Power, Language, and Literacy in The Great Gilly Hopkins

To compensate for her feelings of anger and helplessness over her mother’s abandonment and subsequent displacements, the foster child Gilly Hopkins seeks power and agency through the primary means at her disposal: through the use of language and fairy tales. She constructs a Cinderella fantasy of an idealized mother who will rescue her. She also resonates strongly with the Rumpelstiltskin story, as it is a story about the power of language, and highlights a dynamic of exploitation that seems familiar to her. Through relationships with William Ernest, Trotter, Mr. Randolph, and Miss Harris, Gillie learns, however, to move beyond the habit of exploiting others as objects, and to experience the beauty of language for its own sake. Her emotional and psychological development can be charted through her changing relationship to the imaginative and expressive potentialities of language. Most importantly, literacy becomes not a basis for illusory control and manipulative power, but for the kind of human relationships that make possible the building of a self. Language becomes a rich inner resource, not simply a means for power over others.

The Principal's Apprentice: Mentoring aspiring school administrators through relevant preparation

This emergent case study explores a special case of mentoring about the value and relevance of graduate administration programmes for professionals aiming to lead schools. It describes a questionnaire that was piloted with a graduate education group and then completed by beginning school administrators who were also interviewed. A graduate professor and student in a leadership programme collaborated on this study in order to more fully represent crucial perspectives. Their analysis of the questionnaire data suggests that some administrative tasks and duties (e.g., mediating school conflicts) are considered of the utmost importance for new school leaders to know. Topics covered by this emergent analysis of administrator preparation and related reform issues include a veteran teacher's story, major climate issues, literature on school administrator preparation that elucidates mentoring themes, insights from new school administrators, and examples of graduate programmes that include relevant education internships. Discussion focuses on concepts and examples of educational internship solutions and initiatives. The authors conclude with a call for programmatic improvement from the perspective of challenges that will need to be addressed to ensure change.     

A future to voice? Continuing debates in feminist research with youth

This paper explores the concept of voice in relation to a research project, now in its developing stages, in which I examine how rural youth imagine their futures in the context of a career‐based learning programme called The Real Game. The paper enters into conversation with feminist post‐structural scholars of education in order to situate the problematic of voice within broader epistemological and ethical questions regarding representation and responsibility in research. Exploring the limits and possibilities of the proposed study, and of critical feminist ethnographies more broadly, the paper is divided into three sections: speech, representation, and ethics. Questions of voice serve as an entry point into a larger interrogation of the interrelations of theory, epistemology, and ethics in research practice. The study's specific focus on imagined futures provokes questions about how relations of time shape the production of youth subjectivities and feminist scholarship.     

Exams tested by Covid-19: An opportunity to rethink standardized senior secondary examinations

PROSPECTS - The global Covid-19 pandemic is testing the responsiveness of school systems. Extensive discourse about disruptions to the standardized examinations students take in their final year of...