Children's shyness,popularity, school liking,cooperative participation,and internalizing problems in the early school years

Aims of the present study included understanding the manner in which shyness during the first year of formal schooling predicts early popularity in the peer group, as well as the manner in which children's shyness and popularity uniquely contribute to later school liking, cooperative participation, and internalizing problems. Structural equation modeling using parents’, teachers’, and children's reports suggested that children's (N = 291; 46% girls) kindergarten shyness predicted lower school liking and lower cooperative participation during second grade through its negative association with first grade popularity. Shyness during the first year of formal schooling may relate to difficulties in the classroom during later years due to problematic peer relations. The indirect relation of kindergarten shyness to second-grade internalizing problems through first-grade popularity was not statistically significant. Kindergarten shyness was also directly related to higher cooperative participation, which suggests that relations between early shyness and classroom engagement may be more complex than previously assumed.     

Theorising Inner-city Masculinities: 'Race', class,gender and education

Inner-city boys continue to be stereotypically associated with a range of social and educational 'problems', despite feminist calls for more nuanced and complex analyses to be undertaken of the racialised and classed aspects of masculinities. This article engages with the question of how to theorise diverse, working-class male pupils' masculinities within an inner-city, multicultural context. Data drawn from discussions with boys at one inner-city London school are used to illustrate the boys' complex constructions of 'culturally entangled' masculinities. Particular attention is given to the boys' constructions of 'bad boy' masculinities that are positioned in opposition to education and which we discuss in relation to themes of hegemony, patriarchy and racial/class inequalities.     

On Consumerism,Collective Action,and Whether Art Teaches Anything

In this review essay, Claudia Ruitenberg discusses Trevor Norris's Consuming Schools, René Arcilla's Mediumism, and Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit. While the primary focus of each book is different — with Norris concentrating on the pressures of consumerism and commercialism on K–12 schooling, Arcilla analyzing modernist art and existentialist education, and Nussbaum emphasizing the role of the humanities in educating for democratic citizenship — each of the books in some way addresses the question of how people can be educated to resist consumerism and how education itself can resist being absorbed by consumerism. Here, Ruitenberg considers this common theme as well as the more specific question of what special role — if any — the arts might play in anticonsumerist education.     

“Interpersonal” Clients,Students, and Supervisees: Translating Robert Kegan

The counseling profession prides itself on its developmental focus. However, counselors, counselor educators, and supervisors have generally applied only phasic, and not stage, theories to counseling and supervision practice and have not incorporated developmental concepts into their teaching. This article continues the effort of rectifying this situation by explicating the relevance of R. Kegan's (1982, 1994) subject‐object theory for counseling, supervision, and counselor education. The author reviews Kegan's (1982, 1994) interpersonal and institutional stages and applies the theory to promoting development beyond the interpersonal stage in 3 case illustrations: a counseling case, a counselor educator's experience, and a supervision challenge.     

Discovering the More: Reading Wright's,Colette's,and Cather's Texts as Philosophy of Education

Rather than using literary texts to evidence an analytic argument, within this piece we read Julia McNair Wright's (US, 1840–1902), Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's (France, 1873–1954), and Willa Cather's (US, 1873–1947) texts through theoretical lenses that expose their educational meaning and value and that create conversation among them concerning girls’ and women's educations. While we do not claim that one can generalize these women's works and lessons to every life, we contend that these women and the literary products they created offer girls and women powerful lessons about resistance, subversion, and nurturing one's intellect, lessons that in some ways transcend class and race in particular. First, we define and explain Bruner's concept of the more using Rosenblatt, Gallagher, and Gardner's theories and findings to illuminate his concept. Next, we identify and examine three themes that emerge across these authors’ texts—subverting through the everyday, becoming one's own steward, and moving from survival to self-actualization. Establishing these themes first in Wright's texts, we then use them to frame Colette's and Cather's fiction and support these themes by focusing on one lesson that emerges from each author's work(s). Finally, we ask what one might learn about educating girls and women from these texts and others whose educative meaning and value remain hidden.     

MAD HATTERS,JACKBOOTED MANAGERS,AND THE MASSIFICATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

In this review of three recent books on higher education, Alexander Sidorkin shows how the disinterested discourse that appears to be anticapitalist and anticommercial is actually a way of obtaining income from state subsidies. What links the books under review—Cary Nelson's No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom, Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, and Jennifer Washburn's University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education—is their critical evaluation of the corporatization and commercialization of higher education. In his analysis of this common theme, Sidorkin considers discourse as a means of production, and he maintains that the semiotic fields produced by discourse may create inflationary bubbles unless they engage in innovative discursive practices. Higher education is shaped by the trend toward massification, which makes the innovative discourse essential. Sidorkin concludes that the discursive energy of proponents of higher education should be focused on solving the numerous problems that arise from the massification of higher education rather than trying to reverse the trend and return to some golden age of academia.     

Unifying cognition,emotion, and activity in language teacher professional development

Emotions in the learning-to-teach experience are often ignored or downplayed by teacher educators. Using content and discourse analysis of a novice language teacher's journals, we demonstrate that the pervasive emotional content, reflecting individual teacher's perezhivanie, is a motivated, structural component of teachers' processes of cognitive development. Emotional content indexes dissonance between the ideal and reality, offering potential growth points. We apply a SCOBA of language teacher learning that unifies the dynamic, dialectical relationship among emotion, cognition, and activity, in order to orient teacher educators in mediating novice language teachers' professional development responsively.     

Predictors of discrepancies between informants’ ratings of preschool-aged children's behavior: An examination of ethnicity,child characteristics,and family functioning

The present study examined predictors of discrepancies between mothers’, fathers’, and teachers’ ratings of 3-year-old children's hyperactivity, attention problems, and aggression. Participants were families of 196 3-year-old children who took part in child and family assessments. Ethnicity was one of the most consistent predictors of discrepancies. African American mothers and fathers were more likely to rate their children's hyperactivity, attention problems, and aggression lower than teachers. In contrast, Latina mothers were more likely to rate their children as more hyperactive and inattentive than teachers. ADHD/ODD diagnoses, parental depression, number of children, and children's pre-academic skills were also predictive of discrepancies for some measures for some informants. These findings provide insight into factors that may contribute to informant discrepancies in ratings of preschool children.     

Discursive construction of Pakistan's national identity through curriculum textbook discourses in a Pakistani school in Dubai,the United Arab Emirates

This study investigates Pakistan's secondary school children's constructions of their national identity in a Pakistani school in Dubai by drawing on data collected from students and teachers from the case school and analysing national curriculum textbooks used in the school. Informed by Foucault's concepts, the article problematises how the curriculum textbooks are employed as a technology of power for inculcating national consciousness in the students. The findings suggest that Pakistan's national curriculum textbooks deploy a specific version of Islam as a major technology, which then influences other national identity signifiers in the textbooks for shaping students' national identity. The school affords a crucial space for the complex interplay of these technologies, which construct students' ethnocentric national identities, encouraging social polarisation. This has implications for Pakistan's national social cohesion as well as the potential for subverting international peaceful coexistence and working relationships, particularly in the selected overseas study context.     

Globalisation,modernisation and competitiveness: A critique of the new labour project in education

In this article, the author begins by examining the ubiquitous concept of 'globalisation' - a key theme of the New Labour Government. He question whether developments named as such are as widespread as proclaimed and whether the assumptions underlying the concept are misleading and occlude more than they reveal. The author concludes that, rather than 'globalisation' being viewed as a new epoch, the global movement of capital, which informs and underpins the globalisation thesis, might more accurately be described as an ongoing process, one which began 400-500 years ago. 'Globalisation', however, he suggests, is used ideologically to justify the New Labour programme, or the 'Third Way', which has two major anchors; competitiveness and modernisation. The former entails an economy in which everyone works, where the need for the untrammelled expansion of the free market is promoted as natural and inevitable and where there is the requirement for flexibility in the labour market and for low wages, in the context of the diminution of the welfare state. Since Keynesian demand management has been abandoned, one of the few strategic levers available to the New Labour Government to achieve these ends is to police the education and training of the workforce in the economy and in the educational market-place. This is all carried in the spirit of the 'essential modernisation' of British capitalism.     

A Question of Management Style: Women school governors, 1800-1862

ABSTRACT The article examines the way women managed schools prior to the rise of technocratic management practice and theory and explores the consequences for women of the introduction of 'rational' methods of bureaucratic management. The article begins by looking at women's access to management positions in education at the start of the nineteenth century. It then considers the structural and societal barriers constraining their work before focusing on the women governors' authority style. The work of women school governors is related to the wider question of gender and power and in particular to the historical construction of bureaucratic, technocratic management in discourses of 'reason', which is seen as a form of male power within the project of modernity. The women's work is placed in a Foucauldian framework in which women governors are simultaneously constructed as powerful and powerless due to their straddling of the discursive space of both 'public' and 'private'.     

A Room of Our Own: Rodinsky,Street Haunting and the Creative Mind

Drawing on Virginia Woolf's 'Street Haunting', Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair's Rodinsky's Room and on autobiography, this essay explores place, memory and artistic vision. Just as a room of her own provided Woolf with the solitude necessary to write, rambling through the streets of London fed her imagination. In Rodinsky's Room , Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair explore both these creative spaces. Their book gives testimony to the creative mind and to the role that memory, history and place play in creating story, mythology and identity. The author also discusses her personal and family history in relation to place.     

Mathematics Standards,Cultural Styles,and Learning Preferences: The Plight and the Promise of African American Students

The 2007 film Freedom Writers portrays the real-life experiences of Erin Gruwell, a teacher at an inner-city high school in Long Beach, California. This article discusses the educational theories underpinning Gruwell's pedagogical practice, as seen in Freedom Writers, and identifies four themes—rewriting curriculum, treating students as creators of knowledge, creating classroom community, and teaching as self-realization—that make Gruwell's teaching successful.     

"两个不能否定"的理论依据、历史镜鉴及现实意义

对于如何正确看待改革开放前后两个历史时期的关系,习近平总书记提出了"两个不能否定",并清晰阐明了两个历史时期的本质特征和历史定位,认为它们都是中国共产党领导人民进行社会主义建设的实践探索。对"两个不能否定"予以深入条析,不难发现其具有理论、历史和实践上的合理性及重要现实意义。从中国传统文化、马克思主义理论和中国共产党人的理论创新中,可以寻得"两个不能否定"的理论依据;从中国近代救亡图存史、苏共发展史和中共奋斗史的历史经验和教训中,可以获得"两个不能否定"的历史镜鉴;而且,"两个不能否定"作为促进中国特色社会主义建设实践的重要遵循,对于正确认识党的历史进而坚定历史自信至关重要,同时也对继续全面深化改革和全面建设社会主义现代化国家具有重要现实意义。     

Rich Task Implementation: Modernism meets postmodernism

'School renewal', 'productive pedagogies', 'rich tasks', 'New Basics', 'key learning areas'--these are some of the discourses of change in selected Queensland schools. This paper will report on teaching as an insider/outsider in a school's Health and Physical Education department during a time of intense pressure for structural, curriculum and pedagogical shifts. As a teacher/researcher, I spent ten weeks in a government secondary school attempting to implement rich tasks as well as collect data using formal and informal interviews, field note, and document analyses, with a focus upon teachers', students' and administrators' sense of change processes and outcomes. It is suggested that the processes of, and barriers to, curriculum change in this context are best explained in terms of tensions between modernist and postmodernist phenomena.     

Of All Studies,Study Your Present Condition: Essay Review of Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct: Beauty,Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

In this review I will assess the validity of Denis Dutton's provocative argument for Darwinian aesthetics. In The Art Instinct Dutton draws on the insights of Darwin and the evolutionary psychologists Geoffrey Miller and Steven Pinker to analyse art as the product of evolution. Pinker asserts on the dust cover that ‘this book marks out the future of the humanities – connecting aesthetics and criticism to an understanding of human nature from the cognitive and biological sciences' and that ‘Dutton has made a bold and original contribution to this exciting new field’. Miller's opinion of The Art Instinct is noticeable by its absence. In his review of The Art Instinct, arts academic Richard Hickman concludes: ‘for educators, if we accept that young people have an “art instinct”, then it is incumbent upon us to ensure that this instinct is nurtured and developed’. I agree. My aim is to critically assess Dutton's contribution and speculate about how it might inform future directions in educational research.     

Active,silent and controlled discussions: Explaining variations in classroom conversation

This ethnographic study identifies and explains instructional strategies that result in different kinds of classroom discussions. These discussions are described as active, silent, and controlled. Three dimensions are used to explain strategies teachers use in leading and organizing classroom discourse: the discussion's structural sequence, the content of teachers' questions, and the use of informal language. The success of certain instructional strategies in leading to active discussions is interpreted in terms of differences between the features of classroom conversations and everyday conversations. Contrary to the assumption that students learn and accept organizations of school discussions, it is suggested that high school students may express resistance to such organizations in various ways such as silence or reluctant participation.     

Developing attitude to science scales for use with children of ages from five to eleven years

This paper reports on the development stages of three attitudes to science and school scales for use with children aged from 5-11 years. The investigation is part of a project intended to improve pupil achievement in science in 16 schools in an English city. The base-line performance of the attitude scales with over 800 pupils is reported. Attitude sub-scales measure 'liking school', 'independent investigator', 'science enthusiasm', the 'social context' of science, and 'science as a difficult subject' with Cronbach Alpha reliabilities for the year groups varying from above 0.8 to below 0.7. For the sample, both boys' and girls' enthusiasm for science declines progressively with age alongside a similar decline in their perception that science is difficult.     

Surveying gender differences in Canadian school literacy

Student survey results from Canada's first, national, large-scale assessment of school literacy are analysed for explanations of gender differences in reading and writing skills found in this and other recent Canadian large-scale assessments. Using findings from the 1994 Council of Ministers of Education, Canada School Achievement Indicators Programme, we explore English-Canadian adolescents' literacy preferences, attitudes and practices. Five models derived from recent literacy education and related educational research are posited as potential explanations for female superiority in literacy test results: 'division of family labour', 'character-personification', 'classroom interaction', 'assessment bias' and 'identification with genre'. The assumptions underlying these models are examined in light of the Council of Ministers of Education's study.