Schooling Ideology And The Curriculum Rle Edu L

Although the different contributions to this book range over a wide spectrum of substantive issues, they share a common interest. This is a concern to explore the ways in which notions of the relations between theory and practice, between belief and action, can be used to develop three kinds of sensitivity in the sociology of education. A sensitivity towards how school systems are created, maintained and made to function; towards developing a more refined, critical and constructive awareness of the reliability and validity of descriptions, analyses and explanations offered in this field of study; and a sensitivity towards the ways in which changes take place within the education system and how the insights and realisations generated in the discipline might be used to control such occurrences.

The sociology of education has been at the forefront of new developments in sociological theory. This book examines and criticizes a number of these new developments and discusses some empirical work on issues of current concern. One of the few books that integrates radical and critical sociology into the field of education, it deals with the resultant difficulties. The topics covered include cultural deprivation, ideologies in education, classrooms, the teaching profession and the history of women’s education.

This is an introduction to interactionist work in education during the 1970s and 80s. The interactionist viewpoint concentrates on how people construct meanings in the ebb and flow of everyday life – what they think and do, how they react to one another – and has in recent years established itself as one of the leading approaches in education. It has generated illuminating research studies which, by being firmly based in the real world of teaching and dealing with the fine-grained details of school life, have helped to break down the barriers between teacher and researcher. This volume presents the results of this valuable work, within a coherent theoretical framework, by focusing on the major interactionist concepts of situation, perspectives, cultures, strategies, negotiation and careers. By bringing them together in this way, the author demonstrates their collective potential for the deeper understanding of school life and the possibilities for sociological theory. His book therefore offers both a summary of and a reflection on achievement in the area of interactionism as it relates to schools.

What unites the contributors to this book is an opposition to Thatcherite policies on education and an agreement upon the need for the development of democracy in education. This volume highlights the importance of an area of neglected theoretical and practical concern: the development of a critique of the philosophy and policies of the new Right, and of credible alternative policies.

Originally written at a time of crisis in the education system of Britain – occasioned by cuts, contradictions and change - many of the issues discussed in this book are still relevant today. Debate in the book focuses upon an examination of the nature of the crisis, an exploration of the impact of the crisis upon school processes and upon the relationship between life in school and in the wider community, an investigation of the responses being made by pupils, teachers and educationalists to the day-to-day manifestations of the crisis and a consideration of how the current crisis is giving a particular poignancy to issues to do with the theories and methods employed in our study and interpretation of contemporary educational processes.

This study illuminates how the everyday activity of teachers raises profound economic, cultural, ethical, political and research issues, and provides a new and fruitful way of examining the practice of teaching. The first part of the book offers a detailed description of sensitively recorded school situations, arising from work carried out in a number of British primary schools. From the analysis of their research the authors constructed a theoretical perspective for looking at schooling in the form of sixteen ‘dilemmas’; the second half of the book is concerned with this perspective, and shows how the dilemmas constitute a language for looking at everyday schooling and relating it to more general political, social and cultural issues. The book thus spans the gap in educational thinking between work with a firm empirical base and specifically theoretical studies.