Many contemporary policymakers and philanthropists interested in fixing problems in urban education look to business practices and market-based reforms. Venture Philanthropy (VP), draws its practices directly from the financial sector, using strategic investment to increase the capacity and achievement of funded organizations and to promote social goals. VP firms are increasingly a part of the education environment yet currently there is little empirical data on the specific meaning, ideas, and logic through which these organizations understand and investment in education, particularly urban education. This research sought to answer the research question, what is the theory of action of a venture philanthropy firm focusing on educational improvement and what new meanings and practices does it produce in one urban district? This study collected data using embedded ethnographic methods including over 200 hours of observations, 21 interviews, and document collection creating a case study of a single education VP, the Center for Educational Advancement (CEA). Using Foucauldian disciplinary theory to analyze CEA's perspective on and practice of educational investment, this study found that CEA sought to transform the instruction and culture within its portfolio of urban schools by using the disciplinary practices of observation, judgement, and examination, thereby producing for its donors a student achievement return on investment. / Policy, Organizational and Leadership Studies

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This dissertation research examines students’ lived experiences of dance improvisation in a 2014 Hampshire College course titled “Community Crossovers: Dance in the Community” taught by the author. Research methodology is informed by the hermeneutic phenomenology of educational philosopher Max van Manen, dance education research grounded in phenomenological methods by Karen Bond and Susan W. Stinson, among others, and researchers and writers of classroom action research. Sources of qualitative data include students’ reflective writings about their experiences of three selected dance improvisations—Human Puzzle, Mirror, and Approach/Avoid—in both college and community settings. Additional sources contextualizing students’ experiential meanings include course entry questionnaires, videotaped college and community dance sessions, written pedagogical and phenomenological reflections of both the researcher and a teaching assistant, and class discussions. Our Massachusetts community partners were the Treehouse Foundation, Easthampton and the Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Children’s Action Corps, South Hadley. Student lived experience writings were coded over several cycles to identify categories of meaning in each of the three improvisations at both college and community sites, and these were analyzed for themes across four modes of student participation: self, partner, group and movement (an aesthetic mode). Findings revealed bodily-affective-social-aesthetic meaning making that foregrounds relationality, or connection, through embodied experiences. Students’ descriptions of connection can be understood as qualitatively distinct kinds of felt intersubjectivity: two-person, merged, and other-first. Findings are placed in conversation with literature from dance, community-based education, philosophy, and critical pedagogy. / Dance

This study examines how legislated policy, the New Jersey Amistad Bill, and the subsequently created Amistad Commission, shifted the mandated educational landscape in regard to the teaching of social studies in the state of New Jersey—by legislative edict and enforcement, within every class in the state. Through a century of debates, reforms, and legislations, there has been a demand to include the contributions, achievements, and perspectives of people of the African Diaspora that deconstruct the European narrative of history. It is my belief that the formation of an educational public policy that is reflective of the Afrocentric paradigm in its interpretation and operation, such as the Amistad law, with subsequent policy manifestations that result in curriculum development and legalized institutionalization in classrooms across the country is central to creating the curriculum that will neutralize mis-education and will help American students to obtain an understanding of African American agency and the development of our collective history. The Amistad Commission, created by legal mandate in the state of New Jersey in 2002, is groundbreaking because it is a legal decree in educational policymaking that codifies the full infusion and inclusion of African American historical content into New Jersey’s K-12 Social Studies curriculum and statewide Social Studies standards. This infusion, directed by the executive leadership team, is a statewide overhaul and redirection for Social Studies and the Humanities in all grades in every district throughout the state. The Commission’s choice of the Afrocentric theoretical construct—a cultural-intellectual framework that centers the African historical, social, economic, spiritual and political experience as pertains to any intellectual experience involving Africans and people of African descent—as its organizing ethos and central ideology was central in framing the resulting curriculum products and programmatic directives. This study’s conclusive premise in utilization of the Afrocentricity construct is evidenced in the Amistad curriculum’s Afrocentric tenets: de-marginalization of African historical contribution and agency; the importance of voice and first person narrative when transcribing history, and how shifting of —as in, correcting—the entire Eurocentric structure is important. Rather than an additive prescription of historical tokenisms, or a contributive prescription that does not allow for a centralized locality from within the culture, Afrocentricity allows for a cultural ideology when applicable to the Amistad law. Thus the use of Afrocentricity in the implementation of the Amistad law transforms the entire narrative of American history in the state of New Jersey, one of the original thirteen colonies. The study seeks to remedy the void of research as to how the incorporation of the particular theoretical framework of Afrocentricity impacted the decision guiding the policy directives, programmatic and the curriculum outcomes within the implementation of the New Jersey Amistad Commission mandate. The case study asserts that the Afrocentric theory was put into praxis when operationalizing the New Jersey Amistad law and the work of the Amistad Commission. It chronicles the history of similar mandates focused on the incorporation of African American history in American classrooms that led to the Amistad law. It also enumerates the Amistad law’s subsequent operationalization and curriculum development efforts elucidating practical application of the Afrocentric theory. It has direct implications for teacher education, practicing teachers, and policymakers interested in understanding how Afrocentricity and its tenets are paramount in curriculum development efforts, especially as it pertains to New Jersey, New York, and Illinois. These three states have passed legislations that have attempted to proactively remedy their educational policies. The disparities in knowledge and education about African diaspora people in our Social Studies classrooms are targeted by these states. / African American Studies

Why did we ever purchase computers and place them along the wall or in the corner of a classroom? Why did we ever ask students to work individually at a computer? Why did we ever dictate that students should play computer games or answer questions built from a narrow data set? And why are we still doing this with computers in classrooms today? This approach has contributed to a systemic problem of low student engagement in course materials and little inclusion of student voice, particularly for traditionally underrepresented students. New transformational tools and pedagogies are needed to nurture students in developing their own ways of thinking, posing problems, collaborating, and solving problems. Of interest, then, is the predominance in today’s classrooms of programmed learning and teaching machines that we dub 21st century learning. We have not yet fully harnessed the transformational power and potential of the technology that schools already possess and that many students are bringing on their own. This dissertation aims to address what is missing in best practices of technology in the classroom. Herein these pages will be performed a document analysis of cornerstone books written by John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Seymour Papert. This analysis will be in the form of annotations comprised of the author’s experience as an experienced educator and researcher, and founded in the extant relevant theories of critical theory, technology, and constructivism. The three philosophers were selected for their contributions to constructivism and their urgings to liberate the student from an oppressive system. With a different approach to educational technology, students could be working towards something greater than themselves or the coursework, something with a passionate purpose derived from student inquiry. Instead of working at the computer and having a “one and done” experience, students could be actively transforming their studies and their world. And instead of reifying existing social and racial inequities outside of the classroom through the large computer purchases and the dominant culture attitudes and beliefs found in many software products and databases, we could be examining our practices and programs with a critical lens that allows us to question and seek more inclusive community strategies. The final chapter is about asking for, pushing for, and dreaming for new kinds of schools, classrooms, software, hardware, and new ways to think about and create new opportunities for students. Mixed reality, sometimes called augmented reality, is likely the anticipated future of computers in the classroom. We need to, very deeply and purposefully, mix up electronics with people. We are in a new era with new understandings of old issues showing up in old problems. A unified learning theory for computers, computing, and digital learning environments could help to redefine classroom spaces and class time, as well as graduation outcomes. The revolution will indeed be live on the Internet, but it will also be remixed and recreated by students organically and authentically pursuing their own truth.

The concept of self-esteem has so thoroughly infiltrated American education that “most educators believe developing self-esteem to be one of the primary purposes of public education” (Stout, 2001, p. 119). That the available scholarship challenging the validity of self-esteem principles has had little to no impact on schooling and school policy demonstrates the need for more a comprehensive interrogation of a concept that has become so pervasive and commonsensical that many administrators and teachers do not even think to question its place in traditional pedagogy, let alone consider the possibility that self-esteem is a damaging ideological construct. The rhetorical (and impossible) promise of self-esteem as both a quantifiable and fixed human resource has proliferated in educational language as schools continue to promote self-esteem among racialized and poorly performing students, while the structural conditions that negatively impact these students’ performance in the first place remain intact. The legacy of self-esteem in educational discourse requires a critical interpretation, or re-interpretation, by educators who wish to challenge oppressive commonsense assumptions and feel-good principles that covertly help to maintain “dominant cultural norms that do little more than preserve social inequality” (Darder, 2015, p. 1). This study takes a decolonizing approach that involves a substantive interrogation—historical, political, and philosophical—of the Eurocentric epistemological concept of self-esteem, in order to demonstrate the debilitating effects that self-esteem has on students from working-class communities of color. It then suggests an emancipatory understanding of the self and alternative critical pedagogical principles of social empowerment.

The purpose of this survey was to make a critical study of (a) educational philosophies, (b) the place of auditorium activities, (c) the purpose of auditorium activities, and (d) the value of auditorium activities in the whole scheme of educational procedures.

This paper discusses what Ralph Waldo Emerson believes to be the aim of education and how he thinks the aim is to be reached.

It is the purpose of this thesis to define and explain the educational philosophy of instrumentalism as developed by John Dewey.

Turkey-origin families in Denmark have long been suffering for their children’s future due to the challenges of criminal gangs and violent religious extremist organizations. Hizmet (The Service) movement which is a non-governmental civic movement offers a solution to the afore-mentioned problems of youths through education.  Hizmet movement is a voluntary, transnational, faith-inspired civil movement which was founded in Turkey 50 years ago by a Muslim scholar and preacher Fethullah Gülen and now is globally active.   The purpose of this thesis is to understand Hizmet movement educational philosophy and its role in the success and popularity of Hay school (Hayskolen) which is situated in the capital of Denmark, Copenhagen and known as a Hizmet-inspired school.   After having made a literature review about Hizmet educational philosophy, I tried to understand if this philosophy plays an important role in the success and popularity of Hay school by the data collected through institutional documents and semi-structured interviews.   The conclusion is that Hay school, have many similar aspects with other Hizmet-inspired schools and Hizmet education philosophy plays an important role in the success and popularity of Hay school. That is; The Hizmet-educational philosophy which is an important factor to ensure Hay school as a safe haven for pupils against criminality and radicalism contributes a lot to the success and popularity of the school.