Peter on January 28th, 2009

Today I attended Dr. Baggerly’s workshop Active Learning: Practical Applications to Promote Passion and Ration. I learned about different perspectives attendees held about the role of ration versus passion in education, the importance of having everyone participate, how to enable students to take on the role of teachers (peer support), and several creative strategies for [...]

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Peter on January 27th, 2009

This evening I’ve been reading Lindblom’s The Science of “Muddling Through” and continuing with the Koretz text Measuring Up.  From Koretz, p. 40: “. . .the inclination to apply the knowledge and skills learned in school to later endeavors certainly is an important goal. We don’t put students in school simply to do well while [...]

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Peter on January 25th, 2009

This past week was spent working on webinars and submitting a grant that went out on Thursday. Tomorrow marks 3 weeks until the Qualifying Exam, and I was thankfully able to clear Feb. 9-13 by using vacation days. Having off the week before will allow me to focus and breathe. I’m confident to meet this [...]

Continue reading about Catching up

Today I’m reading the Paul, French, and Cranston-Gingras September, 2001 article Ethics and Special Education in the journal Focus on Exceptional Children. This article traces the contours of ethical approaches to special education (choice morality vs. character morality),their application to contrasting ideals of democracy (liberalism vs. communitarianism), and the construction of ethical arguments concerning the [...]

Continue reading about Historical, Ethical, and Disciplinary Foundations of Special Education

Peter on January 19th, 2009

1690 – John Locke advanced the classical empirical theory that all our ideas come from experience.  ”Before Locke, ideas were generally believed to be innate.  If disabilities are also innate and imprinted before birth by God, the Devil, or nature, then they would not be amenable to ameliorization except by miracle.  Such a conception of [...]

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Peter on January 17th, 2009

Readings • Johanningmeier, E. V., & Richardson, T. (2008). Educational research, the national agenda, and educational reform: A history. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc. • Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum: 1893-1958 (3rd ed.). New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer. • Manna, P. (2006). School’s in: Federalism and the national education agenda. [...]

Continue reading about Education Reform: History and Politics

Peter on January 16th, 2009

Kilbourne, J. (Writer/Producer), & Jhally, S. (Director) (1999). Killing us softly 3 [Motion picture]. (Available from Media Education Foundation, Northampton, MA 01060). Retrieved January 15, 2009, from [if link doesn’t work, search for keywords “killing us softly” via Google or YouTube] http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1993368502337678412&hl=en&fs=true Livingston, S., & Bennett, L. W. (2003). Gatekeeping, indexing, and live-event news: Is [...]

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Peter on January 15th, 2009

My strategy for the Qualifying Exam is to review all of my coursework, course readings, and additional readings provided by my committee and concurrently ask: how schooling has contributed to or worked to negate the Construction of Social Distance and Stratification given their operational/historical context; how schooling has adhered to what Tyack and Cuban term [...]

Continue reading about Qualifying Exam Preparation

Peter on January 12th, 2009

I’m studying for the qualifying exam coming up next month and need to organize my list. This evening I read through the following text and wrote a few things. I need to not do this as if I’m writing a weekly summary for a class, but it was something to get me started:Cremin, L. (1961). [...]

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Peter on January 10th, 2009

When Johnny Mnemonic starts looking eerily familiar, it’s a telling indicator you’re processing a huge amount of information. I just completed the largest grant I’ve ever written, which is a multi-site, mixed methods evaluation design with technical assistance to 10 national sites (2 national partnerships, multiple data collection and analysis waves). The majority of it [...]

Continue reading about Reflection and Recovery