Pedagogy,Patriotism, and Democracy: On the educational meanings of 11 September 2001

In this article, I examine the social and pedagogic context of the 11 September tragedy. Although a good deal has been written about the national and international politics of 11 September, I focus on the most local of levels: the complicated ways in which 9/11 was experienced phenomenologically by teachers such as myself, and on the little known effects it had on pedagogy and on the urge to have schools participate in a complicated set of patriotic discourses and practices that swept over the United States in the wake of the disaster. Given this focus, parts of my analysis are personal, while others parts are more institutional and ideological. I describe one instance in which the 'compulsory patriotism' that arose in schools after 9/11 had damaging effects. The discussion demonstrates that no analysis of the effects of 9/11 on schools can go on without an understanding of the ways in which the global is dynamically linked to the local. Such an analysis must more fully understand the larger ideological work and history of the neoliberal and neoconservative project and its effects on the discourses that circulate and become common sense in society. And no analysis can afford to ignore the contradictory needs and contradictions that this project has created.     

Teachers,School Boards,and the Power of Money: How the Right Wins at the Local Level

Abstract

This article examines national conservative political advocacy groups' growing interest in local politics, and analyzes how they form alliances and gain political power. Following efforts to restrict collective bargaining for Wisconsin public employees, Kenosha school board members' attempts to legally protect teachers' rights provoked concern from nationally financed conservative groups. This article discusses why a small-town school board election attracted such attention, and the significance of increased attention to the local by these national groups.     

The cultural politics of borrowing: Japan,Britain, and the narrative of educational crisis

In the recent debate over education reform, Japanese conservative politicians and intellectuals have selectively appropriated a particular crisis‐and‐success narrative of British education reform to de‐territorialize contentious policy changes. They assert that Britain achieved successful education reform by transforming the very same teaching practices and legal framework that currently afflict Japanese education. In so doing, the Japanese conservatives have legitimized the fundamental ‘reform’ of post‐war Japanese education through the combination of nationalistic and quasi‐market interventions in education. Drawing on a wide range of literature (literature on educational borrowing, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies), this article illuminates how the Japanese conservatives have appropriated external references to ‘British education reform’ to reconstitute the people’s common sense about the current state and the future course of Japanese education. In addition, we use this Japanese case study to advance the re‐conceptualization of the politics of educational borrowing from the perspective of non‐western ‘others.’     

Creating profits by creating failures: standards,markets, and inequality in education

Serious questions need to be raised about the educational ‘reforms’ now underway in a number of nations. Research largely on the English and American experience(s) are used to document some of the hidden negative effects of two connected strategies of reform: neoliberal policies for marketization and neo-conservative policies for imposing national curricula, national standards, and national testing. The combination of these reforms has led to an increase not a decrease in inequalities. Among its results are the production of both a ‘thin’ version of dominant pedagogical and curricular forms and of the social privileges that accompany them.     

The Interplay Among Children's Negative Family Representations,Visual Processing of Negative Emotions,and Externalizing Symptoms

This study examined the transactional interplay among children's negative family representations, visual processing of negative emotions, and externalizing symptoms in a sample of 243 preschool children (M_age = 4.60 years). Children participated in three annual measurement occasions. Cross‐lagged autoregressive models were conducted with multimethod, multi‐informant data to identify mediational pathways. Consistent with schema‐based top‐down models, negative family representations were associated with attention to negative faces in an eye‐tracking task and their externalizing symptoms. Children's negative representations of family relationships specifically predicted decreases in their attention to negative emotions, which, in turn, was associated with subsequent increases in their externalizing symptoms. Follow‐up analyses indicated that the mediational role of diminished attention to negative emotions was particularly pronounced for angry faces.