Search

Representations of dyslexia have a history of educational and literary scholarship primarily concerned with how dynamic characters with learning disabilities are and if they are positively portrayed. This article uses narrative theory to analyze how diagnosis operates on a structural level to create what I call the dyslexic diagnosis paradigm. Examining school stories featuring characters with dyslexia published between 2007 and 2020, I demonstrate how this paradigm functions through a structural closure of struggle, diagnosis and accommodations, and a psychological closure consisting of shame, declaration, and acceptance within these novels. Variations or polytypes of this narrative are also common within this corpus which maintain the psychological closure of shame, declaration, and acceptance present within the prototypical narrative. While some disability counternarratives or dyslexic persistence narratives nuance the school story, the dyslexic diagnosis paradigm ultimately remains prevalent and upholds the medical model of disability within the educational system, promoting the flawed status quo of disability rather than asking readers to question the validity of the systems which enforce them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative inquiry has often been merged with other methodologies to conduct research in schools. Its interweaving with appreciative inquiry as a methodology to research within education, however, is newly emerging. In this study, which interweaves the two methodologies, narrative inquiry and appreciative inquiry are used to examine stories of teaching and explore teacher identity—an evolution of narrative inquiry that facilitates the telling of participant school stories in a focused and intentional way through an appreciative inquiry framework. This paper explores the interweaving of the methodologies and provides an example of its use. It draws on a doctoral study titled Identity as pedagogy: Locating the shadows in the sacred space between, which examined the stories of teacher identities and the ways such stories manifest in pedagogy, with a group of teachers from a common educational jurisdiction in eastern Canada. The data that emerged through the appreciative inquiry process were narratively analyzed and understood through the common themes they presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controversy is intensifying with the rapid spread of charter schools and their domination of the education reform agenda. As charter enrolment increases in the USA, inequities in education worsen. This article contributes to the debate on contemporary education policy by critically examining charter issues from the US literature and stakeholder data. We add insights to research on charter controversy from public discourse and stakeholder groups. Our narrative animates pros and cons in the charter debate through stakeholders' eyes, in effect contributing voices from the field. A case study of a public charter school in Virginia provides a revealing prism for understanding charter schools. Content analysis was performed on data from nine interviews held during the pandemic with founding members (parents, etc.). As found, the charter narrative of success and struggle around public perception, racial equity, segregation, funding, approval, effectiveness, and accreditation was a school story. Charter policy effects on social groups – parents, teachers, community members, and leaders – in their association with the charter's evolution were identifiable. The conflicting views resonate with polarising tensions nationwide. Regarding international implications of the analysis, the move to privatise and reform public education through independent schools with autonomy continues to impact European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zitkála-Šá (Dakota) narrates the effects of rigid domesticity training in her autobiographical boarding school stories for The Atlantic (1900). This article takes up Zitkála-Šá's boarding school stories alongside turn-of-the-century archival documentation of the federally funded Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Zitkála-Šá's boarding school stories document the disabling and debilitating effects of assimilation training on young Native women and girls. I offer a crip reading of Zitkála-Šá's stories to account for the embodied impact of settler colonial violence carried out through domesticity training in federal off-reservation boarding schools, or what I call "settler ableism." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School leaders need effective, affordable approaches to retain their teacher workforce. We investigated a promising, low-cost option for school leaders to encourage teacher retention: subject-area specialization in elementary grades (K–5). Using data on North Carolina elementary grades teachers and schools in the 2011–2012 through 2015–2016 academic years, we track the incidence of subject-area specialization, assess whether teaching in a specialist role promotes retention, and examine whether subject-area specialization is an effective retention strategy for certain schools and teachers. Descriptive analyses show specialization is common in upper elementary grades and has become a more widely used assignment strategy over time. Retention analyses indicate that elementary grades teachers are more likely to return to the same school after becoming a specialist. These results vary by school and teacher characteristics, suggesting that specialization may be a more effective retention strategy in urban schools, in non-high-need schools, and for Black teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools' manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper , to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students' subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton's and Carlisle's representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery's Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the evolution of the girl's school story in The British Girl's Annual during the interwar period. The school story played a crucial role instructing young female readers about their gendered role within the school as a kind of microcosm for nation/empire. Most of these lessons focus on loyalty and leadership, topics especially important during a period when British global leadership is in flux. For during this interwar period, many of the dominion—especially Canada—began to push back against the strictures of colonialism and demand political and economic autonomy, demands which eventually culminated in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. Distributed throughout the commonwealth, The British Girl's Annual (renamed The Canadian Girl's Annual or The Australasian Girl's Annual in its respective countries) tracks this shifting political climate in its representation of female leadership and defense of nation in the girl's school story. In particular, the annual's turn to the Guide story (as a subset of the school story), focusing on themes such as robbery and the defense of school-as-nation, charts a sociopolitical turn inward and the eventual collapse of both global empire and The British Girl's Annual itself during the final years of this interwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "School Stories in Teacher Education" by Ilse Schrittesser and Kerstin Witt-Löw discusses the use of collective memory work in teacher education. The method of collective memory work has been used in teacher training for several years. The article presents the significance of this method from the authors' perspective and describes the course of the teaching event as well as the changed role of the instructors. The goal is to reflect on one's own school experiences and promote openness to new interpretations and action plans. The method allows for reflection and evaluation of one's own teaching from different perspectives and expands the possibilities for action for teachers. [Extracted from the article]

John Badham's cult film WarGames (1983) is widely recognized as one of the most influential narratives shaping the popular image of the hacker. Research and critiques are, however, conflicted regarding what that influence is. Some see it as troubling and countercultural, others as light‐hearted and conservative. Little attention has been given to the fact that WarGames is a convergent narrative working across multiple media. In a study of David Bischoff's eponymous tie‐in novel, this article reveals a composite genre vehicle focused on the new kind of kid rather than the new technology. The protagonist is presented as an outsider by means of literary science fiction devices, only to be made more "normal" and recognizable as part of the school story, love story, and thriller. This refamiliarization gives WarGames a conservative potential, less evident but still present in the film. While it cannot completely neutralize the countercultural character of the hacker gestalt, it seeks to affect the audience's interpretation of WarGames as a media ensemble. The article's result brings nuance to the conflicted assessments of WarGames and contributes to the understanding of the narrative's influence on digital youth discourse at the peak of the personal computer revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chapter 4, 'Detention, Dis-ease, and Death: Contemporary School Experience in Popular World Cinema', Aitchison considers why schools tend to be such common and effective settings for horror fiction, and particularly for horror films. He then argues that the school story is a living genre and, therefore, its diverse contemporary forms can "offer vital insights into the critical issues of our time", much the same as the classic school stories of the past (13). Aitchison's I The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism i makes for a beautifully written and thoughtfully constructed introduction to a wide range of topics within the contemporary school-story genre that encourages further engagement with the trends, themes, and questions about neoliberal school experiences to which Aitchison draws attention. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, the story of a Christian school in Adelaide and its process of reviewing and addressing inconsistencies in its whole school approach to the subject Christian Living is told. We are reminded that staff are a school's greatest assest in establishing a strong Christian ethos and consistent learning outcomes. Developing a learning framework with a shared approach to Christian studies takes commitment and time-- listening to staff and gathering and sorting the wide range of resources available. The core concept of using God's timeless stories of real people and situations, with capable staff and current resources, is shared as the right approach for the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lo studio, mettendo a confronto i documenti ufficiali con il filone letterario delle school stories, analizza l’evoluzione degli ideali educativi delle public schools in relazione ai mutamenti del contesto storico-sociale e dell’immaginario nella Gran Bretagna ai tempi dell’ascesa del suo Impero. Ne individua, al contempo, il persistente e immutato obiettivo di fondo: la formazione di giovani uomini destinati alla leadership e capaci di un comportamento ideale, tanto da diventare un modello.

In recent years, a discourse of Spanish exceptionalism has arisen, whereby Spain has managed to integrate over five million immigrants in a very short period of time without the kind of social upheaval witnessed in other European countries over the past several decades. Overtly racist and xenophobic discourses have generally been, with notable exceptions, absent in the public domain. However, under the radar, visible minorities frequently suffer 'racial micro-aggressions', that is, racially-loaded verbal and other behaviours that are seemingly innocuous but are uptaken as offensive and insulting by the micro-aggressed. More specifically, these racial micro-aggressions are often raciolinguistic in nature, that is, they reflect the confluence of language and race in the unequal positioning of individuals in interactions. In this article, we focus on how young people from immigrant backgrounds tell 'school stories', embedded in normative Catalan/Spanish bilingualism in Catalonia, which are raciolinguistic in nature and relate to racial micro-aggressions experienced by tellers. We do this with a view to showing how all is not as well in Spain as many might think as regards the integration of immigrants, and that greater attention to racism is in order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School stories in contemporary China, which target a pre- and early-adolescent readership, frequently evoke representations of girlhood and boyhood in normative gender terms. The present article considers issues of femininity and gender in Tomboy Dai An (Jia Xiaozi Dai An), one among a series of commercially successful school stories by the popular female author Yang Hongying. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and sexuality with a primary focus on Judith Butler's work, the article examines critically the text's representations of femininity, its construction of ideal womanhood, and the strenuous labour invested in correcting gender deviations. It is posited that, on the one hand, Yang's text, written with the overt intention to enhance children's gender awareness, serves to guide female children into traditional feminine roles, and as such, risks reaffirming gender stereotypes and perpetuating patriarchal values. On the other hand, by revealing the contingency associated with gendered identities, and by acknowledging that deliberate—and sometimes even violent—efforts need to be made to preempt and correct gender deviations, the text sets out to question, paradoxically and inadvertently, the very stability and authority of gender as a natural fact, calling attention instead to its improvisatory and performative nature. Despite its effort to shape the thinking of young readers, the text nonetheless presents the pre- and early-adolescent years as a potentially deviant site where different possibilities of gender play out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Psychopedagogical evaluation is a process of data collection, analysis and interpretation, in order to develop explanatory models of the phenomenon of teaching and learning. This evaluation is based on the principle that subjects who are immersed in academic processes have their own unique conditions and their own personal, family and school stories. Methodology: A systematic review of psychopedagogical evaluation was carried out. The search and selection criteria required that the articles be in English and Spanish, be a related to qualitative research and have been published between 2010 and 2018 in the following databases: EBSCO, Dialnet Plus, ProQuest (Social Sciences and Psychology), Redalyc, Jstor and Scielo. Instruments: To evaluate the methodological quality of the compiled investigations, the "Framework for Assessing Qualitative Evaluations" of the National Center for Social Research was employed, validated by two research experts. Results: 22 studies that met the quality criteria were reviewed. The investigations were mostly developed in Spain. It was found that the issues, commonly associated with psychopedagogical evaluation, are with regards to learning and learning difficulties, classroom evaluation, special needs education, intellectual disability or high intellectual abilities, design of intervention programs, school or educational orientation, inclusive education, diagnosis, cognitive processes or cognitive functions, family participation, school failure and interdisciplinarity. The instruments most used for the collection of information were bibliographic matrices for documentary research, interviews (structured and semi-structured) and some standardized tests. Conclusion: There is a notable growth in scientific and professional interest in psychopedagogical evaluation in the Spanish-speaking world, mainly led by Spain. However, the context and the country's needs are different compared to those of Latin America. Therefore, it is recommended that professionals in the area perform research to understand psychopedagogy in all its forms and research paradigms, under a Latin American context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"School as a site for the production of persons" (Packer & Greco-Brooks, 1999) is discussed in this article through an exploration of children's growth as students. Drawing on Nicholas' school stories from Rene Goscinny and Jean-Jacque Sempe's well-known series entitled, Le Petit Nicolas, the kind of people we could become as students and teachers, even if fictional, is portrayed to highlight the importance of personhood and/or the ontological in schooling. In this article I examine the types of people we could become in school by attending to school stories, as exemplified by Nicholas' stories and voice from Goscinny and Sempe's well-known series entitled, Le Petit Nicolas. Consider, for example, Nicholas' portrayal of his classmate Cuthbert, in his story relating to taking a school photograph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses contemporary American school stories that appear to advocate learning and literacy as a democratic good, but actually undermine democratic possibilities by teaching young readers to think of academic inquiry as a means to selfish, petty ends. Since “learning” and “literacy” are catchwords for educators dedicated to remedying neoliberal inequities, it is understandable why authors of school fiction such as Andrew Clements and Tommy Greenwald are celebrated by educators for foregrounding the exploits of bookish characters. Yet, as is shown, the narrative arcs in works such as Frindle by Clements and Charlie Joe Jackson’s Guide to Not Reading by Greenwald ultimately endorse the market consciousness, deregulation, and excessive individualism for which neoliberalism is known. Examining the ways in which these two novels intersect with ongoing debates over literacy standards, learning outcomes, and academic honesty, it is argued that the didactic-pedagogical imagination in contemporary American fiction for young people has a biased conception of student development and life preparedness, ideologically at odds with democratic curriculum provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]