Cable and New Media

Mary Alice Mayer Phillips' CATV: A History of Community Antenna Television (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972—$9.75)     

Ideal knowing: logics of knowledge in primary school curricula

This paper is written to draw attention to the ideal knower and the logic of knowledge embedded in curricula. New logics and new knowers, I argue, are conjured with the hope they will be capable of succeeding in curriculum designers’ imagined future. I frame this discussion in terms of debates about the place of knowledge in the sociology of education. Knowledge and knowers are produced together in curriculum, and it is useful to keep them together in studying classrooms. The bulk of the paper is a detailed comparison of two curricula written for the Australian state of Victoria. I will show that one – the 2000 Curriculum Standards Framework, second edition – follows a logic of truth. The second – the 2007 Victorian Essential Learning Standards – follows a logic of realisation. These contrasting logics require and instantiate quite different types of knower.     

Social-emotional effects of early childhood education programs in Tulsa

This article assesses the effects of Tulsa, Oklahoma's early childhood education programs on social-emotional outcomes, examining teacher ratings of children's behavior from the Adjustment Scales for Preschool Intervention and a measure of attentiveness using fixed effects regressions with propensity score matching. The sample includes 2,832 kindergarten students in 2006, of whom 1,318 participated in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) pre-K program and 363 participated in the CAP of Tulsa County Head Start program the previous year. Program participation was associated with lower timidity and higher attentiveness for TPS pre-K alumni and a marginally significant reduction in timidity for Head Start alumni. Results were similar for the free lunch-eligible subsample. We conclude that high-quality, school-based preschool programs can enhance social-emotional development.     

Promising Findings on Preschoolers’ Emergent Literacy and School Readiness In Arts-integrated Early Childhood Settings

An approach to early childhood education that integrates visual and performing arts throughout the preschool curriculum—Art as a Way of Learning—was implemented in a program (Promoting and Supporting Early Literacy through the Arts) designed to improve the emergent literacy and school readiness of at-risk young children in community-based preschool settings. A quasi-experimental pre-post treatment-only design was used to explore this program’s potential effects in a real-world setting. Preliminary results revealed improvements in young children’s emergent literacy on a number of targeted and standardized measures after participation in the program. This arts-integrated approach to the teaching of and learning in young children shows considerable promise and warrants a rigorous test of its effects.