In 1993, the author set out to try and gain some understanding about school and community in Havens, New Mexico--a place where she had the opportunity to be immersed in border culture, where she could learn how the border figured into everyday life, and where she could pay uninterrupted attention to the issues as they occurred in the personal and professional lives of those who taught in and administered the schools--and in the lives of the students who studied there. This book offers an interpretation that is disciplined by the long hours, days, and months spent in Havens, and by the...

This study of Edgewood Academy--a private, elite college preparatory high school--examines what moral choices look like when they are made by the participants in an exceptionally wealthy school, and what the very existence of a privileged school indicates about American society. It extends Peshkin's ongoing exploration of U.S. high schools and their communities, each focused in a different sociocultural setting. In this particular inquiry, he began with two central questions:
* What is a school like whose students enter with a determined disposition to attend college, and all of whom are...

This work deals with the politics of identity and the concept of boundaries during a time of rapid change. It investigates how the role of schooling for Hispanos in Northern New Mexico, has changed significantly over the past three generations.

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in an urban elementary school, this volume is an examination of how school division politics, regional economic policies, parental concerns, urban development efforts, popular cultures, gender ideologies, racial politics, and university and corporate agendas come together to produce educational effects. Unlike conventional school ethnographies, the focus of this work is less on classrooms than on the webs of social relations that embed schools in neighborhoods, cities, states, and regions. Utilizing a variety of narratives and analytical styles,...

This is a volume in the Sociocultural, Political and Historical Studies in Education Series. It covers: the historical and sociopolitical context; identity, culture, race, language and gender; social activism, community involvement and policy implications; and directions for the future.

*How should education be organized in pluralistic and multicultural societies?
*What are the roles in education of civil society, markets, governments, and the family?
*How can the idea of the civil society help to reorient education policy discussions that are sometimes stuck in either-or juxtapositions of "market versus government" or "individualism versus communitarianism?"
*What are some of the traditions of civil society--across countries and across history--that educators and policymakers today can revive or build on?
These questions are at the center of this book. Its...

This book addresses the complications and implications of parental involvement as a policy, through an exploratory theoretical approach, including historical and sociological accounts and personal reflection. This approach represents the author's effort to understand the origins, meanings, and effects of parental involvement as a prerequisite of schooling and particularly as a policy 'solution' for low achievement and even inequity in the American educational system.
Most of the policy and research discourse on school-family relations exalts the partnership ideal, taking for granted its...

This book tells us how various global regions are dealing with three major concerns within the field of multicultural education:
*the conceptualization and realization of "difference" and "diversity";
*the inclusion and exclusion of social groups within a definition of multicultural education; and
*the effects of power on relations between and among groups identified under the multicultural education umbrella.
All of the chapter authors pay attention to these themes, but, at the same time, they bring their particular interests and perspectives to the book, addressing issues,...

In this cross-cultural exploration of the comparative experiences of Asian and Western women in higher education management, leading feminist theorist Carmen Luke constructs a provocative framework that situates her own standpoint and experiences alongside those of Asian women she studied over a three-year period. She conveys some of the complexity of global sweeps and trends in education and feminist discourse as they intersect with local cultural variations but also dovetail into patterns of regional similarities.
Western feminist research has established that relatively few women hold...

A Place To Be Navajo is the only book-length ethnographic account of a revolutionary Indigenous self-determination movement that began in 1966 with the Rough Rock Demonstration School. Called Dine Bi'olta', The People's School, in recognition of its status as the first American Indian community-controlled school, Rough Rock was the first to teach in the Native language and to produce a body of quality children's literature by and about Navajo people. These innovations have positioned the school as a leader in American Indian and bilingual/bicultural education and have enabled...