The adolescent novel of ideas

Peter Hollindale first developed critical interests in children's literature during postgraduate teacher training at the University of Bristol, where he was taught by Margaret Meek. After teaching for several years in secondary schools he was appointed to the University of York, where he is senior lecturer in English and educational studies. He now teaches an undergraduate special paper on children's literature in the Department of English there. His bookChoosing Books for Children, a guide for parents, was published in 1974, and he has since written extensively on children's literature in academic and professional journals. His article “Ideology and the Children's Book,” which appeared inSignal 55, received the Children's Literature Association Prize for the best essay in the field of children's literature published in 1988. In recent years he has worked closely on J. M. Barrie. His edition of the “Peter Pan” prose texts was published by Oxford University Press in 1991, andPeter Pan and Other Plays appears from the same publisher in 1995. He is interested in reworkings and adaptations of classic children's texts for film and television, and his study of Steven Spielberg'sHook was published inSignal 72 in 1993. For Thimble Press he is currently completingSigns of Childness: A Short Philosophy of Children's Literature. He has contributed a number of articles toCLE, the most recent being “Westall's Kingdom” in the 1994 Autumn issue.     

The state of American higher education: A conversation with David Riesman,part two

Editor's Note: From time to time,Academic Questions, under the heading “Voces Academicae,” publishes interviews with teachers and scholars whose experiences and reflections provide a telling commentary on the nature of contemporary university life. This is the second half of an interview that took place in late August 1994 with Professor David Riesman, the distinguished social scientist who is among the foremost authorities on the state of American higher education. Part one of the interview appeared in the Winter 1994–95 issue.     

Academic marxism and communisms’ fall

Peter Shaw is consulting editor ofAcademic Questions and Will and Ariel Durant Professor of Humanities for 1990–1991 at St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ 07306. This essay was originally presented as part of the panel “Academic Utopianism: Its Past and Its Future” at “Strategies for the Nineties,” the second national conference of the National Association of Scholars, held June 8–10, 1990. The panel focused on what impact, if any, the fall of European Communism would have on academic Marxism in the United States.     

The decomposition of sociology

This essay was originally presented as part of the panel “The Social Sciences, An Intellectual Balance Sheet,” at “On the State of Academic Discourse,” the third national conference of the National Association of Scholars, held in Minneapolis, October 18 to 20, 1991. It is part of the opening chapter of a book scheduled for publication in 1993 by Oxford University Press tentatively entitledThe Decomposition of Sociology.     

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.     

Reform must begin with K-12

This essay was originally presented as part of the panel “Can Higher Education Be Mass Education?” at “What Should a University Be?” the fourth national conference of the National Association of Scholars, held in San Francisco, 16–18 April 1993.     

Metamorphosis in Two Novels by Melvin Burgess: Denying and Disguising ‘Deviant’ Desire

Melvin Burgess has gained a reputation as an enfant terrible, whose writing tackles topics and presents attitudes which are controversial in literature for adolescents. Kimberley Reynolds cites him as an author whose work demonstrates that “writing about sex, sexuality and relationships between the sexes [is] one of the most radically changed areas in contemporary children’s literature.” Reynolds argues that novels depicting teenage sexuality no longer focus on socialising teenagers into adult-approved behaviours. Yet changes in literature are never fully “radical”; they always build on established traditions. This article examines the ways in which Burgess uses the motif of animal transformation in Tiger Tiger and Lady: My Life as a Bitch to maintain the prevailing view of adolescent carnality as a deviant variation of “proper,” adult sexuality, whilst celebrating early sexual experiences.     

A Festschrift for Andy Hargreaves

Recent social policy reforms have sought to overcome the limitations of “First Way” strategies emphasizing the welfare state and “Second Way” approaches advocating markets. Scholars and policymakers instead have begun to explore optimal synthesis of the public and private sector in a new “Third Way” of leadership and change. According to one line of interpretation advanced by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, however, the Third Way as developed in education has ushered in a new orthodoxy of testing, accountability, and data-driven decision making. This new orthodoxy is said to distract educators from their true moral purposes. Hence, Hargreaves and Shirley have called for a new “Fourth Way” of change that draws upon international best practices in education. In this interpretive essay for a Festschrift issue of the Journal of Educational Change celebrating Andy Hargreaves’ 60th birthday, Dennis Shirley revisits Fourth Way change architecture to inquire after the appropriate role of new technologies in classrooms and schools. He retrieves the concept of mindful teaching and learning from the Fourth Way change model and illustrates how it can be used as a lens to adjudicate various interpretations of the appropriate role of new technologies in schools.     

Exploring how globalization shapes education: methodology and theoretical framework

This is a commentary on some major issues raised in Carter and Dediwalage’s “Globalisation and science education: The case of Sustainability by the bay” (this issue), particularly their methodology and theoretical framework for understanding how globalisation shapes education (including science education). While acknowledging the authors’ contribution to the literature on globalisation and education, it questions the degree to which their analysis captures and explains how globalisation shapes science education, and examines how the research can be complemented by altering its methodology and expanding its theoretical framework.     

Contemporary developments in educational technology design and evaluation: Special issue part II

This special issue of the research section of ETR&D represents the second grouping of papers solicited from national leaders in educational technology research and design. The first grouping, which appeared in Volume 46, Number 4, 1998, contained papers by Rita Richey, “The Pursuit of Useable Knowledge in Instructional Technology”; Mitchel Resnick, “Digital Manipulatives: Tools for Lifelong Kindergarten”; and Ben Shneiderman and colleagues, “Emergent Patterns of Teaching/Learning in Electronic Classrooms.”     

Liberal education and politics: Lessons from the American founding

Editor's Note: This essay was delivered at a Carleton University conference titled “Politicizing the Classroom” and will be published with the other papers by the University of Toronto Press in 1995. This essay is printed by permission of the University of Toronto Press.     

Reconceptualizing the relationship between universities and schools: a dialectic and polysemic approach

This review essay adds to the conversation to which Allison Skerrett and Hannah Sevian contribute in their article, Identity and biography as mediators of science and mathematics faculty’s involvement in K-12 service. Here we address the need to reconceptualize faculty service in public schools and traditional notions of scholarship. We discuss the importance of transforming university structures that envision service as less important than “scholarship” and “teaching” while mediating hierarchical ideas of what “service” entails. We share a dialectical view of social life and an ethical stance that values polysemy and polyphony both in research and in our daily interactions. Here we employ a dialectical lens that seeks multiple perspectives as we engage in a dialogue about these issues.     

Silence of the genes

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Andrew Fire and Craig Mello for discovering “RNA interference—genesilencing by double-stranded RNA”. The Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden selected them for the award for unraveling “a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information” that is “already being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes and may lead to novel therapies in the future”. This has been one of the fastest Nobel Prizes conferred in physiology or medicine, considering that Fire and Mello published their path-breaking article in the journal Nature in 1998, less than ten years ago. Utpal Nath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, IISc. His laboratory is studying the genetic mechanisms of plant development. Saumitra Das is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology, IISc. His laboratory is interested in the translational control of cellular and viral RNA.     

Professional Responsibility – An Issue for Higher Education?

The aim of this article is to shed light on some aspects of professional responsibility by investigating students’ visions of future work and notions of professional responsibility. The data is based on interviews with samples of freshmen in three educational programmes at the University of Oslo in Norway. The data has been analysed in relation to two thesis claimed by Steven Brint: “The rise of a utilitarian ethos” in higher education and the movement from “social trustee professionalism” to “expert professionalism”. The findings show that the students in our sample do not think of higher education primarily as a means to get credentials that will be useful in the labour marked. An intellectual interest in the discipline is the most prevalent reason for the students’ educational choices. Furthermore our findings support an orientation towards “expert professionalism” rather than “social trustee professionalism”. But, embedded in the perspective of an expert there is an emphasis on ethical knowledge, moral and/or societal responsibility and the wish to do good for others. However, the students’ sense of responsibility seems to be restricted to certain “localism” of their specific occupation. Based on the findings we argue that the students reveal a moral awareness that should be taken seriously by the educational institution in order to foster critical rationality and professional commitments.     

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.     

“Suicide machine” seekers: transgressing suicidal taboos online

Internet-mediated joint suicides or “Net group suicides” (Net shinjū) has become a significant social problem in Japan since 2002. Despite a privileged view of suicide-related cyberspaces as a murky underworld, there has been little study about how the participants of such spaces interact and perform their “suicidal” identity. Viewing cyberspace as a unique discursive playground that sprouts a myriad of transgressive narratives, this paper examines “Suicide Club” (Jisatsu Club) an online discussion forum that facilitated the largest “Net group suicide” in Japanese history. A thematic content analysis of actual postings on “Suicide Club” reveals the double-edged nature of the forum. While some participants were determined to seek suicide companions or what I metaphorically call “suicide machines,” others used the board as a social outlet to freely disclose their pent-up struggles, attempting to collectively transgress social taboos of suicide.

Street Smarts vs. Book Smarts: The Figured World of Smartness in the Lives of Marginalized, Urban Youth

How smartness is defined within schools contributes to low academic achievement by poor and racial/ethnic minority students. Using Holland et al.’s (1998) [Holland, D., Lachicotte, W., Skinner, D., & Cain, C. (Eds.) (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] concept of “figured worlds,” this paper explores the “figuring” of smartness through the perspectives of marginalized youth. The youth made key distinctions between being book smart vs. street smart. This distinction is a direct challenge by the youth to the dominant discourse of smartness or “book smarts” as it operates in schools. To the youth, “street smarts” are more important because they are connected to being able to maneuver through structures in their lives such as poverty, the police, street culture, and abusive “others.” This distinction is key because street smarts stress agency in countering social structures whereas, for many of the youth, book smarts represented those structures, such as receiving a high school diploma. Implications for schools and pedagogy are discussed. B.A. earned from Indiana University – Bloomington, Masters and Ph.D. earned from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Beth Hatt Fis an Assistant Professor of Educational Administration and Foundations at Illinois State University where she teaches research methods and social foundations of education. Her current research explores smartness as a cultural construct in schools and the media.     

A correspondence of academic interest

Editor's Note: The following is a continuation of the dialogue “A Correspondence of Academic Interest” in the Spring 1994 issue ofAcademic Questions. That exchange concerned the program, recently announced by the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), to promote diversity on the governing boards of the public corporations in which it invests.     

Theorese

A shorter version of this articles appeared in the Autumn 1992Hudson Review under the title “Comment: The Ascendancy of Theor-ese”.