CHRISTIAN PARTICULARITY DOES NOT DEPEND ON EXCLUSIVE TRUTH CLAIMS: TEACHING ENTHUSIASTIC WITNESS IN A PLURALISTIC WORLD

To educate for deep and responsible religious particularism, while at the same time laying a foundation for commitment to religious pluralism, means dealing with the nature of truth claims. Jesus Christ is an incomparable gift to the world, and the Truth revealed by him is of infinite value. It is a universal truth, and to educate for religious particularism means to proclaim that proudly, clearly, and convincingly. This fact should not, however, be reduced to an exclusive truth claim. To educate for pluralism is to be convinced that one has something of value that needs to be shared, but not to impose one system of truth on others because, without it, they are lost or damned.     

Letty M. Russell: A Feminist Liberation Approach to Educating for Justice

This article examines the Rev. Dr. Letty M. Russell's feminist liberation approach to educating for justice by reviewing the major themes in her writings. Educating for justice was rooted in Russell's life and ministry, namely, a sense of God's mission to reconcile and mend the world; partnership as sharing in God's mission to effect justice; and hospitality as a means of welcoming all to the table of fellowship and of life. Russell used an action/reflection model that is based in experience, draws on Scripture and theology, and works toward transformation. Her experience of being marginalized—as a Christian educator and then as a woman pastor in East Harlem where she learned firsthand how injustice and oppression marginalized her parishioners—developed into a concern for and solidarity with those on the margins of society. Letty Russell dedicated her life to achieving justice and celebrating the reign of God in our midst. In effect, educating for justice was at the core of Letty Russell's life and work.     

Just the Facts? The Separation of Sex Education from Moral Education

In this essay Sharon Lamb considers how progressives have begun to win the longstanding battle to shape sex education and what they have had to give up in the process. After framing the battle in historical context, Lamb uses discourse analysis to explore the hidden values in the “evidence‐based” (EB) curricula that progressives currently favor and that pass for neutral today. As her analysis reveals, EB curricula privilege three discourses — a discourse of science, a discourse of healthy choices (with an emphasis on individuals), and a discourse of efficacy — all of which are grounded in ideology and serve to legitimize certain kinds of knowledge while undermining other kinds. Lamb concludes by proposing eight tenets for the future of sexuality education, which are intended to displace the eight tenets codified by proponents of abstinence‐only‐until‐marriage sexuality education.     

Anxiety of performativity and anxiety of performance: self-evaluation as bad faith

ABSTRACT

Self-evaluation, a devolved, rigorous form of teacher inspection, has increasingly been promoted in educational circles as a way to balance both teacher autonomy and accountability. Such balancing acts help to alleviate anxiety around inspection, for the teacher who would otherwise face a visit from an inspector, and for the public who are concerned about self-evaluation being less objective. Using the Irish policy of self-evaluation, this paper will first explore the evidence-based approaches and the appropriation of a ‘language of evaluation’ that are inherent to so-called low-stakes accountability systems. In part, such mechanisms are used in order to alleviate anxiety. The anxiety that self-evaluation focuses on, however, corresponds only to aspects of teaching that are conducive to measurement, and therefore refers solely to what may be called an anxiety of performativity. Furthermore, its attempts to repress an anxiety of performativity ironically fails to acknowledge a more fundamental form of anxiety that teaching as a ‘performance’ involves. Using Sartre’s idea of ‘bad faith’, this paper will ultimately argue that teaching inevitably involves an element of anxiety that should not be repressed but rather should be lived and worked with well, something which self-evaluation in its current form fails to capture.     

The effect of vocabulary knowledge on novel word identification

The study investigated the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and novel word reading. Fourth-grade students were assessed on standardized measures of word identification, decoding, and receptive vocabulary, as well as on an experimental word identification measure using words that students in the fourth grade are unlikely to have seen before in print. In the experimental measure, pairs of words were matched on printed frequency and orthographic pattern (with a variety of spelling patterns represented), but differed in terms of the frequency of expected oral exposure for children (i.e., higher vs. lower). Results showed that students’ receptive vocabulary knowledge was significantly related to performance on both the standardized and experimental measures of word identification, even after accounting for the substantial amount of variance explained by decoding ability. Students performed better reading the words with higher expected oral frequencies on the experimental task than on those items with lower expected oral frequencies. The results point to the benefits, albeit modest, of oral word familiarity for reading words when they are first encountered in print and suggest that this top-down effect is not limited to exception words, as has been suggested, but has a wider scope.     

Validating Classroom Issues: Case Method in Support of Teacher Change

This article discusses the use of case methods in ateacher development setting. The participatingteachers were implementing an innovative four-yearsecondary mathematics curriculum. The cases underconsideration were vignettes of problematic situationsactually encountered by teachers as they workedtowards implementing the new curriculum. Originally,the cases were developed and presented as a way ofvalidating data gathered on the difficulties theteachers faced. However, the teachers' reactions tothe cases and the discussions and reflections thatfollowed suggested that the cases had played asurprisingly powerful role in helping the teachersacknowledge their classroom concerns and begin to dealwith these concerns.