Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item An Archipelago of Thinkers: The Free School Movement as a Social Movement(2015) Biancolli, Dani Ellen; Hutt, Ethan; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Free School Movement of the 1960s was a short educational reform effort that grew out of the anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian ideas of the counterculture. This group of radical thinkers included individuals like Jonathan Kozol, George Dennison, and John Holt and built upon the rich history of education reform in the United States. This study investigates whether the framework created by sociologist Charles Tilly to study social movements can be applied to education reform efforts like the Free School Movement. The goal of the study is twofold. First, it is to determine whether the Free School Movement can be termed a social movement using Tilly's framework and thus, if the framework can be used to create a common language for the study of educational reform efforts. Second, the study situates the Free School Movement within the larger stream of American educational history. Ultimately, the study concludes that the Free School Movement can be termed a social movement according to Tilly's definition. In determining this, the study also shows that Tilly's framework can, with a few modifications, be used to study education reform efforts and to provide a basis for comparison and analysis. In addition, the study is able to demonstrate that the Free School Movement wrestled with the same tensions common to many educational reform efforts in American history. While those who participated in the Free School Movement believed that they were attempting something new and different, this study shows that the Movement was part of a long struggle to determine if education should be viewed as a public or private good.Item 'Jew and American in the Making': Education and Childrearing in the American Jewish Community, 1945-1967(2015) Furman, Joshua J.; Rozenblit, Marsha; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines American Jewish ideas about childhood, parenting, and identity within the context of the aftermath of the Holocaust and the beginning of the Cold War, as a pervasive mood of anxiety about the future direction of American Jewry and its prospects for survival set in among communal leaders. I analyze a wide range of prescriptive literature on American Jewish parenting from psychologists, rabbis, and social workers, as well as Jewish children's magazines and educational materials from religious schools and summer camps. I argue that concerns about antisemitism, intermarriage, and the viability of Jewish life in suburbia drove the need for a philosophy of education and childrearing that prioritized positive experiences and attachments to Judaism and Jewish culture, without inhibiting the transition of Jews and Judaism into mainstream middle-class American life. Building on insights from Kurt Lewin and other Jewish psychologists, as well as Cold War-era notions about the Judeo-Christian origins of American democratic values, rabbis and educators argued that Jewish education should produce not only happy, well-adjusted Jews, but well-informed and loyal American citizens as well. As the first full-length study of American Jewish approaches to education and childrearing after World War II, this project sheds light on important and contested issues in several areas of scholarly interest. It demonstrates the central importance of Kurt Lewin's work to the formulation of the guiding motives and methods that directed Jewish education after 1940. It helps clarify what we know about the nature and extent of Holocaust education in the American Jewish community before the mid-1960s. It offers new perspectives into the process by which American Jews articulated a middle-class identity for themselves that was grounded in both customs and ideas from Jewish tradition as well as contemporary insights found in secular American culture. It also offers a case study for considering how minority groups in an open society such as the United States seek both to integrate themselves into American culture and to preserve their distinctiveness.Item THE NDEA, LOYALTY, AND COMMUNITY: RESISTANCE AT TWO LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES(2014) Botti, John McDonough; MacDonald, Victoria-Maria; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As part of the effort to supply "brainpower" for the American cold war effort, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 provided a loan program to aid under-resourced postsecondary students. Elements of the NDEA story--the increased federal financial support for higher education; the rhetorical and practical affiliation of schooling, national security, and patriotism; and the easy relationship between an irresistible military-industrial complex and a compliant academic culture--seem to support conventional narratives of post-World War II society and higher education. These narratives hold that the combined forces of research funding and a cold war discourse which demanded conformity often co-opted and reshaped the institutional purposes of American universities. Rejecting the shorthand that "higher education" in the twentieth century was synonymous with the experience of elite research universities, and that significant American institutions generally complied with and even promoted cold war security and defense policies, allows stories unaccounted for in traditional historical narratives to emerge. In the case of the NDEA, two small liberal arts colleges--Swarthmore and Haverford--took a leading role in refusing federal monies offered by the legislation, in protest of an attached disclaimer affidavit. This affidavit was part of a loyalty provision in the legislation which required aid recipients to disclaim membership in or support of "subversive" organizations. From the first, this provision was a point of controversy among collegiate faculties and administrators, who saw in the affidavit a political test that imperiled nascent concepts of academic freedom, and also established dangerous precedent that could influence the direction of future education bills. While resistance eventually galvanized among many schools nationwide--and though higher profile institutions such as Harvard and Yale would ultimately emerge as its public faces--much of the initial example of dissent was promulgated by the non-participation of Swarthmore and Haverford. The example of the purpose and community identity articulated by these two schools during the NDEA controversy suggests the possibility of reclaiming narrative space for the residential liberal arts college in the history of cold war higher education, and perhaps in the present day as well.Item "Against the Public": Teacher Strikes and the Decline of Liberalism, 1968-1981(2013) Shelton, Jon K.; Greene, Julie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1930s, the Democratic Party became the party of working people largely through its support of legislation encouraging the formation of labor unions. As the nation moved leftward, a liberal consensus emerged that placed support--in the name of both economic growth and greater social equality--for labor unions at it center. Support for this labor-liberalism declined considerably during the 1970s, paving the way for the neoliberal conservatism that has emerged in the last quarter century of American politics. This dissertation explains this shift by looking at the intersection between culture and the public sector labor movement in the postwar era. As unionized teachers became increasingly visible in American political culture in the 1960s, lengthy strikes by teachers in major metropolitan areas in the 1970s caused many Americans to question their assumptions about the role of the state and the importance of labor unions. Because of teachers' long-time cultural importance as providers of economic opportunity as well as inculcators of moral values, their labor stoppages (which were often violations of the law) caused many white working- and middle-class Americans to blame the excesses of the liberal state for moral decline and to re-think their views about what had made America so prosperous in the years following World War II. Further, the state's failure to solve the thorny problem of teachers shutting down the school system also caused many of these future "Reagan Democrats" to question the efficacy of the liberal state. With labor-liberalism discredited, free-market conservatives began, by the end of the decade, to argue persuasively for a shift to a more austere state, less government regulation of business, and for the privatization of social goods like education. This dissertation charts these larger developments by putting close examinations of teacher strikes in Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and St. Louis in dialogue with the national trajectory of neoliberal conservatism.Item The Ford Foundation-MENC Contemporary Music Project (1959-1973): A View of Contemporary Music in America(2013) Covey, Paul Michael; Davis, Shelley G; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Challenging the widespread belief that serial or otherwise atonal composers dominated the United States' contemporary music scene of the 1950s and '60s (a situation named the “serial tyranny” by Joseph Straus), this study of the Ford Foundation-funded Contemporary Music Project (CMP) concludes that tonality was prevailingly considered an acceptably “contemporary” compositional orientation at the time (1959-1973). The evidence examined includes music by the 73 composers-in-residence the CMP placed in public school systems and communities nationwide, as well as syllabi and lesson plans for 90 Project-sponsored courses on purportedly “contemporary” music, also spread throughout the country, most at college level. Both the former and the content of the latter are placed in tonal or atonal categories, and the result tabulated. The study is in four main parts: Part 1 gives a working definition of tonality and discusses the Project's early stages (1959-63), when it was called the Young Composers Project and featured only composer residencies. Throughout discussion of these residencies, the Project's absence of bias with regard to style is highlighted. Part 2 details its expansion, as the CMP, to include educational programs such as Seminars and Workshops (1964-1966). Part 3 concerns the Institutes for Music in Contemporary Education (IMCE)--which included experimental musicianship courses at 33 universities--and the final years of school system residencies. Part 4 outlines the Project's final years, which continued workshops and moved composer residencies from schools to communities. The study's account of the content of the CMP's educational programs provides a statistical image of the contemporary canon as of the mid-to-late 1960s: the works and composers from within then-living memory that were considered most significant. Tonal music forms unambiguously the greater portion of this canon, and is also prevalent within the output of the resident composers, a group including many later well-known names. In addition to these findings, the study documents the remarkable collaboration of numerous significant composers and other musical figures, with various individual proclivities, on a massive undertaking that had both the goal and effect of cultivating and promoting contemporary music in a full and open-minded range of styles.Item Indigenismo and its Discontents: Bilingual Teachers and the Democratic Opening in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, 1954-1982(2012) Dillingham, Alan Shane; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the relationship between indigenous peoples and modernizing schemes in Mexico during the second half of the twentieth century. As such, it explores the relationship between indigeneity, educational and development policies, and Cold War politics. The study is grounded in a particular indigenous highland region of southern Mexico, the Mixteca Alta, while at the same time investigating indigenous-state relations as they were articulated on national and international levels. I examine policy debates, institutional reforms and labor struggles within indigenista agencies between 1954 and 1982. I ask how ideas about the value of indigenous language and culture shaped projects of incorporation and the struggles of meaning inherent in those processes. In other words, this dissertation is an investigation of the micropolitics of indigenous education and development efforts in the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that in the late 1970s a confluence of factors-including postwar development projects engaging indigenous brokers, transnational discourses of anti-colonialism, and grassroots struggle with an authoritarian regime-crystallized to shift official policy to the recognition and celebration of indigenous linguistic diversity. The dissertation deepens our understanding of post-1940 Mexican political culture and the transformations it underwent. Specifically, it plots a new periodization for regions, such as the Mixteca Alta, which did not experience significant agrarian reform during the 1930s, by demonstrating how federal agencies (other than the military) only began to exert influence in the early 1950s. The period of liberalizing reforms known as the apertura democrática, or democratic opening, is frequently described as an effort to coopt government opponents. I argue against this cooptation narrative by demonstrating how President Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) employed tried and true tactics of negotiation with mobilized sectors to both concede to and control emerging aspirations. It is in this regard that the Mexican regime, earlier than most of its Latin American counterparts, employed the rhetoric of indigenous cultural and linguistic rights to reformulate its corporatist rule.Item James E. Alatis: A Life in Language An Oral History(2012) Coomber, Nicole M.; Finkelstein, Barbara; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This oral history tells the story of James E. Alatis, who served as dean of the Georgetown School of Languages and Linguistics (SLL) and as the first executive director of the professional organization Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Born to Greek immigrants in Weirton, West Virginia in 1926, his preparation for leadership in language education included an upbringing as a child of immigrants and Greek community school. In this environment, Alatis learned to be an interpreter for his parents and for his community. In his later leadership of transformational organizations in the language education field, he institutionalized a style of leadership characterized by the ability to promote a vision and interpret the needs of various groups. His interpretive leadership style fostered collaboration towards a common vision. His story underscores the essential role of linguistics in language education, advocates for a close relationship between government and academia, and promotes applied linguistics as key for language learning and scholarship. He leads by facilitating collaboration and translating among different groups. His vision of language education proved prescient after over forty years in the field of language education and despite challenges presented to it by a change in leadership at TESOL and the closing of the SLL. Alatis's story both opens a window to this period of history in language education and stands as an example of academic leadership in the field.Item Countering the Master Narrative: The Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum in Social Studies, 1890-1940(2012) Murray, Alana D.; MacDonald, Victoria M; Curriculum and Instruction; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: COUNTERING THE MASTER NARRATIVE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALTERNATIVE BLACK CURRICULUM IN SOCIAL STUDIES, 1890-1940 Alana D. Murray, Ph.D., Curriculum And Instruction, specialization in Minority and Urban Education Directed By: Professor, Victoria-Marĩa MacDonald, and Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the development of the alternative black curriculum in social studies from 1890-1940. W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson worked in collaboration with women educators Nannie H. Burroughs and Anna Julia Cooper to create an alternative black curriculum that would support the intellectual growth of black children. There is a growing body of work, initially articulated by male scholars, that demonstrates the basic principles of the alternative black curriculum, a curriculum that reinterprets dominant narratives in US and world history about the African and African-American experience. My study illustrates how this curriculum was in many ways supplemented and even furthered by an ongoing dialogue with the pedagogical work of African-American women school founders, administrators, librarians, and teachers. Embracing both a critical race theory and integrated gender framework, an analysis of the alternative black curriculum will deepen and strengthen our understanding of the diverse contributors to social studies. Utilizing archival materials from the collection of Nannie Helen Burroughs in the Library of Congress, I document the ways in which women co-created an alternative black curriculum that challenged traditional narratives. I conducted a textual reading of the pageant, When Truth Gets A Hearing, authored by Nannie H. Burroughs, in order to establish how black women contributed to the development of the alternative black curriculum. I also compared When Truth Gets A Hearing to W.E.B. Du Bois's pageant, The Star of Ethiopia. In addition, I developed a case study of the social studies curriculum for National Training School for Women and Girls (NTS), a school Nannie H. Burroughs established with the explicit purpose of developing and nurturing African-American girls. The intent of my case study is to document how the alternative black curriculum in social studies was implemented in a school setting, with the hope that it might serve as a blueprint that teachers of social studies can use to restructure the current social studies curriculum to include a more comprehensive understanding of black history.Item Unsatisfactory Progress: The Pursuit of Good Schools in Suburban America, 1940-1980(2011) Sullivan, Jeremy Patrick; Gerstle, Gary; Sicilia, David B.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a case study of educational politics in Montgomery County, Maryland, an affluent suburban county bordering Washington, D.C., from 1940 to 1980. Following World War Two the county experienced significant population growth due to the baby boom and migration, transforming it into a thriving suburb. Concurrently, state party control over the county's school system was replaced by a pluralist system characterized by local grassroots activism, allowing groups of citizens to articulate and organize around distinct educational visions influenced by attitudes about race, class, and political ideology. Citizens debated the meaning of good schools and discussed the best way to achieve them, and over time conflicts between proponents of different educational philosophies revealed clearly defined segments of people within the county. These divisions developed within a consensual yearning for excellent public schools, and this dissertation explores the tension between the shared desire for educational excellence and the specific, competing desires of activists to define educational quality and influence educational policy. Current scholarship on the history of education in America focuses on urban schools or examines particular issues, like desegregation or teacher unionization, in isolation. This investigation highlights suburban educational politics and explores how suburbanites confronted numerous challenges simultaneously as they worked to make good schools in their community. Four groups of county residents emerged and sorted themselves into associations and activist organizations during the postwar decades: liberals, African Americans, conservatives, and teachers. Members of competing activist organizations defined good schools differently and employed different strategies to implement their preferences, including lobbying, electoral activism, petitioning at public hearings, and direct action such as protests and strikes. Cooperation between activists seemed possible initially, but over time the democratic mechanisms of pluralist educational politics helped cultivate suspicion in the minds of many citizens, splintering the consensus about the quality of the school system and prompting people to view public schools as a limited resource, with benefits available only to some, as opposed to a common good. In this way, the democratization of educational politics constrained what these suburbanites thought public schools could achieve and tempered their hopes for the future.Item Constructing Home Economics in Imperial Japan(2011) Tatsumi, Yukako; Finkelstein, Barbara; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the life and work of two Japanese women, Miyakawa Sumi (1875-1948) and Inoue Hide (1875-1963), who became pioneers of domestic education in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. They discovered home economics as a field of study, went to the Western nations in an attempt to explore its contours and possibilities, and returned to Japan where they introduced and institutionalized a distinctly Japanese variant of domestic education. Their life stories reveal two distinctive constructions of home economics specifically due to the distinct purposes of domestic education. Miyakawa, who borrowed the British model of practice-oriented domestic training, aspired to modernize women's technical competence in an attempt to advance women's self-sufficiency in household management. She believed that the individual household was a fundamental unit of state and essential to national economic development. Accordingly, she sought to mobilize women for serving the state through self-sufficient household management. By contrast, Inoue adopted scientific and sociological paradigms for home management that she had discovered at elite educational institutions in the United States. She sought to elevate the scholarly position of home economics in an attempt to legitimatize a gender-specific university education for women. Additionally, she promoted social activism in the hope of demonstrating women's civic leadership. Their life stories illuminate the key roles of home economics in expanding and advancing higher education for women. The emergence of advanced educational opportunities for women with marriage aspirations suggests a shift in public demand for programs that could credential and train ideal bridal candidates and expand their education to include post-secondary educational opportunities. Additionally, the emergence of an interdisciplinary framework for home management, the alternative to scientifically-based curricula, suggests a shift in a focus of domestic education from environmental solutions to social problems to the comprehensive pursuit of familial and social wellbeing. Using biography as a methodology, this study illuminates women's agency in refining the meaning of ideal womanhood, Ryôsai Kenbo (Good Wife, Wise Mother), uncovers the models with a high potential of acceptance specifically by urban middle-class women and suggests an expanded view of the mainstream discourse of ideal Japanese womanhood.