“Drag Me to the Asylum”: Disguising and Asserting Identities in an Urban School

In many inner-city high schools, students face violence on a regular basis. Authorities contain and curtail the use of weapons and other acts that threaten the individual and the functioning of the institution. These attempts to create a safe environment separate students, who are largely black working class and poor, into criminal and noncriminal categories, creating a labeling system that denies complex individuality. In this article, I demonstrate how teens reaffirmed and subverted harmless/dangerous labels by disguising themselves and creating personas through the use of clothing, graffiti, and poetry. These forms of communication allowed them to achieve anonymity, assert violent identities, and resist dehumanization. Ultimately, I analyze how poetry became a means to explore individual interests, fears, and fantasies. Through personification and metaphor, students articulated and elided psychological and physical constraints despite the monolithic labels of school. Their work often conveyed a subtlety that subverted institutional categories that otherwise reduced them to a single identity. Drag Me to the Asylum emerged from research conducted in and outside a large urban high school. From 1992 until 1997, I collected student poetry, listened to the stories of students and school staff, and taped over 100 hours of unstructured interviews with students and teachers.     

Scientific Education,Girls’ Schools and the Industrial Fund: a research note

During the 1950s a group of major companies launched the Industrial Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Education in Schools to build and equip laboratories in independent and direct grant schools. The Industrial Fund remains as one of the most impressive industrial initiatives in school education. It is sometimes criticised for either neglect or parsimony towards girls’ schools. This research note provides a brief account of the initiation and operation of the Industrial Fund. Although the Industrial Fund did provide fewer resources for girls’ schools this outcome stemmed from using the same and not different criteria for boys’ and girls’ schools and reflected the state of schools at the outset of the Industrial Fund.     

Accounting for diverse missions: can classification systems contribute to meaningful assessments of institutional performance?

Tertiary Education and Management - Although they have been developed for a variety of purposes, classification systems for tertiary or postsecondary education institutions offer a foundation for...     

The mediation of teaching and learning processes through identity artefacts. A Vygotskian perspective

The aim of this paper is to address the teaching and learning processes in schools from a Vygotskian perspective based on the notion of identity artefacts (IAs) which, for our purposes, consist of documents created by the learners about themselves, in which they try to capture all the things that make sense and are meaningful to them and which, subsequently, can be used by teachers to work on curricular and pedagogical content. We conceptualise the notion of the identity artefact from the broader notions of mediation and cultural artefacts. We also provide a critical analysis of some examples of IAs.     

Internet in the Classroom: Effects on Reading Comprehension,Motivation and Metacognitive Awareness

This study examined the potential of entertainment-education (E-E) for promoting engagement with a science issue. It was assumed that certain entertaining features of a media experience increase viewers’ perceived knowledge about an issue. Drawing on different theoretical models of E-E and on persuasive effects of narrative media messages, three hypotheses and one research question were assessed in a survey among 103 participants, who were shown a movie about genetic engineering beforehand. Results suggested that the higher viewers’ transportation, identification, and enjoyment were, the more they actually felt informed. Viewers’ degree of transportation, though, revealed to be sufficient to explain their perceived knowledge.     

Arguments from Analogy and Beyond: The Persuasive Artistry of Local American Civic Life

This essay analyzes a local civic debate in which the purposive, referential, and deliberative structures of an argument by comparison are rendered inoperative. In so doing, it advances our understanding of the rhetoric of exemplarity, widens our conception of democratic political contention, and directs scholarly attention to local forums of civic life, where rhetorical motive often gives way to pure persuasion, reasoned debate commonly slips into everyday talk, democratic deliberation frequently verges on radical dissensus, and emotional investments routinely culminate in affective events.