Descendants of “Ruth:” black Girls Coping Through the “Black Male Crisis”

This article presents the complex relationship between how black male and female identities have been constructed dichotomously in response to the gender framed “crisis” in black America. The ethnographic research study was conducted in an secondary African American History course, located in an urban school district in the southern portion of the United States. A case study of one black female student in a class of fourteen black male students was developed to deconstruct opposition and the use of resistance and empowerment by the female student. The classroom interactions among the male students, teacher, and Nicole were presented and analyzed from Nicole’s perspective. Analysis centralizes how Nicole interprets the class community, social interactions, and language used reflecting the needs of the African American males at the expense of her own social, cultural, and gender identity.     

A Review of “Teaching the Bible Through Popular Culture and the Arts”

Pope Francis incarnates a praxis of encounter in an age of polarization. For Francis, encounter entails displacement, dialog, and discernment. Relational pedagogy illuminates the fecundity of relationships between the teacher and student at the heart of education. Nel Noddings, preeminent proponent of relational pedagogy, grounds an ethics of care in the mother–child relationship and Levinasian encounter. Noddings points toward the application of encounter in education. The hyper-individualized, commodified, and technocratic culture of Catholic higher education today is a formidable challenge to a pedagogy of encounter. However, indigenous ways of teaching and learning offer pedagogical practices for realizing encounter.     

“Solid All the Way Through”: Margaret Mahy's Ordinary Witches

In The Haunting, The Changeover, and The Tricksters, Margaret Mahy fuses supernatural iconography of witchcraft and magic with images of ordinary and domestic adolescence. This article argues that Mahy's fantastic realism illuminates aspects of female teenage experience through a blend of myth, fairy tale, folklore, and history, as well as conventional representations of adolescent development and archetypes of young adult literature. The heroines are ordinary witches who find freedom, empowerment, and sexual knowledge in their magical identities but who also remain firmly positioned as schoolgirls, daughters, and sisters. Although possibilities of excess or black magic are implied by the author's use of witches, such implications are contained by frameworks of real and domestic ordinary life, and this article concludes that witchcraft is a motif that Mahy manipulates in order to describe growing pains, developing sexuality, and an intriguing form of female power.     

“Communicate Through the Roof”: A Case Study Analysis of the Communicative Rules and Resources of an Effective Global Virtual Team

Challenges to effective collaboration are magnified when work teams are composed of geographically distributed members. Team members separated by time, distance, and culture often struggle with issues of trust, conflict, and potentially divisive subgroups. With global virtual teams becoming increasingly common in organizations, it is important to understand how to minimize such interactional difficulties. This study examines rules and resources that members of a corporate global team draw on to structure their interactions. In this case study, team members draw on highly ritualized actions prescribed by their software development process and their enacted values to mitigate their communication challenges.     

Through the Dąbrowski Lens: A Fresh Examination of the Theory of Positive Disintegration

D?browski’s theory of positive disintegration is an emotion-centered, nonontogenetic, five-level theory of personality development where the experience of all emotions is essential for the process of growth. In this article, we examine the complexities of the three factors of development, which are essential to the notion of development within the theory of positive disintegration. We elaborate on the relationships between these factors, depict the processes and interactions in a new graphical framework, provide associated explanations, and support these by additional references to D?browski’s original writings.     

“Everyone is Just Mixed to Me”: Exploring the Role of Multiraciality in College Students' Racial Claims

Examining discourses of multiraciality through college students' claims about race offers helpful insights for educators striving to create equitable campuses for mixed race students. One area of discourse is the positioning of multiracial individuals as evidence for the social construction of race. Another critiques the multiracial movement, with its large college student base, for reinforcing the biological concept of race. This study investigates how a diverse sample of 40 undergraduate students from two U.S. West Coast institutions used multiraciality in varied ways to assert their claims about race and whether it mattered. Six patterns of multiracial discourse emerged in their racial claims. These findings suggest that the novelty of multiraciality allows it to be invoked to support various claims about the nature of race, namely whether race is biological, and the current and future relationship between mixedness and “post-racial” progress. Implications for research and practice also are discussed.     

Introduction to “Racial Inequality and Education: Patterns and Prospects for the Future”

Abstract

American society is in the midst of profound economic and demographic changes. At the same time that the racial and ethnic composition of American society is changing, disparities in income and wealth have grown wider and more pronounced than ever before. This article explores the ways in which race is implicated in the widening gaps in wealth and opportunity, and how these inequities impact educational achievement.     

Understanding College “Burnout” from a Social Perspective: Reigniting the Agency of Low-Income Racial Minority Strivers Towards Achievement

The Urban Review - Research indicates that health problems are becoming increasingly complex and prevalent among college students, while largely going without recognition or treatment. Low-income...     

At the Garden Gate: Community Building Through Food: Revisiting the Critique of “Food, Folk and Fun” in Multicultural Education

This essay takes up a re-evaluation of the ossified view of food events that have circulated in the canonical texts of multicultural education. While agreeing with the critique by progressive multiculturalists against a “touristic” approach to diversity, the author argues that such a conception of food-centered events in schools has obscured how such activities can foster multi-ethnic and multicultural community building. By looking at popular discourses such as newspapers which describe school gardens in particular, the author identifies how school-community partnerships centered on food are developing in multi-ethnic contexts to promote progressive ideals such as volunteerism, civic engagement and environmental awareness.     

Between a “ROC” and a School Place: The Role of Racial Opportunity Cost in the Educational Experiences of Academically Successful Students of Color

Despite numerous reform efforts, schools have not achieved equitable academic outcomes for all students. To better identify where schools have failed, research has sought to understand the complex role the school environment plays in mediating academic success, particularly for students of color. In this article, we forward the concept of racial opportunity cost and then use it as a lens to encapsulate the price academically successful students of color pay in their pursuit of school success. Through individual and focus group interviews, 18 African American and Latina/o students revealed nuances of the costs their academic achievement brought in the racialized, White-normed spaces that often permeated their school cultures. The purpose of this article is to provide theoretical support for the racial opportunity cost concept using existing interdisciplinary scholarship and to describe the racial opportunity costs that emerged from our analysis of student interviews.     

Interrupting the Pathway From Discrimination to Black Adolescents’ Psychosocial Outcomes: The Contribution of Parental Racial Worries and Racial Socialization Competency

Racial discrimination can lead to psychosocial problems for Black adolescents, including internalization (e.g., depression) and externalization (e.g., conduct problems). Black parents (N = 186; M_age = 42.9) of adolescents (ages 10–18) were assessed to investigate how parental worries and racial socialization competency (i.e., confidence, skills, and stress) contribute to the association between parental discrimination experiences and their adolescents’ psychosocial problems. Mediation analyses indicated that the total direct models with discrimination, worries, and problems had good fit, and that the addition of worry mediated the discrimination-problems association. Furthermore, racial socialization competency moderated the association between worry and problems, wherein greater competency was associated with less impact of worry on problems. Findings illuminate potential intervention targets for buffering discrimination’s influence on adolescents’ psychosocial functioning.     

Students’ Development of Representational Competence Through the Sense of Touch

Electromagnetism is an umbrella encapsulating several different concepts like electric current, electric fields and forces, and magnetic fields and forces, among other topics. However, a number of studies in the past have highlighted the poor conceptual understanding of electromagnetism concepts by students even after instruction. This study aims to identify novel forms of “hands-on” instruction that can result in representational competence and conceptual gain. Specifically, this study aimed to identify if the use of visuohaptic simulations can have an effect on student representations of electromagnetic-related concepts. The guiding questions is How do visuohaptic simulations influence undergraduate students’ representations of electric forces? Participants included nine undergraduate students from science, technology, or engineering backgrounds who participated in a think-aloud procedure while interacting with a visuohaptic simulation. The think-aloud procedure was divided in three stages, a prediction stage, a minimally visual haptic stage, and a visually enhanced haptic stage. The results of this study suggest that students’ accurately characterized and represented the forces felt around a particle, line, and ring charges either in the prediction stage, a minimally visual haptic stage or the visually enhanced haptic stage. Also, some students accurately depicted the three-dimensional nature of the field for each configuration in the two stages that included a tactile mode, where the point charge was the most challenging one.     

Improving Schools Through School‐Based Management: An Examination of the Process of Change∗

Data from twenty‐two case studies of schools in four North American school districts are examined to assess the process and outcomes of reform through school‐based management (SBM). The analysis is guided by a theoretical model that describes the process through which SBM can lead to school improvement. This model suggests that the formal change in governance reflected in a shift to SBM must first generate improvements in the decision making processes utilized at the school. Better decision making will enable schools to implement needed strategic and operational changes, and these together will help build an effective school culture. An improved culture, along with the strategic and operational reforms implemented at the school, will lead to changes in the behavior of staff members, which is necessary for there to be improvement in various outcomes that serve as indicators of school quality. The analysis of the case studies indicates that schools in our sample most frequently exhibited positive changes in two areas, namely, decision making processes and school culture. Strategic and operational changes were less likely to undergo positive change, as were individual behavior and school quality. However, the overall pattern of findings provides reasonable support for the general validity of the model. Furthermore, the data from this sample of schools suggest that SBM has considerable potential to elicit positive changes in schools. To help insure that such potential is realized, the findings indicate that school leaders must insure that all constituents have an opportunity to participate in school level decisions, that a vision regarding desired outcomes should be utilized to guide the implementation of strategic and operational changes, and that the process of change should be monitored in order to better identify problem areas and allow corrective action to be taken.

     

Students’ Reflections on the Benefits of a Financial Simulation Through “Thank You Notes”

Abstract

As an instructional strategy, simulations have become common in the field of education. While they have been effective at imparting knowledge and skills, not all simulation experiences meet their objectives. This study determined the effectiveness of a financial simulation, the Reality Store®, aimed at teaching financial literacy and life skills to youth. Data were collected from Thank You notes written by middle school students who had participated in the simulation. These notes were combined with data from post-simulation surveys to ensure trustworthy results. Overall, students were satisfied with the simulation experience and learned that: adult life is hard; children are expensive; and the need for budgeting and saving money is essential. Recommendations for teaching financial literacy and life skills using simulations are provided.     

Advocating for the Rights of the Child Through Family–School Collaboration

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2014 as the premier international human rights treaty focused on childhood rights and protections. In this article, we briefly review the 41 substantive principles embodied in the 54 Articles of the Convention and stress the need for educators, and specifically school psychologists, to work in concert with families to promote these premises through effective collaborative partnerships. Finally, we review examples of how the themes and positive ideology of the Convention can be enhanced through family–school collaboration infused into schooling practices within a multitiered service delivery framework to meet the learning and development best interests of the child.     

“Profound Levels of Learning” Through Brain-Based Teaching: A Tribute to Roland Barth

This article is a tribute to the writings of Dr. Roland Barth through a personal story spanning over two decades. It explores Dr. Barth's personal vision of an effective school through recent brain-based principles. It revisits Barth's axioms and uses recent implications from the neurosciences as new supporting evidence for their success in helping students and their teachers reach profound levels of learning in the classroom and in staff development experiences.     

Legacies of empire: from the “religions of China” to the “Confucian heritage” learner

ABSTRACT

In this article, we delve into the characterisation of international students as “Confucian Heritage” learners. To appreciate the implications of such iterative interpellation, we develop a genealogy of Sinology, which is here approached as the discursive effect of a colonial epistemic division of the world into free and democratic West and civilised and yet authoritarian East. In mapping the deployment of such heuristic in the management of international affairs during and after historical colonialism, we moreover demonstrate how the derivative characterisation of international students as “rote”, “dependent”, and inherently “prone to plagiarism” learners has been used to explain racism without race – that is, the epistemic exclusion of international students as a matter caused by factors other than race: lack of socially relevant cultural skills and communication barriers.