“Is This a Boy or a Girl?”: Rethinking Sex-Role Representation in Caldecott Medal-Winning Picturebooks, 1938–2011

A number of previous studies have addressed gender role-stereotyping in Caldecott Award-winning picturebooks. Building upon the extensive scholarship examining representations of females in Caldecott books, this current study offers a critical investigation of how gender is represented in Caldecott Medal-winning literature from 1938 to 2011 by exploring the ways in which “femininity” and “masculinity,” biological sex, and gender are constructed in these texts. The investigators briefly address author and illustrator gender and the representations of males and females as characters or images in pictures and text before departing from previous scholarship to offer a rereading of books that feature “ungendered” leading characters, those that are not identified in the text as being either “male” or “female” and are therefore open to the interpretation of individual readers. By resisting cultural cues and normative constructions of gender and biological sex, these ungendered depictions extend the range of possible ways in which readers may see themselves or those in their lives represented in Caldecott Medal-winning picturebooks.     

Forty Years on: Touchstones Now

The Touchstones series of poetry anthologies was first published in the UK between 1968 and 1972 in five volumes. Over a million copies and three revisions later, Touchstones Now 11–14 appeared in the summer of 2008. Few, if any, books for the classroom can claim such longevity. In this article, the compilers of the anthologies, Michael and Peter Benton, look back over the 40 years of the series’ life. They reflect upon the principles which have guided their choices; and the social and political pressures, often exerted by governments, which they have confronted in their attempt to help school students become enthusiastic, committed and discriminating readers of poetry. Bionote: Michael and Peter Benton taught in various secondary schools in the UK for 10 years before becoming University Lecturers in Education. Separately, they have published many articles and academic books on the teaching of English and, together, they have collaborated on a variety of anthologies for the classroom in addition to the “Touchstones” series, notably their books on poetry and painting, “Double Vision”, “Painting with Words” and “Picture Poems”. Michael Benton is Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Southampton; Peter Benton is Emeritus Fellow, St Cross College, & formerly Lecturer in Education, Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford.     

Values Embodied in Children’s Literature used in Early Childhood Education in Israeli State Schools

Societies can examine themselves and their values through examining their literature and the way they use literature in values education. This research investigated the values embodied in children’s literature used by early childhood teachers in Israeli state schools. On the basis of questionnaires completed by 14 early childhood educators, and analysis of the official list of recommended children’s books published by the Israeli Ministry of Education, the value “mutual respect and friendship” was found to be most prominent. Structural aspects of children’s books were seen to emphasize the values the books convey.     

Ready...Fire...Aim! Toward meaningful technology standards for educators and students

Conclusion I applaud ISTE, AASL, AECT, and the other organizations involved for tackling the “messy work” of developing standards for the use of technology and information resources in schools. And, at the same time, I call for a “second generation” of standards that define realistic expectations for teachers based on the subjects and levels they are called upon to teach. I propose that professional organizations from each subject work with ISTE and AECT to complete this huge task, and I propose that we consider as a “next step” the creation of a set of on-line learning experiences through which teachers can gain the identified skills and knowledge by using the very technologies we’re hoping they’ll embrace in their own teaching. There’s an old saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.” As far as educational technologies are concerned, this is also true. For many, the goal seems to have been simply to “get more computers into the schools,” without much thought about purpose. To return to Phil Schlechty’s metaphor, It’s generally been a brief and misguided “Ready” stage (occupied with questions like “How many do we need?” “What type?” “Where?” and “How shall we connect them?”), followed by “Fire!” (the acquisition and installation of equipment). What we need is: “Ready” (the creation of appropriate teams of people who will combine their insights to plan for the district)... “Aim” (a series of discussions about what technologies can accomplish for schools and the students they serve)... “Fire” (acquisition, installation, and professional development according to plan)... “Aim” (an assessment of how well the technologies and related programs met the intended goals, and a new planning effort designed to close the gap)... “Fire” (acquisition and implementation designed to eliminate the gap)... “Aim” (another gap assessment)... “Fire” (another attempt to close gaps)..., And so on.     

It’s Not the Book,It’s Not the Author,It’s the Award: The Lambda Literary Award and the Case for Strategic Essentialism

On September 16, 2009, the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) released a statement revising their eligibility guidelines for the Lambda Literary Award, the most prestigious citation offered for LGBT books and authors. This criteria, which demands that an author must self-identify as a member of the LGBT family of writers, has been met with considerable disapproval within the field of children’s and young adult literature, with critics decrying the decision as unfair and essentialist. By arguing for the deployment of strategic essentialism as a discourse of resistance and by working to complicate discussions of essentialism within the field of children’s and young adult literature, the author of this article confronts the condemnation levied at the Lambda Literary Foundation and makes the case for the necessity of establishing the “Lammys” as an “insider-only” citation.     

Hutchins’s University of Utopia: Institutional Independence,Academic Freedom,and Radical Restructuring

In a crisis-plagued world looking to higher education for knowledge, wisdom, and solutions, higher education itself is stumbling. Its transformational thinking has frozen up like an overstressed computer program; and we need, in effect, to “push the reset button.” In 1953, the renowned and controversial president of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins, authored a refreshing and provocative work, The University of Utopia, containing ideas that still challenge today’s paradigms. He argued for institutional independence over “accountability,” “outcomes,” and “stakeholders.” He indicted educational evils he called “industrialization,” “specialization,” “philosophical diversity,” and “social and political conformity” and suggested ways to defeat them. Although his 56-year-old thoughts on reconceptualizing the multiversity are not a panacea, they could help higher education make a fresh start. This essay reintroduces the modern reader to Hutchins’s iconoclastic and stimulating ideas in the hope of restarting the stalled agenda for educational reform.     

The study on the core concepts of contemporary sociology of education and its theoretical construction

Within the sphere of contemporary social sciences, the terms “modernity,” “post-modernity” and “globalization” have penetrated, as the core concepts, into various fields of social sciences in a logical way. In constituting the concept of “modernity,” sociology of education develops the educational theory, as sociological theory does, into a “grand narrative” and “foundationalist” theory; the contribution of post-modernity is pluralism and self-examination in an attempt to transcend modernity. Globalization, a kind of expanded modernity, makes education sociologists broaden their perspective from single and traditional “nationality,” “society” and “nation” to an international society and even to the global society, which has broken through the research paradigm of modernity with ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism and Euro-centrism. These changes have required urgent constitution of the conceptions and theoretical frameworks of sociology of education to be applied on a global level. __________ Translated from Peking University Education Review, 2006 (1)     

Literary critic versus expert commentator: The case of katharine tozer'sMumfie marches on

Nicholas Tucker taught English in comprehensive schools in London before qualifying as an educational psychologist. He is now a lecturer in developmental psychology at the University of Sussex, with a special interest both in children's reactions to literature and in the history and present-day status of childhood itself. He has written five books for children as well as books about children's literature, includingThe Child and the Book: A Literary and Psychological Exploration, reissued in 1990 by Cambridge University Press in their new Canto “Classics” series.     

The “System of Chymists” and the “Newtonian dream” in Greek-speaking Communities in the 17th–18th Centuries

The acceptance of new chemical ideas, before the Chemical Revolution of Lavoisier, in Greek-speaking communities in the 17th and 18th centuries did not create a discourse of chemical philosophy, as it did in Europe, but rather a “philosophy” of chemistry as it was formed through the evolution of didactic traditions of Chemistry. This “philosophical” chemistry was not based on the existence of any academic institutions, it was focused on the ontology of principles and forces governing the analysis/synthesis of matter and formulated two didactic traditions. The one, named “the system of chymists”, close to the Boylean/Cartesian tradition, accepted, contrary to Aristotelianism, the five “chymical” principles and also the analytical ideal, but the “chymical” principles were not under a conceptual and experimental investigation, as they were in Europe. Also, a crucial issue for this tradition remained the “mechanical” principles which were under the influence of the metaphysical nature of the Aristotelian principles. The other, close to the Boylean/Newtonian tradition, was the integrated presentation of the Newtonian “dream”, which maintained a discursive attitude with reference to the “chemical attractions”–“chemical affinities” and actualised the mathematical atomism of Boscovich, according to which the elementary texture of matter could be causally explained within this complex architecture of mathematical “punkta”. In this tradition also coexisted, in a discursive synthesis, the “chemical element” of Lavoisier and the arguments of the new theory and its opposition to the phlogiston theory, but the “chemical affinities” were under the realm of the “physical element” as “metaphysical point”.     

Doing time—Killing time at school: An examination of the perceptions and allocations of time among teacher-defined at-risk students

“Doing time” is an expression that is generally associated with prisoners who are disconnected from society and find themselves counting the days and minutes until their release from prison. In many respects, at-risk students attending our nation's large, urban, inner-city middle and high schools also consider themselves as not being connected to school or society and to be “doing time” in the classroom. Qualitative and subjective impressions of doing time at school have become the theme of many movies, books, and research articles. This study extends this qualitative type of research by quantitatively framing time allocation preferences and temporal dominance characteristics for a large sample of teacher-perceived “at-risk” students at several large urban high school sites. A sample of normal attaining students at the same school site served as a comparison group. The findings of this research effort generally support other more qualitative studies and indicate that there are strong preferences in at-risk students toward nondirected time-consuming activities (i.e., hanging out, video games, watching TV, etc.) with low-directed to nondirected time preference ratios. Normal attaining students had the reverse pattern, i.e., higher-directed to nondirected time preference ratios and higher preferences toward directed time-consuming activities that might be associated with investments in the schooling process (homework, studying, personal development, etc.). Interpretation of the circles test, a projective psychological procedure for establishing temporal dominance for at-risk students, revealed a general lack of recognition and connectiveness between past, present, and future events in their life and weak temporal dominance or orientation toward the future.     

The Four (or Five?... or Six?... or Seven?...) Children’s Books of Graham Greene

An account of the publishing history of four picturebooks with texts by the major 20th century British author, Graham Greene, and illustrations by Dorothy Craigie and, later, by Edward Ardizzone. concluding section questions whether the texts of three other books, nominally by Dorothy—or “David”—Craigie, ought more accurately to be ascribed to Graham Greene. Brian Alderson is a distinguished critic, bibliographer and author of children's books. He has curated many exhibitions and is involved in sundry organisations, such as the Beatrix Potter Society and the Children's Books History Society. He is children's book consultant to The Times Newspaper. He lives in Richmond, North Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom.     

Word sense disambiguation using semantic relatedness measurement

INTRODUCTION The need to determine the degree of semantic similarity, or more generally, relatedness, between two lexically expressed concepts is applied in such ap- plications as word sense disambiguation (WSD), determining discourse structure, text summarization and annotation, information extraction and retrieval, automatic indexing, lexical selection, and automatic correction of word errors in text. All human languages have words that can mean different things in different contexts, s…     

Why a Special Issue on Collaborative Learning in Postsecondary and Professional Settings?

To introduce the special issue on collaborative learning in postsecondary and professional education, the editors describe their reasons for assembling it. First, most of the existing collaborative learning research focuses on K-12 settings; second, some forms of collaborative learning are used predominantly or exclusively in postsecondary or professional education; and finally, increasing numbers of adults are getting some or all of their college education online. The introduction concludes with the editors explaining their decision not to take a position on the nomenclature question (“collaborative” vs. “cooperative” vs. “peer” vs. “small group” learning) which pervades the literature.     

Supervising mentors’ lived experience on supervision in teaching, nursing and social care education. A participation-oriented phenomenological study

Research concerning the supervisor role in separate educational programmes has been undertaken, but cross-professional studies are few. The aim of this study was to explore the lived experience of supervising mentors in Sweden during the practice-based, off-campus sections of the education in teaching, nursing, and social care. The study used a participatory phenomenological approach in which four researchers and nineteen supervising mentors worked together in the research process which was accomplished in four different phases. The data collecting method used was interview. The results constituted a main essence entitled “Struggle of power and control of professional quality enhancement” built upon four themes: “Constitutes a motivating force”, “Feelings of responsibility”, “Feelings of frustration” and “Wishes for alteration”. Conclusions from the study are that communication, information and contact between the professionals in the fields and university teachers need to be strengthen to keep up supervising mentors’ motivating force and to give them support.     

History Writing That’s “Good to Think With”: <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Great Fire,Blizzard!</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">An American Plague</Emphasis>

In this article I argue that history books that are “good to think with” narrate history and, at the same time, provide insight into how it is constructed. These books are much more than collections of facts. Specifically, they provide information about historical context, multiple perspectives, sources of information, and original interpretation. This is crucial information for anyone attempting to understand history. As examples, I show how three books by Jim Murphy—The Great Fire, Blizzard! and An American Plague—address each of these essential topics. Myra Zarnowski is a professor in the Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of History Makers (Heinemann, 2006) and Making Sense of History (Scholastic, 2006).     

Learning/work: Turning work and lifelong learning inside out

CONFINTEA VI took place against the background of an uneven and contradictory social and economic impact of globalisation. This impact registered globally and locally, in both the political North and South, drawing new lines of inequality between “core” and “periphery”, between insiders and outsiders of contemporary society. Financial turmoil in the world has exacerbated levels of poverty and insecurity. The question is how work-related education and conceptions of learning might promote greater inclusion and security for those whose livelihoods are most severely affected by globalisation. The Belém Framework for Action implicitly recognises that lifelong learning and work cannot be discussed outside broader socio-economic and political contexts. The authors of this article draw substantially on research from around the world and argue for the re-insertion of “politics and power” into both the theory and practice of “lifelong learning” and “work”.     

Knowledge of derivational suffixes in students with language learning disabilities

Knowledge of derivational suffix meanings was investigated in 10- to 12-year-old students with language learning disabilities and individually matched chronological- and language-age peers. Students produced derived forms from nonce bases in an elicitation task and selected derived forms in a forced choice task. For instance, students produced a word to label the baby of an invented animal called a TEM (TEMlet, TEMette, TEMkin, etc.) and chose an appropriate label from four options (TEMlet, TEMkin, TEMship, TEMhood). Twenty-eight suffixes (e.g., less, y, ize) conveying seven derivational meanings (e.g., “without X,” “approximately X,” “to make X”) were studied. All groups showed higher accuracy on the forced choice task than on the elicitation task. However, elicitation task accuracy of students with language learning disabilities fell substantially below that of typically achieving students. Suffixes for “agent X,” “character of X,” and “to make X” were produced in the elicitation task with higher accuracy than suffixes for “approximately X,” “diminutive X,” and “state of X.” In both tasks, suffix use was associated with productivity (i.e., regularity of suffix attachment). All groups chose highly productive suffixes (e.g., TEMlet) over less productive suffixes (e.g., TEMkin) to convey each meaning.     

Mitigating Resistance to Teaching Science Through Inquiry: Studying Self

This is the report of a qualitative emergent-design study of 2 different Web-enhanced science methods courses for preservice elementary teachers in which an experiential learning strategy, labeled “using yourself as a learning laboratory,” was implemented. Emergent grounded theory indicated this strategy, when embedded in a course organized as an inquiry with specified action foci, contributed to mitigating participants’ resistance to learning and teaching through inquiry. Enroute to embracing inquiry, learners experienced stages resembling the stages of grief one experiences after a major loss. Data sources included participant observation, electronic artifacts in WebCT, and interviews. Findings are reported in 3 major sections: “Action Foci Common to Both Courses,” “Participants’ Growth and Change,” and “Challenges and Tradeoffs.”     

Students’ Persistence in a Distributed Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership in Higher Education: A Mixed Methods Study

The purpose of this mixed methods sequential explanatory study was to identify factors contributing to students’ persistence in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Distributed Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership in Higher Education by obtaining quantitative results from surveying 278 current and former students and then following up with four purposefully selected typical respondents to explore those results in more depth. In the first, quantitative, phase, five external and internal to the program factors were found to be predictors to students’ persistence in the program: “program”, “online learning environment”, “student support services”, “faculty”, and “self-motivation”. In the qualitative follow up multiple case study analysis four major themes emerged: (1) quality of academic experiences; (2) online learning environment; (3) support and assistance; and (4) student self-motivation. The quantitative and qualitative findings from the two phases of the study are discussed with reference to prior research. Implications and recommendations for policy makers are provided.