Abstract

Contemporary challenges to education pose threats that our current educational system remains unable to meet. With the prevalence of school shootings, rapid technological development, threats to mental health, superficial curriculum content, increased testing standards, and continued inequality in classrooms, now more than ever it is imperative to define, explore, and quantify the ways in which the system of education reproduces or replicates norms, values, behaviors, and practices and the effects these possibly have on students and teachers. The purpose of this research is to redefine 'cultural reproduction' into reproduction and replication in order to explore how the education system in a single district in Florida reacts to threats through adjustments to, or replication of, existing practices. Through the perspectives of teachers, the research question posed was: (RQ) How do teachers perceive the presence of cultural reproduction and cultural replication in their schools? The study discovered that in addition to identifying cultural replication (CL) and cultural reproduction (CD) in their schools, (i) participants perceived that current needs outpace their public-school system's ability to adapt effectively and (ii) that contemporary threats to education produce unmeasurable and unmeetable challenges within current cultural practices and resources. The study contextualized the implications of these findings through social change, cultural studies, social system dynamics, and primitive belief disruption for the purpose of developing a new model of subsystem adaptation to represent the cycle of replication, reproduction, and reform in education as observed by teacher participants in this study.

Thesis Completion

2019

Semester

Fall

Thesis Chair/Advisor

Olan, Elsie

Degree

Bachelor of Science (B.S.)

College

College of Community Innovation and Education

Department

Secondary Education

Degree Program

English Language Arts

Language

English

Access Status

Open Access

Release Date

12-1-2019

Download

Share

COinS