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Recent scholarship has viewed fatherhood from a variety of angles of encounter. In this paper studies that focus on the trope of authoritarian fatherhood in the Arab World were reviewed; extensive variability emerged as to what constitutes authoritarian parenting as well as how it is experienced by children. The authors conclude that current scholarship supports the notion of emergent fatherhood as suggested by Inhorn (2012, 2016) and explore the implications of this concept for the study of childhood.

Online learning is often associated with the

While qualitative research has been among the more open of academic disciplines, processes for analyzing qualitative data have remained dogmatic. Most qualitative data are “coded” by breaking it into pieces of information that stand alone or through contextualizing it as researchers see fit. Data analysis thus remains a process of deconstructing participant voices and reconstructing stories through sound bites, creating an acceptable form of “fake news” to obtain a seat at the research high table. This continues established traditions of denying “subalterns,” already less agentive in higher education spheres, the ability to speak as the voice of the participant is subjugated to the discourse community of the master. In this paper, we demonstrate how protocols for analyzing qualitative data represent the master’s voice as they draw from Euro-Western ways of knowing the world. Possibilities that foreground indigenous and critical epistemologies are presented as alternatives.

The purpose of this research was to provide some opportunities to four Korean families of English-language learners (ELLs) and their children's teachers to share their literacy practices and resources in support of children's literacy development. Their shared support was constructed at three abstract levels: home-school relations, cultural bridges, and literacy resources. A constructivist grounded theory-based approach to data generation was employed, using a wide variety of data collection methods, such as questionnaires, interviews, observations, photography, and video recording. Grounded analysis, content analysis, and narrative analysis were performed on the data. The study found that the families and teachers did their best to support their ELL children within their own experiences and beliefs. In addition, the activity of reading a classroom storybook at home could bridge the isolation and separation between their own practices, improving synergy. Lastly, based on the findings, a home-school connections model was proposed.

This chapter presents the results of a program evaluation conducted to assess the effectiveness of an online doctoral program in educational leadership at a Research One University from the perspective of its students. Feedback was sought from over 80 currently enrolled students. The study focused on three aspects of the program, namely faculty social and cognitive presence. Recent changes to the program that address these areas include the creation of a thematic group model that clusters students based on academic interests over the last 2 years of the program, extensive revisions to coursework, the adoption of a problem-based dissertation model, and the use of social media and an online community portal to promote student engagement. The results indicate that although students had encountered positive experiences in all three areas, online doctoral students continue to need focused individual mentoring in order to experience success.

Recent scholarship on motherhood has tried to trouble the idea that mothering is a set of instinctive “natural” behaviors that all women are born knowing, positing it rather as a set of fundamentally cultural practices, enacted within social and political contexts and intimately related to thinking about citizenship, responsibility, and human development. In this article, the authors draw from a yearlong study of motherhood in the Arabian Gulf nation of Qatar to support those efforts. Approximately, 280 women completed a survey regarding their perceptions of motherhood and follow-up in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 30 participants. A large number of respondents indicated that they employed domestic helpers to help with their children. Although domestic help was common, most of the “intimate” tasks involved in raising children, such as bathing, toileting, and putting children to bed were carried out by the mothers themselves. As many participants had large families (about half of the women surveyed had at least four children living with them), mothers often expressed a strong sense of being overwhelmed, but at the same time, welcoming their responsibilities as God-given. The authors suggest that as the nation of Qatar reconstructs itself, notions of families are also being reconstructed; however, women are being disproportionately being charged with the responsibility to create the “perfect” family.

Although there have been attempts to relate postcolonial theory to teacher education, those attempts have been somewhat limited. Analyses of the corpus of research on teacher education reveal a focus on defining how to become a teacher, how to judge whether what teachers are doing is effective, how to ensure that theories of learning guide what teachers do, and how to ensure that the teaching profession becomes more diverse and more like the population of children they teach. Although these areas are certainly important, what is striking are the losses they conceal and the absences that are revealed. Postcolonial theory has offered powerful commentaries on how most of the world has yet to engage with its colonial past and with endemic issues such as racism. Issues such as how the production of knowledge has been carefully restricted and defined to privilege Western ideologies, the creation of binaries that have systematically marginalized groups of people, the marriage of racist and colonial ideologies, and the creation of institutional structures such as schools that have imposed flawed knowledges on children have yet to be widely acknowledged in teacher education research.

This chapter examines how discourses of intensive motherhood are experienced by Muslim women in the Arab world and in the United States. It looks at how mothers of young children in Qatar and immigrant Muslim mothers of young children in the United States navigate the challenges associated with motherhood. The chapter suggests that for Muslim women, the task of negotiating these discourses is particularly complex, as they often have to also negotiate the confines of identities prescribed for them through the media and other popular culture sources and combat oppressive ideologies imposed upon them. In order to better understand Islamic influence on Muslim mothering, it is helpful to see how the Holy Quran and both Sunni and Shia religious texts address the role of the mother. Some research on mothering in Muslim cultures focused on how motherhood is part of the larger family dynamic.

Qatar initiated a K–12 national educational reform in 2001. However, there is limited information on the instructional practices of the teachers in the reform schools. This project was an observational study of classrooms with a stratified random sample of the first six cohorts of reform schools. Specifically, 156 classrooms were observed in 29 reform schools. Instructional differences were noted in schools with different gender of students and were moderated by school level. Implications of findings were discussed pertaining to implementation of the Qatar national reform and professional development needs of teachers.

Technology is ever-present, touching almost every part of our lives, communities, and homes. Learning modes have changed greatly as to the sources of information, how we exchange and interact with information and how information shapes and informs us but schools have been slower to change in regard to using the internet and mobile technologies in this participatory learning (Davidson & Goldberg, 2009).

In this article, the privilege accorded to language as the 'natural' way of human expression and communication is problematized. Drawing upon multiple post-colonial sources, the author suggests that this is yet another of the ways in which dominant Western ways of viewing the world are imposed upon diverse groups of people, including young children. Questions are asked about whose interests are best served when language is privileged over other modes of communication. Acquiring language is often perceived as a crucial tool in the growth of young children; however, the question is rarely asked, what is lost when language is gained. The article also provides examples from an ethnographic study done in India that suggests that children can engage in complex forms of communication that do not involve language. Finally, the article addresses the common assumption that using language mostly means using one language. Dominant Western discourses about language are almost overwhelmingly unilingual; however, most of the world's children use and live in multilingual environments. The excessive importance given to language as the 'natural' way of human expression represents the continued colonization of the field of early childhood education by dominant perspectives (Cannella, 1997). Said (1991) has used Foucault's work on the alliance between power and knowledge to explore life in colonized societies, and suggests that knowledge transforms power into a 'web-like force which is confirmed and articulated through the everyday exchanges ... which animate social life' (Gandhi, 1998, p. 74). I extend this argument to the lives of young children (who in many ways fit the definition of a colonized group) and demonstrate how, in the case of language, one form of representation (that of the privileged) has gained power and how that marginalizes and casts into shadow other ways of viewing and interacting with the world (Viruru & Cannella, 1998). As Dahlberg et al (1999) ask, why does so much of the early childhood world speak the same language? What other

It is estimated that more than 12 million children in India under the age of 14 engage in paid labor at least part time, due mostly to economic reasons. Dominant discourses about childhood however conceptualize childhood labor not only as unethical but as exploitation. This article explored will the tensions between Western notions of childhood (within which paid labor is considered taboo) and the realities of children's lives in India, arguing that childhood labor must be contextualized and understood not only as a colonial legacy but also as part of its socio-cultural context. The author argues that separating children from the world of work fosters a culture of childhood that emphasizes entitlement over participation and privileges the rights of the consumer over children's rights as citizens. The idea for this article came to me during my stay in India last summer. We were going somewhere in the car, and were stuck in one of the endless traffic jams that seem to characterize life in big cities in India. As we were waiting at one of the traffic lights, two children started to put on a mini roadshow, to entertain the crowd. The older child was probably seven years old, and the younger one seemed to be no more than three or four. The 'show' consisted of doing gymnastic exercises, such as somersaults and tumbles (on the pavement, not more than two feet away from a mass of traffic). These are not uncommon sights in India. Perhaps what made me notice this pair was that during the entire show, the younger child seemed no more than half awake. When I first noticed him, he was sitting on the pavement, leaning against a wall, and dozing. When it was time for the show to begin, he seemed to be able to do everything he needed to without fully waking up. His part was to climb on the back of the older child, and they in tandem performed various tricks, some of them involving a metal hoop, that looked as though it had been made out of some left over metal wires. As soon as the 'show' was over, I watched the younger child resume his place on the pavement, and go back to sleep. I don't think that I have as yet sorted out all the reactions that I had to this incident. It seems to speak of capabilities and limitations all at once, and as such illustrates, in a nutshell, the complexities that surround the issue of childhood labor. My particular focus in this article is on how discourses of childhood and work intersect in Indian contexts. I refer to both dominant worldwide discourses about what it means to be a child, and what it means to work, as well as to more 'indigenous' meanings. What kinds of realities are produced by those intersections (and I would argue that the scene I described above is one of them)? How does one respond to the idea that all childhood labor is necessarily evil and exploitative? At the outset, it is important to note that this is a topic upon which there are literally volumes and volumes of information. Many major international groups, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO), UNICEF, the World Bank and the Save the Children organization, are involved in creating policies and standards to address this issue. With the development of the field of childhood studies, and an increased interest not only in the social construction of childhood, but also in the various forms that it takes, there is a great deal of literature that addresses the issue of working children from nuanced and complex perspectives. Therefore my attempts in this article

What does a body of work that arose originally from looking at literary works written in formerly colonized societies have to do with the education of those who would teach children? In this chapter I argue that there are several similarities between the concerns that many postcolonial scholars have raised and those of critical teacher educators. After defining postcolonial theory, I explore why this set of ideas is an important theoretical lens for those who prepare teachers of young children. I then explore some of the themes raised by a postcolonial critique of teacher preparation, relating each to my own practices as a teacher educator. In doing so I aim to show how postcolonial scholarship can serve as a vital resource for those engaged in educating educators.