Peter on March 30th, 2009

I’m assembling articles on the predominant models of health education for a literature base.   Here’s a continuing list: National Public Radio. (2004, February 24). Sex education in America. Retrieved April 30, 2009, from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1622610 The debate over whether to have sex education in American schools is over. A new poll by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, [...]

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Peter on March 15th, 2009

I passed the Qualifying Exam!  The dissertation work can commence, and the proposal defense will be next.  This is great!   In other school news, I saw this article in the NY Times this morning: Education officials classify some 5.1 million students in the United States — 1 in 10 of all those enrolled in [...]

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Peter on February 14th, 2009

I’m at the point where I’m done sorting through the piles and will spend tomorrow writing essay responses to what I’m hoping will be related to the questions I’ll see.  This will (1) help me practice my exposition and (2) reduce my anxiety by simulating the typing I’ll need to do Monday through Wednesday. The [...]

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Peter on February 13th, 2009

From Hochschild and Scovronick (The American Dream and the Public Schools): “Particular groups make claims to distinctive treatment in schools for two reasons: First, those acting on behalf of children who were treated unfairly because of some shared characteristic have demanded the right to have the group recognized and treated differently, so that in the [...]

Continue reading about Qualifying Exam Readings: Connections

Peter on February 12th, 2009

I’m very much appreciating this passage from Katznelson and Weir’s Schooling for All:  “For far too long now, discussions about education, social structure, and politics have been dominated by a discourse, once suggestive but now stale, between traditional progressive historians, on the one hand, who have identified schools as democratizing institutions that, in relatively unproblematical [...]

Continue reading about Qualifying Exam Readings: Meta Perspectives and Links

Peter on February 11th, 2009

I naturally started thinking about what questions I’ll have on my Qualifying Exam.  I heard that they’re global in scope and that Day 1 is specialization, Day 2 is cognate (Construction of Social Distance), and Day 3 is Methods.  I’m thinking that Day 1 will touch on the value of schooling and how detractors have [...]

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Peter on February 2nd, 2009

In yesterday’s Washington Post: In Black History Month, One-Room School Opens to Offer Lessons “The school was filled with benches, not desks, Orrison said, and blackboards were made of pieces of plywood painted black, unlike at white schools, where students had blackboard slates. ” Sitting on benches all day–yikes. Buske, J. (2009, February 1). In [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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