The US National Science Foundation (2013, 2015) surveys of earned doctorates in education show that between 2003 and 2014, over 20,000 degrees were granted in a field broadly defined as Educational Administration. It is then important to discuss the pedagogies of teaching not only the content area courses for educational leaders, but research as well. We highlight the intertwined tensions between different discourses: the ways of thinking about research that our students bring to the online classrooms, the course goals that we aspire to achieve, and the ways we teach qualitative research online. In doing so, we see our classes as spaces of the (not always smooth) interplay between the firm structure of expected goals and free-flowing nature of qualitative research.
Guided by a networked model of Ecological Systems Theory, this qualitative study listened to nondominant families who had crossed cultures and sent children to schools in cultural contexts different from those of the parents’ upbringing. Researchers looked at the mesosystemic interactions between the microsystems of the family and the microsystems of the school through the eyes of the families in order to capture “third parties” and common patterns of social relations and interactions that families engaged in around school. Families insisted on keeping home and school settings separate and revealed complex social networks that mediated families’ thinking about school and motivated alternative conceptions of their involvement in their children’s education. Implications are discussed.
This investigation looked at the influence of a chess program on adolescents’ attitudes towards schooling at an alternative charter school in a high-risk urban context. Participants included school administrators, subject teachers, and 15 chess players, all of whom were African American male students from low-income backgrounds. Interview data revealed that the game of chess had a positive impact on the adolescents’ attitudes toward schooling in a number of ways by: (1) engaging these adolescents in interactions with a supportive school professional, (2) having the students socialize in a violence-free environment, and (3) providing students with opportunities to explore life beyond their neighborhood.
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