Difference And Sameness In Schools

Presenting European Anthropology of Education through eleven studies of European schools, this volume explores the constructing and handling of difference and sameness in the central institutions of schools. Based on ethnographic studies of schools in Greece, England, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Austria, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, it illustrates how anthropological studies of schools provide a window to larger society. It thus offers insights into cultural lessons taught to children through policies, institutional structures and everyday interactions, as well as into schools’ entanglement in state projects, cultural processes, societal histories and conflicts, and hence into contemporary Europe.

This special issue looks at the constantly changing face of education in the world today. Topics covered include educational values, cross-cultural studies, leadership, social impacts, and the role of technology in education.

The Pedagogy of Special Needs Education: Phenomenology of Sameness and Difference outlines how to understand the inner and behavioral lives of children with intellectual disability through the psychology and phenomenology of "stories" derived from the experiences of living with these children. The book inquires into the meaning of the experiences of children with intellectual developmental disability using a phenomenological method. It examines how the external behaviors of children with special needs may look different from children without these needs but actually do share many similarities at the phenomenological level of lived experience. Themes of difference and sameness are employed for exploring the significances of phenomena such as "finger play," "eating as selffeeding," "smiling and turn-taking," "self-talk," and "don’t touch me." Throughout the narrating and interpreting of the case studies within the book, the author shows the tensional dialectic between individual and collective difference in order to understand what is required to help children with intellectual disability become themselves and form their personal self-identity. The Pedagogy of Special Needs Education can be used in schools, seminars, and courses related to special education programs and in special needs curricula for children with developmental disabilities. It can also support childcare professionals who carry orthopedagogical responsibilities and who are concerned about the wellbeing of children and their families experiencing special needs. Additionally, this book is valuable to students, researchers, teachers, and others interested in a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to human science, professional practice issues, and qualitative research methods.

The contributors in this book discuss key issues facing schools and school systems from both Western and Asian cultural perspectives. In doing so, they expose both the similarities and differences (convergence and divergence) of school leadership in the two regions. A number of themes that are currently "hot" policy issues run through the book, including school performance, school effectivenesss, leadership, and management; school design, improvement, and change; and the globalization and internationalization of policies and policy reforms.

Educators across the nation are engaged in well-meaning efforts to address diversity in schools given the current context of NCLB, Race to the Top, and the associated pressures of standardization and accountability. Through rich ethnographic accounts of teachers in two demographically different secondary schools in the same urban district, Angelina E. Castagno investigates how whiteness operates in ways that thwart (and sometimes co-opt) even the best intentions and common sense—thus resulting in educational policies and practices that reinforce the status quo and protect whiteness rather than working toward greater equity. Whereas most discussions of the education of diverse students focus on the students and families themselves, Educated in Whiteness highlights the structural and ideological mechanisms of whiteness. In schools, whiteness remains dominant by strengthening and justifying the status quo while simultaneously preserving a veneer of neutrality, equality, and compassion. Framed by critical race theory and whiteness studies, this book employs concepts like interest convergence, a critique of liberalism, and the possessive investment in whiteness to better understand diversity-related educational policy and practice. Although in theory most diversity-related educational policies and practices are intended to bring about greater equity, too often in practice they actually maintain, legitimate, and so perpetuate whiteness. Castagno not only sheds light on this disconnect between the promises and practices of diversity-related initiatives but also provides insight into why the disconnect persists.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book explores the intersection in contemporary Western culture of Catholic sexual theology and adolescent female developmental and sexual experiences. The voices of adolescent females, so long silent in sexual theologies, are given privilege here in the articulation of a normative theology. Applying a feminist natural law framework, the book engages both theoretical scholarship and practical evidence from psychological and other social sciences to inform sexual theology in the Catholic tradition. Attending to gendered, developmental, and social contexts, Doris Kieser explores adolescent females’ experiences of puberty, menarche, various sexual activities, communities of support, sexual desire, and the pleasure and danger these realities reap. She critically explores historical and traditional sexual theologies and prevailing social patriarchal and androcentric sexual attitudes through a feminist lens. The author’s attention to the voices of girls and women, and her aim to see their sexual flourishing in particular and diverse social contexts, yields a theology mindful of the rich complexities of female sexual desire, pleasure, and well-being. The result is an integrated sexual theology that grapples with the Catholic theological tradition, feminist theory and theology, and the embodied experiences of females. For anyone who is invested in the lives and well-being of adolescent females, this work uncovers both barriers and boons to their sexual flourishing.

What does it mean to “fit in?” In this volume of essays, editors Günther Schlee and Alexander Horstmann demystify the discourse on identity, challenging common assumptions about the role of sameness and difference as the basis for inclusion and exclusion. Armed with intimate knowledge of local systems, social relationships, and the negotiation of people’s positions in the everyday politics, these essays tease out the ways in which ethnicity, religion and nationalism are used for social integration.