PennGSE Faculty Research

The University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education partners with schools, universities, and communities to expand educational access – especially for those underserved by society. Through rigorous research and innovative programs, we develop new knowledge, and transformational teachers and leaders in pursuit of educational opportunity..

 

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 569
  • Publication
    Negotiating Methodological Rich Points in the Ethnography of Language Policy
    (2013-01-05) Hornberger, Nancy H
    Building on Agar’s (1996: 26) notion of rich points as those times in ethnographic research when something happens that the ethnographer doesn’t understand, methodological rich points are by extension those points where our assumptions about the way research works and the conceptual tools we have for doing research are inadequate to understand the worlds we are researching. When we pay attention to those points and adjust our research practices accordingly, they become key opportunities to advance our research and our under standings. Drawing for illustrative purposes on ethnographic research on bi lingual intercultural education policy and practice in the Andes carried out by Indigenous students for their Master’s theses at the University of San Simón’s Program for Professional Development in Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Andean Region (PROEIB Andes) in Bolivia, I highlight methodological rich points as they emerge across language policy texts, discourses and practices. Framing the methodological rich points in the context of basic questions of re search methodology and ethics, I borrow as organizing rubric the paradigmatic heuristic for sociolinguistic analysis first offered by Fishman (1971: 219) and here adapted to the ethnography of language policy to ask: who researches whom and what, where, how and why?
  • Publication
    Accomplishing Identity in Participant-Denoting Discourse
    (2003-01-01) Wortham, Stanton
    Individuals become socially identified when categories of identity are used repeatedly to characterize them. Speech that denotes participants and involves parallelism between descriptions of participants and the events that they enact in the event of speaking can be a powerful mechanism for accomplishing consistent social identification. This article describes how two different types of participant-denoting speech events—participant examples and autobiographical narratives—can involve such parallelism, in which speakers simultaneously represent and enact analogous social positions and thereby strengthen social identification.
  • Publication
    Much Accomplished, Much at Stake: Performance and Policy in Maryland Higher Education
    (2012-02-01) Perna, Laura W; Finney, Joni E; Callan, Patrick
    The challenge: To maintain an internationally competitive work force, Maryland aims to increase the share of its adult population that holds at least an associate degree from 44% to 55% by 2025. To achieve this goal, the state must improve the performance of its higher education system, ameliorating its weaknesses and building on its strengths. The bottom line: Maryland’s higher education system is leaving poor, urban, black, Hispanic and native-born Marylanders behind. But a strong record of marshaling resources to achieve higher education goals and the state’s relative wealth put Maryland in a good position to do something about this problem, if it so chooses.
  • Publication
    Making Sense of a Looking Glass World
    (2014-05-30) Zemsky, Robert M; Shaman, Susan; Perna, Laura W
    As the Walrus in Lewis Carroll's knows, it is the sorting out that matters most. And in colleges and universities, just as in oysters, those of the largest size and most prestige will almost certainly insist on being grouped together, no matter what the consequences. Working with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation we have set for ourselves the task of doing just that—using data drawn from the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to sort American colleges and universities into recognizable clusters that or segments that facilitate the making of comparisons within groups of similar institutions. No less, we seek a set of indices or measures that document the performance of these institutions in terms of access and completions. And to accomplish this latter task, we seek a reasonable means of describing each institution's undergraduate student body along four gauges of diversity: economic, race and ethnicity, age, and geography.
  • Publication
    The Role and Contribution of Academic Researchers in Congressional Hearings: A Critical Discourse Analysis
    (2019-02-01) Perna, Laura W; Orosz, Kata; Kent, Daniel C.
    This study uses critical discourse analysis to explain how legislators determine the role and contributions of academic researchers in Congressional legislative hearings. The discursive practices that legislators use serve to construct the social identity of academic witnesses, characterize witnesses’ qualifications, solicit information from witnesses, frame comments from witnesses, and amplify and mitigate witness testimony. The findings make visible the ways that legislators use the power of their positions to depict academic witnesses as both experts who offer independent knowledge and experts who validate or confirm a legislator’s preferences and priorities. The results have implications for academics who seek to improve connections between research and policy, and academics who seek to further advance the production of knowledge of federal policymaking processes.
  • Publication
    Minority Serving Institutions: A Guide to Research and Publishing
    (2015-01-01) Abiola, Ufuoma; Commodore, Felecia; Gasman, Marybeth; Ramos, Francisco
  • Publication
    Are They Singing from the Same Hymn Book?
    (1998) Eckel, Peter D
    A fact of academic life is that faculty and presidents primarily concern themselves with different institutional tasks, attend different institutional meetings, and pursue different institutional goals. In short, faculty do "faculty things" and presidents do "presidential things." They have different perceptions of institutional life (Peterson and White 1992). Differing perspectives can easily lead to standoffs between the two powers in academe—those who teach and those who administer—and those standoffs happen quite frequently (American Council on Education & Pew Higher Education Roundtable 1996; Schuster et al. 1994). Faculty-administrator differences are not a new phenomenon; examples exist at Williams and Dartmouth Colleges from 100 years ago (Finkelstein 1984).
  • Publication
    Commentary on: "For Safety 's Sake: A Case Study of School Security Efforts and Their Impact on Education Reform"
    (2012-01-01) Sokoloff, Harris
    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.
  • Publication
    Core Values and the Road to Change
    (1998-07-01) Green, Madeleine F; Eckel, Peter D; Hill, Barbara
    Higher education draws much of the vocabulary and many of the concepts about change from the corporate sector. Corporations "downsized" and "restructured" in the early 1990s in response to competitive and financial pressures; higher education currently is experiencing similar pressures. Yet change and renewal in higher education are not just about money and becoming more cost-effective. Although these are important objectives, higher education must incorporate changes that improve student learning, foster closer connections with their communities, and adapt to the demands of an increasingly technological society. Reorganizing and cutting costs alone do not suggest how colleges and universities might become more agile as institutions, nor do efficiency measures usually address the core issues of the higher education enterprise.