James A. McKernan

Last updated

James McKernan (born November 7, 1945) is an American educational theorist. [1] He is a Professor of Education at East Carolina University, a constituent campus of the University of North Carolina. He has been the King Distinguished Professor and Chair of Education at East Carolina University; Dean and Chair of the Faculty of Education at the University of Limerick, Ireland; College Lecturer, Faculty of Arts, University College Dublin, Ireland and Fulbright Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and Research Fellow, Northern Ireland Council for Educational Research, Department of Psychology, Queen's University of Belfast. In 1967, McJKeran enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served on active duty from September 30th 1969, until July 1971, seeing combat action in the Vietnam War while serving aboard USS Halsey (DLG-23) as a Seaman and Radio Operator. He received a Distinguished Service Commendation under Admiral Thomas Wesiner, Commandant of Naval Forces in Vietnam, in 1971. In September, Jim enrolled on a Master's of Arts Degree course at University College, Galway, National University of Ireland, where he undertook research into Factors Affecting the Educational Success of Irish Traveller Children in the Galway City Primary Schools. He was awarded a First Class Honours degree for this research and was subsequently awarded a Joseph Rowntree Doctoral Research Studentship to pursue Peace and Cultural Studies Education at the Ulster University in Northern Ireland. His thesis, "Teaching Controversial Issues in Some Northern Ireland secondary Schools: Beliefs, Attitudes and Values as Social Indicators," was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1978. In 1979, Jim was appointed to a Research fellowship at the Northern Ireland Council for Educational Research Unit located in the Psychology Department of the Queen's University of Belfast,

Contents

Career

In 1980, McKernan was appointed as a College Lecturer in Education at University College Dublin where he established Curriculum Studies as a new field of teaching and educational inquiry in the Education Department. In 1991, he accepted the King Distinguished Professorship at East Carolina University in [[Greenville, North Carolina, US. He returned briefly to act as Dean and Chair of the Education Faculty at the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 1993. Professor Jim McKernan returned to East Carolina University in 1994. McKernan's educational theory emphasizes the teacher as a researcher and schools as agencies of cultural reconstruction using action research [2] to improve school practices. McKernan is a Founder and Member of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland and has served as its Secretary and General Editor at times since 1977. Professor McKernan is a major advocate for 'action research' -research used to solve practical social problems experienced by those who encounter the problems themselves and has developed a wide array of 'reflective practice' techniques as tools for employing action inquiry in educational settings ( Curriculum Action Research: London: Palgrave Macmillan 1998).

McKernan is listed in Marquis' ' Who's Who in America and has been awarded the Albert Nelson Lifetime Achievement in award for scholarly publications for Marquis 'Who's Who in America' Jim served as Secretary for the Galway Itinerant Settlement Committee, Galway, Ireland which provided housing for homeless Irish "Travellers" (nomadic persons) in Galway, Ireland In 1971 the group-housed all thirty-six families in Galway who had been homeless-the first city to do so in Ireland. He is a founding member of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland and was Editor of its journal Irish Educational Studies. [3] He has also acted as General Editor of the Yearbooks of the South Atlantic Philosophy of Education Society (1998–2004) and was President of the Society during 2003-2005.He has been a finalist for the East Carolina University Lifetime Research Award.

Published works

McKernan has authored more than one hundred publications as author, co-author or editor, including twenty-four books, as well as book chapters and scholarly journals in the US, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, France, Brazil, China, Germany, Canada and Sweden. He is currently completing a major work linking the evolution of Critical Philosophy with Education, basing the thesis upon Socialist ideas and research. His book Curriculum Action Research: A Handbook of Methods and Resources for the Reflective Practitioner (1996) has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese in its second edition.

Professor McKernan is completing his major work, 'Socialism and the Philosophy of Education: From Social Reconstructionism to Critical Pedagogy' for Routledge Publishing, London. The work covers ten chapters highlighting major Socialist thinkers including George Bernard Shaw, William Burghardt DuBois, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey; Theodore Brameld, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Nel Noddings and J.A. McKernan. The book includes a Socialist Manifesto and Charter written by Professor Jim McKernan.

Books

Footnotes

  1. ↑ McKernan, J. (2008) Curriculum and Imagination (London:Routledge)
  2. ↑ Lewin, Kurt (1946) Resolving Social Conflicts (New York: Harper)
  3. ↑ IES is the scholarly educational research journal of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland, the major journal for educational inquiry in Ireland
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.