Voting Power on School Governing Boards: The Countenance of Proportionality

Acknowledging the realities and responsibilities of power is a precondition to using it wisely. The claim that there has been a shift in power away from the formal providers of education towards the individual consumer is one that needs closer investigation. This paper uses the mathematics of cooperative multiperson game theory to analyse the relative strengths of the various representative groupings on three different models of school governing bodies. Only a basic knowledge of mathematics is assumed as the various coalitions are analysed and compared, and conclusions drawn about the relative power of major and minor factions. Voting strategies, suggested payoffs for winning coalitions and implications for committee-forming are fully examined. The paper is based on the author's direct experience of school amalgamations in the border region of Ireland. An extended consideration of the theory of voting in multiperson games can be found in his book Decision-Making and Game Theory (2002, Cambridge University Press).     

Activity frames and complexity thinking: Honoring both public and personal agendas in an emergent curriculum

This article which is largely conceptual in nature, explores the possibilities provided by embracing complexity thinking that are attentive to, but not confined by, externally imposed curriculum mandates while simultaneously honoring the interests and needs of individual students and the classroom collective. From this perspective, the ideas of negotiating authority, adopting a holistic view, engaging in participatory democratic practices, and using a project-based approach to learning are examined. In doing so, the concept of ‘activity frames’ is introduced and developed as a useful way of responding to curriculum mandates while being responsive to and respectful of individual and collective student learning agendas.     

Killing off the Competition

In August 1929, James W. Upton, Editor of the republican newspaper, Honesty, discovered that that Seán Lemass and Gerald Boland, the Secretaries of the Fianna Fáil party, had issued a circular to their members that blackballed Honesty and promoted the sales of The Nation, a publication that Fianna Fáil's leader, Éamon de Valera, had recently brought under his control. The event that triggered this action was Upton's decision to publish an article critical of the Fianna Fáil leadership, something Upton did in the interest of freedom of speech. Upton, who was sympathetic to the Fianna Fáil cause, dubbed Lemass and Boland, ‘the Dublin Junta’ and accused them of launching an underhand attack to further their own careers and party ambitions. Fianna Fáil retaliated in the pages of The Nation, declaring that Honesty was no longer a republican journal and thereby destroying Honesty's readership. An exploration of these events reveals political duplicity and a fundamental misfit between the views of a republican idealist and hardheaded professional politicians. Upton believed that republicanism without journalistic freedom was no republicanism at all, whilst Lemass and Boland focused on building a disciplined party machine intent on suppressing dissent, within and without of its ranks.     

Pedagogy of the Spirit: Comparing Evangelical and Latter-day Saint Youth Self-Reported In-Class Spiritual Experiences

This study statistically analyzes data from 756 evangelical and Latter-day Saint youth regarding their perceived in-class spiritual experiences of twenty items related to Christian theology. The data indicates similar spiritual outcomes between the two groups, with no statistically significant differences between eleven of the twenty spiritual experience items. However, evangelical participants most highly reported affective spiritual outcomes and least commonly reported action-oriented spiritual outcomes, while Latter-day Saint youth most highly reported action-oriented spiritual outcomes and least commonly reported cognitive spiritual outcomes. Action-oriented spiritual outcomes constitute the greatest difference between the two groups. We explore how the differences between evangelical and Latter-day Saint pedagogy and theology might account for these differences.