The Role of Controversial Issues in Moral Education: Approaches and Attitudes of Christian School Educators

This study investigated the approaches and attitudes of Christian school teachers as they addressed controversial issues in moral education. Thirteen teachers from four schools were interviewed extensively. A hermeneutic phenomenological methodology was implemented. Participants conveyed that they attempted to remain pedagogically neutral in matters relating to denominational differences among Christian churches. While acknowledging that indoctrinative techniques may alienate students, teachers chose to indoctrinate selectively, especially in matters critical to the Christian faith. Issues impacting the classrooms included abortion, sex, doctrine, homosexuality, evolution, etc. Teachers rarely chose to remain neutral on controversial issues unless by doing so they sensed that they would undermine parental authority or a particular Christian church’s denominational doctrine

Navigating Religious Rights of Teachers and Students: Establishment, Accommodation, Neutrality, or Hostility?

Despite the notion that First Amendment rights are established, valued, and respected in the United States, there continues to be confusion in public schools that leads to legal conflict over issues associated with freedoms of speech and expression, especially as they relate to religious issues. Navigating the religious rights of teachers and students can be a precarious undertaking, as administrators’ decisions regarding the expression of religious beliefs continue to be highlighted in the media and many times are resolved in the court system at great expense to school districts. The purpose of this article is to clarify religious rights issues for school administrators and school boards. What actions risk violating the establishment clause or expressing hostility toward religion? When and how is religion best accommodated while neutrality is maintained? This study traces court decisions and laws that serve to guide religious rights policies and practices. It also examines recent conflicts and the legal organizations whose mission it is to address First Amendment violations

Margaret Douglass: Literacy Education to Freed Blacks in Antebellum Virginia

In the 19th century, voices for social reform reached a high pitch—both figuratively and literally. Recognizable women’s voices were heard in various reform movements: Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Dorothea Dix, Harriet Tubman, Catherine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher-Stowe. These women were active in bringing about change in the societal roles and treatment of women, children, slaves, freedmen, and persons who were illiterate, disabled, poor, or incarcerated. A name not as recognizable, yet often held as an example of activism for educational rights of emancipated blacks, is that of Margaret Douglass—a white Virginian woman who was jailed for a month for violating an 1849 law prohibiting the teaching of reading and writing to freedmen. Although Douglass’ actions and the consequences faced for them have earned her a modicum of notoriety, further consideration may affirm that the limited status she holds as a social activist is warranted

A Phenomenological Study of ACSI International First Year Teachers’ Experiences in Curriculum Development

Graduate Applie

The evaluation subgroup of a fibre inclusion

Given a fibration of simply connected CW complexes of finite type, we study the evaluation subgroup of the fibre inclusion as an invariant of fibre-homotopy type. For spherical fibrations, we show the evaluation subgroup may be expressed as an extension of the Gottlieb group of the fibre sphere provided the classifying map induces the trivial map on homotopy groups. We extend this result after rationalization: We show that the rationalized evaluation subgroup of the fibre inclusion decomposes as the direct sum of the rationalized Gottlieb group of the fibre and the rationalized homotopy group of the base if and only if the classifying map induces the trivial map on rational homotopy groups.Comment: 15 page