Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Re-imagining secondary education: Voices from South African academic and vocational secondary education programs(2014) Balwanz, David; Klees, Steven; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Global discourse on secondary education and vocational skills development offers a narrative which emphasizes increased use of standardized testing; a focus on science, technology, business knowledge, and vocational skills development; and identifies expansion of access to secondary and tertiary education as a solution to poverty, inequality, and unemployment. In South Africa, academic and vocational secondary education is largely shaped by this discourse, which is grounded in the assumptions of human capital theory and privileges the perpetuation of an elite model of secondary education. Apartheid-era practices of racial segregation and racial capitalism, while legally dismantled, still have a significant influence on the political economy of modern day South Africa. This influence includes the distribution of power, resources, and opportunities articulated through South Africa's public education system. This study draws on critical social theory and political economy to understand existing constructions of academic and vocational secondary education in South Africa, including how these constructions dialectically relate education to work and society. The purpose of this study is to allow grassroots voices, teachers and learners at two schools in marginalized communities in South Africa, to "talk back to discourse" about the purpose of secondary education. How do learners and teachers define purpose? Many see secondary school as a place for students to learn about themselves and education as a means to realizing their dreams, even if their dreams are only, as yet, partially formed. This study offers a humanistic counter-narrative to the dominant discourse by sharing the dreams and holistic development interests of learners and the hopes and frustrations of teachers as they learn and work within an inhumane and narrow construction of education, work, and society.Item Constituting Republics: Toward Political Conception of the Constitutional Predicament(2012) Dzhuraev, Emilbek; Elkin, Stephen L; Soltan, Karol E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How is a good political order constituted? This work is a critical and constructive exploration of the problem of political constitution. Recent contributions to the study of this subject have often failed to adequately recognize its political nature, and have thus fallen short of being able to inform the challenges of actual constitutional development. This thesis argues for a broader conception of constitution that overcomes the limitations imposed by the legalist, formal-institutional, philosophic, and cultural-essentialist perspectives, and one that accounts for the political-ness of the matter more satisfactorily. Correctly understood, constitution of a well-ordered society is a practical, situated, and continuous predicament. From this broad view of political constitution the dissertation moves on to elaborate a more specific instance of it, the idea of pragmatic republicanism. Pragmatic republicanism is a comprehensive idea of political constitution, comprising four main elements: a realistic vision of a good polity, a set of thin-normative procedural orientations of constitution, a set of basic empirical conditions of constitution, and the concept of constitutional crafting that is tantamount to the activity of constituting in the midst of the preceding three elements. Once these concepts are outlined, the idea of pragmatic republicanism is applied, by way of illustration, to the case of Kyrgyzstan - an instructive case of a seemingly hopeless constitutional malaise. This work builds upon a very eclectic range of literature as it makes the case for an interdisciplinary and `problem-driven' understanding of political constitution. Contra some of the conventional criteria of good social science, this work defends the view that a proper understanding of constitution must accept conceptual complexity, deficit of parsimony, analytic uncertainty, and theoretical incompleteness as unavoidable and even necessary.