Teaching, Learning, Policy & Leadership Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2759
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Item The Children Who Ran For Congress and the School Up On The Hill: An Oral-Institutional History of Capitol Page School, 1926-1983(2008-05-01) Gonzalez, Darryl James; Finkelstein, Barbara J.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although the corpus of work on Congressional history is impressive, there is one aspect of life inside the Capitol that has been neglected for over 200 years. Young messenger boys, or Pages, have worked for Congress since its early sessions but have never received much attention. This dissertation traces the evolution of Capitol Page School and by doing so, also follows the evolution of the larger Page system. The purpose of the study is to find out what the historical record can reveal about the history of Capitol Page School. Once that story is told, conclusions can be drawn about things like institutional inertia in Congress, preserving tradition, unusual childhood occupations and informal civic education, among others. Using both a documents review and an oral history approach allowed for a rich description of the evolution of Capitol Page School. Chapter Two reports on Page culture before 1926, concentrating on the relationships between Members of Congress and the boys, and how Pages formed their own culture and community as adjuncts of the Congress. Chapter Three examines the social conditions that were present in the 1920s which forced the formation of a school specifically for Pages inside the Capitol, run as a private enterprise by an individual teacher, and the subsequent attempts to continue the school. Chapter Four describes how Senator Harold Burton intervened to improve conditions at Capitol Page School, and also includes a previously unknown cache of information and behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Chapter Five explains the physical move of the school and then traces the substantial legislation that Congress failed to pass in order to give Pages an official residence to live in, and describes the precarious nature of the school. Chapter Six gives special attention to three noteworthy subcultures within the Page system: girls, African-Americans and Supreme Court Pages, and describes how each group began and received special consideration. Chapter Seven reports on how Capitol Page School was forced to dissolve in the early 1980s and how two new schools were formed to replace it. Chapter Eight discusses what can be learned from the historical record.Item Constructing Civil Society in Transitional China: Case Studies of One Private University and One Non-governmental Institute for Peasant Education(2007-07-11) Liu, Yan; Lin, Jing; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The political shift in China in the last two and a half decades, from an emphasis on ideological orthodoxy and centralized economic control, to an emphasis on national economic development for modernization, has made it possible for non-governmental actors to enter into fields previously controlled by the government and to take initiatives in making social changes. This dissertation examines the capacity that non-governmental organizations demonstrate in their fight against all odds and their promotions of a civil society in China, using two non-governmental organizations working in the field of education as examples. The cases are analyzed from a historical institutionalism perspective to show how organizations' actions are affected by the contextual factors and meanwhile how their actions influence the institutions. In the case studies, the interaction between the society and the state government is carefully studied; moreover, the associational, ideological and cognitive dimensions of the civil society construction in China are comprehensively examined. Two non-governmental institutions are examined in this study. Their increasing participation in educational practices provides alternatives to the educational model in government-managed organizations. The dissertation also examines the development of the two organizations and pays special attention to the constraints imposed on the organizations by the existing political and educational system: The government is alert to their increasing power and attempts to restraint it. However, both organizations were successful in negotiating spaces for their survival and gained increasing influence in the society. Case analysis showed that the most important feature in the state-society interaction in China is trust-building which requires sophisticated strategies. While sticking to their non-state identity, these organizations have made significant efforts in establishing channels of discourse with the government, and won their trust in this way. Overall, the civil society groups in China showed divergence in their goals and practices from other countries, but also share certain convergence in their features and strategies for the redefinition of state-society boundary. In the dissertation, a dynamic interaction between the institutional factors and the agency of social actors is discovered. The institutional contexts shaped the social actors' vision and strategies, and the institutional environment was also transformed by the action of social groups. The direction of political and social reform is co-steered by the state-government and the society, instead of being determined by the government alone.