Essay review

Mark I. West is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he teaches courses on children's literature and serves as coordinator of the American Studies Program. Among his more recent books areWellspring of Imagination: The Homes of Children's Authors (Neal-Schuman) andA Wondrous Menagerie: Animal Fantasy Stories from American Children's Literature (Archon Books).     

Essay review

Susan P. Roberts is Program Coordinator for the Carroll County Public Library in Maryland, working with schools, parents, and community groups to encourage children's reading and lifelong library use. She has been a children's librarian and is currently active in the Children's Services Division of the Maryland Library Association.     

Essay review

Jerlean Daniel is Director of the University of Pittsburgh Child Development Center. She serves on the Advisory Board of Beginning With Books and is a former member of the Governing Board of the National Association for the Education of Young Children.     

Essay review

E. Wendy Saul is Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and is Associate Editor ofThe New Advocate, a journal for those involved with young people and their literature. Her recent work focuses on science tradebooks.     

Essay review

J. D. Stahl is with the Department of English, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.     

Education and conflict: Essay review

This review essay looks at three recent publications in the emerging field of ‘education and conflict’ and explores an apparent gap between theory and practice in the field. Recent works by educationalists Lynn Davies, ‘Education and conflict: complexity and chaos’ (2004) and Tony Gallagher, ‘Education in divided societies (2004)’ are contrasted with the World Bank's 2005 ‘Reshaping the future: education and postconflict reconstruction’, and similarities between the publications are highlighted. Davies’ work uses complexity theory to illuminate the relationships between education and conflict and to establish an argument for ‘complex-adaptive schools’, which would use conflict positively to engage students in the creation of peaceful communities. Gallagher, using a number of well-developed case studies, examines the way education systems have been structured to respond to and operate in divided societies, concluding that classroom agency and flexibility are crucial. The calls, by Davies and Gallagher, for educational re-creation are explored in contrast to the World Bank's publication, which offers best practice lessons to support post-conflict educational reconstruction. The article probes these differences and points to areas where the practitioner-directed Bank publication and the more academic works do and do not intersect, attempting to indicate areas where bridges may be built.     

Essay review: Some unpopular truths

Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives and research, this paper focuses on the significance of settings in qualitative research as well as on associated problems with representations of settings in traditional analyses and reports. The central premise developed is that a deeper analysis of settings requires an unraveling of relations among settings in which individuals or groups participate. In this discussion, setting is defined as a fluid and mutable but bounded environment in which particular situations, interactions, and behaviors accrue to it as normal by virtue of history, cultural values, and beliefs. To represent the complexity of identity and power relations in educational research, author suggests six lenses that offer a multilayered picture of participants' lived experiences across multiple settings. These lenses have the potential to broaden researchers' representations of participants beyond what is often available in traditional analyses and reports of qualitative educational research. These six lenses on settings are not meant to be inclusive but to suggest that finer grained examinations of the social and cultural symbols that permeate settings may yield fresh perspectives on lived experience.     

Essay

Teacher had set his class an essay in ＂A Game of Cricket＂. After two minutes Simon Steel handed his paper in and was allowed to go home. His essay read, ＂Rain, stopped play.＂ 老师给学生出了个作文题：“一场板球赛”。两分钟后，西蒙&;#183;斯蒂尔交了作文，