Hail the Conquering Hero: Remembering the Troops in The Hurt Locker,Inglourious Basterds and Avatar

Three recent movies about war are examined. All have been honored by critics and welcomed by audiences. The three movies are very different from one another. They reflect different ways of thinking and feeling about war. More specifically, they represent ways we relate to the troops we send into battle and our concerns about whether we have done and are doing the right things.     

Angels With Dirty Faces: Who Invited Slumdog Millionaire and The Visitor?

Two recent movies, The Visitor and Slumdog Millionaire, exemplify very different ways of dealing with the pains of inequality in modern life. Popular culture celebrates the successes of meritorious individuals from backgrounds of victimization and oppression, but it struggles to find positive themes when social arrangements continue to victimize other meritorious individuals. We may appear to transcend our past inequalities, but we still have present inequalities to struggle against. Similarities to recent political events, the unsettled issues of immigration, the fear of Muslims, and the election of a multiracial President are noted.     

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As we travel through life, our journeys offer myriad observations, relationships, and experiences. By chance and choice, our journeys align closely with and are guided by other people's journeys; from these associations we form a sense of our individual cultural characteristics and self-identities. Simultaneously, our journeys follow courses that remain distant and distinct from other people's paths; yet our observations and interpretations from afar also contribute strongly to the formulation of individual cultural characteristics and self-identities. Throughout life's dynamic encounters and events, each of us continues to formulate, reformulate, and negotiate our self-identities as we traverse what seems like parallel paths-journeys that appear distant and distinct from other journeys, yet encountering equally powerful influences shaping our thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Rarely are we afforded the opportunities to investigate these parallel paths and communicate honestly with individuals who seemed far away and foreign; seldom can we truly experience multiple perspectives and cross-cultural relationships in our own journeys. This article presents the unique intersection of two parallel lives and the authentic exchange of multiple perspectives reported through narrative or personal life histories. The authors serendipitously met at a National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) conference and by chance shared their childhood stories. The authors were raised in similar environments but from opposite lifestyles -lifestyles that paralleled one another and contributed significantly to their individual understanding of cultural characteristics and self-identity. Here they share their histories spanning 50 years while providing insights and guidelines for teachers and teacher educators to learn from our pasts and reshape our futures.     

Judgments Regarding Appropriate Child Supervision to Prevent Injury: The Role of Environmental Risk and Child Age

Parents, social service workers, and medical personnel failed to differ in the amount of time they estimated that children of 11 differing ages should be left without adult supervision within 5 different supervision domains. More hazardous circumstances dramatically reduced the amount of time respondents said children should be left unsupervised. Amount of unsupervised time increased with age, with clear developmental cutoffs that varied by level and type of risk. When the moderate center of the distribution was examined, 3 clear areas of consensus emerged. For most domains, constant supervision was recommended for preschool children. For early elementary school children, nearly constant (0–5 min without supervision) or close (0–15 min without supervision) supervision was recommended in safer locations, with constant supervision still recommended in high-risk situations. Only with older children was there an absence of consensus regarding supervision. The implications of these results for future injury prevention research are discussed.