Amy Shuffelton

This essay argues that philosophy can be combined with qualitative research without sacrificing the aims of either approach. Philosophers and qualitative researchers have articulated and supported the idea that human meaning-constructions are appropriately grasped through close attention to “consequences incurred in action,” in Dewey’s words. Furthermore, scholarship in both domains explores alternative possibilities to familiar constructions of meaning. The essay explains by means of a concrete example the approach I took to hybridizing these approaches. It describes an ethnographic and philosophical study of how children made meaning of justice and solidarity through their practice of democratic citizenship in an extracurricular program called Village. At Village, children built and ran a miniature town. Their actions and conversations around the political challenges that inevitably arose exemplify meaning-making of ideals in response to actual problems. The meaning of solidarity and justice for these children emerged through the consequences of previous and present actions they took in communication with others. This essay details the methods I used for designing the study, collecting data, and analyzing my findings

In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political.