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).     

“The World Loves an Underdog,” or the Continuing Appeal of the Adolescent Rebel Narrative: A Comparative Reading of <Emphasis Type=Italic>Vernon God Little</Emphasis>, <Emphasis Type=Italic>The Catcher in the Rye</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type=Italic>Huckleberry Finn</Emphasis>

The early reception of D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little (2003) has been characterized by comparisons with two canonical literary antecedents: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1991/1951) and, at a greater remove, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The three novels capitalize on the subversive potential of disaffected teenage narrators, whose compelling vernacular voices, and distinctive position as outsiders in the adult world, are powerful tools for social critique. This article offers an analysis of the continuities and discontinuities in the narrative tradition that links Vernon Little to Huckleberry Finn via the pivotal figure of Holden Caulfield, who is widely considered as the original, unsurpassed model of adolescent rebelliousness in modern literature. Grounded in an extensive exploration of the history of reception of the three texts, this study proceeds to highlight and explore the wider implications of Pierre’s provocative twist on his predecessors’ narrative template. Significantly, this deliberate departure is overlooked in most reviews of Vernon God Little—an omission which testifies to our deep investment in the idea of teenagers as liminal figures between childhood and adulthood, and thus still relatively untainted by worldly corruption. Paradoxically, the persistence of this romanticized view of adolescence coexists with much less idealized representations of young people, especially in the media. This particular contradiction is tentatively teased out in a brief coda to the main argument, with reference to another idiosyncratic adolescent narrator who has managed to capture the popular imagination in recent years: Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003). Although his connection with Salinger’s text is less immediately obvious than Vernon’s, in some ways Christopher is a more legitimate heir to Holden Caulfield than Pierre’s protagonist.     

Citizenship and Children’s Identity in <Emphasis Type=Italic>The Wonderful Adventures of Nils</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type=Italic>Scouting for Boys</Emphasis>

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906–1907) by Selma Lagerlöf and Scouting for Boys (1908) by Robert Baden-Powell are characteristic of their time and their respective national and cultural contexts—the Swedish nation state of the early twentieth century and the British Empire. Taking its cue from recent theories on citizenship and education, the article discusses ways in which these two classic children’s books relate to citizenship, nation and education. Ultimately, both books point to ways in which education—in and out of school—can be used to promote individual growth and a peaceful and durable society for world citizens.     

Post-secondary Science Students’ Explanations of <Emphasis Type=Italic>Randomness</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type=Italic>Variation</Emphasis> and Implications for Science Learning

The concepts of randomness and variation are pervasive in science. The purpose of this study was to document how post-secondary life science students explain randomness and variation, infer relationships between their explanations, and ability to describe and identify appropriate and inappropriate variation, and determine if students can identify sources of variation. An instrument designed to test statistical concepts was administered to 282 college students from three universities, ranging from introductory non-science majors to science graduate students. Students readily distinguished between causes of variation. A naïve no-pattern concept of randomness persisted from first-year non-science majors to senior-level science majors, contributing to incorrect responses on the variation instrument. Students’ expressions of randomness were better predictors of performance on the variation instrument than their expressions of variation. It is argued that inclusion of everyday language uses of randomness in instruction can bridge the gap between vernacular and scientific uses of this term.     

Enhancing Prospective Teachers’ Knowledge of Learners’ Intuitive Conceptions: The Case of <Emphasis Type=Italic>Same A</Emphasis>–<Emphasis Type=Italic>Same B</Emphasis>

This paper addresses the accumulating knowledge of prospective teachers of secondary school mathematics and their acquired proficiency during the course “Psychological aspects of mathematics education,” in which we discussed theoretical models including the intuitive rules theory. Participants’ performances are examined by means of an extensive report of two episodes, one during the course and one afterwards. These episodes marked different stages in the prospective teachers’ analysis of their own and of students’ solutions, which led me to conclude that exposing prospective teachers to the intuitive rules theory is important, since their familiarity with the theory provided them with a tool to reflect on their own mathematical solutions (subject matter knowledge; SMK), on others’ solutions, and on the tasks (pedagogical content knowledge; PCK).     

Is a posthumanist <Emphasis Type=Italic>Bildung</Emphasis> possible? Reclaiming the promise of <Emphasis Type=Italic>Bildung</Emphasis> for contemporary higher education

My central argument in this article is that the notion of Bildung may offer conceptual sustenance to those who wish to develop educative practices to supplement or contest the prevalence and privileging of market and economic imperatives in higher education, which configure teaching and learning as an object available to measurement. I pursue this argument by making the case for an ethical posthuman Bildung which recognises the inseparability of knowing and being, the materiality of educative relations, and the need to install an ecology of ethical relations at the centre of educational practice in higher education. Such a re-conceptualisation situates Bildung not purely as an individual goal but as a process of ecologies and relationships. The article explores Bildung as a flexible concept, via three theoretical lenses, and notes that it has always been subject to continuing revision in response to changing social and educational contexts. In proposing the possibility of, and need for, a posthuman Bildung, the articles offer a critical review of the promise of Bildung and outline some of the radical ways that a posthuman Bildung might reinvigorate conceptualisations of contemporary higher education.     

Navigating Between Home and Empire: Mobility and Male Friendship in <Emphasis Type=Italic>Tom Brown’s Schooldays</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type=Italic>The Three Midshipmen</Emphasis>

In this article, we investigate the public school novel as represented by Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and the boy’s sea story as represented by W. H. G. Kingston’s The Three Midshipmen (1873). The school novel and the sea story sometimes functioned as twinned forms enabling authors for boys to explore anxieties about male selfhood and relocating oneself in the larger community while growing up. As becomes especially apparent when they are read together, these novels address the boy’s relationship to home and empire, rootlessness and rootedness. The coming-of-age plot found in the boys’ books reveals a literature that embraces both rootlessness/mobility and rootedness/community and that posits an all-male version of something closely resembling domestic life as a way to navigate between the two.     

Complicating Culture and Difference: Situating Asian American Youth Identities in Lisa Yee’s <Emphasis Type=Italic>Millicent Min,Girl Genius</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type=Italic>Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time</Emphasis>

This review situates how culture, difference, and identity are discursively constructed in Millicent Min, Girl Genius and Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time, two award-winning books written by critically acclaimed Asian American author Lisa Yee. Using contextual literacy approaches, the characters, cultural motifs, and physical settings in these texts are deconstructed to explore the nuances of Asian American youth identities that intersect along the lines of class, gender, and race. This review ends by offering teaching strategies for explicating Asian American young adult literature to critically investigate the representations of Asian American counter-narratives, experiences, and youth cultures. Rachel Endo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her current research interests are comparative multicultural education, immigrant/refugee experiences in post-1965 contexts, teacher education, and transnational studies of Asian America.     

Another textbook project? The implementation of <Emphasis Type=Italic>Escuela Nueva</Emphasis> in Vietnam

This qualitative case study examines the implementation of Escuela Nueva, a rural multigrade schooling model, in Vietnam from the perspectives and experiences of local teachers and school administrators. Escuela Nueva first emerged in Colombia in the 1970s as a scalable low-cost educational innovation model that can be disseminated to other under-resourced regions around the world. Indeed, to date, the model has travelled to fourteen countries around the world, impacting the lives of over five million children. On the surface, the implementation of Vietnam Escuela Nueva (VNEN) appears to be a close reproduction of the original model. However, some aspects of VNEN in practice in fact directly contradict the principles and philosophies of the original model. Rather than encouraging more teacher autonomy, child-centered pedagogies, and local adaptation, the implementation of VNEN has reproduced the rigidity, conformity and textbook dependency that have been core features of the traditional Vietnamese education system. This points to the difficulties that can arise when attempts at scaling up educational change across borders come into conflict with local systems of reasoning, which impede the achievement of the intended outcomes.     

An Easy and Well-Ordered Way to Learn: Schooling at Home in Louisa May Alcott’s <Emphasis Type=Italic>Eight Cousins</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type=Italic>Jack and Jill</Emphasis>

Louisa May Alcott’s juvenile fiction is often focused on aspects of children’s lives that were also topics of reform in nineteenth century America. In Jack and Jill and Eight Cousins, Alcott presents an idealized picture of child-centered learning, building on three central principals: (1) Good teachers are sympathetic and understanding of children; (2) Every child needs to be healthy in order to learn; and (3) Children should be allowed to explore their world through self-directed, active learning. The ideal educational environment that she describes has much in common with the theories of John Dewey that would emerge some years later; using Dewey’s writings can give further insight into Alcott’s fiction. In this article, I argue that Alcott sees the world from the perspective of her young characters, and describes it in a way that simultaneously connects to her young readers and gives adults insight into the child’s world.     

The Future of the Discipline? Mathematics and the <Emphasis Type=Italic>Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme</Emphasis>

The crisis in UK mathematics education, both in schools and universities, has been widely reported. Currently, 24% of full-time mathematics teachers in English secondary education have `weak’ or `nil’ qualifications in the subject, 31% of secondary mathematics teachers are now over the age of 50, and it is estimated that England alone is short of 3500 qualified mathematics teachers. Furthermore, studies suggest that UK mathematics undergraduates often lack confidence in several key skills essential for teaching, and the availability of attractive careers for mathematics graduates impacts upon the numbers entering the profession, thus risking a spiral of decline. This paper recounts the development of a unit of study in the Faculty of Mathematical Studies at the University of Southampton, England, in conjunction with a new national initiative entitled the Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme (UAS). This aims to address the crisis in UK mathematics education through the training and placement of final year undergraduates as teaching assistants in local schools, with a view to promoting mathematics as a university choice to the broadest possible constituency, whilst simultaneously developing those key skills in which undergraduates regularly feel least confident, and facilitating an insight into teaching as a career option. The paper also provides a detailed evaluation of this new initiative, together with the recent comments of students who, having completed the UAS unit, have progressed subsequently to postgraduate teacher education.     

David Almond’s <Emphasis Type=Italic>Skellig</Emphasis>: “A New Vista of Contemplation”?

The debates that have arisen regarding Darwin’s theories of evolution and Christian views of creation and their place in education in the United States have frequently been extremely heated, resulting in trials, hearings, and laws. This article provides an overview of some of the disagreements and illustrates how David Almond’s British novel, Skellig (1998), can be read as a response to the disputes. The author suggests a close reading of Skellig demonstrates how a decrepit, broken, dispirited creature, who might be characterized as an angel, and the crumbling building in which he lives serve as a series of metaphors for attitudes regarding the role of Christian views of creation and evolution in contemporary culture.