Negotiating the boundaries of parental school engagement: the role of social space and symbolic capital in urban teachers' perspectives

As public schools continue to be driven by standards-based accountability practices, scholars contend that family engagement must become more egalitarian, with parents contributing their own insights for the betterment of the entire school community. Classroom teachers are key stakeholders in this process, with enormous potential impact. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of social space and symbolic capital, we examined teachers’ perspectives on their role in engaging diverse parents, using focus group interviews with urban classroom teachers. Multi-layered qualitative analyses elicited three themes that illustrated the powerful, but contradictory, positioning of teachers in facilitating authentic partnerships with families: (a) creating responsive relationships (b) casting engagement as education, and (c) creating varied-and tailored-opportunities, yet also revealed teachers’ assertions of power and authority, most often expressed as a need for boundaries between home and school. A progressive approach to family engagement and educator resistance is discussed, whereby teachers engage in collaborative advocacy with urban families to reclaim the notion of teaching as a public service, aimed at the promotion of equitable, accessible, and culturally responsive schools.Accepted manuscrip

Iñupiaq Culture and Wind Band: An Analysis of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Access to Music Education on Alaska\u27s North Slope

Iñupiaq Culture and Wind Band: An Analysis of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Access to Music Education on Alaska’s North Slope is an observational ethnography examining implications for incorporating the Iñupiaq culture into the instrumental music education curriculum for the North Slope Borough School District. The North Slope Borough School District is the geographically largest and northernmost school district in the United States. The majority of the student population it serves are Iñupiaq Native Alaskans. The research interprets the Iñupiaq Iłitqusiat (cultural values), the North Slope Borough School District pedagogical frameworks, and the Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools to answer the following questions. What does culturally responsive teaching through wind band music education and Iñupiaq culture look like for current and future music educators on the North Slope? How can North Slope wind band music educators implement cultural standards, in correspondence with essential music standards, into the instrumental music curriculum? What are the best options for access to instrumental music education across the North Slope? My doctoral research addresses the esprit de corps of the Iñupiaq culture and the band program’s role within this community, the absence of essential standards for instrumental music for grades six through twelve, and the inequitable access to music education within the district. The data explains the importance of lived values in creating the learning environment and provides solutions for expanding access to instrumental music education across the North Slope

Harmonization Without Consensus: Critical Reflections on Drafting a Substantive Patent Law Treaty

In this Article, we contend that the World Intellectual Property Organization\u27s proposed Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) is premature. Developing countries are struggling to adjust to the heightened standards of intellectual property protection required by the TRIPS Agreement of 1994. With TRIPS, at least, these countries obtained side payments (in the form of trade concessions) to offset the rising costs of knowledge products. A free-standing instrument, such as the SPLT, would shrink the remaining flexibilities in the TRIPS Agreement with no side payments and no concessions to the catch-up strategies of developing countries at different stages of technological advancement. More controversially, we argue that a deep harmonization would boomerang against even its developed country promoters by creating more problems than it would solve. There is no vision of a properly functioning patent system for the developed world that commands even the appearance of a consensus. The evidence shows, instead, that the worldwide intellectual property system has entered a brave new scientific epoch, in which experts have only tentative, divergent ideas about how best to treat a daunting array of new technologies. The proposals for reconciling the needs of different sectors, such as information technology and biotechnology, pose hard, unresolved issues at a time when the costs of litigation are rising at the expense of profits from innovation. These difficulties are compounded by the tendency of universities to push patenting up stream, generating new rights to core methodologies and research tools. As new approaches to new technologies emerge in different jurisdictions, there is a need to gather empirical evidence to determine which, if any, of these still experimental solutions are preferable over time. Our argument need not foreclose other less intrusive options and measures surveyed in the Article that can reduce the costs of delaying harmonization. However, the international community should not rush to freeze legal obligations regarding the protection of intellectual property. It should wait until economists and policymakers better understand the dynamics of innovation and the role that patent rights play in promoting progress and until there are mechanisms in place to keep international obligations responsive to developments in science, technology, and the organization of the creative community