The corporatizing and privatizing of schooling: A call for grounded critical praxis

Our review of Henry Giroux's Stealing Innocence , Alex Molnar's Giving Kids the Business , and Kenneth Saltman's Collateral Damage describes how these authors assess the problems posed by contemporary corporate influences on public schools and considers the solutions they offer to counter those influences. We also examine Henry Levin's edited collection Privatizing Education , in which various authors address research on privatization in schooling. In our analysis of this book, we highlight the underlying themes of the wide-ranging chapters. Next, we critique all four books, focusing primarily on the books by Giroux, Molnar, and Saltman. We suggest that these three authors provide a somewhat totalized and ahistorical portrait of contemporary corporate influences on schooling and offer a solution that depends on teachers acting as democratic revolutionaries, though there is no realistic possibility that teachers today would take on this role. In contrast, we call for a critical theory and practice that is grounded both in a more complex understanding of the current historical context and also in a dialogical engagement with students, teachers, parents, and other community members.     

一项父母--子女活动的跨文化研究

近些年来，对学生课后活动家长的参与，及这类活动与学生在校学习的关系的研究吸引了众多教育研究者和学校、社会工作者的关注与兴趣(科克，2000)。摩鄂(2000)专题讨论了学生课外阅读中家长的介入，以及与学业成绩的关系。撒舍德等人(1997)分析了父母对学生在音乐、艺术、乐器演奏和欣赏，及对他们在学校的行为的影响。     

Professional Conversations and Professional Growth

A professional development program for 18 teachers was conducted over a two-year period. The participating teachers taught in intermediate schools (students aged 11–13) and secondary schools. The teachers worked collaboratively to improve their mathematics teaching, with encouragement to reflect on their practice but with minimal instruction from the researchers. Results, as defined by change in teaching practices, beliefs, and reflections, and student achievement, indicated that the collaborative program was particularly useful for experienced secondary school teachers but less useful for intermediate school teachers. We concluded that this type of professional development was most useful for teachers who had sufficient knowledge of mathematics; these teachers were able to focus on pedagogy and to draw connections between aspects of the mathematics they taught, without recourse to a specialist's advice. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Exploring indicators of engagement in online learning as applied to adolescent health prevention: a pilot study of REAL media

Educational technology research and development - Engagement is central to the effectiveness of online health messages and the related educational programs that aim to deliver these messages to the...     

Understanding Violence Against Women in Southeast Asia: A Group Approach in Social Justice Work

Using a liberatory group approach, women and men from three countries in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Cambodia, and among refugees of Burma, analyzed gender-based violence within their cultural contexts. Group members also discussed strategies for transforming systems supporting violence against women into structures of peace and gender justice. The author briefly describes the group model employed in the project, based on principles from liberation theory and feminist psychology. Themes emerging from the analyses generated by group members are also presented along with preliminary recommendations for social change at the personal, family, community, institutional, and societal levels.     

Discourse appropriation and category boundary work: casual teachers in the market

With the increasing casualisation of the teacher labour force, there is little written on the experiences of casual teachers and the challenges they face in brokering professional identities within constantly shifting and uncertain work contexts. Being a category bound casual teacher (a product of category boundary work) is a complex subject position. The aim of this article is to advance our understandings of the identity work inherent in casual relief teachers (CRTs) performativity. Anti-essentialist theories support this exploration of CRT subjectivities and processes of discourse appropriation. Using collective biography methodology as re-storied memory work, this article speaks back to neoliberal politics of casualisation. The stories draw attention to how both experienced practitioners and newly graduated teachers might ‘do’ category boundary work within the complexity of school politics as they navigate the uncertainty of gaining and maintaining employment in the Education market.