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Motivational Challenges Experienced in Highly Complex Learning Environments
Richard E. Clark, Keith Howard, and Sean Early
"One of the greatest challenges facing education today is to find more effective and efficient ways to support the learning of highly complex knowledge...Our discussion begins with a definition of complexity and a description of current motivation theory. We then go on to describe five different research areas where task complexity may interfere with the motivational processes that support learning. Where possible, we will also describe the evidence for ways to overcome motivational problems."
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Preface: A Pedagogy for Life
Peter McLaren
"At this moment in history, Paulo Freire remains critical pedagogy's conscience-in-exile. Especially today, Freire's corpus of work threatens to explode the culture of silence that informs our everyday life as educators in the so-called world's greatest capitalist democracy."
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Preface: Fashion a Bulwark Against Barbarism
Peter McLaren
"It is evident everywhere that progressive educators around the world are harboring an anticipatory regret at what the world will surely be like if unbridled capitalism has its way. Great swathes of the globe are imploding from the expansion of the world capitalist system… Increasingly youth have been forced to sacrifice their futures in order to fund the endless wars on terror, to fund a crisis response program of bailing out the banks and to bolster the extravagant lifestyles of the financial elite. This calls for a revolutionary upsurge on the part of youth, with teachers playing a vital role in educating for socialism as state officials consistently refuse to consider increasing taxes on corporations and the rich to prevent public service and wage cuts."
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Preface to Learning and Social Difference
Peter McLaren
"Critical pedagogy has been developed over the past several decades as a counterweight to right-wing ideologues whose fustian (and Faustian) proclamations darkly denouncing liberal educators as enemies of civilization only add to the mawkish legacy of the neoliberal state's assault on public schooling. In addition, critical pedagogy has shed important light on the limited advances of liberal reformism, exposing its conspiracy of good intentions as little more than readjusting capitalism while at the same time readjusting to its readjustments."
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Who Will Educate the Educators? Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Globalization
Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur
"The globalization of capital and its profane partnership with neoliberal politics pose unique and urgent challenges to today's progressive educators. The central questions that were raised by George Counts in the 1930s and by Henry Giroux in the 1980s need to be raised again: Dare schools build a new social order? What purpose do schools serve and in whose interest? … The time could not be more ripe for exploring how the business of schooling is linked to the 'businessification' and the environmental destruction of the wider society, for unraveling how the idea of citizenship has been sutured to a fascist aesthetics, and for demanding how education can be transformed in the interests of social justice."
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Alternative Globalizations: Critical Globalization Studies
Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo
“The central antagonism of the current historical moment is one that we can now unhesitatingly call empire… As market fundamentalism unleashes its vicious assault against humanity under the auspices of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Washington Consensus, and as it accords itself the sacerdotal status necessary to divine a future of human dignity, prosperity, and democracy, the transnational ruling elite are being afforded a rite of passage to scourge the earth of its natural resources while besieging the working-class, women, children, and people of color… Critical educators today are struggling assiduously to defend the public sphere from its further integration into the neoliberal and imperialist practices of the state and the behemoth of globalized capitalism (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005). Still others are seeking a socialist alternative.”
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Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire
Peter McLaren
Capitalists and Conquerors is a series of path-breaking essays in the political sociology of education on topics hotly debated within the educational community. In this volume Peter McLaren addresses some of the most daunting political challenges of the current times, including the globalization of capitalism, the United States' drive towards world domination, strategies, tactics and models of resistance to neoliberalism and the ravages of empire-building, the role of the educator as a social agent and public citizen, the purposes and possibilities of public schooling, and the struggle for socialism. As a Marxist-humanist philosopher and social theorist, McLaren is able to offer new philosophical premises and socialist principles for building an alternative to capitalism.
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Comprehending Through Composing: Reflections on Reading Assessment Strategies
Robert C. Calfee and Roxanne Greitz Miller
The assignment to comment on the four chapters in this section, which present interestingly distinctive perspectives on the conference topic, is both engaging and challenging. The engagement springs from the depth of the ideas, the challenge from the task of molding the ideas into a coherent image. To address this task, we rely on three relatively standard lenses, and introduce a fourth that is less typical. Three constructs spring from the conference focus and the recent history of comprehension assessment: comprehension, (re)construction, and assessment. The fourth theme, composition, reflects our recent research, but, somewhat to our surprise, also emerged during the conference. Toward the end of the conference, for instance, Dick Anderson suggested that researchers might consider shifting attention from reading comprehension to literacy comprehension. Such a move is consonant with our thinking about the issues, and meshes with the increasingly important concept of academic language. Our chapter begins with brief reflections on the four lenses, continues with comments on the four chapters, and concludes by illustrating our recent efforts to engineer the reading-writing connection.
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Engaging Troubling Students: A Constructivist Approach
Scot Danforth and Terry Jo Smith
Filled with rich narrative and designed for educators working with troubling students each day, this insightful, practical guide leads you in developing helpful, trusting student-teacher relationships.
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From Giving Service to Being of Service
Philip M. Ferguson and Patricia O'Brien
This chapter focuses on the place of those with intellectual disabilities in the Western world.
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God’s Cowboy Warrior: Christianity, Globalization, and the False Prophets of Imperialism
Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo
"At this particular historical moment democracy seems acutely perishable. Its contradictions have become as difficult to ignore as sand rubbed in the eyes. While dressed up as a promise, democracy has functioned more as a threat. Spurred on by feelings of 'righteous victimhood' and by a 'wounded and vengeful nationalism' (Lieven, 2003) that has arisen in the wake of the attacks of September 11, and pushing its war on terrorism to the far reaches of the globe, the United States is shamelessly defining its global empire as an extension of its democratic project. The US National Security Strategy of 2002 states quite dearly that the US will not hesitate to act alone and will "preemptively" attack against "terrorists" that threaten its national interests at home or abroad. And one of its national interests is to bring free market democracy to the rest of the world."
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IQ
Scot Danforth
An encyclopedia entry about the IQ or "intelligence quotient", "a numerical score derived by combining a person's chronological age with his or her 'mental age' as determined by the person's performance on a standardized intelligence test."
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Neoliberal Citizenship and Federal Education Policy: A Critical Analysis of the No Child Left Behind Act
Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo
This article is a discussion of U.S. neoliberal ideology of imperialism in light of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a major political initiative that has been extolled by the Bush administration as the most significant educational reform package in the history of the nation.The authors argue that NCLB is implicated in the historically extant categories and practices of neo-liberalism and the globalization of capital. Through a historical materialist analysis, this article will explore the tensions and contradictions between official U.S. transcript of educational policy--to expand opportunity--and the U.S. drive for global economic hegemony. While the authors claim that NCLB is an historical apparatus that serves to exert control over the largest segments of the population to serve the needs of capitalist consumption and the reproduction of the law of value, there is also an important counterpoint to this imperial momentum rooted in grassroots education."
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Place, Profession and Program in the History of Special Education Curriculum
Scot Danforth, Steve Taff, and Philip M. Ferguson
"This chapter explores how three topical threads: place, professionalism, and program, have woven their way through the history of special education. The authors argue that these themes have played out over the last 200 years in the United States in a way that provides a helpful explanatory narrative for the evolution of policies and practices for children with disabilities. The authors' narrative looks at three key eras. First, they look at the influence of the French Enlightenment on American social activists in the middle of the 19th century. This was a time when the theme of place held sway as the dominant narrative thread. Next the authors move to the Progressive era and the dominance of the theme of a bureaucratic professionalism and rampant specialization of expertise. Finally, the authors look briefly at the period running roughly from 1975 to 2000, and review how the final thematic strand (program) of our triad gained prominence. The authors want to emphasize throughout their discussion of all three eras that their three themes--where children with disabilities should be taught, who should teach them, and what they should be taught--may be seen as interweaving threads in the history of special education."
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Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy
Peter McLaren
This book will address a number of urgent themes in education today that include multiculturalism, the politics of whiteness, the globalization of capital, neoliberalism, postmodernism, imperialism, and current debates in Marxist social theory. The above themes will be linked to critical educational praxis, particularly to teaching activities within urban schools. Finally, the book will develop the basis for a wider political project directed at resisting and transforming economic exploitation, cultural homogenization, political repression, and gender inequality.
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Towards a More Complex Understanding of Power to Better Grasp the Challenges of the Contemporary Superintendency
Sheldon Watson and Margaret Grogan
"This chapter suggests that the notion of power in educational research has been conceptually limited and laced with normative biases. In the case of the superintendent and school board relationship, this has resulted in a truncated understanding of the power relations that influence school district operations. In addition, a narrow view of power diminishes the capacity of leadership preparation programst to develop leaders who can navigate the contested terrain of district politics, particularly if the goal of such leaders is school reform. A reappraisal of the concept as it relates to educational research is necessary. Specifically, we suggest that a feminist poststructuralist (Brunner, 2002a; Grogan, 2000a) perspective on power offers a useful lens for examining the contemporary superintendency. This being said, our aim is not to supplant existing theoretical convention, but rather to argue for an expanded multi-paradigmatic perspective (Capper, 1993)."
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Women Superintendents and Role Conceptions: (Un)Troubling the Norms
Margaret Grogan and C. Cryss Brunner
"The dearth of national-level research on women superintendants draws attention to the need for further study focused only on women. We hope that these findings, which give us an indication of how women conceive of the role of superintendent, will prompt others to focus on the question in further large studies. Our assertions in this chapter are grounded in our findings about superintendents from the AASA-funded Study of Women Superintendents and Central Office Administrators (Brunner & Grogan, 2003). This study is the first in history to include all women superintendents in the United States."
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Assessment and Evaluation of Students’ Behavior and Intervention Outcomes: The Utility of Rating Scale Methods
Stephen N. Elliott and Randy T. Busse
"In this chapter, we discuss validity issues commonly related to rating scales, describe several frequently used behavior rating scales, and examine some useful rating scales applications and analytical methods that may advance research and practice. Before discussing the rationale and technical aspects of behavior rating scale assessment, we present six fundamental assumptions that should be kept in mind when using and interpreting behavior rating scales."
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Foreword to Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity
Peter McLaren
"I am very pleased to have been invited to write the Foreword for Performance Theories in Education, an important and innovative volume that creatively advances the language and discourse of educational theory and opens a number of causeways for progressive educational analysis. I am equally pleased to see my work engaged by various contributors, although, to be honest, my work has shifted discernibly over the last decade from a left postmodernism to a Marxist humanism. Marxism for some might seem an outdated theory as there has been no end over the last half century to scholarly commentators bidding farewell to Marx. But if Marx were really so dated, why has the need persisted to repeat obsessively those farewells?"
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A Critical Perspective on Culture in the Second Language Classroom
Linda M. Crawford and Peter McLaren
"This paper challenges the neoconservative agenda by rethinking culture from a postmodernist perspective. Implications for the second language curriculum and classroom are explored in the context of each selected aspect of a postmodernist and post-colonialist definition of culture."
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Critical Pedagogy and Marxism: Rethinking Revolutionary Praxis in Education
Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur
"The globalization of capital and its profane partnership with neoliberal politics pose unique and urgent challenges to today's progressive educators. The central questions that were raised by George Counts in the 1930s and by Henry Giroux in the 1980s need to be raised again: Dare schools build a new social order? What purpose do schools serve and in whose interest? … [E]ducators need to unthink their current relation to pedagogical practice as decoupled from the infrastructure of capitalism's deep value system and ruling moral syntax. "
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Winks, Blinks, Squints and Twitches: Looking for Disability and Culture Through My Son’s Left Eye
Philip M. Ferguson
This chapter focuses on the culture and human experience of having an intellectual disability.
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Breaking Signifying Chains: A Marxist Position on Postmodernism
Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur
"This chapter attempts to address some fundamental problems with postmodern theory, as it currently informs the field of educational research. Our position is that postmodern theory has overwhelmingly debauched the field of Leftist criticism. However, we have not undertaken an analysis of specific postmodern educationalists (this being achieved by many of the other chapters in this book). Rather, we set forth counterpositions to claims put forth in the literature by postmodern theorists. We give a positive appraisal of postmodern theory in certain instances where we feel it has contributed to the field of Leftist critique. In the main, however, our position remains unwaveringly critical. This is largely a result of our contention that postmodern theorists advocate an expansion of existing bourgeois forms of democratic social life into wider arenas of society, by means of a reformist politics in the tradition of Western liberalism. Such a politics views culture as partially independent of the state. Such a move only makes sense, however, within a larger politics of anticapitalist struggle. Yet postmodemists fail to challenge existing social relations of production and the larger social totality of capitalist social relations. As a result, their work has very little to contribute to the uprooting of the contradictions between capital and labor."
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Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts
Peter McLaren
"In practice, critical pedagogy is as diverse as its many adherents, yet common themes and constructs run through many of their writings. I have talked about general characteristics in the previous pare. In the part that follows, I will outline in more detail the major categories within chis tradition. A category is simply a concept, question, issue, hypothesis, or idea chat is central to critical theory. These categories are intended to provide a theoretical framework within which you may reread my journal entries and perhaps better understand the theories generated by critical educational research. The categories are useful for the purposes of clarification and illustration, although some critical theorists will undoubtedly argue chat additional concepts should have been included, or that some concepts have not been given the emphasis they deserve."
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Ethnography
Peter McLaren and Amanda Datnow
"At one time ethnography referred to the field methods of anthropologists in studying "exotic" cultures. It is now used by sociologists, educational researchers, cultural anthropologists, and other social science researchers to study any bounded group of people in virtually any context, urban or rural, global or local."
Below you may find selected books and book chapters from faculty in the Attallah College of Educational Studies.
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