutionalized places affect the kind of work faculty do on campus and in their professional fields, as well as their social relations among colleagues. Finally, while talking about both institutional space and activist possibilities, faculty described their work utilizing themes of connection, isolation, and integration, three themes that have implications on both social and material levels.

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This study was a phenomenological inquiry into the concrete and lived experiences of educators in a holistic school in Ecuador and from the founder of a creativity methodology program in Vietnam. These educators embarked on the remarkable journey from realizing the importance of holistic worldview to bringing about holistic education. The purpose of the study was to explore the significance of holistic worldview for education through investigating life-world stories. Using in-depth phenomenological interviews, the study explored these educators' past experiences, their present experiences and the integration of their past experiences with their present experiences. From a cross-case synthesis the salient themes and patterns evolved and unfolded into an interwoven web of knowing, doing, being and becoming. When this web is displayed in a two dimensional form it depicts the four most important dimensions of holistic educators: (1) the integrated knowing of the self, the subject, the students and the world; (2) the harmonious doing to create nurturing learning environments; (3) the genuine being to serve as authentic modeling; and (4) the ever-evolving becoming that seeks deeper meaning and larger purpose of life. When transform this web to a three-dimensional spiral, it portrays the dynamic, evolving, uplifting and transcending nature of the journey of holistic educators, where the four elements merge into an ultimate oneness that represents the essence of holistic educators. As Mario Solís suggests in my interview with him, “in a deep sense, my capacity as an educator comes from my choice to allow life to unfold through me and to demonstrate from my entire being.” The study manifests that when educators' entire being lives through their knowing and strives for becoming, namely, a higher purpose and deeper meaning of life, their vision and mission are not empty words on paper but rather a reality of life that they have created as the result of drawing from energy and resources from the creative, implicate order of life. The major insight of the journeys of these holistic educators is about touching the higher values of themselves, allowing themselves to manifest the excellence from within, and in turn, allowing others to manifest their inner resources, creativity and excellence. The study demonstrates how the holistic educators have successfully created a caring, nurturing, and nourishing learning environment where loving for life, appreciating relationship, learning to live and to create, living to transcend, and educating for peace are modeled and fostered.

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No description available.