Do swans really eat fudgesicles? (the picture book and child drama)

The city had never before and has never since witnessed such a celebration as that which greeted the adventurers on their return from the battle with Humbaba. A holiday was declared. All work ceased. Feasts were laid out everywhere, and the people went up and down the streets carrying standards and bright banners. The young and the old gathered in the family house and sat crosslegged while the two heroes told the story repeating it again and again and answering all the questions that were asked. Singers immediately made up long songs about the adventure; dancers acted it out; and scribes laboriously engraved it on stone, or pressed the words and letters into tablets of wet clay. Runners carried the clay tablets from city to city...Robert Barton and David Booth are respectively program consultant for the arts, Ministry of Education, Province of Ontario and drama consultant for the Borough of York in Metropolitan Tornoto. They are coauthors ofNobody in the Cast, a drama text for students;Film, a student handbook on the cinema and, soon to be publishedColours, an imaginative look at literature and language for 8–12 year olds.     

The International Adult Literacy Survey: What Does It Really Measure?

The paper evaluates the work of the International Adult Literacy Survey as reported in OECD 1997. It assesses its contribution to understanding literacy in terms of the perspective of the New Literacy Studies. It outlines this perspective as a basis for a critique that is mostly concerned with the validity of the test. Three criticisms of the survey are made: that it provides only a partial picture of literacy; that culture is treated as bias; and that the test items do not represent the real-life items as claimed. Finally, the paper concludes with an overall evaluation of what the IALS achieves in terms of its own aims.     

The pragmatics of payment: adventures in first-person economy with Bill Maurer

Bill Maurer, Dean of the School of Social Sciences, Professor of Anthropology and Law, and Director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, all at the University of California, Irvine, has recently joined the Journal of Cultural Economy editorial team. Here, we reproduce an interview with him by Lauren Tooker from September 2014.     

美国民俗学/非物质文化遗产保护中的“本真性”问题

在美国,"本真性"这一概念是一个精致而复杂的建构,是民俗工作和文化自身中定义合法性的核心。假定"本真性"是民俗学理性研究数十载的成果以及学术推论,它也可被视作一些民俗学者及其拥护者发明和部署的一种策略,以便将物质素材、社区和与中产阶级的精致性、政治意识形态、商业实体和大众传播机制相关的实践活动进行恰当的定位。和直观的或"自然的"不同,本真性本身是人为制造的。尽管这一概念符合一些学者和活动家的需要,但是当被僵化地使用时,本真性也对功能性的概念提出质疑,即传统行为实际上如何为个人和社区服务。在美国语境中,什么是"本真性"明确和暗含的标识?美国的本真性概念是否太过狭隘和条框化?在面对21世纪的文化保护与实践问题时,在全世界对非物质文化遗产的标识有一种共识时,美国民俗学者是否能够或者是否应该找到办法调整本真性的理念?     

Blogging pragmatics and pedagogy: An adventure in faculty development

As university faculty are increasingly called upon to ‘do more with less,’ particularly to teach more students with fewer resources, technology can provide viable solutions to pedagogical dilemmas. Faculty developers are frequently tasked with introducing faculty to or coaching them in the use of technological solutions. With respect to blogs, the typical show-and-tell approach to technology awareness that our faculty development center uses seemed inadequate, given the complexity of blog design, implementation, and maintenance. Instead, we found the best way to instruct university faculty in the use of blogs is to give them an opportunity to participate in a blogging community as part of a Course in College Teaching (CCT). We experimented with two different approaches in two different sections of our CCT. This paper reports on the current blogging culture in higher education, describes our specific context for utilizing blogs, shares implementation decisions and learning affordances, and forwards a set of ‘lessons learned.’