This paper studies the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his years (1920–26) as an elementary school teacher in remote Niederösterreich, Austria. The paper gives a survey of his life, and also a brief account of three of his main works: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Attention is given to his alphabetical word list, Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, published for educational use in elementary schools. The study is focused on Wittgenstein’s educational practise, and establishes a connection between his experience as a teacher and his late philosophy.

During the Progressive Era, literary writers such as Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman engaged with ideas emerging from the newly consolidated educational profession about art's capacity to mediate between individual and social development. These ideas varied widely in their philosophical, pedagogical, and political implications, but all reinforced the authority of professional educators at the expense of democratically elected boards of education. Novels working through these ideas can be usefully theorized as Bildungsromane if the definition of the Bildungsroman is refined to be more sensitive to the wide range of educational philosophies that can inform it, and to the range of attitudes, from critical to worshipful, that it can assume toward these philosophies. This reimagining of the genre opens up the possibility that the Bildungsroman, and the Bildung idea more broadly, can have a more positive political valence than most scholars have acknowledged. In particular, a viable project of aesthetic education can be discerned in the philosophy of John Dewey, although it lacks a clear literary corollary.

Utilizing elements of Lightfoot and Davis’s (1997) portraiture method and life history interviews, this qualitative research study explores the portraits of four Mexican-origin scholarship boys. Two Mexican-origin students and two professors were selected from a snowball sample. A snowball sample consisted of gathering referrals from graduate students and faculty who contacted me through email to comment on their personal identification with the scholarship boy themes discussed in the essay I authored, "Lost in Degree: a Chicano PhD Student’s Search for Missing Clothes" (2007). I use the term “Mexican-origin” as a concept that identifies the subjects of this study as being of Mexican descent. All of the participants were born and raised in low SES, urban settings in the United States and they are children of Mexican-born parents. Hoggart’s (1957/2006) scholarship boy framework serves as the primary theoretical lens guiding this work. Rodriguez’s (1982) seminal work on this topic, Hunger of Memory, enumerates how this concept may apply to Mexican-origin scholarship boys. This study also utilizes Dubois’s (1903) double consciousness and Anzaldúa’s (1999) mestiza consciousness to analyze the ways in which Mexican-origin scholarship boys used culturally situated constructions of giftedness, “ghetto nerd” (Diaz, 2007) masculinities, and philosophical perspectives related to “home” to pursue academic excellence and cope/challenge the microgressions they experienced in K-12 schooling and higher education. The scholarship boys in this research provide critical information germane to the struggles and strategies used by academically successful Mexican-origin students as they negotiate the experiences related to the contrasting working-class culture of their upbringing and the middle-class culture of academia. While studies often focus on academically low-performing Latino students, this work explores the narratives of working-class Latino students who attained a graduate level education. Moreover, this research complicates clean “victory narratives” by unearthing various aspects of loss and gain inherent to the Mexican-origin scholarship boy trajectory. Findings inform scholarship in the areas of pedagogy, education reform, philosophy of education, education policy, curriculum, and revisionist conceptualizations of giftedness and human development. / text

Arts education must continually provide justification for its inclusion in the K-12 curriculum. This dissertation utilizes philosophical and conceptual analysis to probe the tensions, ironies, and contradictions that permeate the arts education advocacy discourse. Using evidence from advocacy materials published online, scholarly critiques of themes in the advocacy discourse, and research reports describing school-based arts programs, I construct an argument that posits generative consequences for student learning when arts-centered inquiry is reimagined as pragmatic instrumentalism. Such a reimagining of arts-centered inquiry seeks to draw a distinction between utilitarian justifications for the arts and instrumental benefits the arts provide individual students in mediating complex and connected learning. In reclaiming the term “instrumental” for arts-centered inquiry, I offer a way to restore the notion of generativity to arts learning and a means to promote greater understanding among practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and advocates.

Focusing on a lived and practiced tolerance, this thesis sets out to explore questions concerning education for tolerance, and, specifically, how teachers and educators can prepare students to become tolerating subjects in their everyday encounters with others. Taking its point of departure in real and fictional classroom situations, the overall purpose of the study is to explore the ethical and transformative potential inherent in education for tolerance. The theoretical frame of the study is deconstruction and the philosophical writings of JacquesDerrida. The purpose of the thesis is accomplished in three movements. The first aims to show why teachers and educators need to redirect their attention in the classroom if the ethical and transformative potential that lies in education for tolerance is to be taken seriously. Instead of focusing on the tolerated and “deviating” other, it proposes that the tolerating subject should be the center of attention. The second movement aims to prepare the ground for a deconstructive reading by mapping different contemporary discourses of tolerance. Three distinct but interrelated dilemmas of tolerance are identified: the dilemma of welcoming, the dilemma of drawing boundaries, and the dilemma of bearing or enduring the otherness of the other. The third movement aims to show how a deconstructive reading of the dilemmas of tolerance can help teachers and educators to perceive and relate otherwise to the tolerating subject in education. For this, I turn to Derrida’s deconstructions of three concepts that are vital for our understanding of tolerance: hospitality, justice and mourning. The final section of the thesis discusses some educational implications deriving from the study. It is argued that if we look at the tolerating subject through the experience of its deconstruction, we also come to see education for tolerance otherwise. What this altered perspective can mean for education is articulated within the framework of what is calleda pedagogy of tolerance. / <p>Kommer ev. att publiceras på förlag.</p>

There is a public perception that Canada is an ideal place for cultivating global citizenship because of its culturally plural demographics and official policies of multiculturalism. Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is a growing field in Canadian education and is an explicit focus in the Alberta social studies curriculum. This thesis brings together four conversations within which multiculturalism and GCE are both related and conflated: (a) the public perceptions of Canada as a model of cultural diversity and global citizenship, (b) the scholarly discussions of GCE and multiculturalism, (c) the policy context where multiculturalism is set alongside GCE, and (d) the practical ways that the two are mutually related in curriculum and lesson documents. There are four interrelated sections to this thesis; each identifies the tensions inherent to multiculturalism, GCE, and the perceived relationship between these fields. First is a wider philosophical and theoretical framing of the topic. Second is the examination of educational research on the topic. Third is a critical discourse analysis of policy, curriculum, and lesson plan documents in the province of Alberta. Last is a synthesis of the findings from all three sections. The analysis finds that there are philosophical and ideological tensions inherent to both fields and to the relationships between them. This contributes to conceptual and ideological conflation and confusion. This finding raises some important concerns in terms of possibilities and constraints to thinking about cultural diversity and social inequities in new ways. It highlights how multicultural contexts of GCE can lead to the recreation of tensions, conflation, and ambiguity. However, the Alberta context demonstrates that a multicultural context can also open critical spaces and possibilities for GCE through engagements with tensions and complexities. Thus this thesis contributes theoretically, by presenting a framework and perspective for interrogating and critically inquiring into the relationship between the two fields. It also contributes to the policy and curriculum discussions in educational research and practice by highlighting the importance of foregrounding key tensions inherent to each field and by identifying the potential negative consequences of leaving these tensions implicit.

There is a public perception that Canada is an ideal place for cultivating global citizenship because of its culturally plural demographics and official policies of multiculturalism. Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is a growing field in Canadian education and is an explicit focus in the Alberta social studies curriculum. This thesis brings together four conversations within which multiculturalism and GCE are both related and conflated: (a) the public perceptions of Canada as a model of cultural diversity and global citizenship, (b) the scholarly discussions of GCE and multiculturalism, (c) the policy context where multiculturalism is set alongside GCE, and (d) the practical ways that the two are mutually related in curriculum and lesson documents. There are four interrelated sections to this thesis; each identifies the tensions inherent to multiculturalism, GCE, and the perceived relationship between these fields. First is a wider philosophical and theoretical framing of the topic. Second is the examination of educational research on the topic. Third is a critical discourse analysis of policy, curriculum, and lesson plan documents in the province of Alberta. Last is a synthesis of the findings from all three sections. The analysis finds that there are philosophical and ideological tensions inherent to both fields and to the relationships between them. This contributes to conceptual and ideological conflation and confusion. This finding raises some important concerns in terms of possibilities and constraints to thinking about cultural diversity and social inequities in new ways. It highlights how multicultural contexts of GCE can lead to the recreation of tensions, conflation, and ambiguity. However, the Alberta context demonstrates that a multicultural context can also open critical spaces and possibilities for GCE through engagements with tensions and complexities. Thus this thesis contributes theoretically, by presenting a framework and perspective for interrogating and critically inquiring into the relationship between the two fields. It also contributes to the policy and curriculum discussions in educational research and practice by highlighting the importance of foregrounding key tensions inherent to each field and by identifying the potential negative consequences of leaving these tensions implicit.

This thesis aims to show how the secondary teacher in New Zealand was constituted in discourse through an examination of two major recontextualisations of education, the changes resulting from the Thomas Report (1944), and the Picot Report (1988), and of the collective identity of secondary teachers. Both reports redirected government education policy and regulation and had fundamental implications for teachers' work and the role they were expected to play in education. Secondary teachers resisted both reforms, and in doing so they revealed elements of their conservative, pragmatic and defensive collective identity, which changed in only one significant respect in the time period considered in this study. It took twenty years before the central tenets of the Thomas Report were even close to being universally accepted. Even then, the child-centred philosophy and practice propounded by the Thomas Report, supported by the Currie Report in 1962 and supervised by the gentle discipline of the Department of Education, was likely to have been more honoured in the breach than in the observance by many New Zealand secondary school teachers. In more recent times, the 'neo-liberal', market-driven view of education and teachers, as expressed in the reforms which followed the Picot Report, were stoutly resisted despite the much more rigorous disciplinary techniques employed by the Ministry of Education. This thesis will show that the dominant discourses which constituted the secondary teacher were those of the collective identity of secondary teachers and that these effectively frustrated attempts to impose change on New Zealand secondary teachers and on secondary education.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Educational Leadership, 2009. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 107-115).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Counseling and Educational Psychology, 2007. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Dec. 9, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1667. Adviser: Jonathan A. Plucker.