Descriptive Inquiry in Teacher Practice

Descriptive Inquiry in Teacher Practice

Author: Cara E. Furman

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0807779326

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What does it mean to teach for human dignity? How does one do so? This practical book shows how the leaders at four urban public schools used a process called Descriptive Inquiry to create democratic schools that promote and protect human dignity. The authors argue that teachers must attend to who a child is and find a way to create classrooms that allow everyone to feel safe and express ideas. Responding to the perennial question of how to cultivate teachers, they offer an approach that attends to both ethical development and instructional methods. They also provide a way forward for school leaders seeking to listen to, and provide guidance for, their staff. At its core, Descriptive Inquiry in Teacher Practice champions a commitment to schools as places in which children, teachers, and leaders can learn how to live and work well together. Book Features: Illustrates how to take an inquiry stance toward the difficult issues that educators face every day.Examines how themes regularly addressed in foundations can be used to improve schools.Includes engaging portraits of progressive urban schools that showcase the qualities of the leaders that guide them.Demonstrates the power of a progressive and humanistic education for children of color and for those from lower-income backgrounds.


The Chicago School of Sociology

The Chicago School of Sociology

Author: Martin Bulmer

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1986-08-15

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0226080056

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From 1915 to 1935 the inventive community of social scientists at the University of Chicago pioneered empirical research and a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, shaping the future of twentieth-century American sociology and related fields as well. Martin Bulmer's history of the Chicago school of sociology describes the university's role in creating research-based and publication-oriented graduate schools of social science. "This is an important piece of work on the history of sociology, but it is more than merely historical: Martin Bulmer's undertaking is also to explain why historical events occurred as they did, using potentially general theoretical ideas. He has studied what he sees as the period, from 1915 to 1935, when the 'Chicago School' most flourished, and defines the nature of its achievements and what made them possible . . . It is likely to become the indispensible historical source for its topic."—Jennifer Platt, Sociology


Ghosts in the Schoolyard

Ghosts in the Schoolyard

Author: Eve L. Ewing

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-10

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 022652616X

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“Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools.” That’s how Eve L. Ewing opens Ghosts in the Schoolyard: describing Chicago Public Schools from the outside. The way politicians and pundits and parents of kids who attend other schools talk about them, with a mix of pity and contempt. But Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures—they’re an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closings. Pitched simultaneously as a solution to a budget problem, a response to declining enrollments, and a chance to purge bad schools that were dragging down the whole system, the plan was met with a roar of protest from parents, students, and teachers. But if these schools were so bad, why did people care so much about keeping them open, to the point that some would even go on a hunger strike? Ewing’s answer begins with a story of systemic racism, inequality, bad faith, and distrust that stretches deep into Chicago history. Rooting her exploration in the historic African American neighborhood of Bronzeville, Ewing reveals that this issue is about much more than just schools. Black communities see the closing of their schools—schools that are certainly less than perfect but that are theirs—as one more in a long line of racist policies. The fight to keep them open is yet another front in the ongoing struggle of black people in America to build successful lives and achieve true self-determination.


Latina/o/x Education in Chicago

Latina/o/x Education in Chicago

Author: Isaura Pulido

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0252053508

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In this collection, local experts use personal narratives and empirical data to explore the history of Mexican American and Puerto Rican education in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. The essays focus on three themes: the historical context of segregated and inferior schooling for Latina/o/x students; the changing purposes and meanings of education for Latina/o/x students from the 1950s through today; and Latina/o/x resistance to educational reforms grounded in neoliberalism. Contributors look at stories of student strength and resistance, the oppressive systems forced on Mexican American women, the criminalization of Puerto Ricans fighting for liberatory education, and other topics of educational significance. As they show, many harmful past practices remain the norm--or have become worse. Yet Latina/o/x communities and students persistently engage in transformative practices shaping new approaches to education that promise to reverberate not only in the city but nationwide. Insightful and enlightening, Latina/o/x Education in Chicago brings to light the ongoing struggle for educational equity in the Chicago Public Schools.


Department and Discipline

Department and Discipline

Author: Andrew Abbott

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-05-19

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 022622273X

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In this detailed history of the Chicago School of Sociology, Andrew Abbott investigates central topics in the emergence of modern scholarship, paying special attention to "schools of science" and how such schools reproduce themselves over time. What are the preconditions from which schools arise? Do they exist as rigid rules or as flexible structures? How do they emerge from the day-to-day activities of academic life such as editing journals and writing papers? Abbott analyzes the shifts in social scientific inquiry and discloses the intellectual rivalry and faculty politics that characterized different stages of the Chicago School. Along the way, he traces the rich history of the discipline's main journal, the American Journal of Sociology. Embedded in this analysis of the school and its practices is a broader theoretical argument, which Abbott uses to redefine social objects as a sequence of interconnected events rather than as fixed entities. Abbott's theories grow directly out of the Chicago School's insistence that social life be located in time and place, a tradition that has been at the heart of the school since its founding one hundred years ago.


How Schools Really Matter

How Schools Really Matter

Author: Douglas B. Downey

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-12-07

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 022673336X

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Most of us assume that public schools in America are unequal—that the quality of the education varies with the location of the school and that as a result, children learn more in the schools that serve mostly rich, white kids than in the schools serving mostly poor, black kids. But it turns out that this common assumption is misplaced. As Douglas B. Downey shows in How Schools Really Matter, achievement gaps have very little to do with what goes on in our schools. Not only do schools not exacerbate inequality in skills, they actually help to level the playing field. The real sources of achievement gaps are elsewhere. A close look at the testing data in seasonal patterns bears this out. It turns out that achievement gaps in reading skills between high- and low-income children are nearly entirely formed prior to kindergarten, and schools do more to reduce them than increase them. And when gaps do increase, they tend to do so during summers, not during school periods. So why do both liberal and conservative politicians strongly advocate for school reform, arguing that the poor quality of schools serving disadvantaged children is an important contributor to inequality? It’s because discussing the broader social and economic reforms necessary for really reducing inequality has become too challenging and polarizing—it’s just easier to talk about fixing schools. Of course, there are differences that schools can make, and Downey outlines the kinds of reforms that make sense given what we know about inequality outside of schools, including more school exposure, increased standardization, and better and fairer school and teacher measurements. ? How Schools Really Matter offers a firm rebuke to those who find nothing but fault in our schools, which are doing a much better than job than we give them credit for. It should also be a call to arms for educators and policymakers: the bottom line is that if we are serious about reducing inequality, we are going to have to fight some battles that are bigger than school reform—battles against the social inequality that is reflected within, rather than generated by—our public school system.