Section archive - Theories & Approaches

“Conventional schooling” is characterized by underlying values of competition and credentialism implicit in an unconscious, cultural framework for U.S. institutional schooling. Schools that define themselves in opposition to this cultural heritage consider themselves innovative schools and tend to use collaborative learning environment. The authors examined how students who had attended an innovative collaborative elementary school interpreted their former innovative and current conventional schools. They also examined how these students used these interpretations to form coping strategies for success in the new environment.

The review focuses on intervention studies that tested whether parent-child reading activities would enhance children's acquisition of reading from kindergarten to Grade 3.The combined results for the 16 intervention studies, representing 1,340 families, showed that parent involvement has a positive effect on children's reading acquisition.

Festinger's classical social comparison theory deals with individuals' need to have accurate appraisals of their abilities and opinions. At the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, however, researchers proposed that social comparison is not limited to self-evaluation. The paper reviews research conducted on social comparison processes in the classroom since Festinger proposed his theory of social comparison.

The article is driven by a simple question: what type of collective space is a classroom and how can it be imagined differently? Drawing on the social topography provided by Hardt and Negri, the author suggests that schools have traditionally worked to produce either (a) a people; (b) a crowd; or (c) the masses. The problem with these forms of social collectivity is that they each tend to limit radical movements for democracy.