bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Why the "Monkeys Passage" Bombed: Tests, Genres, and Teaching
Authors: Peirce Bonny Norton , Stein Pippa
Published: May 2015

Pippa Stein and Bonny Norton Peirce, two White educators in South Africa, explore issues of textual meaning, testing, and pedagogy based on their experience piloting a reading test to be used as a college entrance examination for Black students. Drawing on Stein's personal experience administering the test and on literature in the fields of genre analysis and textual interpretation, Stein and Peirce question the test's meaning and validity. The authors discuss how the students' interpretations of the text differed as Stein altered the social context, illustrating the ways in which the politics of different social occasions contribute to the production of multiple meanings. In their exploration of how shifting power relations produce multiple meanings, the authors raise important questions at the heart of testing, equity, and pedagogy.
Editors' Reviews
Authors: Leistyna Pepi , Sherblom Stephen
Published: May 2015

Pepi Leistyna: Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

By Bell Hooks

New York: Routledge, 1994. 216 pp. $16.00 (paper).

Stephen A. Sherblom: The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience

By John Stoltenberg

New York: Penguin, 1994. 308 pp. $21.00, $10.95 (paper).

Moral Perception and Particularity

By Lawrence A. Blum

Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 273 pp. $59.95, $ 18.95 (paper).
Pulp Fiction and the Culture of Violence
Authors: Giroux Henry
Published: May 2015

Exploring the intersection of entertainment, politics, and pedagogy, Henry Giroux analyzes some recent films as popular cultural texts, arguing that the cinematic violence and racist stereotypes portrayed are inextricably linked to what has been called the rising culture of violence in the United States. Offering a schematic definition of different representations of violence in film, particularly focusing on what he refers to as the "hyper-real" violence of Pulp Fiction, Giroux challenges educators to engage critically the pedagogical and political implications of popular culture with students and others.
Preventing and Producing Violence: A Critical Analysis of Responses to School Violence
Authors: Noguera Pedro
Published: May 2015

Do the strategies that schools adopt in response to "disciplinary problems," including violence, actually perpetuate violence? In this thoughtful article, Pedro Noguera traces the history of institutional disciplinary measures, showing that the underlying philosophical orientation toward social control exacts a heavy toll on students, teachers, and the entire school community by producing prison-like schools that remain unsafe. Noguera maintains that a "get-tough" approach fails to create a safe environment because the use of coercive strategies interrupts learning and ultimately produces an environment of mistrust and resistance. He offers alternative strategies for humanizing school environments, encouraging a sense of community and collective responsibility.
Essay Reviews: The Hidden Message in Anti-Violence Public Service Announcements
Authors: Gerbner George
Published: May 2015

In this essay, George Gerbner reviews eight television public service announcements (PSAs) that deal with urban violence and are produced by the media conglomerate HBO/Time Warner. Gerbner couches his critique of the PSAs in terms of the historical tension between the commercial nature of television in the United States and broadcasters' mandated role to serve the public. In creating a framework to understand the anti-violence PSAs, Gerbner broadens the discussion to include both the media industry in the United States and the demand for violence television programming in the international marketplace. Although he acknowledges the high production value of the PSAs, Gerbner contends that the race, age, and gender of the characters, as well as the situations depicted, constitute a hidden message of stereotyped violence. Gerbner argues that the images portrayed in the PSAs reflect the type of violence that is presented by the television industry itself, not the kinds of violence that may actually exists in the United States.
Life after Death: Critical Pedagogy in an Urban Classroom
Authors: Johnson J. Alleyne
Published: May 2015

In this article, J. Alleyne Johnson describes the evolution of her classroom into one in which the day-to-day realities of students' lives — most significantly their encounters with death — are acknowledged and formally addressed as being central to the work of the classroom. She explains how her understanding of her teaching has been informed and transformed by critical pedagogy. Johnson invites readers to follow her journey with her students as they move from viewing the teacher as "knowledge giver" to legitimating the students' knowledge and experiences as a basis for learning. In this example of a teacher's attempt to translate critical pedagogy into practice, she also brings home the impact of the violence and death in U.S. society of students' lives.
Violence, Nonviolence, and the Lessons of History: Project HIP-HOP Journeys South
Authors: Murray Nancy Uhlar , Garrido Marco
Published: May 2015

During the summers of 1993 and 1994, groups of young people from the Boston area took part in an innovative educational initiative known as Project HIP-HOP (Highways into the Part: History, Organizing and Power). These students made a five thousand mile journey south to visit key sites of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and to learn about the power of nonviolence from people who were teenagers or younger when they participated in the movement. this two-part manuscript is about that journey. The first part, by Nancy Uhlar Murray, the chief organizer of Project HIP-HOP, describes how the idea of a "civil rights tour," with participants going into schools after the trip to share their experiences with their peers, evolved from efforts to encourage young people to explore racism, a root cause of the violence engulfing so many of their lives. The project operates on the premise that a largely a historical outlook that focuses on violence as if it were unique to this generation of urban youth serves neither young people nor the country and its future.

In the second part, seventeen-year-old Marco Garrido, a participant in the 1994 Project HIP-HOP tour, reflects on the lessons he learned from the trip. He writes vividly about his own efforts to understand the racism around him and of his encounters with the sties and the people of the civil rights movement.
A Dialogue: Culture, Language, and Race
Authors: Freire Paulo , Macedo Donaldo
Published: May 2015

The following is part of an ongoing dialogue that Donaldo Macedo and Paulo Freire have been having since 1983. As it attempts to address the current criticisms of Freire's work along the lines of gender and race, this dialogue not only challenges the frequent misinterpretations of his leading philosophical ideas by conservative and some liberal educators, but will also embrace contemporary educational issues and discuss what it means to educate for critical citizenry in the ever-increasing multiracial and multicultural world of the twenty-first century.
Editors' Review
Authors: Miech Edward
Published: May 2015

The Rise and Fall of Strategic PlanningBy Henry Mintzberg. New York: Free Press, 1994. 416 pp. 29.95

Strategic Planning in Education: Rethinking, Restructuring, RevitalizingBy Roger Kaufman and Jerry Herman. Lancaster, PA: Technomic, 1991. 315 pp. 39.00
Further Comment: Critique without Difference: A Response to Goodman
Authors: Carr Alison , Jenlink Patrick , Reigeluth Charles
Published: May 2015

In "Change without Difference: School Restructuring in Historical Perspectives," Jesse Goodman offers his critique of the "third wave" school restructuring movement and highlights the history of the fields critiqued in an effort to show that the traditions of those involved in this movement cause them to propose an agenda of social functionalism, individualism, and expertism for school reform.1 He suggests that due to a reliance on technology, a faith in efficiency and productivity, and a history in instructional systems management, these current "restructuralists" propose nothing more than a return to the past.

We wish to take issue with many of Goodman's assertions. In the process, we hope to make clear the true values that underlie the systemic transformation movement. We also wish to point out some inherent contradictions in Goodman's argument, take issue with a historical approach that freezes disciplines in a single moment, and suggest that critique in the service of evolution of a discipline is more useful than what Goodman has offered.
Essay Review: Crossing Borders/Shifting Paradigms: Multiculturalism and Children's Literature
Authors: Schwartz Elaine
Published: May 2015

If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, course and sing, in all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here. We would make our language conform to the truth of our many selves and we would make our language lead us into the quality of power that a democratic state must represent. (Jordan, 1987, p. 24)

June Jordan's words bring forth a utopian vision of a future in which issues of language, voice, truth, power, and democracy all come together in the creation of a culturally diverse democratic world. She speaks in the language of a critical multiculturalism, one in which words such as representation, many selves, power, and democracy are integral. In this article, I develop a broad understanding of the basic epistemological positions underlying the discourse of multicultural education and, in particular, multiculturalism in children's literature.
A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures
Authors: The New London Group
Published: May 2015

In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overview of the connections between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies." The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors' twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment.
Race and Sexual Orientation: The (Im)possibility of These Intersections in Educational Policy
Authors: Snider Kathryn
Published: May 2015

In this article, Kathryn Snider critiques the Toronto Board of Education's Triangle Program, a program designed for lesbian and gay youth who are at risk of dropping out of high school. She questions whether this program, which provides support for students coping with issues of sexual identity, can really work for lesbian and gay youth of color unless it also includes strategies that acknowledge how issues of sexual orientation interact with issues of racial identity. She locates this critique within the larger context of the Board's approach to multiculturalism and diversity in the schools. Rather than implementing a program that further marginalizes and isolates lesbian and gay students by removing them from mainstream education, Snider suggests, schools must make fundamental changes that work to eliminate racism and homophobia within the dominant educational structure.
What Difference Does It Make? The Story of a Lesbian Teacher
Authors: Rensenbrink Carla Washburne
Published: May 2015

In this article, Carla Rensenbrink explores the question of what difference it makes to be a lesbian teacher herself and for her students. Rensenbrink focuses her exploration by telling the story of Rosemary Trowbridge, a fifth-grade teacher who comes out as a lesbian to her students and colleagues. Drawing on interviews and visits to Rosemary's classroom, the author notes ways in which Rosemary's lesbianism does make a positive difference in the classroom. She makes connections between Rosemary's identity as a lesbian and the fact that her classroom represents a safe place where students feel comfortable questioning the culture and taking an active stand.
Manly Men and Womanly Women: Deviance, Gender Role Polarization, and the Shift in Women's School Employment, 1900–1976
Authors: Blount Jackie
Published: May 2015

Drawing on historical data, Jackie Blount argues in this article that explanations for shifts in employment patterns of women educators for most of the twentieth century have overlooked the impact of homophobia and gender role stereotypes. As Blount notes, although women teachers, more than half of whom were single, outnumbered men by more than two to one in the early 1900's, this trend shifted radically in the fifteen years following World War II, when the percentage of single women in the teaching profession fell to half its pre-war levels. Similarly, the number of women superintendents also declined rapidly. Blount analyzes school policies and practices, events, and publications from the turn of the century to the 1970s to uncover the practice of sexually stigmatizing women who defied narrowly defined gender roles. She describes events and theories that led to increasing gender role polarization after World War II that pressured women into assuming gender-specific roles, attitudes, and appearances, and that led to increasing gender role polarization after World War II that led to campaigns to identify and dismiss those in schools who were thought to be homosexual. Blount cautions that homophobia continues to hold sex discrimination practices in place, particularly those connected with women seeking power in schools. She concludes with the thought that until gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender educators are valued in public education, the powerful forces that maintain gender role barriers are unlikely to be erased.
Dominance Concealed through Diversity: Implications of Inadequate Perspectives on Cultural Pluralism
Authors: Boyd Dwight
Published: May 2015

In this article, Dwight Boyd focuses on a dilemma that is at the heart of sincere commitments to cultural pluralism. When the moral aspects of cultural diversity are fully appreciated, the "dilemma of diversity" is revealed as the tension point resulting from the acceptance of the fact of "reasonable moral pluralism" conjoined with the perceived need to morally ground prescriptive intentions to promote cultural diversity within a democratic society. After discussing this dilemma, Boyd analyzes three perspectives commonly found in response. He argues that each of these perspectives is inadequate by revealing how it fails to come to grips with one or the other side of the dilemma, despite its surface appeal. He then shows how, in each of these perspectives, this failure functions to conceal and protect dominant points of view within the diversity. He concludes by sketching out a positive direction for successfully addressing the dilemma of diversity hinted at in the successes and failures of each of the three perspectives.
Editors' Reviews
Authors: Woyshner Christine
Published: May 2015

The Culture of Young Children from the Colonial Era to the PresentBy Barbara Beatty New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. 252 pp. 30.00
"How Come There Are No Brothers on That List?": Hearing the Hard Questions All Children Ask
Authors: Jervis Kathe
Published: May 2015

In this article, Kathe Jervis explores how children's experiences of race, even in the "best" schools, often go unnoticed by faculty, and how students' questions about race go unaddressed. As she documented the initial year of a New York City public middle school, Jervis did not intend to focus her observations on issues of race. However, in retrospect, she found children's questions about race and ethnicity were prominent in her field notes, and educator's responses significantly absent. Jervis suggests that even in schools that seek to create diverse and integrated school communities, silence about race prevails. She argues that unless educators consciously create the safe spaces for both children and adults to explore honestly the implications of race, culture, and ethnicity, discussions of race that might be opened by children's seemingly inconsequential questions are not pursued. Jervis concludes that, although discussions about race are difficult, educators — especially White educators — need to focus attention on race and racism if children's questions about discrimination and equity are ever to be part of school discourse.
Multiple Discourses, Multiple Identities: Investment and Agency in Second-Language Learning among Chinese Adolescent Immigrant Students
Authors: McKay Sandra Lee , Wong Sau-Ling Cynthia
Published: May 2015

In this article, Sandra McKay and Sau-Ling Wong argue for a revision of code-based and individual learner-based views of second-language learning. Their position is based on a two-year qualitative study of adolescent Chinese-immigrant students conducted in California in the early 1990s, in which the authors and their research associates followed four Mandarin-speaking students through seventh and eighth grades, periodically interviewing them and assessing their English-language development. In discussing their findings, McKay and Wong establish a contextualist perspective that foregrounds interrelations of discourse and power in the learner's social environment. The authors identify mutually interacting multiple discourses to which the students were subjected, but of which they were also subjects, and trace the students' negotiations of dynamic, sometimes contradictory, multiple identities. Adopting B. N. Peirce's concept of investment, McKay and Wong relate these discourses and identities to the students' exercise of agency in terms of their positioning in relations of power in both the school and U.S. society.
The Colonizer/Colonized Chicana Ethnographer: Identity, Marginalization, and Co-optation in the Field
Authors: Villenas Sofia
Published: May 2015

In this article, Sofia Villenas describes her experience of being caught in the midst of oppressive discourses of "othering" during her work as a Chicana ethnographer in a rural North Carolina Latino community. While Villenas was focusing on how to reform her relationship with the Latino community as "privileged" ethnographer, she missed the process by which she was being co-opted by the dominant English-speaking community to legitimate their discourse of Latino family education and child-rearing practices as "problem." By engaging in this discourse, she found herself complicit in the manipulation of her own identities and participating in her own colonization an marginalization. Through her story, Villenas recontextualizes theories about the multiplicity of identities of the researcher. She problematizes the "we" in the literature of qualitative researchers who analyze their race, class and gender privileges. Villenas challenges dominate-culture education ethnographers to move beyond the researcher-as-colonizer position and to call upon their own histories of complicity and marginalization in order to move toward new identities and discourses. Similarly, she calls upon ethnographers from marginalized cultures to recognize their position as border crossers and realize that they are their own voices of activism.
Sustained Inquiry in Education: Lessons from Skill Grouping and Class Size
Authors: Mosteller Frederick , Light Richard , Sachs Jason
Published: May 2015

In this article, Frederick Mosteller, Richard J. Light and Jason A. Sachs explore the nature of the empirical evidence that can inform school leaders' key decisions about how to organize students within schools: Should students be placed in heterogeneous classes or tracked classes? What is the impact of class size on student learning? How does it vary? Since tracking (or skill grouping, as the authors prefer to call it) is widely used in U.S. schools, the authors expected to find a wealth of evidence to support the efficacy of the practice. Surprisingly, they found only a handful of well-designed studies exploring the academic benefits of tracking, and of these, the results were equivocal. With regard to class size, the authors describe the Tennessee class size study, using it to illustrate that large, long-term, randomized controlled field trials can be carried out successfully in education. The Tennessee study demonstrates convincingly that student achievement continues when the students move to regular-size classes in the fourth grade and beyond. The authors suggest in conclusion that education would benefit from a commitment to sustained inquiry through well-designed, randomized controlled field trials of education innovations. Such sustained inquiry could provide a source of solid evidence on which educators could base their decisions about how to organize and support student learning in classes and schools.
Accountability and School Performance: Implications from Restructuring Schools
Authors: Newmann Fred , King M. Bruce , Rigdon Mark
Published: May 2015

Many politicians and policymakers today link school accountability and school performance. Drawing on evidence from the corporate world, they assume that strong external accountability will impel schools to improve student achievement. In this article, however, Fred Newmann, M. Bruce King, and Mark Rigdon argue that three issues keep this popular theory from working in practice: a) implementation controversies around standards, incentives, and constituencies; b) insufficient efforts to organize the human, technical, and social resources of a school into an effective collective enterprise — what the authors term "organizational capacity" — and c) failure to recognize the importance of internal school accountability. In a study of twenty-four restructuring schools, the authors found that strong accountability was rare; that organizational capacity was not related to accountability; that schools with strong external accountability tended to have low organizational capacity; and the strong internal accountability tended to reinforce a school's organizational capacity. Although the implications of this study for both accountability policy and, more broadly, school restructuring efforts may appear disconcerting, the authors conclude with several practical guidelines to stimulate the kind of internal accountability that they found to be related to enhanced school performance.
Cognition, Complexity, and Teacher Education
Authors: Davis Brent , Sumara Dennis
Published: May 2015

Drawing on recent developments in complexity theory, ecology, and hermeneutics, Brent Davis and Dennis Sumara present an "enactivist" model of cognition and contrast it to popular notions of what it means to learn and think that pervade formal education. They illustrate their model by drawing from their experiences during a year-long study in a small, inner-city elementary school. According to this model, cognition does not occur in individual minds or brains, but in the possibility for shared action. An enactivist theory of cognition, the authors suggest, requires teachers and teacher educators to reconceive the practice of teaching by blurring the lines between knower and known, teacher and student, school and community.
The More We Get Together: Improving Collaboration between Educators and Their Lawyers
Authors: Heubert Jay
Published: May 2015

Effective collaboration between educators and their lawyers increasingly influences such central educational matters as school governance, school reform, equality of educational opportunity, school leadership, and allocation of scarce resources. In this article, Jay Heubert demonstrates the growing need for such collaboration. Examining scholarship on professional education, interprofessional collaboration, preventive law, alternative dispute resolution, and client education, he identifies many factors that can promote or impede close, ongoing educator-lawyer interaction. Heubert argues that lawyers, educators, and the schools that train them can do a great deal to improve collaboration, and offers many specific recommendations. He concludes by calling for more balance in school law research in order to focus less on how courts treat education cases and more on how good lawyer-educator collaboration can improve education and reduce the need for litigation in the first place.
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Which Is the Fairest Test of All? An Examination of the Equitability of Portfolio Assessment Relative to Standardized Tests
Authors: Supovitz Jonathan , Brennan Robert
Published: May 2015

Do alternative assessments result in greater equity than standardized tests with regard to gender, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity? In this article, Jonathan Supovitz and Robert Brennan investigate this question and find that, in the Rochester, New York, school system, gender, socioeconomic, and racial inequities persist even with alternative assessment, although alternative assessments have a smaller gap between Blacks and Whites, and a larger one between the sexes, than do standardized tests. The authors conclude that alternative assessments have potential to decrease the inequities seen with standardized tests, but they caution that care be taken in the development of such assessments to reduce cultural and other biases.
The Road to College: Hmong American Women's Pursuit of Higher Education
Authors: Lee Stacey
Published: May 2015

In this article, Stacey Lee examines the phenomenon of low educational participation and achievement among Hmong American women. She argues that the focus on cultural differences as the sole explanation for this fact ignores the existence of economic, racial, and other structural barriers to Hmong American women's educational persistence and success. Lee shares the stories of several Hmong American women who are pursuing or have completed higher education in the United States, investigating the factors — economic, racial, and cultural — that helped or hindered their decisions to continue their education. These women are part of a movement within the Hmong community that questions traditional expectations for women and girls, in particular early marriage and motherhood. Lee illustrates how these women's experiences are also shaped by social factors such as welfare policies and racism. Their stories demonstrate that cultural transformation is neither a smooth nor unambiguous process.
The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880–1960
Authors: Perkins Linda
Published: May 2015

The Seven Sister colleges are well known for producing some of the nation's most successful women. At the turn of the century, they were recognized as the leading institutions for elite White women. In this article, Linda Perkins outlines the historical experiences of African American women attending the Seven Sister colleges from the institutions' founding to the civil rights era of the 1960s, a period during which approximately five hundred Black women graduated from these institutions. Through an exploration of university archives, alumni bulletins, and oral interviews with alumnae, Perkins shows that the Seven Sister colleges were not a monolithic entity: some admitted African American women as far back as the turn of the century, while others grudgingly, and only under great pressure, admitted them decades later. Perkins illustrates how the Seven Sister colleges mirrored the views of the larger society concerning race, and how issues of discrimination in admissions, housing, and financial aid in these institutions were influenced by, and had an influence on, the overall African American struggle for full participatory citizenship.
"The Department Is Very Male, Very White, Very Old, and Very Conservative": The Functioning of the Hidden Curriculum in Graduate Sociology Departments
Authors: Margolis Eric , Romero Mary
Published: May 2015

In this article, Eric Margolis and Mary Romero examine the effect of the "hidden curriculum" on women of color graduate students in sociology. They interview twenty-six women of color enrolled in Ph.D. programs in sociology to uncover how the graduate school curriculum not only produces professional sociologists, but also simultaneously reproduces gender, race, class, and other forms of inequality. In their analysis, Margolis and Romero identify two forms of the hidden curriculum at work: the "weak" form, which is the professionalization process essential to "becoming a sociologist," and the "strong" form, which acts to reproduce stratified and unequal social relations. The numerous quotations from the women graduate students interviewed reveal that many elements of the hidden curriculum — such as stereotyping and blaming the victim — were painfully obvious to them. As Margolis and Romero argue, the women's stories, the authors' analysis, and the publication of this article are forms of resistance to the hidden curriculum, constituting "a lifting of veils to make visible what was hidden."
Symposium: "Staging Encounters": The Educational Decline of U.S. Puerto Ricans in [Post]-Colonial Perspective
Authors: Walsh Catherine
Published: May 2015

In this article, Catherine Walsh presents and analyzes the colonial "push-and-pull" of education in a White-run, northeastern school system where Puerto Rican students are the numerical majority. Using school department data, court reports, interviews, and field notes collected over the last five years, Walsh provides a case study of the condition and experience of Puerto Rican students in these schools, making central the present-day manifestations of colonialism in the workings of schools and highlighting the opposition that emerges in response. This opposition includes racially/ethnically positioned tensions that shape administrative policy- and decisionmaking. Walsh suggests that students, parents, and others working for the improvement of conditions for Puerto Ricans must come to better understand the push-and-pull of colonial relations in the schools, make connections between the need and strategies for educational change and for change in other social institutional contexts, and establish alliances across groups, contexts, and other boundaries.
Symposium: Memorias de una Vida de Obra (Memories of a Life of Work): An Interview with Antonia Pantoja
Authors: Perry Wilhelmina
Published: May 2015

Antonia Pantoja is an important activist and educator in the Puerto Rican community, both on the Island and in the United States. Pantoja was interviewed for the Harvard Educational Review by Wilhelmina Perry, an African American educator who has known Pantoja for the last twenty years as a colleague, friend, and coworker. This interview is part of a dialogue around the significant issues of Pantoja's life that reflect her life's work resisting the colonization of the Puerto Rican community. Through Pantoja's memories we are provided with the early and personal experiences that shaped her political and social commitments in her struggle against injustice. Pantoja's contribution to this Symposium brings in a unique voice of a Puerto Rican woman committed to her people.
From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to Hopwood: The Educational Plight and Struggle of Mexican Americans in the Southwest
Authors: Miguel, Jr. Guadalupe San , Valencia Richard
Published: May 2015

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought an end to the Mexican American War of 1846–1848, marked its sesquicentennial on February 2, 1998. The signing of the Treaty and the U.S. annexation, by conquest, of the current Southwest signaled the beginning of decades of persistent, pervasive prejudice and discrimination against people of Mexican origin who reside in the United States. In this article, Guadalupe San Miguel and Richard Valencia provide a sweep through 150 years of Mexican American schooling in the Southwest. They focus on the educational "plight" (e.g., forced school segregation, curricular tracking), as well as the "struggle" (e.g., litigation) mounted by the Mexican American people in their quest for educational equality. The authors cover four major historical eras: 1) the origins of schooling for Mexican children in the "American" Southwest, 1848–1890s; 2) the expansion of Mexican American education, 1890–1930; 3) the changing character of public education, 1930–1960; and 4) the contemporary period. In their discussion they identify a number of major themes that characterize the education of Mexican Americans in the Southwest from the time of the Treaty up to the Hopwood decision in Texas—the landmark case that gutted affirmative action in higher education. These include the exclusion and removal of the Mexican-origin community and its cultural heritage from the schools; the formation of the template (segregated, inferior schooling) for Mexican American education; the quest for educational equality; the continuing academic gap between Mexican American and Anglo or White students; and the impact of nativism on educational opportunity, as reflected most recently in the regressive and oppressive voter-initiated propositions in California and in the legal decisions in Texas. As such, Mexican Americans face an educational crisis of an unprecedented magnitude in the history of racial/ethnic minority education.
Reprint: Cultural Action for Freedom
Authors: Freire Paulo
Published: May 2015

In this article, Part I of Cultural Action for Freedom, Paulo Freire rejects mechanistic conceptions of the adult literacy process, advocating instead a theory and practice based upon authentic dialogue between teachers and learners. Such dialogue, in Freire's approach, centers upon the learners' existential situations and leads not only to their acquisition of literacy skills, but also, and more importantly, to their awareness of their right as human beings to transform reality. Becoming literate, then, means far more than learning to decode the written representation of a sound system. It is truly an act of knowing, through which a person is able to look critically at the world he/she lives in, and to reflect and act upon it. (pp. 480-498)

In this article, Part II of Cultural Action for Freedom, Paulo Freire explains the process of conscientization as an intrinsic part of cultural action for freedom. He rejects the mechanistic and behaviorist understanding of consciousness as a passive copy of reality. Instead, he proposes the critical dimension of consciousness that recognizes human beings as active agents who transform their world. He makes specific reference to the political and social situation in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, discussing the need for cultural action in order to break the existing "culture of silence." (pp. 499-521)
The Development of Professional Developers: Learning to Assist Teachers in New Settings in New Ways
Authors: Stein Mary Kay , Smith Margaret Schwan , Silver Edward
Published: May 2015

In this article, Mary Kay Stein, Margaret Schwan Smith, and Edward A. Silver identify and describe the challenges that practicing teacher educators and professional developers are likely to encounter as they design and implement new programs to help teachers learn new paradigms of teaching and learning amidst current educational reforms. The authors call attention to the fact that, just as teachers will need to relearn their teaching practice, so will experienced professional developers need to relearn their craft, which traditionally has been defined as providing courses, workshops, and seminars. This article focuses on two professional developers who engaged in long-term efforts to work with teachers in new ways, identifying the tensions that each actually faced. The cases illustrate the challenges that professional developers may encounter in supporting the transformation of teachers, including learning how to work with groups of teachers in school settings, expanding their repertoires beyond workshops and courses, and balancing interpersonal sensitivity with the need to challenge prevailing practices and beliefs. The final section of the article looks across the two cases and begins to map out common features of the terrain through which practicing professional developers can expect to travel.
Tribal Sovereigns: Reframing Research in American Indian Education
Authors: Lomawaima K. Tsianina
Published: May 2015

The inherent power dynamic between academic researchers and those they study is the focus of this article. Author K. Tsianina Lomawaima analyzes the shift in the balance of power between scholars and American Indian tribes that has occurred over the last four decades. She argues that issues such as access to subjects, data ownership, analysis and interpretation, and control over dissemination of findings all reflect what amounts to a struggle for power and tribal sovereignty. Lomawaima maintains that understanding the historical relationship between Native communities and academia, as well as the relatively new research protocols developed by various tribes, is necessary for responsible and respectful scholarship.
The Evolution of Community Education: Content and Mission
Authors: Willie Charles
Published: May 2015

Informed by his work with schools and communities for over thirty-five years, Charles Willie, a sociologist and well-known scholar in the field of community education, provides an overview of the emergence and contributions of community education. He presents a theory of complementarity in which interdependence and reciprocity contribute to the advancement of both individuals and groups. He uses this theory to challenge the generally asserted dichotomy of educational excellence versus equity. The Controlled Choice student assignment plans he developed with Michael Alves illustrate his theory of complementarity in practice. From his own work, Willie presents a comparative analysis of districts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Charleston, South Carolina. Willie leaves the reader with the challenge faced by those who study community education: to simultaneously enhance the individual and advance the community.
Blind Vision: Unlearning Racism in Teacher Education
Authors: Cochran-Smith Marilyn
Published: May 2015

In this article, Marilyn Cochran-Smith uses narrative to reflect on her experience of "unlearning" racism as a teacher educator. According to Cochran-Smith, unlearning racism involves interrogating the racist assumptions that are deeply embedded in the courses and curricula that we teach, owning our often unknowing complicity in maintaining existing systems of privilege and oppression, and grappling with our own failures to produce the kinds of changes we advocate. In her narrative, Cochran-Smith describes a moment in time when issues of race and racism were brought into sharp relief for her. She does not offer explicit directions for unlearning racism. Rather, she illuminates some of the complex questions we need to wrestle with in teacher education. At the same time, she demonstrates the usefulness of narrative as a way to organize and understand experience and as an alternative to the expository stance of traditional academic discourse.
Late Immersion and Language of Instruction in Hong Kong High Schools: Achievement Growth in Language and Nonlanguage Subjects
Authors: Marsh Herbert , Hau Kit-Tai , Kong Chit-Kwong
Published: May 2015

In this article, Herbert Marsh, Kit-Tai Hau, and Chit-Kwong Kong evaluate the effects of instruction in the first language (Chinese) and the second language (English) on achievement using multilevel growth models for a large representative sample of Hong Kong students during their first three years of high school. For nonlanguage subjects, late immersion in English as the language of instruction had large negative effects. Immersion in English did have positive effects on English and, to a smaller extent, Chinese language achievement, but these effects were small relative to the large negative effects in nonlanguage subjects. Whereas previous research has shown positive effects for early-immersion programs that start in kindergarten where language demands are not so great, negative effects for this late-immersion program challenge the generality of these findings to high schools and, perhaps, theoretical models of second-language acquisition.
Education for Democratic Citizenship: Transnationalism, Multiculturalism, and the Limits of Liberalism
Authors: Mitchell Katharyne
Published: May 2015

Why and how do shifts in the philosophical underpinnings of education occur? How should students be educated in and for democratic citizenship? In this article, Katharyne Mitchell explores these questions by analyzing a debate regarding the purpose of education in a Vancouver suburb. She shows how immigrants from Hong Kong successfully contest the normative assumptions of Western liberalism, in which the production of democracy, the practice of education, and the constitution of the nation-state are naturally bound together. By tracking the recent ideological debates and the actual decisions made, it is possible to analyze some of the growing rifts between a Dewey-inspired understanding of education and democracy and newer, more global, transnational educational narratives.
Apprenticing Adolescent Readers to Academic Literacy
Authors: Greenleaf Cynthia , Schoenbach Ruth , Cziko Christine , Mueller Faye
Published: May 2015

Throughout the United States, concern is growing among educators about the numbers of students in secondary schools who do not read well. In response, committed and well-meaning educators are increasingly advocating remedial reading courses for struggling adolescent readers. In this article, Cynthia Greenleaf, Ruth Schoenbach, Christine Cziko, and Faye Mueller offer an alternative vision to remedial reading instruction. The authors describe an instructional framework — Reading Apprenticeship — that is based on a socially and cognitively complex conception of literacy, and examine an Academic Literacy course based on this framework. Through case studies of student reading and analyses of student survey and test score data, they demonstrate that academically underperforming students became more strategic, confident, and knowledgeable readers in the Academic Literacy course. Students in Academic Literacy gained on average what is normally two years of reading growth within one academic year on a standardized test of reading comprehension. Student reflections, interviews, and pre-post surveys from Academic Literacy revealed students' new conceptions of reading for understanding, their growing interest in reading books and favorite authors, their increasing repertoires of strategies for approaching academic reading, and their emerging confidence in themselves as readers and thinkers. They argue for investing resources and effort into demystifying academic reading for their students through ongoing, collaborative inquiry into reading and texts, while providing students with protected time for reading and access to a variety of attractive texts linked to their curriculum. This approach can move students beyond the "literacy ceiling" to increased understanding, motivation, opportunity, and agency as readers and learners. These findings challenge the current policy push for remedial reading programs for poor readers, and invite further research into what factors create successful reading instruction programs for secondary school students.
Voices Inside Schools: Moving Beyond Polite Correctness: Practicing Mindfulness in the Diverse Classroom
Authors: Vacarr Barbara
Published: May 2015

Much of the diversity work on college campuses has focused on training multiculturally competent teachers and on transforming the curriculum to embody multiculturalism. Nevertheless, a gap remains between conceptual understandings of diversity work and teachers' abilities to respond to challenging moments of encounters with difference. Drawing on her own experience, Barbara Vacarr analyzes a pivotal and tension-filled moment of encounter that took place in a graduate course examining the dangers of remaining silent in the face of others' oppression. The author suggests that multicultural competence requires leaving behind the elevated position of teacher and confronting one's own fear of vulnerability and ineptitude. Vacarr's experience with the practice of Buddhist meditation provides a strategy for entering both the interpersonal encounter of the classroom and an intrapersonal encounter with oneself. (pp. 285-295)
Affirmative Action and Education in Fiji: Legitimation, Contestation, and Colonial Discourse
Authors: White Carmen
Published: May 2015

In this article, Carmen M. White analyzes the debate about affirmative action policies in education in Fiji and explores the impact of colonial discourses on the debates. She asserts that, much like in the United States, affirmative action policies in Fiji have been intended to correct past injustices to minority and underprivileged groups. She shows how proponents of affirmative action use a colonial discourse that undercuts the power of their argument and yet paradoxically fails to acknowledge the historical roots of the lower educational attainment of the Fijian population. In considering similarities of debate on this issue between the United States and Fiji, White offers an additional perspective from which to understand the affirmative action debate. (pp. 240–268)
The Relative Equitability of High-Stakes Testing versus Teacher-Assigned Grades: An Analysis of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS)
Authors: Brennan Robert , Kim Jimmy , Wenz-Gross Melodie , Siperstein Gary
Published: May 2015

Which is more equitable, teacher-assigned grades or high-stakes tests? Nationwide, there is a growing trend toward the adoption of standardized tests as a means to determine promotion and graduation. "High-stakes testing" raises several concerns regarding the equity of such policies. In this article, the authors examine the question of whether high-stakes tests will mitigate or exacerbate inequities between racial and ethnic minority students and White students, and between female and male students. Specifically, by comparing student results on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) with teacher-assigned grades, the authors analyze the relative equitability of the two measures across three subject areas — math, English, and science. The authors demonstrate that the effects of high-stakes testing programs on outcomes, such as retention and graduation, are different from the results of using grades alone, and that some groups of students who are already faring poorly, such as African Americans and Latinos/Latinas, will do even worse if high-stakes testing programs are used as criteria for promotion and graduation. (pp. 173–216)
Introduction: Immigration and Education
Authors: Baolian Desiree , Qin-Hilliard  , Feinauer Erika , Quiroz Blanca
Published: May 2015

At the beginning of the last century, the United States experienced a wave of large-scale immigration that brought unprecedented numbers of hopeful people to this country to start a new and better life. Coming from countries around the world, but mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe, these immigrants settled throughout the United States, in time shaping the culture and psyche of their new home to make the nation it is today.