Rituals and Student Identity in Education Ritual Critique for a New Pedagogy

by Quantz, Richard A.; O'Connor, Terry; Magolda, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780230101159
• ISBN10: 0230101151
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The current crisis in American schools has been more than fifty years in the making. The present assumption that "accountability" equals "testing" and that "education" equals "measurable objectives" has occurred in a brief lifetime. How has this happened? Quantz attempts to answer this question in this fascinating study. It is not a history of the movement, but an exploration of how the nonrational aspects of schooling, especially ritual(s), have been harnessed to construct a commonsense which serves the interests of transnational corporations, leaving those educators committed to democracy to develop a new pedagogy that rejects the technical solutions that present reforms demand.

Author Biography

Richard A. Quantz is Professor of Social Foundations and Education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University, Ohio. For thirty years, he has been actively teaching and producing scholarly work that critically challenges the fundamental assumptions that guide pedagogy, leadership, policy, and research. One of the co-founders, along with Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, of the Center for Education and Cultural Studies at Miami University, Quantz has worked to open understanding of education and educational scholarship.

Terry O’Connor was Professor of Social Foundations of Education in the School of Education at The College of New Jersey.

Peter Magolda is Professor of Student Affairs and Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University, Ohio.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Nonrational in Education: Ritual and the Forming of Reality, Morality, and Identity * School Ritual as Performance: A Reconstruction of Durkheim’s and Turner’s Uses of Ritual * From Ethnography to Ritual Critique: The Evolution of a Method (with Terry O’Connor) * Nonrational Classroom Performance: Ritual as Aspect of Action (with Peter Magolda) * On Seminars, Ritual, And Cowboys * The Puzzlemasters: Performing the Mundane, Searching for Intellect, and Living in the Belly of the Corporation * Ritual Critique and the New Pedagogy