‘You are a Flaw in the Pattern’: Difference, Autonomy and Bullying in YA Fiction

Though portrayals of bullying in children??s books stretch back to Victorian public school stories, this article sees a new subgenre about bullying in young adult novels emerging in the post-Columbine years. Selected works by Jerry Spinelli, Walter Dean Myers, Jaime Adoff, Carol Plum-Ucci and Rita Williams-Garcia are examined, although the article begins by looking at a precursor of this subgenre, Robert Cormier??s classic The Chocolate War. In this subgenre, it is argued that bullying is not presented as dysfunctional adolescent behavior, but as a tool for addressing issues of difference and discrimination on the grounds of race, class, sexual orientation or personality; issues that filter into adolescent culture. High schools are thus portrayed as totalitarian microcosms where bullying functions as a means of social control, curbing deviance from masculine, heterosexual, middle-class and white norms. The narrative techniques and themes of these books??around homophobia, jock culture, rampage shootings and girl-on?Cgirl violence??will be examined.     

Arctic Space,Lonely Place: “Mammy Moments” in Higher Education

Many ideologies and cultural practices influence the way we think about Black women. Specifically, the Mammy trope permeates the walls of higher education in ways that leave Black female professors feeling disrespected, not acknowledged, and questioning their own intellectual ability. The ways in which students, faculty, and staff interact with Black female faculty members is termed accordingly as “Mammy moments.” “Mammy moments” are the overt and covert behaviors, attitudes, preconceived notions, and stereotypes that are held on, over, and against Black female professors. Historically, the Mammy trope is depicted as unintelligent, invisible, and self-sacrificing. The author argues that these same depictions are apparent in higher education. Black female professors are presented and represented as lacking the skills, knowledge, and capabilities to be a critically component and credible college professor.     

How Exactly Does Place Matter in Crime Analysis? Place,Space, and Spatial Heterogeneity

This article has four aims. First is to clarify the origins and different meanings of place, space, and other basic concepts in spatial analysis. The second aim is to reiterate the illogicality of the spatial homogeneity assumption in ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. An illustration of the comparison between traditional OLS and geographically weighted regression modeling is included for this purpose. The third aim is to explain that place matters in crime analysis not only when crime data are spatially clustered, but when relationships between correlates are found to be conditional upon place. The final aim is to convince criminology and criminal justice faculty to begin discussing the inclusion of spatial modeling as a compulsory topic in the curriculum.     

The Subjectivity of the Teacher and the Subjectivity of the Children: Negative or positive co‐operation

Subjectivity is one of the elemental human needs. It is also significant since it plays a part in educational situations. A particularly important premise of subjectivity is responsibility for one's actions and, associated with this, determination of a direction for one's own activity, the exercise of control and the making of choices.

Human activity takes place principally in a social context. For this reason it is important to pay attention to two‐subject relationships. Their features are above all purposefulness, bi‐directionality and co‐ordination. Two‐subject activity may be of two sorts—negative co‐operation (conflict) or positive co‐operation, co‐ordination of a line of action including dialogue and collaboration.

Educational activity, particularly when directed at younger children, is characterized by different planes of functioning. The adult acts in a longer‐term perspective and formulates his aims in terms of general concepts but a small child acts in a short term perspective and formulates aims in concrete terms.

A system of priorities is put forward here, a two‐task model for the educational situation which makes subjective activity possible both for the child and for the adult. In the last part of the article an experiment is described which illustrates how such a two‐task situation works with a system of priorities and the results that were obtained.

     

“If Carmen Can Analyze Shakespeare,Everybody Can”: Positions,Conflicts, and Negotiations in the Narratives of Latina Pre-Service Teachers

This study, focusing on the life stories of three pre-service Latina teachers in the United States, explored how they positioned themselves as learners of English and teachers of Spanish in their oral narratives, and how their past experience as minority students shaped their current professional identity negotiations as language teachers. Positioning analysis of their narrative accounts indicated that these female teachers, throughout their education, felt different or isolated because of their ethnic identity, language background, and socioeconomic class. They negotiated memberships in different communities across settings in their lives. Understanding the conflicts and struggles that they experienced and unique strategies that they used to overcome them will hopefully provide insights for all teachers and teacher educators in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.     

Boundaries and selves in the making of ‘science’

Relying on ideas from practice theory and critical autobiography, I use this article first to tell, and then to analyse, a story about trying to publish a book whose contents are in some ways marginal to what is normally considered science or science education. During the publishing process, what counts as science got tangled up with what counts as “credible” science, “marketable” literature, and academic competence. As a result, a book and a person (me) dedicated to expanding the boundaries of science also became contributors to those very same boundaries.     

Interprofessional Activity in the ��Space of Reasons��: Thinking, Communicating and Acting

The paper analyses a form of interprofessional working and learning (IPWL)—the fleeting spatial and temporal constitution of project teams with little prior history of working together—that is an increasing feature of work in the global economy. The paper argues firstly: (i) this form of working and learning is relatively under-researched in professional, vocational and workplace learning (PVWL); and, (ii) the research traditions—Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and Cultural Anthropology/Symbolic Interactionist (CA/SI)—that some researchers in PVWL have drawn on to investigate IPWL do not allow them to capture the cognitive and symbolic complexity of this activity. Secondly, it is possible to reveal the nature of this complexity when the concepts and methods associated with CHAT and CA-SI-based approaches are supplemented with the concepts of ‘inference’, ‘space of reasons’, ‘restructuring and ‘recontextualisation’ (Guile, 2010). The paper demonstrates this claim by reinterpreting a classic study of the aforementioned form of working and learning undertaken by Hall, Stevens and Torolba that drew on concepts and methods from CA and SI (2002).     

Negotiating Sociolinguistic Borderlands—Native Youth Language Practices in Space,Time, and Place

Drawing on the work of Philip Deloria (2004) and recent explorations of “American Indian languages in unexpected places” (Webster & Peterson, 2011a), this article challenges received expectations of Native American languages and language users as “rural” and physically distant and of “urban” Indigenous language practices as anomalous. With a focus on Native American youth, I develop the notion of sociolinguistic borderlands—spatial, temporal, and ideological spaces of sociolinguistic hybridity and diversity—as a lens into the grounded realities of language in the lives of contemporary Native youth. The article first contextualizes the current situation of Native American languages and language users within dynamic linguistic ecologies, then presents 4 ethnographic vignettes that illustrate the ways in which youth use their knowledge and claims to heritage languages to negotiate, cross, and occupy sociolinguistic borderlands. I conclude by suggesting the ways in which language planners and educators can reorganize received expectations about youth language practices and ideologies, thereby opening new possibilities for Indigenous language reclamation and youth self-empowerment.     

Space: the final frontier in the learning of science?

In Space, relations, and the learning of science, Wolff-Michael Roth and Pei-Ling Hsu use ethnomethodology to explore high school interns learning shopwork and shoptalk in a research lab that is located in a world class facility for water quality analysis. Using interaction analysis they identify how spaces, like a research laboratory, can be structured as smart spaces to create a workflow (learning flow) so that shoptalk and shopwork can projectively organize the actions of interns even in new and unfamiliar settings. Using these findings they explore implications for the design of curriculum and learning spaces more broadly. The Forum papers of Erica Blatt and Cassie Quigley complement this analysis. Blatt expands the discussion on space as an active component of learning with an examination of teaching settings, beyond laboratory spaces, as active participants of education. Quigley examines smart spaces as authentic learning spaces while acknowledging how internship experiences all empirical elements of authentic learning including open-ended inquiry and empowerment. In this paper I synthesize these ideas and propose that a narrative structure might better support workflow, student agency and democratic decision making.     

Between Fiction and Reality: Maps and Cartographic Logic in the Works of Peter Sís

This article examines the use of maps in the works of Czech author- illustrator Peter Sís in order to consider the role that cartography plays in the construction of four of his biographical picturebooks: Follow the Dream: The Story of Christopher Columbus (2003/1991), Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei (1996), The Tree of Life: A Book Depicting the Life of Charles Darwin, Naturalist, Geologist and Thinker (2003), and The Pilot and the Little Prince: The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (2013). The profusion of maps found in Sís’s biographical picturebooks expresses an understanding that the exploration of identity is intimately linked with the exploration of the spaces in which that identity is formed. The maps represent three basic functions for Sís: first, he uses maps to situate the reader in a specific time and place; second, maps are elements that initiate adventure; and third, the profusion of maps, combined with other textual elements, raises a question that runs through all of Sís’s work regarding the limits of representations of reality. The article illustrates the three functions by presenting a walk through the pages of the four chosen picturebooks, describing and analysing the different types of maps that Sís uses.     

“Without Manifest,None of the Book Would have Happened”: Place,Identity, and the Positioning of Canadian Adolescent Readers as Literary Critics

This article explores the interconnections between young adult fiction and young adult readers’ constructions of place within two contemporary texts. It employs a qualitative, multiple case study design, and utilizes discussion groups, semi-structured interviews, and the creation of place-journals to interpret some of the ways in which several young adult readers, from two contrasting Canadian communities (rural/urban), respond to how place and place-identity are construed within two young adult fiction texts: Tim Wynne-Jones’ Blink and Caution and Clare Vanderpool’s Moon Over Manifest. Drawing on geography theory and ecocriticism, it argues that the participants’ interpretations of place align with the theories of place put forth by cultural geographer Doreen Massey and ecocritic Lawrence Buell. In doing so, it illustrates how the participants reflected on place, inside and outside of the chosen texts, as geographers and ecocritics would have done. The methodological approach moves beyond strictly textual analysis to privilege the voices of adolescent Canadian readers, positioning them as critical interpreters of place.     

Beyond the “Pragmatic Acquiescence” Controversy: Reconciling the Educational Thought of Lewis Mumford and John Dewey

This article provides a reconsideration of the intellectual altercation between John Dewey and Lewis Mumford in the 1920s, and a sketch of some educational implications that follow this reconsideration. Although past scholarship has tended to focus on ways in which the altercation obscured similarities in their thought, we consider whether important differences were also obscured, particularly regarding their outlook on science and technology, their potential place in society, and their ideas about the best means to positive social change. We also consider how these differences might play out in philosophy of education/educational practice, concluding that Mumford's commitment to regionalism can augment Dewey's philosophical vision while also helping deal with pressing contemporary social and educational needs.     

Remembering “A Great Fag”: Visualizing Public Memory and the Construction of Queer Space

This essay examines how public memory is visualized in the statue to Canada's “gay pioneer,” Alexander Wood. By analyzing three viewing positions of the statue—the official democratic memory, traditionalist countermemory, and camp countermemory—I argue each position enacts a distinct form of remembering Wood with implications for both materializing queer memories and how space and identity are understood in the city. Based upon these visualizations, I extend arguments for how rhetoricians critique memory texts and contribute to defining “queer public memory” in light of this statue.