Incentives to Alleviate Teacher Frustrations: Inroads to Better Work Production for Teachers and Administrators

This article first looks at how teachers\u27 apt work is contrasted with that of teacher-perceived inept administrative work habits. Second, a distinction is made between teacher official and pragmatic work zones. More teacher autonomy was achieved through completing administrative duties within the pragmatic zone. This acted as a constant source of teacher struggle and frustration, yet concurrently this was also a possible source of liberation. Conclusions suggest that both teacher and administrators first open communication lines by airing the core of the problem that bothers them, and second, create united normative platforms on issues. This would help to alleviate teacher-related frustrations

Reflective Critical Inquiry on Critical Inquiry:A Critical Ethnographic Dilemma Continued

This manuscript argues that there is an intimate connection between a critical ethnographer\u27s personal history and the data collected. The author traces elements in his personal life, such as school, religion, immigration and forms of discrimination, and connects dominant values within the above to the various studies he has conducted over the last decade. The author reflects back on how he may have unconsciously been seeing the everyday experiences of subjects he was studying as a reflection of his own personal experiences at various times in his life - all which relate to forms of institutional and cultural political resistance. The author argues that the educational Left can only be caught in a theoretical and cynical catch 22 logic if the interpretation of critical data remain at the structural level. Moments of joy and emancipatory possibility , the author maintains, becomes a possibility particularly when the critical ethnographer\u27s personal voice is entered into the whole ethnographic picture. That in mind, the author argues that school change on any level of liberation can only occur when the researcher and researched can attain a level of intersubjective compromise, where both their personal voices and relationships to structure are better understood

Classrooms As Socialization Agents: The Three R\u27s And Beyond

The conceptualization of curriculum as more than a document, specifically, as an active negotiation and construction of knowledge, was explored in two different studies as a first step toward understanding curriculum in practice. In particular, the studies explored the social process curriculum which was embedded in the enacted curriculum in the classrooms. Findings showed that the enacted curriculum was comprised of many elements, i.e., a pragmatic, unofficial, masked, social, and hidden curriculum. Each of these types of enacted curriculum were interwoven within the enacted curriculum, and were socializing agents which conveyed norms, behaviors, values and meanings to students

Teacher Group Formation as Emancipatory Critique: Necessary Conditions for Teacher Resistance

One of the essential problems of critical social theory in education has been the inability by critical ethnographers to practicalize the heavy theoretical formulations of resistance theory. This naturalistic case study situates a group of four middle school teachers acting both individually and collectively in an attempt to undermine the contradiction between the individual and group concepts. It is argued that, through institutional and cultural political resistant acts, teachers can build an intersubjective, group understanding that potentially opposes dominant ideological propensities. My proposal is that teachers realize their group identity and use this to form a normative stance on cultural issues at the school site

The Pragmatic Curriculum: Teacher Reskilling as Cultural Politics

It is said that teachers can, and do, use curricula different from thestandardized versions presented to them. The author argues that teachers are more than deskilled technicians and, using excerpts from three case studies, demonstrates that teachers apply cultural politics to create pragmatic curricula and to reskill themselves. The application of cultural politics alleviates oppressive, alienating, and subordinating relations in schools. It is suggested that, to transform themselves from deskilled technicians to reskilled practitioners, teachers question seriously the socio-political climate in which curricula function

Identity Politics: The Dialectics of Cynicism and Joy and the Movement to Talking Back and Breaking Bread

The author argues that critical pedagogues can overcome their postmodern cynicism by connecting areas of personal and public narrative to forms of alienation, oppression, and subordination. Whether narrative is about structural elements of schools or society (such as religion) the author argues that to overcome one's own cynicism one has to joyfully and symbolically talk back and break bread - making the enlightenment and modernistic ideals of freedom, justice, and liberation a genuine possibility. The fusion of modernism and postmodemism and cynicism and joy intertwined with personal narrative becomes a "method" to answer the question critical theorists always have to ask in order to remain honest with themselves: To what end do we do what we do

Constructing a University/Public School Partnership: Scholar-Practitioner Pursuits.

A discussion on how universities can work with public school teachers and administrators to improve educational services