In an age of adultism in which children have been perceived as mere drains on society, schooling often has been viewed as a means to an end. Due to the fact that a capitalistic society requires future workers, children have been socialized in the necessary skills and knowledge required to fulfill their future job requirements. Consequently, schooling often has taken place in the form of the banking model in which students are treated as empty vessels to be filled up by the knowledgeable teachers, and then to regurgitate said knowledge on assessments to prove their understanding. I challenge this antiquated vision of education, especially in relation to what it has meant for young children in preschool through first grade. Using critical pedagogy and the Reggio Emilia approach as theoretical frameworks, I conducted a critical narrative study of eight early educators who have had experience working with students in early grades in emancipatory ways. I found that educators’ own experiences and consciousness greatly affected their beliefs about young children as well as the liberatory practices they engaged. I present a proposal for a shift in thinking about the education of young children, a relational model of education that highlights the intersections of critical pedagogy and the Reggio Emilia approach in grounding the work of teaching in armed love, belief in the capabilities of children, and opportunities for students to work with educators as revolutionary partners and transformative change agents who have an active role in their education and their world.

By employing pláticas y encuentros, this qualitative study examined the testimonios of Chicana/Latina youth and their experiences with navigating the sexual politics on the high school campus. Six young Chicana/Latinas, all of whom graduated from the same high school in South East Los Angeles, participated in the study. The study used two frameworks: Chicana/Latina feminist theory and critical pedagogy to analyze the young women’s testimonios. Findings speak of their daily struggle with adults policing, objectifying, and containing their bodies; as well as the benefit of a third space, counterspaces, for self-actualization. This study contributes to this field by identifying how Chicana/Latina youth experience schooling and what they believe must happen in order to ensure that the school community and larger society is more responsive to their experiences with navigating sexual politics in and outside of the educational context.

Much attention has been given to “bridging the gap” between research and practice since neuroscience research first made claim to its potential impact in classrooms. With the inception of Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) as a new interdisciplinary field, an unprecedented opportunity to explore the educational implications of new research coming out of neuroscience has presented itself. And yet, the gap between research and practice persists while new problems arise as education looks to brain science for answers with ongoing social and academic difficulties faced by students. A critical bicultural methodology, grounded in a decolonizing interpretive approach, is utilized to interrogate the field of MBE in order to shed light on the epistemological power dynamics and social justice issues that inform the field. By examining the historical, philosophical, economic, and ideological roots of neuroscience and education, a colonizing epistemology and hidden curriculum of inequality is revealed. The lack of awareness of how MBE, if left unexamined, will continue to fall short of the democratic and socially just goals of education is also addressed. The argument made is that there exists an abyssal divide within the field that epistemologically privileges neuroscience with its reductionist, Eurocentric, and positivist discourse. The case is made that the field must move toward an itinerant position that honors hierarchical dialogue and praxis and places the voices, scholarship, and values of educators and students at the forefront of this educational movement, in order to close the gap between research and practice in emancipatory ways.

The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the development of global-mindedness (GM) in the leadership of primary schools offering international educational programs around the world with an emphasis on the need for school leaders that understand and support the development of a critical, global perspective of education. Reported findings identified the presence of the five dimensions of global-mindedness as well as the relationships between demographic variables such as travel experience, second language ability, and years of teaching experience. The findings also reported positive relationships between the subscales of Hett's (1993) Global-Mindedness Scale and the attributes of international-mindedness as defined by the International Baccalaureate's learner profile. The results of this study are intended to advance knowledge of the development of global-mindedness for school leaders around the world. / by Maria Hersey. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2012. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

With the liberalisation of the society and education in the Western Countries, new development horizons have emerged thus altering our expectations from the younger generation and our vision of human fulfilment and happiness. As Dewey stressed, the current advance of technology and democratic ways of life results in the unprecedented rate and speed of changes and ‘it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities’ (Dewey, 1897, p.77). This prompted many educational policies in Western Countries to resort to character education as a long-term solution to the tensions between the demands on the child to succeed in tougher market-led society and the necessity to foster a democratic citizen of the globalised world (The US Partnerships in Character Education Program, 1994; Strategic Plan, 2002; Character Education Framework, 2019).  However, the recurring instances of school violence and shooting (Schaeffer, 1999, p. 2), and the turmoil of incessant military conflicts around the world expose the failure of current policies to foster a modern ‘self’ that would sustain the humanity rather than just democracy, thus making the current goals and priorities sensitive to criticism.    This paper takes on the topic of character education in liberal school setting and views it in a broader sense as part of formation of the modern ‘self’ in liberal society as opposed to traditional Aristotelian reading through virtue ethics and moral character. By studying the current character education policies in the USA, UK, European Union and Sweden, the first chapter of the thesis demonstrates the instrumentality of character education and prioritising educating for citizenship and democratic values. This paper sets to contest this approach to character education and proposes to adopt the idea of The Love of the World advanced as the guiding principle of education by Naomi Hodgson, Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski in their Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy (2017) as opposed to ‘educating for….’ formular predominant in the policies. The Manifesto offers the banner but does not elaborate on the content and how to attain the goals. The aim of this thesis is to commence to fill this gap. Carefully laying out the concepts of conservative, liberal and critical theories of education related to character formation, this paper analyses their strengths and week points and consolidates in ‘My Creed’ section what it considers the worthwhile postulates that would help to design character education governed by The Love of the World. Resorting to the educating power of literature I address the question of ‘How to foster character in liberal schooling of today’ when the child and what is good in the world replace the current slogans of educating for citizenry and democracy.

Syftet med vår essä är att undersöka situationen för fritidshemslärare med utländsk bakgrund inom svensk skola. Vi har fokuserat på situationer då elevers ifrågasättande av att de avviker från normen på grund av att deras hudfärg. Vi har skrivit berättelser som bygger på våra egna erfarenheter ifrån vårt arbetsliv som vi ser som dilemman. Fyra frågeställningar har vi kunnat forma utifrån våra dilemman. För att kunna förstå våra dilemman och besvara våra frågeställningar har vi använt teorier som handlar om dialogiska samtal och erfarenheter, interkulturellt ledarskap, normer, maktperspektiv, svenska styrdokument för skolan och yrkesetik. Vår slutsats är bland annat att genom dialog om våra personliga erfarenheter kan man förstå sig själv och andra bättre. I vår essä framgår det också hur viktiga styrdokumenten är som stöd för fritidshemslärare i sina ageranden som påverkar elevernas sociala utveckling. / The purpose with our essay is to research the situation of leisure-time teachers within the Swedish school that has foreign background, specifically the situation when pupils question them of being different from the norm through the color of their skin. We have written stories that we have based on our own experiences from our professional lives and that we view as dilemmas. We have been able to form four questions from our dilemmas. For us to be able to understand our dilemmas and to answer our questions we have used theories that are about dialogue, experience, intercultural leadership, norm and authority perspective, Swedish regulation documents for school and work-ethics. Our conclusion, amongst other things, is that through dialogue about our personal experiences one can understand oneself and others better. In our essay, it also shows the importance of the regulation documents as support to the leisure-time teachers in their actions that influence pupils`, social developement.

A considerable amount of work has been written on race and education in the British context since the 1960s. This work has largely focused on policy issues, curriculum development and teacher training. This work has been important largely for developments in multicultural education in the school context. In Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), the teaching of race related modules and courses have flourished since the 1980s (Jacobs 2006). This interest, however, has not translated into work on praxis, that is, anti-racist teaching practices that aim to improve the situation that students and teachers face when challenging racism. This PhD study by publication begins to redress this by exploring student experiences and classroom dialogue. It adopts an interpretist methodological perspective and uses participant observation and interview methods. The observations and interviews are drawn from my classroom teaching, specifically, my modules dealing centrally with race and racism. Most of the writing around race and HEIs focuses on institutional matters rather than those that seek to enable praxis. The original contribution to knowledge advanced in this critical commentary and my published works submitted here is that it underlines the importance of anti-racism as it emerges organically within classroom engagement and exchange. Anti-racist practice, I claim, becomes fundamental to the learning process, where student experiences are first considered within the teaching process. This study focuses on students' learning experiences as found in my second and third level modules on the Sociology degree on which I teach at Wolverhampton University. My publications examine students' perspectives on racism as they arise in class. They explore student identities as they are experienced and classroom interaction. In this endeavour, I focus on the ways that Critical 5 Theory and Feminism and Critical Pedagogy can challenge students' prior perspectives on their identities and those of others. This work seeks to add to analyses of the ways that racism currently operates and could be challenged in HEIs. It argues that it can be challenged through more fully developing anti-racist educational practices that must engage with debates about ethnicity and identity in education, as discussed in Section One. This is because students’ lived experiences are core to an understanding of how racism impacts on students' lives. This commentary advances the argument that anti-racist debates in HEIs that organically evolve from classroom teaching and learning are paramount to the work of anti-racist education in HEi, because lived experience is seen to be powerful material that can counter mainstream discourse on racism. What is distinctive about my model of anti-racist teaching and learning practices is my anti-racist practice. This informs my academic work with students and encourages them to reconsider their thinking in classroom teaching and learning. The use of Critical Race Theory and Feminist theoretical and methodological approaches and Critical Pedagogy is central to my anti-racist teaching practices in HEis.

This dissertation used a mixed method to develop an analytical model from a random selection of one of eight secondary history textbooks for instances of Indians to determine if the textual content: 1) constructs negative or inaccurate knowledge through word choice or narratives; 2) reinforces stereotype portraits; 3) omits similar minority milestones in United States history and politics; and 4) contained the enactments of political milestones in the development of US history and politics with regard to personhood and sovereignty of the American Indian. The methods used to evaluate secondary history textbooks are content manifest and critical discourse analysis and a modification of Pratt's ECO analysis which measures judgment values of descriptive terms. Data mining includes word choice, events, contributions, and governmental relations as these refer to the American Indian. Unexpected outcomes from this research resulted in a spider graph of four relational power axes to visually display diametrically opposed ideological discursive formations. Textbooks introduce students to authoritative content within the public school environment to impart national historical experiences that will shape their national identity, ideology and culture. Negative or inaccurate instances of the United States relationships with 566 American Indian Nations can affect social and political issues of Indian People today. This work will contribute to the field of American Indian Studies, Curriculum and Instruction, Cultural Studies, Critical Discourse, Critical Pedagogy, Indigenous Theory and Pedagogy, Popular Culture, Social Justice, Language Studies, Identity, Ethics, American Indian and Public Education.

本研究從幼兒園第二代經營者的角度出發，以研究者家族所經營，位在相對弱勢社區中的幼兒園為對象，從批判教育學的角度，探討透過教育消弭階級差異的方法，以及課程模式與階級文化間的關係。批判教育學探討在資本主義制度下，教育對中下階層學生的壓迫，進一步主張透過覺醒與轉化的教育模式，消弭階級差異彰顯人性的價值。呼應這樣的概念，近年來台灣的幼兒教育現場，在幼托整合的政策引領下，也開始施行以遊戲為主的統整課程模式，宣稱可透過根植於學生經驗的方式，使學習更有意義。然這樣的政策在教育現場施行並不順利，台灣幼兒教育現場，長期以私立幼兒園為主，多數幼兒園在激烈競爭下，不得不呼應家長需求崇尚讀、寫、算，為進入小學做準備的教學模式。因此統整課程的驟然推行，受到來自基層教師、家長與學生的抗拒。研究者透過自己長年在幼兒園中的觀察，與家長及教師的訪談，釐清這些抵抗背後的原因，並引述批判教育學者Freire覺察、解放，以及Giroux轉化型知識份子的概念，透過與教師取得觀念上的共識，幫助其了解自身在社會中的角色，進一步改變其教學方式。在得到幼兒園教師的初步共識後，進一步使轉化的意識擴及家長。期望透過由下而上的基進方式，達成課程改革並拉近階級差異的目的。 / From the perspective of the second generation manager of kindergarten, this study, with the kindergarten operated by the researcher family’s in a disadvantage community, explores methods to eliminate the class difference through education, and relationship between curriculum model and class cultures based on the viewpoint of critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy investigates the oppression of the lower class students through education in the capitalist system. Furthermore, it advocates eliminating class differences and highlighting the value of humanity through awareness and transformation of education. Echoing this concept, in recent years, the field of early childhood education in Taiwan begins to implement play-based integrated curriculum model under the guidance of preschools integration policy, and claims that learning can become more significance from student’s perspective. However, such policy does not work well. Early childhood education in Taiwan is mainly private kindergartens. Under the intense competition, most kindergartens have to respond to the demands of parents to advocate reading, writing, counting, implementing teaching mode preparing for entry into primary school. Therefore, the sudden implementation of integrated curriculum gets resistance from teachers, parents and students. The researcher clarifies reasons of the resistance by observation in kindergarten for many years, interviews with parents and teachers, quoted from critical pedagogy such as concepts of conscious and liberation by Paulo Freire and transformative intellectuals by Henry Giroux, to realize the consensus with teachers to help them understand their position in society and further change their teaching methods. After build-up the preliminary consensus with teachers in kindergarten, the researcher make transformation expanded into parents. The study expects to reach the purpose of curriculum reform and eliminate class difference through the radical approach.

Noam Chomsky, figure notoire du cognitivisme innéiste en psycholinguistique, est aussi un important penseur américain et activiste politique ayant écrit sur une multitude de sujets, issus de domaines variés : politique interne et étrangère des États-Unis, critique des médias de masse et enjeux sociaux liés aux droits de l’Homme, pour ne nommer que ceux-ci. Par contre, et malgré l’abondance de ses écrits à ce propos, Chomsky est, à ce jour, très peu étudié en philosophie de l’éducation : ce mémoire de maîtrise s’inscrit ainsi dans une perspective d’exploration, de définition et d’analyse de la pensée éducative chomskyenne, dans le but de présenter et réfléchir la portée possible d’une telle pensée dans l’axe philosophique des recherches en éducation. Devant la rareté, voire l’absence de recherches francophones et anglophones concernant notre objet d’étude, plus d’une centaine de livres, articles, entrevues et vidéos portant sur la philosophie chomskyenne et celle de grands penseurs humanistes, critiques ou opposés aux postulats chomskyens ont été retenus, lus et analysés dans le cadre de ce projet. Deux objectifs précis ont guidé ce mémoire : d’abord, présenter et analyser la pensée éducative chomskyenne en regard de ses fondements philosophiques et de ses ancrages intellectuels dans les traditions humaniste et critique en philosophie éducative, puis mettre en lumière l’unicité de cette pensée par rapport à ces traditions et à quelques courants opposés en éducation. Au terme de ce mémoire, nous espérons ainsi répondre aux questions suivantes : dans quelle mesure Chomsky s’inscrit-il dans les traditions humaniste et critique en éducation? Peut-il être considéré comme un héritier de la pensée de certains philosophes particuliers? En quoi sa pensée, relative à la philosophie de l’éducation, est-elle pertinente et innovante pour ce domaine fondamental? Et, finalement, quelles critiques pouvons-nous lui adresser? / Noam Chomsky, a notorious figure of nativist cognitivism in psycholinguistics, is also an important American thinker and political activist who writes on a variety of topics from various fields : internal and foreign policy of the United States, criticism of mass media and social issues related to human rights, to name a few. However, despite the abundance of his writings on this subject, Chomsky has been, to this day, rarely studied in philosophy of education: this thesis is thus part of an exploration perspective, definition and analysis of Chomsky's educational thought, in order to present and consider the possible scope of such thinking in the philosophical aspects of research in education. Considering the absence of academic French or English research on this object of study, more than a hundred books, articles, interviews and videos on the chomskyan educational philosophy and other great humanist, critical or opposed thinkers to chomskyan postulates have been selected, read and analyzed as part of this project. Two specific objectives guided this thesis : first, to present and analyze Chomsky's educational thought in terms of its philosophical influences and its anchoring in the intellectual humanist and critical traditions in educational philosophy, and to highlight the uniqueness of his thought in relation to these traditions and some opposing theories or points of view. At the end of this thesis, we hope to answer the following questions: to what extent Chomsky fits into humanistic and critical traditions in education? Can he be considered an heir to the thought of specific philosophers? How does his thoughts on philosophy of education are relevant and innovative in this fundamental field? And, finally, what critics can we address it?