Professor Authors New Book on Standardized Testing vs. Existentialist Choice

Brookville, N.Y. - In a world of standardized tests is there room for non-standard learning? What can educators do to set their own course in the classroom beyond required mandates?

Shaireen Rasheed, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, explores these issues in her new book, "The Existentialist Curriculum of Action: Creating a Language of Freedom and Possibility" (University Press of America).

"The timing is poignant," Dr. Rasheed said. "Are we producing test-takers or thinkers? In the classroom, teachers and students are being bombarded with mandates and standards that they must abide by. Consequently, we aren't raising critical or global thinkers."

Dr. Rasheed originally broached the topic as her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, studying under Rene Arcilla, Maxine Greene and Nel Noddings, forerunners in educational philosophy. By drawing on the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Paulo Freire and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dr. Rasheed analyzes how Greene's work represents an advance in existentialist discourse via her interpretation of concepts, such as choice, freedom and possibility within an educational setting.

In the book, Dr. Rasheed provides exercises for educators and their students to help them understand how they learn surrounded by different types of influences - political, social and economic. With this knowledge, Dr. Rasheed writes, students can obtain freedom.

"In trying to effectively grapple with issues surrounding alternative ways of student assessment, I aim to urge educators to think ethically about what discourses of difference mean in terms of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation," says Dr. Rasheed.

As a result of her research for the book, in 2005 Dr. Rasheed served as a principal investigator on a federally funded grant from the U.S. Department of Justice that explored the correlation between academic performance among at-risk students in Freeport (an ethnically diverse school district on Long Island) and their involvement in the Aesthetic Education Partnership at C.W. Post's Tilles Center for the Performing Arts (part of the aesthetic education partnership with Lincoln Center.)

Dr. Rasheed also led a two-day workshop on Mentoring Faculty and Creating Cultural Sensitivity at the American Education Research Association and invited renowned international faculty from various disciplines including Sandra Acker, David Sadkar, Judith-Glazer Raymo.

Dr. Rasheed has an interdisciplinary background in social and political philosophy, German idealism and post-colonial thought as well as educational foundations. Her research combines varied interests into a line of inquiry that explores the relationship between philosophical concepts of freedom, responsibility, individual choice and its effects on cultural, historical and political issues in educational pedagogy.

Her current research, which is under review as a book manuscript, "Sexualized Spaces in Public Places," explores the possibility of enunciating pedagogies that call into question the conceptual geography of 'standards' and their normalization in curriculum theory.

She received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University and a master of philosophy from the New School. While there, she studied with Jacques Derrida and Drucilla Cornell on interpreting the discourse of justice and its relationship to ethics.

Excerpts of her work have been presented at the Heidegger Society conference in Messkirch, Germany. She has collaborated with the Aurat Foundation in Pakistan, a nonprofit organization that performs grassroots work on policy issues in South Asia. The American Educational Research Association, Standing Committee for Scholars and Advocates in Gender Equity invited her to participate in a panel that examined the role of globalization and women's issues, and she has been invited by the American Philosophical Association to present her research as part of a panel on "Post Colonial History and Issues of Language."

For more information about her book, visit http://www.univpress.com/ISBN/0761835911

Posted: November 2, 2006