SYMPHONY JOURNALS
Not a member yet
71 research outputs found
Sort by
Read and resonate: Welcome to this, the inaugural issue of Currere and Praxis
Get PDFMy thanks to Professors Sümer Aktan and Ünal Deniz for inviting me to serve as Editor-in-Chief of Currere and Praxis. My thanks, too, to Teresa Strong-Wilson and Wanying Wang for consenting to serve as Associate Editor and Managing Editor, respectively. My thanks also to those who agreed to serve on the Editorial Board. Thanks as well to those who submitted their manuscripts and, especially, to those whose scholarship and art appear in this inaugural issue. Thanks, finally, to those anonymous reviewers whose invaluable critiques of submitted manuscripts ensure the academic quality of the essays we publish. Thanks all around
Continuous curriculum updating: An alternative approach to periodical reformulation in university
Get PDFResearch on curriculum continuous updating is reported (CCU); the objective was to test a methodology and its technological database device. The hypothesis considers that CCU allows the professor’s creativity and brings closer the prescribed curriculum with the curriculum-in-use. A CCU methodology and its database (BDW 2.0) were designed. They were tested with 22 professors from three universities (2 Mexican and 1 Chilean), and they produced 85 records. The prescribed curriculum is a power and exclusion dispositive that provokes an anti-democratic education and diminishes the professors’ pedagogical freedom. The results show the types of modifications used in daily classroom work. These modifications are not usually recorded, and the valuable experience of professors is lost. The proposed methodology allows the systematic recording of this as it provides an informative and historical archive for the CCU. The conclusions account for the relevance of teachers’ curriculum practices in the curriculum in use and imply bringing teachers’ voices into the prescribed curriculum. That is, the currere occupies the hegemonic place instead of the mandated curriculum
Equity and excellence in English language education in the USA: A literature review from the 1960s to 2020s
Get PDFThis study examined the trends in English language education (ELE) using a literature review from the 1960s to the 2020s as a research method. After reading the 1012 journal article abstracts, 210 articles emerged using the 37 keywords, which were supposed to embrace racial and linguistic equity. After multiple iterations of reading and open coding these abstracts, thirty-two articles were selected for the final analysis. One research question guided this study, “What were the emerging trends of PK-12 ELE in the USA in terms of equity and excellence from the 1960s to the 2020s?” Three phases were identified: Phase 1 (1968-1999) on remedial service; Phase 2 (2000-2007) on test accountability; and Phase 3 (2008-2020) on asset-based ELE. We integrated Feiman-Nemser’s central tasks into the four themes: 1) gaining EBLs\u27 funds of knowledge (FoK), 2) enacting EBLs\u27 racial, linguistic, and cultural repertoires, 3) forming teacher beliefs, and 4) deepening knowledge of the curriculum. The findings revealed shifts in three phases under each theme: from assimilating to the target language and culture and devaluing EBLs\u27 assets in Phase 1 to interweaving EBLs’ FoK but with racialized attitude towards EBLs in Phase 2 and valuing EBLs’ FoK as assets, seeing them as ‘language architect’, and integrating translanguaging and resisting raciolinguistic ideologies into ELE in Phase 3
The role of relational resilience in classifying childhood abuse experiences among university students
Get PDFWhen the literature is analyzed, it is seen that childhood experiences are an important determinant for reactions in university ages. It is thought that this study will contribute to the related literature by drawing attention to the fact that childhood abuse experiences are also a determinant of university students’ relational resilience. This study examines the accuracy with which relational resilience categorizes university students who have been abused in childhood and university students who have not been abused. The research comprises 225 university students, 75 women and 150 men, aged 19-48 years, selected by convenience sampling. In the study, the Relational Resilience Scale and short information form were used to determine the relational resilience levels of the participants. Logistic regression analysis was performed on the data obtained from the data collection tools. The results of the analyses showed that relational resilience was able to classify university students with and without abuse experience with a correct prediction rate of 60.4%. It was observed that a 1-unit increase in the relational resilience variable caused a 3.30% increase in the abuse rate. This finding shows that relational resilience significantly contributes to categorizing individuals who have been victimized and those who have not been victimized. It was seen that relational resilience made a significant contribution to the classification of individuals who had been abused and those who had not been abused
The method of currere in M. R. Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts
Get PDFThe Girl With All the Gifts depicts the struggle of a group of humans who embark on a journey of survival with a gifted girl named Melanie. Although the narrative is not set in the context of education, the military and scientists in the story set up a carceral classroom to investigate the infected children’s abilities, including Melanie. In the classroom, the learning initiates Melanie’s self-realization as the next person during the outbreak of the hungries plague, demonstrating Pinar’s method of currere. This paper examines how Melanie’s self-realization embodies the four steps in the method of currere and discusses the educational experience within two confrontational views on education presented in this narrative
Examining Algebra I performance differences among at-risk Texas Hispanic high school boys: A multiyear investigation
Get PDFThis investigation examined the Algebra I End-of-Course exam performance of Hispanic boys who were at-risk and those who were not at-risk during the 2016-2017, 2017-2018, and 2018-2019 school years. Data for all students in Texas who took the Algebra I End-of-Course exam during these years were obtained from the Texas Education Agency. The analysis focused exclusively on Hispanic boys. Utilizing secondary data, a causal-comparative or ex post facto study was conducted. The inferential statistical procedures revealed statistically significant differences in performance for at-risk Hispanic boys across all three school years. In each of these years, a significantly lower percentage of at-risk Hispanic boys met the three grade-level standards (Approaches Grade Level, Meets Grade Level, and Masters Grade Level) compared to their not-at-risk peers. On average, at-risk Hispanic boys answered about 13 fewer items correctly than those who were not at-risk. These findings indicate that current instructional practices are not adequately meeting the needs of at-risk Hispanic boys. Policymakers and educational leaders are advised to review current programs and implement necessary changes to better support these students
Qualities of papers we like: An editorial perspective
Get PDFIn this edition of Culture, Education, and Future, I think I can helpfully discuss the qualities we, the editors, seek in a paper. This discussion develops ideas that are not necessarily covered in author guidelines (see the CEF webpage); instead, these ideas reflect our preferences for the journal and the qualities that attract our attention. This editorial\u27s audience is broad: It speaks to authors, reviewers, editors, and even those wanting to learn more about the dynamics of journal editors\u27 decision-making.
The first quality we seek is CEF preference papers that are theoretically or conceptually current. I am not referring only to its applicability to today’s administrators or teachers—although that is important as well—rather, this refers to papers that are responsive to current theoretical trends and movements. In 2001, Hunt and Dodge wrote a piece for The Leadership Quarterly in which they argued that had they gone to sleep 20 years earlier and just awakened, they would have found that leadership theory had not changed in the intervening years. This was a clear call for a new perspective on leadership. Hunt’s voice was quite influential, and others were making similar grumblings. Anyone with their “ear to the ground” would have realized that the theoretical wind was shifting. What evolved was a set of perspectives that described leadership as a collective rather than an individual activity. Like Hunt, we, the CEF editors, are looking for a scholarship that is aware of trends and aware of where the pressure points are in current thought.
Second, to accomplish the first preference, we look for scholarship that demonstrates genuine expertise in the subjects developed in the paper. Of the many submissions I have read over the years, I find a depressing number that were obviously written by authors who exhibit a lack of mastery of the material they are discussing. They misinterpret or misapply ideas; they have not explored the weaknesses in the current literature on their subject, or they are not sufficiently mature in the subject to spot those weaknesses. For example, the literature on relationships between leaders and followers has been criticized for being ineffectively defined (i.e., it fails to clarify whether measures are defined as the perceptions of followers or as the differences in perceptions by leaders and followers; Gottfredson et al., 2020). Other submission authors may misunderstand incompatibilities between epistemologies, as when they use statistics (which assumes independencies among cases and stability across time) to evaluate a phenomenon that is clearly interdependent and changing; for more, see Cilliers, 1998)
Radial blended-collaboration in doctoral education: Insights from an Indonesian higher education institute
Get PDFThis study explored how doctoral educators apply a radial blended collaborative (RBC) strategy to teach EFL speaking. This study used a narrative case study design and a qualitative approach. In doing so, teachers employed eight RBCs\u27 strategies: raising collaboration awareness, forming groups based on 21st-century skills, using controlled-chosen topics and theme-based prior knowledge, employing snowball questioning techniques, engaging in role-play in different contexts, conducting peer evaluations, and providing oral and written feedback. This study found that technology integration, such as WhatsApp, Zoom Meeting, Google Classroom, and electronic mail, enhanced the learning experience, whereas pooling WhatsApp messages was used to direct the chosen discussion topics. The results demonstrated that RBC significantly improved students\u27 speaking performance across four instructional dimensions: collaborative awareness, active learning, classroom interaction, and technological integration. Future research should aim to enhance spoken communication by integrating technology in assessments and fostering collaborative learning environments
Becoming ethically preoccupied through Currere: W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka and narrative self-representation
Get PDFWithin education, we can learn a great deal from others’ uses of narrative as a site of praxis from which to work through difficult psychic processes. The narratives published by W.G. Sebald and Franz Kafka—as well as what we know about these authors’ narrative processes—hold important insights for the kind of narrative writing that can happen in currere. Born in Germany near the end of WWII and inheriting the heavy burden of the Holocaust, Sebald was concerned with the social implications of writing as a form of witness, even as he was persuaded that a narrative approach was more powerful than discursive prose. Sebald saw in the writing of narrative an attempt at restitution. For Franz Kafka, the writing of literary texts offered the only space in which he experienced some redemption from (as he called it) “murderers’ row.” Despite their stature, both considered themselves as periphereal writers; writing came from a felt sense of precarity and vulnerability. Both relied on unreliable narrators. By exploring the relations between Sebald’s and Kafka’s writing lives and their melancholy, I inquire into how both were driven by a sense of urgency in writing narratively (one form of which is literature) and look at how such writing embodied an ethical probing of unsettling preoccupations, in ways of compelling interest to projects of subjective/social reconstruction
Displacing curriculum normativity through teachers’ autobiographical processes: A case study from Brazil
Get PDFThis text engages with discussions on curricular normativity and autobiographical processes, challenging prescriptive discourses and subject-centered perspectives. The objective is to underscore both the fallibility of normative processes and the dynamics at play when curricular practices intersect with life stories, thereby displacing essentialist and efficiency-driven propositions. It presents a brief experiential analysis of currere with undergraduate Pedagogy students in the context of Educational Management and Supervised Internship in Brazil. The contributions of autobiography are viewed not as a panacea but as a potent proposal to disrupt rigid, expected, and quantifiable outcomes. The focus on autobiography stems from a preference for theoretical production within the field, representing a commitment to understanding the interactions that bridge universities and schools. Curricular thinking, through an autobiographical and post-structural approach, can broaden studies, contributing to a more profound understanding of the school environment and the support of teachers and their experiences