Copyright (c) 2009 University of Pennsylvania All rights reserved. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs Recent documents in GSE Publications en-us Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:12:06 PDT 3600 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/199 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/199 Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:41:50 PDT Previous research has highlighted numerous ways in which historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) offer more supportive educational environments for Black students than do predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Notwithstanding the consistency of these findings, persistence and graduation rates remain low for undergraduates, especially men, at HBCUs. Furthermore, anecdotal reports and news stories have called attention to the conservative politics of many Black colleges. This study explores how Black male students characterize, respond to, and make sense of environmental politics at 12 HBCUs that participated in the National Black Male College Achievement Study. In addition to 2-3 hour face-to-face individual interviews with 76 undergraduates, documents from 103 HBCUs were analyzed to gather additional insights into the political press of these institutions. Conservatism was evident in the areas of sexuality and sexual orientation, student self-presentation and expression, and the subordinate status ofstudents beneath faculty and administrators. Shaun R. Harper http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/198 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/198 Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:43:10 PDT Dena Phillips Swanson http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/197 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/197 Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:03:23 PDT Marybeth Gasman http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/196 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/196 Mon, 24 Aug 2009 07:59:55 PDT A content analysis of the media's coverage of Morris Brown College's situation suggests that the media have made and continues to make generalizations about Black colleges based on the faults of a few. These generalizations call into question the very existence of Black colleges. Although news reports began with appropriate questions about the leadership, financial stability, fundraising ability, and quality of the board of trustees at Morris Brown, they quite frequently attributed the institution's problems to Black colleges as a whole. Marybeth Gasman http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/195 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/195 Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:53:57 PDT The article analyzes the content of college viewbooks, which are designed to entice students to enroll in the universities that they represent. Viewbooks are considered a very important medium by which institutions communicate with prospective students. The authors look at the content of a wide variety of college viewbooks, examining common themes, the ways in which themes vary by institutional type and control, and what messages are communicated to students about the academic purposes of higher education.Viewbooks are an important medium for enticing students to apply to colleges. But what messages are conveyed in them? This study offers an in-depth examination of 48 viewbooks using content analysis. The findings point to the predominance of a highly privatized conception of a college education. Matthew Hartley http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/194 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/194 Wed, 20 May 2009 08:11:54 PDT The article reviews the book "Fostering Student Success in the Campus Community," edited by Gary L. Kramer. L W. Perna http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/193 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/193 Thu, 14 May 2009 09:08:47 PDT As many scholars have noted, narrative is a primordial human tool for making sense of life experience (Brockmeier, 2000, Ochs & Capps, 2001). While often described as a mode of relating experience that organizes events along temporal dimensions, research has also shown how participants in narrative activity explore the experiential logic of events by theorizing and evaluating the causes, consequences, responses and attempts to deal with problematic or unexpected situations (Ochs et al, 1992, Stein & Glenn, 1979). This paper explores how educators and parents evaluate the moral identity of a problematic student through narrative activity in a Thai parent-teacher conference. Drawing on Taylor's (1989) conceptualization of "the good" as a moral space of questions within which modern persons orient themselves, the paper extends Taylor's metaphor of orienting persons in moral space to orienting them in time. Focusing in particular on the use of tense, aspect and modality in temporal perspective taking (Andersen, 1997), the analysis focuses on how narrators discursively configure an ideal moral landscape which narrated persons are temporally positioned within-- as having realized or having failed to realize "the good". Kathryn M. Howard Language and Literacy http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/192 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/192 Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:26:44 PST One does not expect to find a high school in downtown Los Angeles. Daily, thousands of cars are deposited among the tall buildings and swiftly funneled into underground parking, their drivers whisked up interior elevators to work. At the end of the day, well-engineered entrance ramps carry the cars back to homeward-bound freeways. These cars crisscross each other, making elaborate and split-second negotiations, but interaction between people, it seems, is an indoor activity here. The vision of high school students carrying backpacks, walking and talking in groups, seems incongruous with this urban efficiency. Betsy R. Rymes Language and Literacy http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/191 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/191 Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:19:23 PST As methodological pendulums swing wildly and politicized education reform climates grow hot then cold, as teachers change their books and their seating arrangements, as laptops are issued, as blackboards change to whiteboards, and even as the complexion and language backgrounds of students change dramatically, a certain feature of classrooms may change very little. It is likely that certain students, those who have always struggled through school, will continue to do so. From one perspective, this persistent inequity in the classroom is rarely affected by policy changes because inequity is handed down from societal injustice at large. While certain critical theoretical perspectives on education (e.g., Freire, 1970; Giroux, 1992; Hooks, 1994) investigate, theorize, and practice education by first analyzing injustices outside the classroom, a linguistic anthropological perspective combines this awareness of larger societal patterns with a close look at how the particularities of interactions shape who gets to learn inside a classroom. Linguistic anthropology provides analytic tools to investigate and critique interactions inside, around, and relevant to these classrooms. The promise linguistic anthropology holds for education, then, is in the analytical insights it provides into the relationship between larger sociocultural patterns and the (re)production of inequity, on the level of person-to-person interaction, inside the classroom (Philips, 1993). Betsy R. Rymes Language and Literacy http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/190 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/190 Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:38:04 PST This historiography of gender and black colleges uncovers the omission of women and gender relations. It uses an integrative framework, conceptualized by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, that considers race and gender as mutually interconnected, revealing different results than might be seen by considering these issues independently. The article is significant for historians and nonhistorians alike and has implications for educational policy and practice in the current day. MaryBeth Gasman Educational Foundations