The ``R's of School Reform' and the Politics of Reforming or Replacing Public Schools

Pressures to reform or replace public schools have flowed from a variety of social trends interacting with a growing perception that the schools are performing poorly or are inadequate for the demands of the new global economy they now face. Since the 1980s, many reforms have been attempted, but with little evidence of real improvement, especially in the education of poor and disadvantaged children. As a result, support is growing, at the very least in elite circles, for more radical reforms that would dramatically alter or even privatize public education. Public educators increasingly recognize the threats they face, but have trouble seizing upon the opportunities these threats present because they challenge fundamental aspects of the paradigm and ideology of public education to which they are wedded. This paper focuses on competing views of the policy problems and possible solutions public educators face in this situation, with particular reference to the experience of school reform efforts in the United States.     

Language and culture learning in higher education via telecollaboration

This article focuses on the ways of researching the process of designing, developing, and using telecollaboration (also known as online intercultural exchange) to facilitate the learning of both linguistic and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in higher education courses in different educational contexts in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Although telecollaboration would intuitively seem to be an ideal medium for learning another language and about another culture, extensive research has shown that this learning process takes years and faces many challenges. This paper situates the research on language and culture learning within the broader scope of language and intercultural education (see Pedagogies, 8(2), for a report of an interview with Michael Byram, one of the originators of the concept of ICC). A multinational example of the integration of telecollaborative networks in European university language classes collaborating online, the INTENT project, is described. In addition, a telling case, the Cultura model, implemented in the United States, Europe, and Asia, demonstrates a successful approach (with accompanying research) to telecollaboration for language and culture learning. However, there are also invisible factors and unanticipated challenges that teachers and learners need to understand in order to benefit from these telecollaborative environments; these are examined at the end of the article.     

Multiculturalism and its exclusions in New Zealand: the case for cosmopolitanism and indigenous rights

Abstract

In light of biculturalism's prevalence as a power-sharing agreement between New Zealand Maori and the Crown, any attempts to establish a state-sponsored project of multiculturalism have been treated by Maori with suspicion and controversy. This article presents cosmopolitanism as an appropriate solution to citizenship and cultural diversity in New Zealand that can coexist in harmony with the country's biculturalism that enjoys a constitutional-like status. A state-sponsored policy of liberal multiculturalism comparable to the legal species found in Western democracies, it is argued, would remain mutually exclusive and hostile towards biculturalism. This work concludes with a discussion on the theoretical applications of cosmopolitanism in New Zealand and how it could work empirically, in practice, without attenuating biculturalism.     

Where Theories of Mind Meet Magic: The Development of Children's Beliefs about Wishing

In two studies, we probed children's beliefs about wishing. In Study 1, we gathered initial data on 50 3- to 6-year-old children's concepts of wishing and beliefs about its efficacy, with both a semistructured interview and a variety of tasks. Results revealed considerable knowledge about wishing in young children, along with an age-related decrease in beliefs about its efficacy. Parents were not found to encourage differently the beliefs of children at different ages, nor were they found to begin actively discouraging such beliefs at any particular age. A moderate relation was found between environmental supports for wishing and children's beliefs in its efficacy. In Study 2, we continued to probe these issues and also address the nature of the broader conceptual context in which children situate their beliefs about wishing. Participants were 92 3- to 6-year-old children. Results of this study suggest that children may reconcile beliefs in the efficacy of wishing with knowledge about everyday mental-physical relations by situating these beliefs more within their emerging beliefs about magic than within their theories of mind.     

Discovering ethnic root behavior patterns: Towards an applied Canadian ethnic studies

This paper reports a method used with six groups of either students or community professionals, since 1977, to experiment with inductive ways of identifying “ethnic root” behavior patterns. Such patterns are hypothesized to develop beyond the immigrant generation as ethno-culturat patterns and are passed on in the context of socialization. An acculturative framework is proposed to denote benchmarks in the cultural accomodation of individuals and families, through several generations. Along with this framework, the evolution of an ethnic behavior pattern is graphically depicted.A method is developed to identify the pattern beyond the level of conscious remembrance; (it is assumed that adult immigrants will remember the patterns from the country of origin). Although the method is interesting as an avenue of investigation in its own right, it was developed primarily as a conceptual tool to assist community professionals to understand ethnic-related material in their daily work. Three uses of the framework are outlined. First, it draws attention, in the counselling situation, to the level of integration into Canadian society that the client displays. Second, by getting in touch with the personal ethnic pattern that they own, the practitioner him/herself begins to understand the nature of ethno-culture, and thereby appreciate the presence of it in others. Third, the method permits the practitioner to identify personal values of an ethno-cultural sort that can interfere with practice.