“Lord,Keep My Kids Safe”

很多人都说美国是民主的过度。但是,当几位黑人孩子要去白人学校上学的时候,他们的父母却要向上帝祈祷保佑他们。这是为什么呢?     

“It’s Everybody’s Job”: Youth and Adult Constructions of Responsibility to Take Action for School Change through PAR

The Urban Review - Participatory action research (PAR) with youth holds potential to spur social justice-oriented change due to its explicit orientation to transform systemic inequity. Whereas...     

“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.     

“A Question Everybody Danced Around”: Gay Men Making Sense of Their Identities in Christian Colleges

Despite broader social changes in attitudes and policies regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, the space available for gay students to develop and express their identities in Christian colleges provides only limited and fleeting relief because of the culture of heteronormativity central to their history and identity. Yet, in an era of enrollment competition in higher education, Christian colleges must navigate their traditional mission to preserve and advance the faith, changing cultural attitudes regarding LBGTQ people, and the financial realities facing contemporary institutions. This article draws from interviews with men who attended Christian colleges. First, we present their narratives to render the presence of LGBTQ people visible in these sites. Second, we seek to understand how these men made sense of their sexualities within educational cultures saturated with retention imperatives, institutional surveillance, and denominational ambivalence or hostility about LGBTQ persons. The men's narratives highlight the challenges they faced as “unfit subjects” (Pillow, 2004 Pillow, W. (2004). Unfit subjects: Educational policy and the teen mother. New York, NY: Routledge.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), their absorption of normative constructions of gender and sexuality governing their educational context, and the need for Christian colleges to better serve their gay students of faith.     

“This Group of Difficult Kids”: The Discourse Preservice English Teachers Use to Label Students

This study attempts to understand how achievement gap Discourse might be present in preservice teachers' (PSTs) Discourse about students they found challenging to teach. Using a Discourse analytic approach, the project considers: How do PSTs describe challenging students in their written reflections? Do PSTs draw on students' multiple identities? Findings reveal PSTs are taking up a Discourse prevalent in today's educational environment in which students, particularly ethnically and linguistically diverse students, are discussed in terms of inadequacy. PSTs typically describe students in terms of a single label, rather than as having multiple identities. Implications include that PSTs might enter teaching with a limited view and incomplete understanding of students and that even a teacher-education program aimed at pushing PSTs to question their assumptions about students might be reifying a systemwide Discourse that identifies students based on labels—sometimes deficit-oriented labels—rather than fuller understandings of students.     

“Methods of Inquiry”: Using Critical Thinking to Retain Students

In the late 1980s a large northeastern university implemented a critical thinking course for undergraduate students. Combining insights from cognitive psychology and philosophy, this class was designed to give students concrete strategies to promote self-regulated learning and ensure academic success. The analyses in this study are based on university warehouse data for three consecutive entering freshmen cohorts, resulting in a sample of 9,665 students, 1900 of whom had successfully completed the course. Results show these students are more likely to be retained or to exit successfully by the second, third, fourth, and fifth year as compared to those students who do not complete the course.     

Reaching Back Strategy: Using Mirroring,Trust, and Cultural Alignment in a Service-learning Course to Impact Hispanic Parents’ Perception of College—A Case Study

Thirty-four undergraduate public relations majors participating in a problem-based service-learning project at a Hispanic-Serving Institution executed an event that attracted more than 100 low-income Hispanic families to campus. The purpose was to help parents prepare their children for college. From primary and secondary research, the students identified 3 dimensions for reaching the targeted audience—mirroring, trust, and cultural alignment—which were dubbed the Reaching Back strategy. Our purpose is to describe how the Reaching Back strategy works, the benefits of problem-based service-learning projects for both students and community participants, and how this strategy can be replicated.     

“Gymnasts Are Like Wine,They Get Better With Age”: Becoming and Developing Adult Women’s Artistic Gymnasts

Women’s artistic gymnastics is commonly understood to require early entrance and intense training during childhood. Most gymnasts retire before reaching adulthood. In recent years, the gymnast population at the highest level has “aged.” In this article, we adopt a socio-pedagogical perspective to explore the training contexts, pubertal development, and associated learning 10 older elite gymnasts reported. We develop a cultural perspective of gymnast development and show that transitioning through puberty allowed the gymnasts to extend their careers. Support from their coaches and parents, self-reflective time, and genetic predispositions facilitated the transitioning. Through this, gymnasts gained control over self, body, relationships, and performance. In conclusion, we provide implications for gymnast development practice.     

A Review of: “Jewish Lives,Jewish Learning: Adult Jewish Learning in Theory and Practice by Diane Tickton Schuster (UAHC Press, 2003)”

This articles explores how a group of women in the Former Soviet Union grapple with questions of Jewish identity and Jewish “authenticity” as they participate in adult Jewish learning program that employs methods of feminist pedagogy and transformative learning. The study reflects on areas of dissonance between the transformational learning process and the tenacity of the women's world assumptions that are shaped by background, history, and worldview. While the learning process seems to be prompting these women to seriously and critically reflect on and reframe their self-understanding as learners and as Jews, their limited content-knowledge combined with a tentative sense of personal authority about Jewish life seems to impede their ability to harmonize their learning with a clear sense of what constitutes authentic practice of Judaism.