Browsing by Author "Engebretson, Kathryn"

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    Controversy and counternarrative in the social studies
    (2017-05-12) Shaver, Erik James; Rogan, Patricia; Medina, Monica; Keller, Deb; Engebretson, Kathryn; Pike, Gary
    This qualitative study sought to explore reasons why social studies teachers chose to teach controversial issues and counternarratives in their classroom in an era where doing so is dangerous for teachers and their job security, and how they go about doing so in their classrooms. The theoretical framework of this study encompassed the notion that the five selected teachers embodied and practiced elements of Foucauldian parrhēsía, which is teaching the truth despite the risk of doing so, despite not having explicit knowledge of this particular philosophy, and utilized counternarratives and controversial issues as a means of challenging dominant social norms to bring about a more just and equitable society. The existing literature suggests that their pre-service teacher education provided little influence on their decisions, despite the positive historical, personal, and democratic outcomes from teaching a curriculum exploring controversial issues and counternarratives. Five teachers were recommended for this study due to their reputations for teaching controversial issues and counternarratives in their social studies classrooms. After interviewing and observing these teachers, a number of interesting findings came to light, including a list of best practices for how to teach controversial issues in the classroom, reasons why the teachers taught controversial issues in the classroom, structures of support and barriers for teaching a critical social studies curriculum, and differences between those who believed they taught controversial issues in their classroom but did not, and those who actually did.
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    Gender, subjectivity, and the material-discursive school entanglement
    (2018-04-04) Robbins, Kirsten Rose; Pike, Gary; Thorius, Kathleen King; Dennis, Barbara; Engebretson, Kathryn; Medina, Monica
    New materialist scholars argue that schools are important material-discursive entanglements for engendering, racializing, and subjectivizing human subjects. Despite this claim, there is a dearth of research that examines the perceptions that students have of the messages they are sent from schools about how to perform their gendered subjectivities in schools, particularly from a material feminist framework. This study used native photography through a post qualitative methodological framework to explore the messages that students’ receive from their school related to subjectivity and gender. This study took seriously both the voices and perceptions of the participants and the significance of the material environment of the school. Within the course of the research study, students both resisted and conformed to messages the school sent them about their subjectivities. Students conformed to many of the dominant ideas about gender, including privileging maleness. Students resisted the school’s control of their bodies, as well as the school’s attempts at rendering the student population homogenous. The students, though aware that there were differences in the way the school treated them based in gender and other identity markers, struggled to articulate those differences because the school sent a false message of equality. This false message of equality performed an erasure of their experiences of differences and denied them the language they needed to discuss the inequities they experienced. The results of the analysis contribute to conversations about the ways in which school environments contribute to narratives about identity, particularly as it relates to gender. Additionally, the way in which this post qualitative study unfolded has implications for research, including the importance of emergent design. Finally, the tensions that exist in using the new materialisms as a framework when studying schools led me to question the benefits of choosing to decenter humans in this type of research.