John Dewey and Museum Education

Abstract Although John Dewey's educational concepts have been discussed previously in relation to museums, his own writing about museums has received little attention. Dewey, who visited museums frequently throughout his life, recognized the powerful educational value of museums. He assigned a central role to museums as integrative components of raw experiences in his educational theory, and he made extensive use of student visits to museums at the Chicago Laboratory School. Early twentieth‐century museum educators and directors applied Dewey's ideas, and advocated a museum education philosophy, based on the progressive education movement, that has significance for current exhibition and educational practice.     

John Dewey's Experience and Education: Lessons for Museums

John Dewey, one of the preeminent educational theorists of our time, wrote Experience and Education 60 years ago, toward the end of his career, as a review of his educational philosophy and the progressive schools it had spawned. Based on the principle that all genuine education comes about through experience, Dewey's ideas are still current and particularly relevant to the theory and practice of museum education. They are, nevertheless, not widely cited within the museum profession. This article comments on Experience and Education, a slim, readable volume, in the hope of giving it wider readership. Major ideas from each chapter of the book are summarized along with comments on their application to various museum issues. Dewey distinguishes two fundamentally opposed ideas: that education is development from within and that it is formation from without. Believing that experience is the basis for education, he basically takes the within position, although he also warns against either-or thinking. Dewey identifies two aspects of experience and two criteria for judging it which have implications for such things as setting exhibit goals, evaluating exhibits, developing exhibit content, and untangling education and entertainment. He goes on to look at problems of implementing experience-based learning such as maintaining social control, moving people from initial impulses to more purposeful inquiry, and developing organized subject matter from individual experiences. All of this applies to museums as well as schools.     

Batter Up: Classifying Pre-World War II Baseball Cards Using Dewey Decimal

Abstract

Within cataloging non-book items, literature on sports cards is limited and not rooted in academic research. Sports cards provide valuable statistical information and evidence of lineups. This article addresses the gap by examining Jefferson Burdick’s The American Card Catalog. Known as the Dewey Decimal system of trading cards, the Catalog is the preeminent resource for collecting pre-World War II cards. This article expands upon Burdick’s work and guides librarians through the building of a class number for individual sports cards. The result incorporates classification methods to support user search, and highlights the historical value of cards within library collections.     

Stephen Colbert's Civics Lesson: How Colbert Super PAC Taught Viewers About Campaign Finance

This study tests whether exposure to The Colbert Report influenced knowledge of super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups, and ascertains how having such knowledge influenced viewers' perceptions about the role of money in politics. Our analysis of a national random sample of adults interviewed after the 2012 presidential election found that viewing The Colbert Report both increased peoples' perception of how knowledgeable they were about super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups and increased actual knowledge of campaign finance regulation regarding these independent expenditure groups. Findings suggest that the political satirist was more successful in informing his viewers about super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups than were other types of news media. Viewing The Colbert Report also indirectly influenced how useful his audience perceived money to be in politics.     

"To Keep the Present and Future in Touch with the Past"- Lewis Wickes Hine:

Lewis Wickes Hine exploited the powerful impact of the visual image to arouse the reforming spirit among the middle and upper classes and to inspire them to do something about the living and working conditions of thousands of America's poor. Hine was acquainted with many of the men and women who were involved in the Progressive social reform campaigns that were popular in the United States during the early twentieth century. A trained sociologist, he became interested in photography while teaching at the Ethical Culture School. Hine quickly realized that photographs could be powerful instruments of social reform and was able to effectively combine his interests in social welfare and photography. Hine believed that this efforts as a photographer should be guided by a social conscience and referred to his work as "social photography." His photographs of men, women and children enduring dangerous and inhuman working conditions were both sensitive and intense. As a result of his social conscience and artistic commitment Hine raised the cultural and social awareness of his contemporaries and made a significant contribution to social reform efforts in the United States.     

Reclaiming history: Arthur Schomburg

Focusing on the inter-war period, this article examines the context of the publication of Sir Hilary Jenkinson’s Manual of Archive Administration alongside the less well-known contemporary publication of Arthur Schomburg’s ‘The Negro Digs up his Past’. By placing these publications together, this article raises questions about the production and reproduction of the professional canon, as well as highlighting Schomburg’s contribution to key archival questions on the nature of collecting. This work discusses Schomburg’s articulation of the purpose of archival collecting which offers a radically different conception of the value and use of archives, one that focuses on the concepts of recovery and transformation. This article also places Schomburg within the wider emergence of the Pan-African movement and situates his work within the developing Pan-African ideologies and the networks in which he operated, and argues that Schomburg’s legacy can be found in the development of Black-led archives in London.     

少年儿童图书馆开展民主教育刍议

杜威的民主教育理论认为:对儿童的教育过程,就是促进其不断地生长过程。他还认为:民主的生活环境是儿童生长的最好条件。少儿图书馆工作的开展应融合杜威的民主教育理论,充分利用少儿图书馆的各种资源,创建一个适合儿童健康成长的民主生活(阅读)环境,建立一个循序渐进的知识秩序,促进他们健康成长,让儿童成长与社会发展和谐共生。     

“I’ll see you in Mystic Falls”: intimacy,feelings, and public issues in Ian Somerhalder’s celebrity activism

Critics of celebrity activism often assume that fans blindly follow celebrities who invite them to support celebrity activism and charity. These fans are often imagined as participating in celebrity activism only because their beloved celebrity asked them to — not out of any kind of rational understanding of a political issue, awareness of a public problem, or commitment to a public issue. We contest this view of celebrity activism. Drawing on scholars like Bennett, Ellcessor, and Chouliaraki, we argue that the case of Ian Somerhalder demonstrates that a commitment to a celebrity may actually be connected to a commitment to a public issue. We trace the ways in which Somerhalder plays with the slippage between television celebrity and his character, arguing that such slippage merges the intimacy fans feel for Damon with the intimacy fans feel for Somerhalder and imbues Somerhalder’s environmental appeals with the values his on-screen character comes to represent in The Vampire Diaries. We argue that Somerhalder deploys themes and ideals from The Vampire Diaries in his communication with fans and in his activist appeals. Ultimately, Somerhalder’s celebrity activism demonstrates how intimacy with celebrities might function to connect fans to public issues in powerful ways.     

The conservative backlash argument controverted: carnivalesque,comedy, and respect in Rocky

The 1976 film Rocky is not the catalyst for conservative backlash that scholars of American cinema and culture have long made it out to be. Through detailed analysis this essay reveals two counterposed dramas: an epic race rivalry conceived by Creed, and a low mimetic comedy that sees Balboa integrated in his local community. The epic dissolves in carnivalesque play and gives way to the earnest local drama of building relationships. Rocky embodies some progressive ideals for race and class under the general theme of respect; it also manifests the men’s liberation movement against the classical male machine. As a pivotal film for critical conceptions of US cinema and culture after 1975, my reappraisal of Rocky challenges ideological criticism’s prevailing paradigm.     

Neither Cited nor Foundational: Niklas Luhmann’s Ecological Communication; A Critical Exegesis and Some Theoretical Suggestions for the Future of a Field

In this paper I critically explicate Niklas Luhmann’s treatise Ecological Communication (1989). Locating this rather neglected treatise against the backdrop of the embryonic and amorphous academic field of environmental (or ecological) communication (EC), I argue that the treatise provides the only comprehensive conceptual definition of ecological or environmental communication—and it thus deserves attention as well as scrutiny. Past my detailed explication of Luhmann’s key concepts, I register my deep disagreements with his philosophy and speculate about why his treatise may have suffered neglect within EC. Briefly mentioning critical traditionalism, I also suggest alternatives to Luhmann’s theoretical framework. I devote the last section of the paper to my vision for the future of EC.     

Absurd Masculinity: Will Ferrell’s Time-Bending Comic Persona

The key to Will Ferrell’s success is his genuinely likeable comic persona that relies on overdetermined and excessively masculine and feminine traits. Accordingly, this article argues that despite criticism surrounding Ferrell’s comedic films, they actually have a great deal to tell us about masculinity and comedy in the new millennium. By discussing Anchorman, Elf, and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the author asserts that Ferrell’s films map changes to masculine identity in the post-9/11 era by their representations of absurd masculinity embodied in Ferrell’s comic persona.     

“Is this Ella Fitzgerald?”: My Reflections of James C. McCroskey

Editor’s Note: This essay reflects the final in our five-part set of essays on the career of Communication Research Reports founding editor, James C. McCroskey. In these previous essays, Levine and Park (2017) offered the opening essay in our series, with a professional and personal rememberance of a scholar deeply impactful on both of their careers. Hickson (2018) commented on McCroskey’s formal and informal mentorship styles, and how others might understand the critical importance of offering oneself to one’s peers. Park, Oh, and Ryu (2018) explained the unique impact of McCroskey’s research on communication scholarship in South Korea, and Frymier (2018) reminded us of McCroskey’s impact as a core scholar for instructional communication research. In this final essay, we reached out to current West Virginia University Department of Communication chair Matthew M. Martin for his thoughts. As McCroskey spent most of his career at WVU (including a 25-year stretch as the department chair, from 1972 to 1997), inviting the current chair of that department for a closing commentary seemed most fitting. We hope that these five essays serve as a memorial to a scholar whose career and influence extends far beyond his publication record.     

刘国钧图书馆学术思想之起点——纪念《近代图书馆之性质》发表95周年

刘国钧于1919年开始发表研究论文,是年共发文7篇,其中有5篇为译文,其内容则以实用主义教育为主。以“教育救国”为逻辑起点,《近代图书馆之性质》是刘国钧图书馆学术思想之起点,成为首位在读非图书馆专业学生发表图书馆学研究论文者,及首位专论现代图书馆性质者。受杜威思想之影响,又于1921年发表了《儿童图书馆和儿童文学》一文,1923年起又从儿童中心论向以读者为中心的思想升华,完成了由译介消化吸收到创建中国图书馆学的蜕变。     

‘We need a committee for men's rights’: reactions of male and female viewers to reverse gender discrimination in Korean comedy

This study investigates the ideological implications of Nambowon (‘the Committee for Men's Rights’), one of the most popular sketches in a live comedy series entitled Gag Concert in Korea. The sketch humorously criticizes women who take advantage of men in various situations and always ends with a funny slogan demanding equal rights for men and the end of reverse gender discrimination. We treat Nambowon not as an idiosyncratic text but as part of Korean television programs that portray the rising social status of women as well as gender differences. Previous studies of gender and comedy have typically focused on textual meanings, and relatively little work exists to explain the audience's reception. Thus, we explore why audiences enjoy the show and whether and why there are differences in the reactions of male and female viewers to the portrayal of gender in Nambowon.     

“公意”与“舆论”之间:五四时期李普曼《舆论》的知识传播和话语实践

基于新发现的袁昌英《公意之源》,并与陶孟和的书评比较,考察李普曼《舆论》作为一种现代性话语在中国的传播与实践的问题。《舆论》推动了近代西方"public opinion"从哲学论述转向现代性的知识和概念,但其核心概念仍融合了"公共意志"与"公众意见"两方面涵义,作为现代性话语尚具有两歧性。这个特征为五四时期的中国学者提供了"舆论"与"公意"的两条阐释路径。陶孟和用书评形式引介《舆论》,关注其在政治心理学上的创新意义;袁昌英则以近似于政论文的形式,评述李普曼的新舆论观、大众媒介观和政治传播观,实已触及现代传播学的范畴。陶、袁都被李普曼的民主理论修正观点所吸引,对于著名的"李普曼-杜威之辩",也有精英主义与大众主义不同的评论视角。从话语实践上看,《舆论》参与了一战以后中国知识界对西方民主制度的反省思潮。     

Giving voice to the accused: Serial and the critical potential of true crime

The first season of Serial, to date the most popular podcast in the medium’s decade-long history, told the story of the conviction of 18-year-old Adnan Syed in 2000 for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. At the center of Serial, producer Sarah Koenig presented Syed’s voice, his take on the prosecution’s evidence, and his own contemporaneous experience. This essay examines the way Serial used Syed’s voice to challenge institutional truth claims from within the textual space of crime journalism. “Criminal biography,” as a genre affordance of true crime, offers a textual means to interrogate modes of truth production and representation.     

Elder men’s bromance in Asian lands: normative Western masculinity in Better Late than Never

Better Late than Never is a remake of a Korean reality T.V. travel show, which aired on N.B.C. in August 2016. The show’s premise features four elder celebrity men – Henry Winkler, William Shatner, Terry Bradshaw, and George Foreman – with their mid-30s companion Jeff Dye as they travel through the “exotic” lands of East Asia. Through the use of two popular narrative tropes, the bromance and the Western journey for self-discovery in Asia, the show argues that the interaction with the Asian other is beneficial primarily in masculine self-discovery and masculine homosocial bonding. Borrowing from Steeves’s use of the hybrid encounter, I argue that B.L.T.N. positions the strange Asian other as valuable only as a reference for becoming reacquainted with the U.S. American self and emotionally connected to his fraternal companions. Thus, B.L.T.N. rejects hybridity and reinforces U.S. American masculinity through the reification of ideologically preferred contact with the other that is shallow and that benefits the Western traveler.     

Past,present, and future: Trajectories in Kittler studies

Following his death in 2011, there has been a spate of publications on the work of Friedrich Kittler. This review essay discusses The Truth of the Technological World (2013), Kittler Now: Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies (2015), and Media After Kittler (2015). These three recently published collections feature essays that cover the history of Kittler’s writing, and trace out the debates about the significance of technical operation to the effects of media. Most importantly, the exegetical essays in these volumes signal a shift from earlier efforts to introduce Kittler’s writings towards a more robust conceptualization of how his work might benefit English-language theorizations of the contemporary media situation.     

Image Repair on the Donald Trump “Access Hollywood” Video: “Grab Them by the P*ssy”

In October 2016, Donald Trump was in the midst of a hotly contested and sharply divisive presidential campaign. Days before the second presidential debate, The Washington Post posted a video of Trump “having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005.” This video and the firestorm of criticism it provoked threatened to derail his presidential run. Mr. Trump and his wife Melania Trump offered several messages to repair his damaged image. This article analyzes and evaluates these image repair messages concerning Donald Trump’s “Access Hollywood” video. In such a divisive context, the defense had no hope of repairing Trump’s image with the general public (Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million). Even though he lost the popular vote, the business magnate won the Electoral College. We cannot say that the “Access Hollywood” video was solely responsible for Trump’s poor popular vote showing, but it is clear that this defense did not completely dispel the cloud surrounding him.     

Us,them, and the war on terror: reassessing George W. Bush’s rhetorical legacy

In this essay, I try to answer a few basic questions about George W. Bush’s war rhetoric: (1) How did the president talk about the Iraqi people specifically and Arabs and Muslims generally? (2) How did that vision of Iraqis, Arabs, and Muslims shape the war and its aftermath? Bush did not talk about tyrants and terrorists the same way he did everyday Arabs and Muslims. Tracking the simplified, singular vision of a democratic, freedom-loving Arab and Muslim Other that the Bush administration anticipated, based policy around, and, in the end, failed to find is vital to account for the failures of the war on terror and to differentiate Bush’s imperialism from fin de siècle imperialists, Orientalists, and garden-variety racists before and after his presidency. The Bush administration went to both war and postwar on the basis of a deeply flawed constitutive framework, but where Arabs and Muslims were concerned, that framework failed because of presumed sameness, not difference. Put differently, calamities in war on terror were due to violence done to those construed as savages and violence enabled by a total failure to strategize around difference.