Critical Considerations (Asynchronous Session)
Voluntary Race-conscious Policies as a Frame of Justice for Marginalized Students: Mainstreaming Government Speech Doctrine in Parents Involved View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Joseph Oluwole
School districts today remain racially segregated due to vestiges of past discrimination and there is an expanded resegregation of our public schools. While the resegregation today remains mostly de facto, it still presents great dangers to race relations in our country if, from their impressionable years, students are not exposed to the benefits of diversity as part of an overall educational experience, further embedding subalternity in American society. This dialogue is even more important given the political climate today if we are to give voice to students; we need this dialogue to give voice to the desegregation and equal educational opportunity needs of students. This topic is very fitting for this year’s conference focus on frames of justice as it empowers us to give voice to and speak for students who are facing inequitable educational opportunities. This research presents analysis of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence niceties, revealing that a relationship exists between race-conscious measures and prohibited government speech. This study examines the role of the government speech doctrine in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District. The analysis reveals that Parents Involved targeted districts’ racial messages (a form of government speech) rather than race-conscious policies. Thus, districts design of race-conscious policies must be deliberate in messaging to promote diversity and equal educational opportunity.
Leveraging Organizational Dynamics to Attract Educators to Inner-City Schools View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sean Ratican, Kathleen Cripe, Crystal Ratican, Susan Miller, Kenneth Miller
Strategic investments in organizational leadership within the education sector can reap significant dividends in attracting and retaining quality teachers. These investments include comprehensive cultural competency training for all school administrators, teachers, and staff as well as the inclusion of these groups in creating a collaborative organizational culture. Such investments are particularly important in inner-city schools, where research reveals that cultural incompetence and the absence of a collaboratively developed organizational plan contribute to high levels of teacher attrition and substantial difficulties in attracting new teachers. Because scholarship has already recognized and identified the problem of attracting talented teachers to the low-income and urban districts, this paper takes the next step to suggest novel evidence-based solutions to the problem. Central to this approach is the school administrator’s responsibility to build an organizational culture that ensures equity, educational rigor, and opportunities for meeting teachers’ and administrators’ work-related needs. Building this culture requires: (a) delivery of empirically-supported cultural competency training; (b) self-assessments of management style to create an approach designed to enhance employee satisfaction; (c) creation of a shared vision and organizational leadership plan designed to make the work environment more attractive and satisfying to current and prospective teachers; and (d) development of a flexible yet practical service delivery framework that enables employees’ workplace needs to be met. In creating this culture, we argue that inner-city teacher attraction and retention rates can be dramatically improved.
Changes in Teachers' Intercultural Literacy as a Result of a Fulbright-Hays Group Program to Indonesia View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paul R. Wallace
This paper reports on changes in intercultural literacy of participants involved in a month-long Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Program (GPA) to Indonesia. The Fulbright-Hays GPA is a U.S. Department of Education program that provides institutional grants to support overseas experience and opportunities for curriculum development for teachers, students, and faculty engaged in a common endeavor. Participants included in this study are comprised of both K-12 teachers from North Carolina public schools and graduate-level teacher education majors. Before and after the overseas program, each participant completed a self-assessment of intercultural literacy, which measures competencies, understandings, attitudes, language proficiencies, participation, and identities that have been identified as being necessary for successful living and working in a cross-cultural environment. This paper includes the results of the assessment survey, as well as a discussion of changes in intercultural literacy of eight participants related to the dimensions of language and participation. Lastly, the participants' comments on the value of overseas program activities are presented, related to the dimensions of intercultural literacy.
Understanding the 'How' of Gender Dynamics: A Discourse Analysis of Sweden's Feminist Foreign Policy Handbook View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hitesh Lathwal
This study cultivates an explanatory to exploratory argument of how the construction of the gender(s), the dichotomy of male and female in international relations and the institution of diplomacy, is accumulated. Such a review helps to critically examine the epistemological discourse of gender dynamics in traditional diplomacy. It enquires the feminist foreign policy handbook of Sweden published by the Sweden government and attempts to draw the gap in research in the discourse of feminist theory of feminist diplomacy that strives to curb gender discrimination via diplomacy. The central question inquires about what constitutes gender(s) in I.R. theories of realism and feminism. It uses Michel Foucault's concept of discourse analysis of power relations and the Butlerian framework of Performativity; this paper examines the amalgam of the present and the "ideal" theorized episteme of Swedish diplomatic practices. Moreover, It also offers to open up a reflection on anxiety and negotiation between queer theory and the State. Therefore, the paper analyses the traditional approach to diplomacy and feminism, and generate the argument that policy experts can observe to understand the pluralistic universality with a profound understanding of the term gender.
