Popular education and pedagogy in everyday life: The nature of educational travel in the Americas

This dissertation is a qualitative study of educational travel. I focus on the travel organizations and publishing agencies that market and sell educational travel and the travelers themselves who desire to travel for learning purposes. The dissertation is also partly historical. The focus is on travel in the Americas; primarily U.S. travel to countries in Central and South America. There is also a chapter about a 19th-century trip to Canada. There are four data chapters in the dissertation. The first data chapter is historical. I examine educational travel as it developed since the Grand Tours of the 17th century. In the next chapter, I analyze tour brochures distributed by travel organizations that sponsor educational tours to Latin America. Following is a chapter based on interviews conducted with individuals who had gone on various types of educational tours to Latin America. In the final data chapter, I examine 19th-century travel diaries as a means of studying how individuals constructed educational travel experiences at a time of rapid growth in tourism. With this dissertation, I enter into the growing literature in the field of education that attempts to see education as a popular activity. I study education in connection to movement, popular culture, advertising, and the wants of individuals who search out information and knowledge in common places. In this way, I view education as a means through which people learn in everyday life. I attempt to make sense of education as it increasingly becomes enmeshed with activities traditionally deemed entertainment or leisurely--such as travel. Here, education is viewed and taken seriously as a popular activity that accounts for people\u27s everyday understandings of the world

Guns in schools : a closer look at accidental shootings : review article

Violence has become a pervasive part of the social fabric of South African society, and researchers have shown that young people are twice as likely as adults to be victims of at least one crime. As a result schools are frequently perceived as places associated with harm and fear. This paper sets out to briefly explore the policy context, describe some of the shooting incidents and considers some ways of addressing accidental shootings in school. While there are many concerns related to school violence, this paper focuses on accidental shootings. Some simple steps are proposed to make students more aware of potential tragedies associated with guns. • Schools should have periodic talks or lectures about the lethality of guns, especially with boys and students should be made aware of the incidents that have occurred in schools. • Parents must be made aware that many youths get guns from home. Guns need to be locked-up, or not owned at all. Parents must be made aware in writing that they can be held responsible if a gun is taken from home by a youth and brought to school. • Students should be made aware of the importance of immediately reporting if they see a gun or suspect that a student has a gun. This should be done periodically throughout the school year. These steps cannot guarantee a gun-free school or that gun-related violence will not occur; rather, they are steps that are useful in helping to prevent a tragedy, as they raise awareness and communication about guns in school. Keywords: school shootings, school violence, school safety, crime prevention South African Psychiatry Review Vol. 9(4) 2006: 216-21

The Institutional Context of Being a Behavioral Problem

Based on qualitative research conducted from September 1998 to May 2001 in a city high school, this article examines a special education program in relation to the institutional processes that were in place to attend to students identified with behavioral disabilities. The article draws attention to how policy impacted school-based activities; the influence of social contexts and professional systems on students' special education placements; and how decisions about students were made through a system of divisions and animosities that often worked against students. The article points out how the behavioral disability system was organized and used to meet the needs of a larger school system that was already set up in a way that categorized and separated students based on a variety of factors related to academic and behavioral abilities, as well as socioeconomic and racial identifications. At a broader level, the article also shows how the needs of professionals and the nature of institutions shape the goals of what professionals and organizations aim to achieve. The qualitative research presented here examines aspects of special education that are mostly unseen by those mandating and implementing disability policy, yet have great influence on young peoples' futures

A Practical Guide To The Qualitative Dissertation

xii, 141 hlm.; 24 x 16 c

The More You Talk, the Worse It Is

Prior works have established the association between students’ perceptions of school discipline and both behavioral and academic outcomes. The interplay between disciplinary fairness and students’ perceptions of their rights, however, warrants further investigation. In an effort to better understand the development of students’ perceptions of school disciplinary climates amid variation in school legal environments, we identified students’ perceptions of their due process rights based on 5,490 student surveys and 86 in-depth interviews in New York, North Carolina, and California high schools. We then examine the link between students’ perceptions of their due process rights, their past experiences with school discipline, and their perceptions of school disciplinary fairness. While quantitative results reveal a negative relationship between students’ perceptions of their rights and perceptions of disciplinary fairness, our qualitative data bolster this finding and deepen our understanding of students’ perceptions, illustrating students’ complex, varied, and often vague understandings of their due process rights when faced with disciplinary sanctions. As prior work has underscored the critical relationship between students’ perceptions of their schooling experiences and educational outcomes, uncovering this negative relationship is an important step toward understanding how variation in perceptions of rights may have consequences for students’ educational outcomes