Democratic Educational Practices Research Articles

A case study on evaluation of the context, input, process, product (CIPP) implementation in the child-friendly school program

This study evaluates the effectiveness of the Child-Friendly School (CFS) program at Al Mumtaz Integrated Islamic Elementary School in Pontianak using the CIPP (Context, Input, Process, Product) Evaluation Model. Through field research and purposive sampling, it delves the experiences and perceptions of principals, vice-principals, students, teachers, and parents on the program's impact. The school has successfully implemented the CFS program, noted for its qualified teachers with professional educational backgrounds and a focus on religious knowledge. The context evaluation revealed that the program aligns with child-friendly school policies, receiving a very positive evaluation and documented by official decrees. Input evaluation indicates Al Mumtaz meets all criteria including qualified staff, infrastructure, educator training, and engagement from students and parents. Process evaluation highlights the school’s effectiveness in facilitating positive educational dynamics, with non-violent disciplining, affection towards students, democratic educational practices, and teachers as role models. Finally, product evaluation shows significant achievements in fostering students' holistic development across various dimensions such as honesty, tolerance, communicative skills, democracy, social concern, responsibility, environmental care, and academics. The suggestion for this school involves establishing an organizational framework within the child-friendly school initiative to facilitate the efficient allocation of responsibilities and to confirm that the program’s monitoring and evaluation procedures are conducted in a more organized and methodical manner.

Democratic Education as Expressed in Practice: An Integrative Literature Review

Despite a strong theoretical foundation, teachers’ pedagogical practices that represent the principles of democratic educational theory are not holistically understood. This qualitative integrative literature review provides a more complete view of the practices used by those who define themselves as democratic educators. By analyzing and integrating existing literature on classroom practice this review discusses four pedagogical approaches that engage democratic educational practices including inquiry, artistic, oral, and student-centered methods.

Moving towards critical democracy: democratic spaces in the Portuguese early years classroom

ABSTRACT In societies where authoritarian and populist perspectives are on the rise, a focus on the concept of democracy within education can provide a meaningful space to reflect critically on, and disrupt, the status quo. In post-dictatorship Portugal, democracy has become a central symbolic concept within education policy and, in particular, Early Childhood Education (ECE) policy emphasises the importance of democratic citizenship within children’s personal and social development. Through a lens of critical pedagogy, we examine the diverse enactments of democracy at the classroom level within ECE settings in Portugal. By analysing interviews with twenty early years educators in three kindergartens, we identified ten concepts of democratic educational practice. Through observation of their classrooms, we explored divergent applications of these concepts in practice which embodied three distinct pedagogical approaches, which we termed instructive, responsive, and synergetic. These respectively enacted three styles of classroom democracy, which we described as procedural, interactive and critical democracy. We found that “critical democracy” was most evident where collaborative democratic spaces were created by educators who emphasised and enacted the values of listening, critical thinking, freedom, and respect.

Constructive Controversy in an Instrumental Methods Classroom: An Exploratory Case Study

Abstract Mirroring the current polarized political climate in America and beyond, ideological debates in instrumental methods often occur absent attention to potential common ground. Using Hess and McAvoy’s (2014) pedagogical principles for engaging students in democratic educational practices as a conceptual framework, the purpose of this exploratory case study was to investigate preservice instrumental music teachers’ (N = 24) experiences during a semester-long constructive controversy project. Researchers analyzed the following data from 13 students: initial and ending journal reflections for all nine controversial topics, final course papers, and two semistructured interviews. The findings indicate that students’ high school experiences played a key role in how students engaged with the controversial topics. Students valued conflict; they not only appreciated hearing about but actively sought out contrasting perspectives. Yet, students did not necessarily value compromise, and these endeavors rarely resulted in individuals substantially changing their beliefs. Participants disagreed about whether the consensus-making process was easy or difficult, and they saw the resultant consensus statements as ranging from syntheses to midpoints. While most students saw listening as key to the constructive controversy process, not all of them felt heard by their classmates.

From ‘Prevent’ to ‘Enable’

Given the increasing pressures on teachers in Further and Adult Education across a range of economic, political and managerial factors, this article argues that inquiry-based approaches to education can open up much-needed transformative learning spaces to the benefit of tutors, students and wider communities.
 Through the presentation of a case study, this article suggests that the inclusion of such ‘pro-social pedagogies’ in teacher training programmes will both equip teachers with tools to facilitate dialogue, and provide reflective spaces in which they can consider their own positions regarding challenging education policy.
 The case study, a ‘community philosophy enquiry’ into Prevent and Fundamental British Values involving trainee teachers in the North of England, is outlined and the ethical challenges considered. 
 The approach taken is based on a posthuman ‘ethics of affirmation’ (Braidotti, 2012) and a nomadic ontology which facilitates change through the joining together of agents for transformation, across a series of on- and off-line rhizomatic assemblages. The article concludes with recommendations for the further implementation of democratic educational practices such as community philosophy, which allow space and time for discussion and dissent.

Teachers' beliefs of democratic educational practices: the case of Arab teachers in Israel

It was the aim of the present study to examine teachers' beliefs about democracy in the classroom as a component of the classroom environment. This issue is especially important in the case of teachers who live in a traditional society such as the Arab teachers in Israel. The participants were 498 Arab teachers from the Triangle area in Israel. The research results indicated that the participating teachers' beliefs about democracy in the classroom were 'normal' but not 'good'. Furthermore, the results showed that those teachers' beliefs in democracy have significant relationship with their background variables. It is suggested that a clear educational policy should be developed for confronting failures of the educational system. In addition, those teachers would benefit from participating in democracy workshops that prepare them for more democratic practices in the classrooms.

Teachers' beliefs of democratic educational practices: the case of Arab teachers in Israel

It was the aim of the present study to examine teachers' beliefs about democracy in the classroom as a component of the classroom environment. This issue is especially important in the case of teachers who live in a traditional society such as the Arab teachers in Israel. The participants were 498 Arab teachers from the Triangle area in Israel. The research results indicated that the participating teachers' beliefs about democracy in the classroom were 'normal' but not 'good'. Furthermore, the results showed that those teachers' beliefs in democracy have significant relationship with their background variables. It is suggested that a clear educational policy should be developed for confronting failures of the educational system. In addition, those teachers would benefit from participating in democracy workshops that prepare them for more democratic practices in the classrooms.

We May Well Become Accomplices

Research on education and society is the focus in discussing four essays of AERA past presidents, Newton Edwards, Maxine Greene, Linda Darling-Hammond, and William F. Tate, IV. The title, “We May Well Become Accomplices . . . ,” is taken from Greene’s speech to foreground inherent moral obligations of scholars when racial and social justice is a goal of education research on education and society. The essay begins with a prologue situating the author’s personal and professional biography within the span of time in which these essays were published. Progress and challenges with respect to race and racism in relation to learning for freedom and democracy and research on education and society are displayed in thematic timetables organized to contextualize the intellectual issues and the social times surrounding the presidential publications. The conclusion discusses a role for AERA in supporting new possibilities for collaborative learning relative to morally engaged research as democratic educational practice.

Appropriating Assessment: Possibilities for an Alliance Perspective through Teaching Social Foundations in Unusual Places

In this article, I explore teaching with a social foundations perspective in the unusual place of an Introduction to Assessment course for second-year, undergraduate, teacher candidates. By bringing the work of three candidates together with the four concerns of the proposed third edition of the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies—P-12 students; professional educators; democratic educational practices; and research, policy, and advocacy—I argue for the possibility of alliance among educators through engagement of the interpretive, normative, and critical perspectives. Alliance did not emerge in the work of the three candidates—instead the Standards, as embodied in my teaching, furthered the dominance of the modern myths of progress and individualism. I propose however, that the addition of an alliance perspective to the three existing social foundations perspectives upon which the Standards rely might better allow for work within and across the concerns delineated in the Standards.

Multiple repertoires of ways of being and acting in music: immigrant students' musical agency as an impetus for democracy

The aim of this article is to explore how immigrant students experience and enact musical agency inside and outside the music lessons in three Nordic lower secondary schools. The research was designed as a multi-sited ethnographic study and the data were collected in Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo through classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students. The 19 interviews made with a total of 30 students are especially focused in this article. The findings show that the student interviewees possessed multiple repertoires of ways of being and acting in music, and also that the forms and aspects of musical agency exercised and emphasised inside and outside music lessons were quite different ones. Furthermore, much of the students’ musical competence was not recognised within the school setting. These findings are discussed with respect to what special needs immigrant students may have in a music education situation, and the students’ multiple repertoires are viewed in relation to their potential for constituting an imperative resource for building of future, democratic educational practices.

A Researcher-Student-Teacher Model for Democratic Science Pedagogy: Connections to Community, Shared Authority, and Critical Science Agency

This article presents a model for democratic pedagogy in science classrooms that is based on an examination of existing literature on democratic educational practices and on teacher and student ideas about how this pedagogy can take shape and be operationalized in science classrooms. A goal of democratic science pedagogy is to explore ways of teaching science for social justice among diverse school populations by drawing on the ideas and assets of students and teachers. Drawing upon interview and observational data, the model shows democratic science pedagogy as centered in constructions of community, shared authority, and critical science agency—students relying on subject-matter knowledge to make change and to redress power differentials in their lives.

Seen and heard, and then not heard: Scottish pupils’ experience of democratic educational practice during the transition from primary to secondary school

Education for citizenship is firmly on the policy agenda throughout Britain, and there is an expectation that teachers will create a participative, consultative ethos in schools. This paper identifies three main vehicles for pupil consultation: elected pupil councils, democratic and participative classrooms and opportunities for pupils to engage with controversial issues within the curriculum. It focuses on a longitudinal study of pupils’ experience of democratic practice in Scottish schools in relation to these vehicles. Evidence from a diverse sample of primary schools illustrates the way in which upper‐stage pupils are encouraged to participate in decision‐making processes and engage in the discussion of contemporary social issues of their own interest both in the classroom and during pupil council meetings. In addition, further evidence of the extent to which these same pupils’ experience of the democratic process evolves following their transition to secondary school is reported. The paper raises new questions about the extent to which Scottish pupils may be exposed to a progressive model of democratic education, and suggests that children may be given more opportunities for consultation in primary school than they are in the early stages of secondary school.

Post‐modern Sociology as a Democratic Educational Practice? Some suggestions

Abstract This paper explores the relationships between sociology, democracy and education. Its main argument is that post‐modernist theory (in spite of its own inherent inconsistencies) can be interpreted as a constructive challenge to the hierarchical presuppositions of academic sociology. It can thus help to provide a theoretical framework for formulating a new set of institutional arrangements for social inquiry, which would reconstitute sociology as a democratic educational practice. In order for this to occur, sociology must recognise that the problematic nature of the social relationships of authoritative interpretation constitute a key theoretical problem: a ‘democratic’ sociology must re‐focus its efforts on formulating methods for critique which would help to enfranchise practitioners in the rigorous analysis of their work.