The Social Context of the School (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

In their appearance, schools often seem to be physically separated from their surroundings, cut off from the neighbouring houses and streets by high walls, by playgrounds or playing fields. Within the school, another world seems to exist, with a life of its own – its own routine, dress, rules and customs – which appears to have little relationship to the day-to-day life of the society outside. Yet despite these signs of separateness, we are becoming increasingly aware that a school’s surroundings, the local society in which it is set and whose children it educates, play an important part in determining what actually goes on in the classrooms and the playgrounds. This book looks at some of the factors in the local context of the schools and describes and analyses some of the often complex ways in which the schools interact with them.




Marxism and Education (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

This book introduces the student to the various phenomenological and humanistic Marxist perspectives as they are being applied to education and provides an account of the strengths and weaknesses of these perspectives, drawing on a variety of disciplines in order to explain the controversies described. The opening chapters deal with the phenomenological perspective in the sociology of education, discussing its adoption of a phenomenological model of man, its use of anthropological studies, the importance of classroom studies, and its rejection of the ‘liberal’ philosophy of education. The aim is to show the significance of these ideas for education, with a discussion of the concept of alienation and schooling, developments in Marxism such as the focus on the mode of production and the labour process, and the political economy of education.




Contemporary Research in the Sociology of Education (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

The subject matter of this book – what happens in schools, the effects of curriculum change, the reasons why some children are successful and others are not – explains just why the sociology of education is one of the most important areas to achieve political importance. There are five sections to the book covering: Educational Achievement; Educational Provision; The Organization of the School; Roles in the School and Values and Learning. The editor discusses the implications of the material presented (much of which was available for the first time when this book was originally published).




Schooling, Ideology and the Curriculum (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

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.




Education and Poverty (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

This book describes the attempts that have been made to achieve an educational policy relevant to those most disadvantaged in our society; examines the different ways in which sociologists have conceptualized the related problems; and evaluates the success of the policy. He suggests that we are in need both of a more realistically defined view of what schools can do and a concerted official approach to compensatory policy.




Education, Class Language and Ideology (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

This book presents an analysis of the ‘essentialist ideology’, which is inherent to class-based societies. The author argues that essentialist ideology is efficient through its unconscious component and is imposed on everyone. It guides school selection and imposes on each class a language specific in its reference to concrete domination relations. It even unbalances the scientific objectivity of researchers in the social sciences, not only among those who abide by the theory of natural aptitudes, but also among its sharpest critics, such as Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu and J C Passeron, whose work is considered in this book.




Doing Sociology of Education (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

This collection of specially commissioned articles exposes the practical and personal influences on the process of doing sociology of education. All of the authors have been involved in conducting well know major research projects, and discuss here the pitfalls and problems, conflicts and compromises that went into doing their particular research. A particular feature of the book is that a wide variety of types of research in the sociology of education is covered. The range is from small-scale ethnographic case studies to large-scale postal questionnaire sample surveys and includes studies based on interviews, observation and questionnaires. There are examples of longitudinal work in case studies and in surveys. The collection also includes discussions of action research, the development and influence of theory, and the relationship between research and policy.




Dilemmas of Schooling (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

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.




Education (RLE Edu L Sociology of Education)


Book Description

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.




Paradigm and Ideology in Educational Research (RLE Edu L)


Book Description

This book explores the complex social assumptions and values that underlie research programmes about schools. The analysis of educational research draws upon American and European scholarships in the sociology of knowledge, social philosophy and the history and sociology of science. The discussion considers first the communal, crafts and social characteristics of educational research. Three research models empirical-analytic, symbolic or linguistic and critical sciences are given attention. The discussion of the three research models is to illuminate how the constellation of commitments, assumptions and practices inter-relate to perform a paradigm giving different and conflicting definitions to the meaning of educational theory and to the use of the particular techniques of enquiry. The social role of educational research and the researcher is also considered.