Scholarly Commons @ MU
Knight Abowitz, Kathleen
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Recent Submissions
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Rhetoric and the purposes of public education: building discourse for shared responsibility
In this study, we employ discourse analysis of US gubernatorial political advertisements to analyze the discursive struggles over the purposes of public schools. The advertisements are analyzed to demonstrate how rhetoric ... -
#NeverAgainMSD Student Activism: Lessons for agonist political education in an age of democratic crisis
In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz and Dan Mamlok consider the arguments for agonist political education in light of a case study based in the events of the 2018 mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, ... -
132 Words: A Critical Examination of Digital Technology, Education, and Citizenship.
This article explores the potential of digital technology to advance democratic citizenship. Drawing on critical theory and following a critical, comparative qualitative study which examined the relationships among digital ... -
Reclaiming Community
The call for community can be heard throughout public and educational discourses; parallel calls for respecting difference are part of the discursive landscape as well. The terms have now become simplified and dichotomized. ... -
Telling new stories about school
Contemporary societies frame education through cultural narratives about schooling’s purposes and practices. Societal stories about school are not just reflective of our current views and values, but shape our political ... -
Virtual Charter Schools and the Democratic Aims of Education
Virtual schooling is expanding as an alternative to traditional public schooling in the early twenty-first century. This paper analyzes virtual schooling with regards to the democratic associational aims of public schooling ... -
A Pragmatist Revisioning of Resistance Theory
Resistance theorists in education urge educators to evaluate the moral and political potential of opposition in schools. The scholarship of resistance calls us to examine oppositional acts of students in school settings ... -
Citizenship in our Time: Community Service, Town Meeting, Protest March, or Drag Show
How is citizenship properly enacted in the contemporary era? How are contemporary discourses of citizenship constructing and reconstructing our meanings of the terms of citizenship? To answer these questions, I have recently ... -
The school principal as democratic leader: A critique of the Wallace Foundation’s vision of the principalship
What is the role of the public school principal in the contemporary era? As conceived by many in educational policy-making and research today, the duty of the US school leader is to ensure that the district is, above all ... -
The case of #NeverAgainMSD: When proceduralist civics becomes public work by way of political emotion
Civic culture is a term for how citizens actively live out, perform, and create public life through our habits, actions, words, and public work. A vital civic culture, with an engaged citizenry, is one of the measures of ... -
Public schools, public goods, and public work
When determining whether public schools constitute a public good, it’s important to understand what we mean by a public good. An economic definition, common among school choice advocates, focuses on the individual benefits ... -
Contemporary Discourses of Citizenship
Meanings of “citizenship,” a concept that has informed teaching practices since nation-states first institutionalized schooling, are shaped over time and through cultural struggles. This article presents a conceptual ... -
Moral perception through aesthetics: Engaging imaginations in educational ethics
Moral "seeing" - the ability to take in the particulars of a moral encounter, and to interpret and imagine its implications - is analogous to aesthetic perception. This article defends and explores the use of aesthetic ... -
What makes a Public School Public? A Framework for Evaluating the Civic Substance of Schooling
Between the banality of the phrase in some contexts and its sacredness in others, it is hard even to ask the most basic question: what makes a public school public? In realms of governance, curriculum, and pedagogy, ... -
Imagining democratic futures for public universities: Educational leadership against fatalism’s temptations
At current rates, almost all U.S. public universities could reach a point of zero state subsidy within the next fifty years. What is a public university without public funding? In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz ... -
Achieving Public Schools
Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz ... -
Heteroglossia and Philosophers of Education
Essay commentary on Rene Arcilla's question regarding the predicament of the contemporary philosopher of education. I use the example of Cornel West to illustrate how his philosophical work exemplifies the concept of ... -
The Interdependency of vocational and liberal aims in higher education
Our teaching and curricula need to reflect the connected nature of the vocational and the liberal, two differing but interrelated aims in higher education.Most students see their academic lives—their liberal arts classes ... -
Charter schooling and democratic justice
As the mixed achievements of charter schools come under more intense political inspection, the conceptual underpinnings of current charter school reform remain largely unexamined. This article focuses on one moralpolit ... -
Moving Out of the Cellar: A New (?) Existentialism for a Future without Teachers
We employ some of the most recognizable ideas from the existentialism of Sartre and Kierkegaard as a way to understand the current “teacher (human) condition.” In so doing we examine key existentialist concepts—fear and ...
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