Critical Sociocultural Perspective Research Articles

Tensions in school context and teacher praxis in equity-oriented professional learning

Teaching language-minoritized students requires educators to gain equity-oriented ways of thinking and teaching. Using critical sociocultural perspectives on teacher learning, pedagogy, and coaching, we explore how 22 teachers at two United States urban elementary schools experienced a year-long, equity-oriented instructional coaching program focused on pedagogical practices called the Enduring Principles of Learning. Drawing on Freire's idea of praxis, interview data were analyzed to reveal tensions arising from enacting new pedagogical practices and how these tensions (or the lack thereof) related to teachers' professional learning. School climate and principal leadership style generated different types of tension, resulting in differential teacher uptake.

A systematic review exploring body image programmes and interventions in physical education

Body image has implications for child and adolescent well-being. Schools have been positioned as a suitable site to provide body image education and support the development of body image; however, little is known about the role of physical education in body image education. The aim of this study was to systematically review the evidence on the content and effectiveness of physical education-based body image or body-focused programmes published between 2000 and 2021. Using seven databases (Web of Science, SCOPUS, EBSCO, PsycINFO, MEDLINE, Science Direct, and SportDiscus), a total of 1185 non-duplicated articles were retrieved. The articles were selected using the following inclusion criteria: (a) intervention, programme or curriculum based in physical education that explores body image or related phenomena, (b) focused on children or young people, aged 18 years or younger, (c) conducted between 2000 and 2021, (d) quantitative and/or qualitative methods: and (e) published in English. Following the screening process, a total of 19 articles were included in this review. Results showed that most programmes reported successful outcomes, yet there was no consistent approach to the programme design and delivery. Physical activity and fitness-based programmes were the most frequently used intervention type, followed by critical sociocultural perspectives and programmes focused on movement experiences and body functionality. Whilst fitness-based programmes were generally effective in improving body image and related phenomena, future research should explore the mechanisms associated with these changes and further consider how sociocultural perspectives can be used to support body image programmes.

A socially-critical curriculum for PETE: students’ perspectives on the approaches to social-justice education of one Brazilian programme

ABSTRACT Brazil is the largest and most influential country in South America with a population of about 211 million. The reality is a country with a wide gap between rich and poor. Many of its issues of (in)equity are related to a complex mix of factors, such as its large population, ethnic and cultural diversity, class and income disparity, late slavery abolishment, unstable democracy and political governance. At a national level, the former Brazilian government attempted to address the challenges outlined above by passing new legislation in 2007 that expanded the services and scope of the federal universities, particularly in respect to increasing access to tertiary education and providing increased support and infrastructure for people of middle- and low-income families. In this paper we analyse a PETE programme offered at one university in the Brazilian Northeast in response to changes introduced as a result of the 2007 legislation. Drawing on the perspectives of graduates from this programme, we examine how they see the complexity of social justice and equity issues from their experience in the course. Data were generated through focus group and individual interviews with former students. We supplemented this with document analysis of key policy and curriculum artifacts produced by the programme, and consultation with professors from the course to better understand the former students’ experiential dynamics. Each participant expressed a strong affinity for and orientation towards social justice as an integral aspect of school physical education. The curricular restructuring enables students to engage with a broad range of content underpinned by ethical, political, aesthetic, epistemological, pedagogical and theoretical-methodological principles. We consider that this curricular orientation seeks to meet the regional and local needs so that future physical education teachers, in turn, intervene with a more critical socio-cultural perspective in their teaching.

From the local fringe to market centre: analysing the transforming social function of student ratings in higher education

ABSTRACT Student ratings are now an accepted orthodoxy in global higher education environments. They form an increasingly important metric that has been assimilated as a robust proxy measure of quality for evaluating individual, institutional and even system-level performativity. Although the technical design aspects of student ratings have received extensive attention, the broad sociocultural contexts of their use in higher education settings have had considerably less attention. In this study, a meta-synthesis framed by a critical sociocultural perspective was used to investigate the social evolution of student ratings over the last four decades. The outcomes suggest that student ratings have developed through three primary motives: an originating democratic improvement imperative; a dominating quality assurance assimilation and the emerging drive of satisfying the student-as-consumer. This analysis suggests that student ratings cannot be understood only in their benign technical form but must also be considered as performing significant functions in supporting the changing social imperatives of evolving higher education policy.

Parents’ discourse on English for young learners

English, the global lingua franca, enjoys a growing status worldwide. The high status of English is also linked to the increasing interest in teaching English to young learners (EYL), and is reciprocally linked to complex political, cultural and social forces. Research on the advantages of learning English at a young age is controversial and inconclusive, but despite uncertainties it seems that EYL will continue to be a growing trend. This study aimed to understand the forces that drive the EYL phenomenon and focuses on the analysis of parent’s discourse from a critical discursive sociocultural perspective. Findings illuminate the subtle, powerful ways in which parents’ discourse leads to the growing of EYL in Israel. Parents’ overenthusiasm to promote English in schools stems from their perceptions about the high value of English, global aspirations and their belief in the popular axiom ‘the younger the better’. Findings further suggest that decisions about EYL and its teaching are not necessarily based on professionals or academics but rather exist within the powers of the community, with parents being a dominant force.

Why not an integrative and inclusive approach—hands on and “minds on?” A lesson for mentoring 21st century science education researchers

AbstractThis essay uses a critical sociocultural perspective to examine Osborne's review of an essay written by Furtak and Penuel. This essay highlights dichotomous thinking and positivist/postpositivist perspective underpinning Osborne's discourse and argues that an integrative and inclusive orientation is more advantageous for science education researchers conducting research in an increasingly diverse world in demography and views. An integrative and inclusive approach to research requires an understanding and engagement with positionality, power associated with one's perceived or actual political and social location in a society.

Psychometric Analyses of New Measures of False-Self Defense

Abstract. The concept of the false-self defense has been widely used in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic literature, both in understanding processes of childhood development and in outlining personality defense mechanisms. This study presents a translation of this theoretical and clinical concept into empirical economical self-report scales assessing Self-Relatedness (16 items) and Environment-Directedness (14 items). The scales’ content judgment and psychometric analyses were carried out in three successive studies based on separate samples ( N = 226, 208, 176). The scales demonstrate good to excellent internal reliability and are normally distributed in a sample of university students. Results of Study 2 support the scales’ convergent, discriminant, and criterion construct validity. Study 3, comparing deaf and hard-of-hearing (d/hoh) students with controls, provides a partial support for the scales’ criterion group validity. The findings demonstrate the scales’ potential contribution to psychodynamically oriented research, as well as to research enriched by critical sociocultural perspectives.

A Critical Sociocultural Perspective to Academic Literacies in Latin America

In this editorial, the author reflects on the state of research on academic literacies in Latin American higher education. To this end, the author presents a description of the context of higher education in Latin America, and the analysis of literature on academic literacies in the region through the lenses of three models: the study skills model, the academic socialization model, and the critical sociocultural model. From this analysis, the author argues that a critical sociocultural perspective is emerging in Latin America, which considers academic literacies as social practices embedded in systems of power. This turn into a critical sociocultural perspective is important and timely because it challenges deficit views of students, and it includes issues of power, identity, representation, and authority. The author invites Latin American scholars to consider the implications of a critical sociocultural perspective to academic literacies and the possibilities it offers to understand how youth interact with literacy in a region where education most of the times reinforces deep inequalities.

Families of Children with Down Syndrome in Turkey: A Sociocultural Approach

Studies on children with Down syndrome have been on the rise in recent years because interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches have been developed to understand both parents and children with Down syndrome. This study aimed to analyze the views of Turkish parents of children with Down syndrome from a critical sociocultural perspective. Five families of children with Down syndrome were interviewed. These families discussed their views composed of medical and familial discourses, legal rights, bureaucracy, sociality, socialization, outsiders’ perspectives, criticism to educational and medical system and resistance through social dialogue. The qualitative results of the study show that the families developed a different discourse that resisted the conventional discourses created by medical institutions and macro social structures. In addition, negative and pessimistic perspectives of others were, to a large extent, eliminated and transformed into more positive and optimistic viewpoints through social dialogue and constructive narratives.

The stigmatized tourist

This paper explores the tourism experience of the Arab and Muslim Tourist (AMT) visiting a (Western) developed country for tourism, from a critical socio-cultural perspective. Encapsulated in Goffman’s theoretical underpinning of the study of stigma, and informed by Said’s Orientalism, I used in-depth interviews to understand the tourism experience of the AMT in an immigration context, situated in what Goffman refers to as the ‘normal-deviant drama’. In a contemporary climate of xeno/ethno-racism, The AMT is stigmatized by association with his/her nationals (or par default by semblance to those nationals), who constitute a visible ethnic immigrant group in the visited country. His/her actual social identity becomes confounded with an ascribed virtual identity. As a moral issue, stigmatization spoils the tourist identity of the AMT, resulting in feelings of shame, confusion, and anger. The rise of anti-immigrants discourse and sentiments, and the rise of religious extremism practices and sentiments in the world, begs for more attention in contemporary tourist studies.

Should great lakes city build a new power plant? How youth navigate socioscientific issues

AbstractThere is a growing consensus that simply learning enough science to decipher public debates on socioscientific issues will not make citizens better equipped to handle the complex and ill‐structured problems these controversial issues present. This study highlights the interaction and complex interplay between youth authored and appropriated frames for making sense of socioscientific issues. To do so, we analyze how two middle‐school aged youth, in an after‐school program focused on green energy technologies, made sense of and took a stance on whether their city should build a new hybrid power plant over the course of a 13‐week unit. Using critical sociocultural perspectives on learning and qualitative case study, we examined how the two youth navigated the issue and the resources, scientific and otherwise, they leveraged in defining the problem spaces involved in whether their city should build a new power plant. Our findings indicate that the scientific knowledge youth brought with them and acquired over the course of the investigation influenced how they made sense of the issue, but their knowledge was deeply connected to a range of personal and public discourses that influenced how they defined the issue and why it mattered to them. In particular, it was through how they framed their range of knowledge and experiences that they were able to recognize the multi‐dimensional nature of the problem and propose complex solutions resonant with the science they understood. Our study offers conceptual tools for teaching and learning socioscientific issues. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 541–567, 2012

‘Are You Guys Girls?’: Boys, Identity Texts, and Disney Princess Play

Drawing from critical sociocultural perspectives that view play, literacy, and gender as social practices, boys’ Disney Princess play is examined as a site of identity construction and contestation situated within overlapping communities of femininity and masculinity practice where children learn expected practices for ‘doing gender’. The article presents critical discourse analysis of two instances of five- and six-year-old children’s doll play excerpted from data collected during a year of weekly visits to one focal kindergarten in a US Midwest public school, which is part of a larger three-year study of literacy play as mediated discourse. Through princess play, children enacted femininities and masculinities and negotiated character roles with peers in ways that enforced and contested gender expectations circulated in media marketing and enacted in play groups. Findings indicate that doll play is a productive pedagogy for mediating gendered identity texts circulating through global media and for creating spaces for diverse gender performances in early childhood settings.

‘My home and my school’: examining immigrant adolescent narratives from the critical sociocultural perspective

Privileging the voices of 12 recent Chinese immigrant adolescents, this multiple‐case narrative study examined their home and school experiences from the critical sociocultural perspective. The adolescent stories about home testified to the significant influence of immigrant poverty, parental sacrificial altruism, and disciplinary Chinese parenting in their academic achievement. The adolescent experiences at school revealed their appreciation of Canadian liberal education, their perception of ethnic peer divides, and their concerns about the ineffectiveness and the negative psychological consequences of the ESL (English as a Second Language) programming. Locating the adolescent narratives in the hierarchical power of domination in Canadian society, this article challenges mainstream educational institutions to address the changing nature of urban Canadian classrooms, structurally and ideologically representing the strengths of cultural diversity.

African American perspectives and informal science educational experiences

AbstractThis qualitative study examined the perspectives of African American parents as it pertained to informal science education. The following questions guided this study: (1) What are the desires of African American parents/guardians with respect to informal science programs and experiences for their children?; (2) What happens in Jordan Academy, an enrichment program that has successfully recruited African American students?; and (3) What are the African American parents'/guardians' opinions of the program? We inductively and deductively analyzed classroom observations; academy curriculum; photos and videotaped class sessions students' written responses to open‐ended items on the program's evaluation; and teachers' and parents' responses to semistructured, audio‐recorded interviews. We viewed the analysis results from Boykin's Black cultural ethos (BCE). We further interpreted the study's findings from a critical sociocultural perspective that employed a model synthesized from Cole's cultural‐historical framework, Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, and Boykin's triple quandary. Results indicated that most of the African American parents' desires and opinions align with seven of the nine dimensions of Boykin's BCE. The parents' opinions highlight the potential impact of culture on parental choice to enroll their children into an informal science program. The study has important implications for practices within and research on informal science education. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 93: 293–321, 2009

Teacher education

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