Book Review: Poiicy, Pedagogi, and Social Inequality:

Policy, Pedagogy, and Social Inequality: Community College Student Realities in Post-Industrial America by Penelope E. Herideen. Bergin & Garvey, Westport, Connecticut. 1998, 160 pages. ISBN 0-89789-5932 $49.95. I have frequently pointed out with pride of discipline that sociologists from Burton Clark, to Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, to Kevin Dougherty have written a number of the most influential, sophisticated, and controversial critiques of community colleges (see Eaton, 1994, pp. 54-72). A few years ago in a paper addressed to sociologists, I suggested that community colleges provide "Quite an opportunity and challenge for the sociologist who views himself/herself as a teacher, a scholar, a researcher, an activist, or a much needed public/community intellectual (a new C. Wright Mills?)" (Oromaner, 1995, p. 56). Herideen has a Ph.D. in sociology, teaches and conducts educational research at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts, is an activist, and argues that "Mainstream educational planners need to understand and to utilize what Mills.... called the sociological imagination, which directs attention to the dynamic interaction between the individual and social forces" (p. 23). In addition to her educational and intellectual experiences in the United States, Herideen worked for nine years with poor urban women in Brazil. Her book is written in the memory of Paulo Freire and is a contribution to the Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series originally edited by Henry A. Giroux and Paulo Freire. This series publishes works that challenge the current primacy of market values and the retreat from politics evident in recent works of educational theorists, legislators, and policy analysts; they demonstrate how pedagogy is "connected to a wider project designed to further racial, economic, and political democracy" (p.ix). Given the mission and characteristics of its students, the community college is a strategic theoretical and research site for critical theorists. Herideen, of course, acknowledges that critics have long pointed to the contradictions or tensions (for example, cooling out versus open access) in the community college philosophy. These critics have been described in various ways: official critics, left-official critics, anti-university group, radicals (Zwerling); mainstream, structural, elite (Pincus); pluralist functionalists, instrumental Marxists, institutional theorists, state-relative autonomy theorists (Dougherty); insiders, outsiders (Oromaner). Herideen's approach for this volume was to employ an insider's perspective to develop a critical analysis of the role played by the community college. Her self-defined label is "a critical lover's perspective" (p. 4). Her specific goal "was to understand community college culture and to document community college students' life circumstances so that educational reforms, both structural and instructional changes, can be crafted to better serve their needs" (p. 5). Herideen's work in a literacy group with impoverished women in Sao Paulo influenced her work with students at Wade Community College (a pseudonym). For instance, she learned the importance of being both an educator and a participant and of sharing experiences as a stage in conceptualizing possibilities for change. From Herideen's perspective, the educational mission of both the community college in the United States and the grassroots literacy movement in Brazil is "to provide educational opportunity to those who have been historically denied schooling, thereby creating the conditions for citizens to secure a better quality of life for themselves and their families" (p. 35). The participant-observation project at the college lasted three years and involved using observation, notes from a field journal, and tapes of recorded classes. In addition, Herideen examined approximately 200 student journals, which were required of all students in her classes. …