Peace is one of the greatest needs in the world today. Until the causes of war are addressed, there can be no peace. Education, justice, and unity are the building blocks to peace and the necessary conditions for its existence. Achieving a peaceful world depends upon our willingness and efforts to remove those things that lead to war and to…

Rural people in their environment have the necessary attributes to successfully endure and survive those trials that would lead to urban decline. As societal problems require increased investment in existing institutions, the growing complexity eventually yields a lower level of benefits or returns. Urban problems such as hunger, homelessness, and…

Theories of learning and instruction usually are grounded in psychological and epistemological assumptions. However, these theories ignore the child in relation to his or her cultural and institutional context and ignore the schoolteacher from the social context that regulates the process of transmission and acquisition of knowledge and skills.…

The term "underclass," which refers to the concentration of economic and behavioral problems among racial minorities (mainly Black and Hispanic) in large, older cities, accurately describes a real and new condition in the United States social structure. In a sense, the rise of the underclass is an effect of the success of American social…

Symbolic interactionism is a theoretical framework that derives from critical humanism through social psychology and is presented as an alternative to sociological and psychological views of social reality. This paper analyzes the general arguments of symbolic interactionism, its portrayal of people as responsible agents, and its interpretive…

Social stratification in agriculture is a complicated process without a theoretical paradigm. Research to date has typically focused on the stratification of farms rather than the social stratification of farmers. Therefore, identifying social classes in agriculture based on a typology of farms clearly misses the social relations segment of…

A conceptual and theoretical framework is needed for the literature on newswork and to do this the relationship between skill and control which has been raised as an issue in the Marxist theory of industrial organization needs to be examined. A theoretical reinterpretation might help to understand how the notion of skill on the individual,…

To better understand the effects of the media on audiences, five media sociology theoretical approaches to the study of influences on media were investigated by looking at tests of the approaches in three journals over the last 10 years. The mirror approach predicted that the media would accurately represent reality, but, while accurate, the media…

Beginning with a brief critique of the behavioral science approach to educational administration, this paper traces the roots of an alternative perspective through examination of the new sociology of education and critical social theory. Arguing then for the location of a critical practice of educational administration in a cultural analysis of…

Social theory defines "ritualism" as the communal act of accepting the legitimate means to achieve while rejecting the goals. The innovative-school community accepts the goals; however, the legitimate means are rejected. Ninety-three teachers were surveyed in a high-performing high school and a low-performing high school to determine the…

This paper presents a Web-based environment (Web-course) designed for large groups distance learning programs in which students may benefit from the availability of large user and information bases, without losing the advantages of working in small groups. The system implements concepts of Social Translucence developed by Erickson and Kellog.…

This paper presents an inquiry into teaching and learning practices in a Year 11 mathematics class at a private college for girls in Western Australia, studying a topic on vectors. The focus is on learning through problem-solving, where students used graphics calculators as a matter of routine. Constructivist and sociocultural theories were…

This paper discusses the history and trauma of Native education in Canada and stresses the importance of integrating the best of the Native culture with the best of the Western culture in future Native education. The paper is organized in three parts. The first section acknowledges the trauma inflicted on the indigenous peoples by means of early…

The analysis presented here focuses on different problem situations extracted from everyday interactions in which individual developmental changes of the child interfere with well-established interaction patterns of the family. These problem situations require conjoint mastery of two objectives: (a) successful integration of the child into the…

The importance of theory in qualitative work is discussed through an examination of the search for theory that arose in relation to a case study of educational change in an American school district. Theory is defined as an analytical, interpretive framework to help the researcher make sense of what is going on in the social setting. Certain…