Copyright (c) 2013 University of Pennsylvania All rights reserved. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs Recent documents in GSE Publications en-us Sat, 11 May 2013 01:44:32 PDT 3600 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/240 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/240 Thu, 09 May 2013 14:51:20 PDT The widespread disaffection of students from school is manifested in academic failure, indifference, and defiance. These problems can be alleviated, I argue, when an authority structure is developed that combines three components – freedom, power, and legitimacy. Authority understood as either power or freedom is apt to subvert students’ school attachment even while attempting to strengthen it; authority that combines power and freedom, when perceived by all parties as serving a legitimate mission, is apt to enhance engagement. The bonding potency of authority is augmented when it is joined to strongly marked school purposes and dispersed to students. The three components of authority are interwoven with school visions and student authority into various patterns: some schools lean more towards power, others more towards freedom; some operate under highly moralized and totalizing visions, others under vaguer, less moral, and less encompassing visions. The nature and interdependence of the three components and the trade-offs under various combinations are discussed. While legitimate authority has many faces, if schools are to be engaging places for students it is essential that the norms promoted are welcomed by them; advantageous to that process is ordaining students with authority to advance prevailing norms.

]]> Joan F. Goodman http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/239 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/239 Thu, 18 Oct 2012 09:14:03 PDT In many cases, student activism on college campuses stems from alienation – alienation of one generation from another, alienation of students from administration. The atmosphere in Nashville, Tennessee, at Fisk University during the early 1950s included neither of these ingredients. Most students admired their professors and respected the University president. In the case of Fisk, activism grew out of a shared sense of values and demonstrated leadership – as well as a response to outside oppression. This leadership and these values were passed on to students by Fisk's charismatic president, Charles S. Johnson. The purpose of this historical research is to explore the approach to activism that Charles S. Johnson advocated and instilled in the students at Fisk University. How did Johnson develop his values and convictions? On which principles were they based? How did he pass them on to others? And, how can Johnson's example help today's college presidents contribute to a renewed sense of activism among their students? Through the use of archival materials, interviews, and secondary sources, I will highlight Johnson's "sidelines" approach and discuss his student's reactions to it. Further, I will explore their own approaches to activism – that in their words "were heavily influenced by their Fisk experiences."

]]> MaryBeth Gasman http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/238 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/238 Thu, 18 Oct 2012 08:27:12 PDT In this article, we seek to understand how faculty door displays can evolve into an elevated form of self expression rather than mundane decoration. Other research on this topic has linked the decoration of faculty doors to theories of personalization: the need to mark the territory as belonging to the owner and as a symbol of commitment to an institution. Our discussion, however, focuses less on the personal and more on the use of the door as a means of positioning oneself within the department, institution, and discipline. We find that faculty door displays encompass more than just matters of personal style but also touch on the larger concerns that the professor wishes to communicate to the academic public.

]]> MaryBeth Gasman et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/237 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/237 Wed, 17 Oct 2012 10:50:35 PDT Invited commentary on the article "For Safety’s Sake: A Case Study of School Security Efforts and their Impact on Education Reform" by Rachel Garver and Pedro Noguera.

]]> Harris Sokoloff http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/236 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/236 Tue, 16 Oct 2012 07:49:28 PDT Few educational issues have received more attention in recent times than the problem of ensuring that our nation's elementary and secondary classrooms are all staffed with quality teachers. Concern with teacher quality is not surprising. Elementary and secondary schooling is mandatory in the United States and it is into the care of teachers that children are legally placed for a significant portion of their lives. The quality of teachers and teaching is undoubtedly among the most important factors shaping the learning and growth of students. Moreover, the largest single component of the cost of education is teacher compensation. Especially since the seminal Nation at Risk report in 1983, a seemingly endless stream of studies, commissions, and national reports have targeted teacher quality as one of the central problems facing schools.

]]> Richard Ingersoll http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/235 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/235 Wed, 25 Jul 2012 14:26:10 PDT Few educational problems have received more attention in recent times than the failure to ensure that our nation’s elementary and secondary classrooms are all staffed with qualified teachers. Over the past couple of decades, dozens of studies, commissions, and national reports have bemoaned the quality of our teachers. As a result, there have been numerous policies and initiatives enacted at the federal, state, and local levels. The most significant of these efforts has been the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), enacted in 2002, which set an unprecedented goal to ensure that students are all taught by “highly qualified” teachers. These policies and initiatives have for the most part focused on either upgrading the education and preparation requirements for teachers, or on increasing recruitment and the incoming supply of teachers.

]]> Richard Ingersoll Policy and Administration http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/234 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/234 Fri, 08 Jun 2012 13:05:01 PDT Induction support programs for beginning teachers is an education reform whose time has come. The national data indicate that over the past couple of decades the number of beginning teachers has ballooned in the U.S. Simultaneously, there has been a large increase in the number of states, districts, and schools offering induction programs. Importantly, the data also indicate that induction can help retain teachers, improve their instruction and their students’ achievement. However, the data also tell us that the kinds and amounts of support greatly vary, and research suggests the effects depend on how much induction one gets and for how long

]]> Richard Ingersoll http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/233 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/233 Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:32:29 PST Someone tells you a story. It seems wrong. It misrepresents someone you care about. But it has been told by someone you do not want to offend or contradict. What do you do? You feel you must say something—set the record straight, absolve your friend, clarify your relationship to her, assert your view on what is right and wrong. How do stories provoke this sense of urgency? When a story is told and interpreted, nothing less than truth, power, morality, and individual agency can be at stake, and these stakes are too high to ignore. The stories analyzed in this book illustrate that narratives bring into play those elements that bring meaning to life . . .

]]> Betsy R. Rymes et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/232 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/232 Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:01:11 PST The debate over the accommodation of culture in liberal democracies tends to emphasize exit rights. Autonomy is typically taken as a pre-condition for exit, and public schools are often charged with promoting or facilitating it. I argue that diversity liberals have a more justifiable viewthan that of autonomy liberals on cultural accommodation, but diversity liberalism too should reframe its view of exit rights. Narrow exit rights that protect basic human rights should be maintained and augmented with entrance paths into general society. I further suggest that for exit rights along with entrance paths to provide the morally required conditions for accommodating culture while respecting freedom, policies in this realm should be designed to address adults rather than children. I consider the effect of this dual change of perspective on the accommodation of culture in democratic institutions, including schools.

]]> Sigal R. Ben-Porath http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/231 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/231 Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:46:57 PST Stanton Wortham http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/230 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/230 Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:46:51 PST “Homies” are a series of over two hundred 1¾ inch figurines created by a California artist, with the images also available on clothing, in comics, in videogames, on stickers and on the internet. The artist claims that his creations represent the whole range of people one finds in “the barrio.” As the images circulate, however, different audiences interpret them differently - some decrying their glorification of gangsters, for instance, with others lauding the portrayal of less commonly represented social types. This paper traces the uptake of Homies images in one suburban American town, a town with no previous history of Mexican settlement that has become home to thousands of Mexican immigrants over the past 15 years. In this location, Homies images are taken up in various identity projects as Anglos use them to make sense of the rapidly growing immigrant community and as Mexican youth use them to identify themselves. The role that Homies play in social identification cannot be understood by examining discrete events of media “reception,” however. Analysts must also take into account ongoing local struggles over identity through which the mass mediated images come to have meaning and in which these images sometimes play central roles. The recontextualization of these mass mediated images among different groups in town sometimes results in the homogenization of identities - with the signs used to construe Mexican youth in unflattering ways drawn from nationally circulating stereotypes - while at other times the images are taken up in less familiar identity projects.

]]> Stanton Wortham et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/229 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/229 Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:18:59 PST Interviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often yield useful propositional information, and interviewers must guard against the sometimes-corrupting influence of interactional factors. But we argue that the interactional aspects of interview events can also be valuable data. Interview subjects sometimes position themselves in ways that reveal something about the habitual positioning that characterizes them or their groups. We illustrate the potential value of this interactional information by describing “payday mugging” stories told by interviewees in one New Latino Diaspora town.

]]> Stanton Wortham et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/228 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/228 Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:18:52 PST As Mexican immigrants move to areas of the United States that have not been home to Latinos, both longstanding residents and newcomers must make sense of their new neighbors. In one East Coast suburb relevant models of identity are sometimes communicated through “payday mugging” stories about African American criminals mugging undocumented Mexican victims. These narratives racialize African Americans and Mexicans in different ways. As payday mugging stories move across narrators from different communities, the racialized characterizations shift.

]]> Stanton Wortham et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/227 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/227 Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:05:04 PST This article describes a cultural production process called religification, in which religious affiliation, rather than race or ethnicity, has become the core category of identity for working-class Pakistani-American youth in the United States. In this dialectical process, triggered by political changes following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Muslim identity is both thrust upon Pakistani-American youth by those who question their citizenship and embraced by the youth themselves. Specifically, the article examines the ways in which schools are sites where citizenship is both constructed and contested and the roles that peers, school personnel, families, and the youth themselves play in this construction/contestation of citizenship.

]]> Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/226 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/226 Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:31:11 PDT This study examines and compares the recruitment and retention of minority and White elementary and secondary teachers and attempts to empirically ground the debate over minority teacher shortages. The data we analyze are from the National Center for Education Statistics’ nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey and its longitudinal supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey.

Our data analyses show that a gap continues to persist between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in the U.S. school system. But this gap is not due to a failure to recruit new minority teachers. Over the past two decades, the number of minority teachers has almost doubled, outpacing growth in both the number of White teachers and the number of minority students. Minority teachers are also overwhelmingly employed in public schools serving high-poverty, high-minority and urban communities. Hence, the data suggest that widespread efforts over the past several decades to recruit more minority teachers and employ them in hard-to-staff and disadvantaged schools have been very successful.

This increase in the proportion of teachers who are minority is remarkable because the data also show that over the past two decades, turnover rates among minority teachers have been significantly higher than among White teachers. Moreover, though schools’ demographic characteristics appear to be highly important to minority teachers’ initial employment decisions, this does not appear to be the case for their later decisions to stay or depart. Neither a school’s poverty-level student enrollment, a school’s minority student enrollment, a school’s proportion of minority teachers, nor whether the school was in an urban or suburban community was consistently or significantly related to the likelihood that minority teachers would stay or depart, after controlling for other background factors.

In contrast, organizational conditions in schools were strongly related to minority teacher departures. Indeed, once organizational conditions are held constant, there was no significant difference in the rates of minority and White teacher turnover. The schools in which minority teachers have disproportionately been employed have had, on average, less positive organizational conditions than the schools where White teachers are more likely to work, resulting in disproportionate losses of minority teachers. The organizational conditions most strongly related to minority teacher turnover were the level of collective faculty decision-making influence and the degree of individual classroom autonomy held by teachers; these factors were more significant than were salary, professional development or classroom resources. Schools allowing more autonomy for teachers in regard to classroom issues and schools with higher levels of faculty input into school-wide decisions had far lower levels of turnover.

]]> Richard Ingersoll et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/225 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/225 Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:10:53 PDT School anti-violence programs are united in their radical condemnation of aggression, generally equated with violence. The programs advocate its elimination by priming children's emotional and cognitive controls. What goes unrecognized is the embeddedness of aggression in human beings, as well its positive psychological and moral functions. In attempting to eradicate aggression, schools increase the risk of student disaffection while stifling the goods associated with it: status, power, dominance, agency, mastery, pride, social-affiliation, social-approval, loyalty, self-respect, and self-confidence. It is argued that the distribution to students of power and authority, plausible substitutes for aggression, would enable them to express aggression in a legitimated manner and simultaneously encourage their attachment to school. A vibrant anti-violence program that attracts children will find a way for caring, amiability, sympathy, and kindness to live in tandem with competition, power, assertiveness, and anger tamed by institutional constraints.

]]> Joan F. Goodman et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/224 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/224 Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:56:42 PDT This study seeks to empirically ground the debate over mathematics/science teacher shortages, and evaluate the extent to which there is, or is not, a sufficient supply of teachers in these fields. Our analyses of nationally representative data from multiple sources show that mathematics and science are the most difficult-to-staff fields, but the factors behind these problems are complex. There are multiple sources of new teachers; those with education degrees are a minor source compared to those with degrees in mathematics and science, and the reserve pool. Over the past two decades, graduation requirements, student course taking, and teacher retirements have all increased for mathematics and science, yet the new supply has more than kept pace. However, when preretirement teacher attrition is factored in, there is a much tighter balance between supply and demand. Unlike fields such as English, for mathematics/science there is not a large cushion of new supply relative to losses—resulting in staffing problems in schools with higher turnover.

]]> Richard Ingersoll et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/223 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/223 Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:58:54 PDT Managing problematic interactions in online communities has been a challenge since the days of early text-based, multi-user environments. Research in this area has mostly focused on adults and older teens. In this article, we examine the interactions and commentaries of tween players in Whyville.net, a virtual world with (at the time of the study) more than 1.5 million registered players ages 8–16. To understand how tween players define problematic behavior and what they observe in their own community, we draw from an archive of online postings to Whyville’s newspaper. The postings cover the period from 2000 to 2009 and consist almost entirely of player-generated content. Complementing these tween writings are observations of an after school gaming club in which, over a period of three months, about 20 youth players ages 9–12 met almost daily to play for an hour on Whyville.net. We highlight one particular incident observed in the gaming club because it illustrates how club members dealt with problematic behavior experienced online. Finally, we address the challenges and opportunities that tween player participation in community management presents for managing online behavior and player safety.

]]> Yasmin B. Kafal et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/222 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/222 Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:58:49 PDT Many recent efforts to promote new literacies involve the promotion of creative media production as a way to foster youth’s literate engagement with digital media. Those interested in gaming literacies view game design as a way to engage youth in reflective and critical reading of the gaming culture. In this paper, we propose the concept of “gaming fluencies” to promote game design as a context in which youth not only learn to read but also to produce digital media in creative ways. Gaming fluencies also present the added benefit of addressing equity issues of participation in the new media literacy landscape. We report on an ethnographic study that documented urban youth producing digital games in a community technology center. Our analyses focus on an archive of 643 game designs collected over a 24-month period, selecting a random sample to identify evidence of creative and technical dimensions in game designs. In addition, we highlight three case studies of game designs to identify different pathways into the participatory culture. Our goal is to illustrate how gaming fluencies allow for a wide range of designs, provide low thresholds and high ceilings for complex projects, and make room for creative expression. In our discussion, we address how gaming fluencies represent a complementary pathway for learning and participation in today’s media culture.

]]> Kylie A. Peppler et al. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/221 http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/221 Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:15:33 PDT Richard Ingersoll et al.