This book explores changing practice in history classrooms from the autonomy of the 1980s through the introduction of GCSEs and the National Curriculum to the prescription of the National Strategies and the pervasive influence of league tables in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It uses individual narratives from history teachers to shed light on a changing profession. Showcasing research that is crucial reading for leaders in education, it uses oral accounts from 13 experienced teachers to provide a rich testimony of the constraints and affordances acting on history teachers. The book offers a unique perspective to show how teachers experienced steady but substantial changes in policy and autonomy and how this affected their practice; this detail enhances an analysis of policy and curricular documents across three decades. The findings are crucial for educational settings today, facing crises of teacher recruitment and teacher retention. This book will be of great interest to academics and higher degree research students in history education, history of education and education policy. It will also be of interest to beginning history teachers and senior school leaders responsible for teacher development and curriculum.
This book explores changing practice in history classrooms from the autonomy of the 1980s through the introduction of GCSEs and the National Curriculum to the prescription of the National Strategies and the pervasive influence of league tables in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It uses individual narratives from history teachers to shed light on a changing profession. Showcasing research that is crucial reading for leaders in education, it uses oral accounts from 13 experienced teachers to provide a rich testimony of the constraints and affordances acting on history teachers. The book offers a unique perspective to show how teachers experienced steady but substantial changes in policy and autonomy and how this affected their practice; this detail enhances an analysis of policy and curricular documents across three decades. The findings are crucial for educational settings today, facing crises of teacher recruitment and teacher retention. This book will be of great interest to academics and higher degree research students in history education, history of education and education policy. It will also be of interest to beginning history teachers and senior school leaders responsible for teacher development and curriculum.
This work embodies the most thorough treatment yet made in this country of the subject indicated by the title. The book opens with what history is, the problem of grading history, and the question of aims and values. The aim of history teaching is "to make the world intelligible." Next, the subject of history in schools of Europe and the United States; then, the biographical approach and the study of social groups. Practical methods in making history real by using visualizations are discussed, along with textbooks and their use, collateral reading, the historical method, correlation, and examinations. The critical chapters--dealing with the meaning of history, with the materials of history, with the aims and values of history-teaching, and with the grading of history--are models of clear, logical thinking expressed in simple but concrete language.
The discourse of neo-liberal school reform is centered on the push for accountability measures and the emphasis on schools of choice (Ravitch, 2013). Accountability measures have resulted in standardized testing, curriculum and teacher practice. Standardization and standard practice come to regulate the field of education by becoming invisible and taken for granted (Lampland & Star, 2009). Charter schools have become prevalent as a school of choice, which appeal to those who wish for privatization and those who desire an alternative choice for students previously underserved by traditional schooling sites (Mehta, 2012). Teach for America and its alumni have had a strong hand in the management and vision of many of these charter schools, based in business model discourse and competitive practices (Kretchmar, 2014; Lahan & Reagan, 2011, Veltri, 2008). With an avowed discourse of change theory, leaders in this organization have set out to make extensive changes to the structure of education (Knopp, 2008). This narrative inquiry and sociological exposition focuses on the experience that a new-to-the field teacher has in her experience in schools of choice, both charter and public. It utilizes James C. Scott’s sociological theories of how states traditionally have enacted reform measures on populations as a device to analyze these experiences (1998, 2013). Teacher forms of resistance are also analyzed in this way using Scott’s understanding of weapons of the weak (1985, 1990). This teacher’s stories are laid along side the sociological texts, viewed as stories (Brochner, 2012), in order to provide new insights into the way that changes of reform are felt and enacted in the everyday lives and experiences of a teacher (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Clandinin, Pushor & Orr, 2007). The resonance (Conle, 2000) between the research texts and stories are used as guideposts to shed illumination upon the relationship between teacher’s experience and the context of the reform movement. By looking at the teacher professional knowledge landscape broadly, outside the classroom, where teachers “meet all the other aspects of the educational enterprise such as the philosophies, the techniques, the materials, and the expectations” (Craig, 1995), this work aims to show how an individual teacher uncovers the functionality of the discourse of the reform movement in her own environment (Foucault, 1984). This uncovering, through the stories themselves can become a newly contested space where sites of resistance can be imagined (Scott, 2013). “Where teachers can engage with and resist the compelling and conditioning forces, to open fields where the options can multiply, where unanticipated possibilities open each day” (Greene, 1988, p. 115). Selected References Brochner, A. P. (2012). On first person narrative scholarship: Autoethnography as acts of meaning. Narrative Inuqiry 22 (1), 155–164. Clandinin, D. J. & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Clandinin, D.J., Pushor, D. & Orr, A.M. (2007). Navigating sites for narrative inquiry. Journal of teacher education. 58(1), 21–35. Conle, C. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Research tool and medium for professional development. European Journal of Teacher Education, 23(1), 49–63. Craig, C. (1995). Dilemmas in crossing the boundaries on the professional knowledge landscape. In D.J. Clandinin and F. M. Connelly (Eds.) Teacher professional knowledge landscapes (pp. 16–24). New York: Teachers College Press. Foucault, M. (1984). Nietzche, Geneaology, History. In P. Rabinow (Ed.). The Foucault reader. (pp. 76–100). New York: Pantheon Books. Greene, M. (1988). The dialectic of freedom. New York: Teachers college Press. Knopp, W. (2008). Building the movement to end educational inequity. The Phi Delta Kappan 89(10), 734-736. Kretchmar, K., Sondel, B. & Ferrare, J.J. (2014). Mapping the terrain: Teach for America, charter school reform and corporate sponsorship. Journal of Education Policy. doi:10.1080/02680939.2014.880812 Lahann, R. & Reagan, E. M. (2011). Teach for America and the politics of progressive neoliberalism. Teacher Education Quarterly 38(1), 7–27. Lampland, M., & Star S.L. eds. (2009) Standards and their stories: how quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life. Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press. Mehta, J. (2012). The allure of order: High hopes, dashed expectations, and the troubled quest to remake American schooling. NY: Oxford. Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America’s public schools. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Books. Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J.C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J.C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (2013). Decoding subaltern politics: Ideology, disguise and resistance in agrarian politics. New York: Routledge. Veltri, B. T. (2008). Teaching or service? The site-based realities of Teach for America teachers in poor, urban schools. Education and Urban Society. 40(5), 511–542.
Learn how to enact justice-oriented pedagogy and foster students’ critical engagement in today’s history classroom. Over the past 2 decades, various scholars have rightfully argued that we need to teach students to “think like a historian” or “think like a democratic citizen.” In this book, the authors advocate for cultivating activist thinking in the history classroom. Teachers can use Teaching History for Justice to show students how activism was used in the past to seek justice, how past social movements connect to the present, and how democratic tools can be used to change society. The first section examines the theoretical and research foundation for “thinking like an activist” and outlines three related pedagogical concepts: social inquiry, critical multiculturalism, and transformative democratic citizenship. The second section presents vignettes based on the authors’ studies of elementary, middle, and high school history teachers who engage in justice-oriented teaching practices. Book Features: Outlines key components of justice-oriented history pedagogy for the history and social studies K–12 classroom.Advocates for students to develop “thinking like an activist” in their approach to studying the past.Contains research-based vignettes of four imagined teachers, providing examples of what teaching history for justice can look like in practice.Includes descriptions of typical units of study in the discipline of history and how they can be reimagined to help students learn about movements and social change.
The word fundamentalism usually conjures up images of religions and their most zealous followers. Much less often the word appears in connection with political economy. The phrase “free market” gives the connotation that capitalism is freedom. Neoliberalism is the rise of global free-market fundamentalism. It reaches into nearly every aspect of our daily lives as it seeks to dominate and eliminate the last vestiges of public domains through wanton privatization and deregulation. It degrades all that is public. The good news is that a global community of resistance continues to struggle against neoliberal oppression. Formal and informal education entities contribute to these struggles, offering visions and strategies for creating a better future. The purpose of this volume is twofold. Several contributors will highlight how the neoliberal agenda is impacting educational policy formation, teaching and learning, and relationships between K-12 schools and communities. Other contributors will highlight how the global community has gradually become conscious of the ideological doctrine and how it is responsible for human suffering and misery. The volume is needed because the growing body of educational research linked to exploring the impact of neoliberalism on schools and society fails to provide conceptual or historical understanding of this ideology. It is also an important scholarly intervention because it provides insights as to why educators, scholars, and other global citizens have challenged the intrusion of market forces over life inside K-12 schools. Teacher educators, schoolteachers, and anyone who yearns to understand what is behind the debilitating trend of commercial forces subverting humanizing educational projects would benefit from this volume. Activists, educators, youth, and scholars who seek strategies and visions for building democratic schools and a society would consider this volume essential reading.
This book describes how neoliberalism as societal philosophy works to limit human potential in our school systems. Analyzing contemporary school reform and control, punishment, and pathologization in schools, this book outlines a theory of emancipation and a process by which pedagogy can build solidarity in classrooms and society more broadly.
In clear, concise language, this book deals with fundamental issues that must be addressed if teachers are to construct coherent and powerful history curricula, including: What are the purposes and goals that different types of teachers establish for their history teaching?, and What do children know and think about history, and what are the teaching implications for our schools? This book represents a major advance in developing a knowledge base about childrens historical learning and thinking that applies to history teaching some of the principles involved in teaching for understanding and conceptual change teaching, methods that have been so successful in other school subjects.
This book is about the Anatomy of Neoliberalism and Education from a Marxist perspective. It is the dialectical materialism of neoliberal ideas, examining the material conditions of how these ideas and practices emerged, and under what conditions. Each of these elements is related to the other and can only be properly understood as part and parcel of the whole system of capitalism, which links them together. This book investigates neoliberalism's political, cultural, and financial tools. It goes deep in the forces who have supported neoliberalism and how it became "common sense". It explores the imperialist outcomes and the social devastation it created. It then goes to see how these ideas and policies have been implemented in education. In short, it is the materialist conception of the history of the American empire. It then uses the analytic tools developed through this investigation to re-read the neoliberal educational reforms.
The Destructive Path of Neoliberalism: An International Examination, a compilation of twelve essays by leading scholars and educators, sheds light on the social, political, economic, and historical forces behind the rise of neoliberalism, the dominant ideological doctrine impacting developments in schools and other social contexts across the globe for over thirty years.
