Handbook of Research in the Social Foundations of Education

Steven Tozer, Bernardo P. Gallegos, Annette Henry, Mary Bushnell Greiner, Paula Groves Price

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135283797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Parts one and two of this volume present the theoretical lenses used to study the social contexts of education. These include long-established foundations disciplines such as sociology of education and philosophy of education as well as newer theoretical perspectives such as critical race theory, feminist educational theory, and cultural studies in education. Parts three, four, and five demonstrate how these theoretical lenses are used to examine such phenomena as globalization, media, popular culture, technology, youth culture, and schooling. This groundbreaking volume helps readers understand the history, evolution, and significance of this wide-ranging, often misunderstood, and increasingly important field of study.

This book is appropriate as a reference volume not only for scholars in the social foundations of education but also for scholars interested in the cultural contexts of teaching and learning (formal and informal). It is also appropriate as a textbook for graduate-level courses in Social Foundations of Education, School and Society, Educational Policy Studies, Cultural Studies in Education, and Curriculum and Instruction.

Part I
Original Foundational Disciplines

STEVEN E. TOZER, SECTION EDITOR
University of Illinois–Chicago

Social Foundations of Education is a sprawling, complex domain, grounded in long-established disciplines while at the same time embracing and shaping new multi-theoretical perspectives over time. As Part I of this volume makes clear, even those long-established disciplines are dynamic and contested. Anthropology and philosophy of education, it seems, are hardly more “settled” than feminist or post-colonial theory in education. The politics of education is a field marked by boundary disputes no less than critical race theory in education.

Since its beginnings in the Foundations Division at Teachers College Columbia (TCC) in the 1930s, the field has been marked by a productive tension between disciplines rooted in the social sciences and humanities—such as anthropology, sociology, history, and philosophy of education—and cross-disciplinary approaches that have integrated those disciplinary perspectives to analyze education in cultural context. The multidisciplinary “panels” of scholars who team-taught the early courses at TCC were themselves disciplinary specialists in history, philosophy, sociology, and even psychology, but they taught in multidisciplinary groups of three because they believed that the social and educational phenomena that concerned them were not subsumable under any single discipline. These faculty could together be “cross-disciplinary” or “multidisciplinary” because as individuals they were trained in the disciplines.

Those single-discipline origins are evident in a 1951 monograph produced at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, only 10 years after the first textbook of readings in Social Foundations of Education was assembled at TCC in 1941 (Rugg et al., 1941). Ten years after its publication, the University of Illinois Division of Historical, Comparative, Philosophical, and Social Foundations of Education wrote of the term “Social Foundations”:

It is frequently used in a broad, collective sense to designate the “non-psychological” foundations fields. In this sense, it includes such fields as the history of education, comparative education, philosophy of education, educational sociology, educational anthropology, and educational economics. … [T]he field of “social foundations” is relatively new and unstabilized, and is not taught as a separate discipline in many teacher training institutions. Social foundations, as a field, is concerned with those aspects and problems of society which need to be taken into account in determining educational policy, especially as this policy concerns the social role of the school, and in determining broader social policies which affect educational policy. … This definition of the field distinguishes it from educational history and philosophy on the one hand, and from educational sociology on the other.

(Anderson et al., 1951, iv)

That distinction, between the single disciplines that comprise a significant part of the field of Social Foundations of Education and the field itself, continues to reflect today’s academic realities. There are historians and sociologists of education, for example, who do not consider themselves Social Foundations scholars at all, and who do not identify with the American Educational Studies Association (founded in 1968). They are rooted in their particular disciplines and research paradigms, and they may or may not be engaged in the professional preparation of teachers and school administrators as the Social Foundations field has been since its inception. At the same time, many Social Foundations scholars locate their professional identities in the disciplines—sociology or anthropology or history, for example—and rely on these scholarly and intellectual communities for their development as theorists and researchers.

Recent presidents of the central Social Foundations academic organization, the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), have been philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of education, reflecting their training in the historic “Foundations disciplines,” as Harold Rugg termed them in 1955. Rugg, of course, was editor of the first Foundations Division text at TCC. He could not have foreseen that later scholars in Social Foundations (and presidents of AESA), would include scholars in feminist theory, cultural studies, and critical race theory: Foundations scholars all, but Foundations in a new collection of voices that have become prominent since the 1970s. Those newer theoretical perspectives reflect the historic commitment of Social Foundations to the use of multidisciplinary, critical analyses of the intersection of cultural and educational phenomena. But they also provide theoretical tools that simply were not available to Counts, Rugg, Butts, and the rest of the field’s founders.

These emergent theoretical perspectives did not replace the original Foundations disciplines; they complemented and influenced them. Part I of this volume, then, presents scholarly accounts of the established Foundations disciplines that have helped define the field since its inception: philosophy of education, history of education, economics of education, and a number of others that have endured for the 75 years of the field’s existence. One persistent theme running through these chapters is that these are not unproblematic domains. Long-established they may be, but their boundaries are always under construction and re-construction as new theoretical perspectives and methodologies challenge the status quo within them.

We begin this section with a chapter on the Social Foundations of Education itself, in the sense established by the Foundations Divisions at TCC and the University of Illinois: a critical, cross-disciplinary field animated by the application of democratic values to the analysis of education in social context. It has been a treasured opportunity to co-author with R. Freeman Butts, one of the founders of the Foundations Division at Teachers College and later chair of the division. While relying on scholarship that both Butts and I have published in the past on the history of the field, our collaboration produced some new (for us, at least) insights into the directions the field has taken and new challenges to its boundaries.

The theme of new directions and definitions is a recurrent one throughout Part I. If the field of Social Foundations of Education is sprawling and contested, so are its constituent disciplines, as we see discussed in chapters on philosophy of education (Lynda Stone), sociology of education (Lois Weis et al.), anthropology of education (deMarrais, Armstrong, and Preissle), and politics of education (Fusarelli), among others. In examining the shifting directions and definitions of their fields, some authors chose to be more comprehensive than others. Don Warren’s chapter on history and historiography of education, for example, challenges us to think as much about what history of education could be as about what it has been in the past. Patricia Randolph Leigh examines economics of education from a distinctively critical Social Foundations perspective that foregrounds economic inequality rather than portraying the entire field. Three chapters might be surprising choices for some readers: those in religion (Chappell), law (Welner, Biegel, and Jackson), and aesthetics (Higgins) in education. They were included because scholars from those domains contributed to the founding of the field, and these disciplines remain salient to examining how we can inquire into the acculturation and education of youth today. All three of these authors make significant contributions to mapping out their fields as well as detailing the distinctive perspectives that religion, aesthetics, and law bring to the consideration of education as a social phenomenon.

The chapters in Part I attend to the methodology of the field as well as to the content of what is studied. The picture that emerges today is that original foundational disciplines are marked not only by “theoretical, analytical and methodological tensions and debate,” as Weis et al. express it, but by evolutionary change that reflects major shifts in American political economy and ideology, new ways of looking at relations between knowledge and power, increased attention to the voices and experiences of marginalized and oppressed populations, and a continued commitment to cross-disciplinary approaches to investigating these social phenomena. Not only have these historic foundational disciplines borrowed and traded from one another methodologically and theoretically, but the authors in these chapters show how these disciplines have influenced and been influenced by postmodern theoretical lenses detailed in Part II of the Handbook. And many of these authors have, as well, attempted to point to where their field needs to go from here if it is to continue to help us interpret the relations between school and society.

The methodological inheritance of these founding disciplines derives largely from the humanities (e.g., history, philosophy, aesthetics, religion) and the social sciences (e.g., sociology, anthropology, economics, and politics), all of which fields have been in recent years dominated by qualitative or mixed-methods approaches. While quantitative methods still thrive in the social sciences, it is clear that, as in the past, they are not prominent in the critical orientations of these established social foundations disciplines today.

The “mapping of the field” function that most of these authors have undertaken is also a function of a handbook such as this, and omissions and lacunae are inevitable. Part I should rightly have included a chapter on comparative education, for example, but the logistics of obtaining authors and replacement authors broke down and we were unable to include that chapter. International influences on foundations scholarship are documented in a number of chapters in Part I (and throughout the Handbook) but this omission is nonetheless regrettable.

Even with a chapter on comparative education intact, Part I would not offer a definitive or thoroughly comprehensive mapping of the origins and current status of the founding disciplines of the field. Like Part I as a whole, each chapter in Part I is an interpretation of an important intellectual tradition in the field of Social Foundations today, and each interpretation is necessarily partial and subjective. Together, however, these investigations provide a necessary introduction for those who would seek to understand the range, depth, and complexity of the field.

References

Anderson, A. O., Benne, K. D., McMurray, F., Smith, B. O., & Stanley, W. O. (1951). The theoretical foundations of education (p. iv). Urbana, IL: Bureau of Research and Service, College of Education, University of Illinois.

Rugg, H. (1941). Readings in the foundations of education, Vols. I & II. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.

1
The Evolution of Social Foundations of Education

STEVEN E. TOZER
University of Illinois–Chicago

R. FREEMAN BUTTS¹
Teachers College–Columbia University

Beginnings

When George S. Counts published the landmark volume The Social Foundations of Education in 1934, his title did not refer primarily to a component of study in teacher education or school leader preparation programs. Instead, he was referring to the cultural phenomena—institutions, processes, practices, beliefs, values, and ways of knowing—that underlie any society’s educational ideas and practices (Counts, 1934; Tozer, 1993). Those phenomena are both material and ideational: including institutions of family, governance, and the economy, as well as beliefs and values that explain and justify those social institutions and ways of life. Counts argued that teachers and school leaders need to study the social foundations of education if they are to understand the consequences of their actions as educators, and to be able to make informed and ethical choices within their educational practice. A significant part of Counts’s book was devoted to the notion of democratic ideals as an ethical framework that should guide educational decision-making in the United States in the 20th Century.

Counts was at the time part of a discussion group of 10–15 men (as group member Harold Rugg reports) who had been meeting in regular, bi-weekly dinner discussions since 1928 and would continue to do so until 1941. Led by William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College Columbia, where Counts was a faculty member and would soon be head of the Foundations Division, these meetings constituted what Rugg would later recall as “a longtime, gr...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Original Foundational Disciplines
• Part II Emergent Perspectives
• Part III Globalization, Institutions, and Power
• Part IV Popular Culture, Media, and Technology
• Part V The Social Contexts of Schooling, Teaching, and Learning
• Illustrations
• The Editors
• The Editorial Board
• The Contributors
• The Reviewers
• Index