Large, lingering, and recently widening gaps in educational achievement exist amid growing differences in access to educational opportunity along lines of race and socioeconomic status among American students. Recognizing these gaps and developing strategies for eliminating them is essential. Previous research has documented a positive relationship between religious involvement and a wide range of adolescent outcomes. Most importantly, for the purposes of this article, these outcomes include educational resilience, attainment, and achievement. However, relatively little is known about the factors behind the relationship between religious involvement and educational outcomes especially for those students most often marginalized within the mainstream education system. This article seeks in particular to explore the influence of religious involvement on the educational outcomes of urban African American adolescents. It draws primarily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Christian Smith in constructing a theoretical framework employed in the qualitative analysis of interview data illustrating some mechanisms by which religious involvement can serve to promote positive educational outcomes among these students.
The article discusses the link between a curriculum based on academic subjects derived from disciplinary knowledge and a progressive pedagogy that endeavours to engage students from all backgrounds with it. Section 1 describes the realist theory of knowledge which justifies the argument for this accommodation between curriculum and pedagogy. Section 2 explains how conceptual progression serves as an effective curriculum design strategy for supporting pedagogy. The final section discusses how concepts and studies from within the social realist tradition can be used to theorise an accommodation between curriculum and pedagogy that promotes cumulative knowledge building among students and teachers by being responsive to both the students and to the knowledge being taught in motivating ways.
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