Cultural Persistence,Political Resistance,and Hope in the Community and School-Based Art of a Puerto Rican Diaspora Neighborhood

The authors describe themes of cultural persistence, political resistance, and hope in the art of one Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Midwestern United States. The themes are described across three contexts: community mural art, poetry from students in an alternative high school, and poetry from seventh grade students in a neighborhood middle school. In describing currents of Puerto Rican identity-making, resistance to gentrification, and struggles against local oppression that are evident in all three contexts, the authors argue that as they name their worlds, students commit acts of social justice through their perpetuation of historical and cultural themes situated within a tradition of community activism.     

Closing the Racial/Ethnic Gap Between Students of Color and Their Teachers: An Elusive Goal

This article examines minority teacher recruitment policies and programs of the past two decades and explores their influence on the racial/ethnic makeup of the teaching force in elementary and secondary public schools. The results show that while important progress has been made toward increasing the overall number and proportion of minority teachers in the public schools, those gains have been eclipsed by the rapid growth of the minority student population. As a result, the racial/ethnic gap between students of color and their teachers has actually increased over the years. The authors provide an overview of current minority teacher recruitment state policies and introduce the Teacher-Student Parity Index, a new metric for comparing the proportions of teachers and students from different racial/ethnic groups to gain a more textured understanding of the demographic reality of today's schools than is presently found in the literature. The authors conclude with recommendations for policy and research.     

PROGRESS TOWARD INTEGRATION

Public higher education has undergone a process similar to that in the national polity: a one-sided struggle by those with power to shape the institution to be more market driven, more focused on what will generate (non-state) revenues, more dominated by top administrators, and less concerned about the working class and people of color. This article examines these trends nationally with a focus on one case study, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the state's public higher education flagship university. First the article examines the concentration of power in fewer hands. Second it looks at the squeeze in the middle, the way cuts in state appropriations coincide with increases in tuition and fees. Third, it examines attacks on the working class and people of color through changing the rules on affirmative action, reducing support services for students of color and others, and shifting away from needs-based financial aid toward an increased reliance on so-called merit-based financial aid. Fourth, the article describes a vigorous attempt to contest these changes, which has won some victories and has certainly helped to raise awareness of the class issues involved in the transformation of public universities. Finally, the article assesses both the main trends and the efforts to contest those changes.     

La inteligencia artificial y su aplicación en la enseñanza

Podríamos decir que un educador es una «inteligencia natural» que moviliza sus recursos cognitivos para enseñar lo mejor posible. ¿Hasta dónde ha llegado hay la ciencia en ese ambicioso objetivo de copiar la mente humana? ¿Puede simularse la mente natural de un profesor experto y competente y situarla en un programa que eduque a través del ordenador? Este artículo introduce el tema y hace un balance de las posibilidades.     

Educational psychology within teacher education

In a context where the role of the teacher and teacher education are undergoing considerable change, the role of educational psychology in teacher preparation is discussed within a new framework. Educational psychology is now perceived as an inherent component within teacher training and professional development, having previously been an additional course and often considered irrelevant to teaching practice. The current paper discusses the relationship between educational psychology and teacher preparation. Educational psychology's contribution to teachers' professional development is delineated through the constructs of teachers' prior beliefs about teaching, reflective practice and self‐efficacy, while its contribution to the improvement of teacher–pupil interaction is viewed through the lenses of instruction theories, social and emotional learning, special educational needs and classroom management. It is argued that through a productive dialectic dialogue between educational psychology and education, educational psychology provides the knowledge defined by its field to be utilized by teachers, whereas at the same time, teachers gain a wider reconceptualization of their practice.     

Book Reviews

The present study explored the relationships of preservice teachers’ levels of commitment to teaching and their beliefs and perceptions of teaching as a career. Participants were undergraduate students enrolled in a teacher education program at a major university in the southeast. Sixty‐seven preservice teachers completed a survey in which they rated the importance of 20 factors for influencing their choice of career. Additionally, among the survey respondents, nine students were selected from three groups of preservice teachers for in‐depth interviews: (1) students who were currently considering teaching as a career choice, (2) students who were undecided about their future teaching career, and (3) students who were no longer considering teaching as a career. Overall, findings from this study revealed that preservice teachers’ understanding of their goal of becoming teachers and interpretations of their motivation for teaching were unique, yet the types of influences on their career choices were similar across participants’ stories.     

Change agency as a way of promoting pedagogical development in academic communities: a longitudinal study

ABSTRACT

In the face of organizational transformations, academics are given a role as informal ‘change agents’ in their discipline-specific communities of practice (DCoP). Simultaneous participation in pedagogically oriented communities of practice (PCoP) enables them to promote pedagogical development through brokering at community interfaces. This empirical study explores academics’ experiences of acting as informal change agents at the interfaces of DCoP and PCoP during an organizational transition phase of three years. The longitudinal data were collected with interviews of 13 academics from the fields of science and technology. The findings reveal a variety of pedagogical development activities related to shared meanings, practices, identities, and ways of belonging. The activities are aligned with the organizational transition process and enabled by collegial support. The findings indicate that lack of supportive formal leadership may terminate the informal development activities. The resulting model of change agency provides a novel approach to pedagogical development in higher education.     

Synchronic Tutoring of a Virtual Community

The role of tutors has changed over time, depending on models of learning and on the technology available. This article discusses the evolution of the tutor role and presents a new model concerning the tutoring functions in a synchronous virtual community. The definition of a virtual community starts from a theory of communities of learning and takes the features of the virtual environment into account. A project set in order to verify the tutors' features in a synchronous virtual community with an educational aim will be described in detail. The chats on-line are analyzed combining two analysis systems: (a) a category system describing the tutor's on-line functions; and (b) a discourse analysis exploring the dialogical and interactive dimensions of the tutor interventions. Results gathered from this study highlight typical features of tutoring on-line a virtual community. On-line tutorship appears to be a fluid, situated and dynamic process of meaning negotiation. Tutors are able to take over each others' specific roles and students act as tutors to each other.     

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
Has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else
It seems to him there are a thousand bars;
and behind the bars, no world.