Further Attempts to Balance Liberal Virtues with Claims for Cultural Identity within Traditional Non-liberal Communities. A reply to Neil Burtonwood

In a recent paper, Neil Burtonwood (Educational Studies, 24(3), pp. 295–304, 1998) argued that 'recent attempts to balance the claims for political citizenship in a liberal democracy (liberalism) with the claims of cultural identity within traditional non-liberal communities...' (p. 295) are bound to fail; because 'liberalism cannot be neutral between ... cultures that value individual autonomy and those that do not', any 'attempts at reconciling' those two perspectives 'are bound to fail' (p. 303). His claim is that whatever position we begin from, there are real difficulties in achieving a reconciliation between the two perspectives, which he sees as exclusive. He refers to my papers (Singh, Educational Review, 47(1), pp. 11-24, 1995; Educational Studies, 23(2), pp. 169-184, 1997) where discussion method has been suggested as a means of reconciling the two positions. I still favour this method. This paper agrees with Burtonwood that liberalism is non-neutral in relation to liberal virtues such as equality and respect for persons, and no groups including liberal ones, should be privileged with respect to non-interference from the state. Although the paper acknowledges the value of 'Popperian critical method', it sees this method as very limited in respect of settling conflicts arising from comprehensive or world-views. Liberals and liberal societies have long realised this and have made attempts to accommodate cultural practices of traditional groups. Although the two positions exclude each other at a deep level, at a more mundane, every-day level, they share much that is common to both, which makes intercultural understandings possible. Education must capitalise on this and take us beyond a single framework. The difficulty is, of course, what do we do and how can we assess the situation, when frameworks themselves clash? The paper argues for dialogue, tolerance and accommodation within limits, set by respect for persons. This is not to ask liberalism to give up what is foundational to liberalism, as Burtonwood suggests, but to reinforce liberalism itself, as we show below.     

Refusing the Performance: Disrupting Popular Discourses Surrounding Latino Male Teachers and the Possibility of Disidentification

Popular discourses surrounding male teachers of color can serve to reify confining and problematic notions of masculinity in schools. Taking a critical approach to the study of gender and race, this article highlights the ways schools reproduce specifically Latino male identity through the cultural expectations of Latino male educators, as well as the gender performance of Latino male teachers themselves. Through an ethnographic case study of a middle school Latino boys’ program in the San Francisco Bay Area, I explore the ways one Latino male teacher navigates cultural pressures surrounding the enactment of Latino masculinity. This study uncovers the ways the scarcity of Latino male educators creates a pressure to perform specified notions of masculinity; particularly that of the domineering, hypermasculine disciplinarian. Furthermore, this study looks at embodied resistance to dominant discourses of Latino masculinity through deviant gendered performances, locating the body as a key site of struggle.     

Box 1. Polymer/Clay nanocomposites

Conclusion Novel polymer/clay nanocomposites can be prepared by varying two parameters; first by optimizing polymer to clay ratio and second by varying the processing techniques. An exploration in making the polymer/clay nanocomposites with different clays, surfactants and polymers is a continuing subject of research and interest to both academia and industry.     

Novel Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Infants: Evidence for a Bilingual Advantage

Previous studies revealing that monolingual and bilingual infants learn similar sounding words with comparable success are largely based on prior investigations involving single‐feature changes in the onset consonant of a word. There have been no investigations of bilingual infants' abilities to learn similar sounding words differentiated by vowels. In the current study, 18‐month‐old bilingual and monolingual infants (n = 90) were compared on their sensitivity to a vowel change when learning the meanings of words. Bilingual infants learned similar sounding words differing by a vowel contrast, whereas monolingual English‐ and Mandarin‐learning infants did not. Findings are discussed in terms of early constraints on novel word learning in bilingual and monolingual infants.     

Diversity,Disadvantage and Differential Outcomes: An analysis of Samoan students' narratives of schooling

Social justice discourses, particularly those attentive to the politics of difference, suggest that the perspectives of least-advantaged groups need to be taken into account when endeavouring to realise social justice in education for these groups. In this paper, we analyse narratives on schooling produced by one cohort of least-advantaged students, namely, Samoan students attending state-designated disadvantaged secondary schools in Queensland, Australia. Specifically, the narratives of educational disadvantage provided by Samoan students are analysed. The focus is on 'the what' (the knowledge to be transmitted) and 'the how' (the teacher–student relations) of pedagogy in state-designated disadvantaged schools. Attention is paid to the contradictory and ambivalent discourses inherent in these narratives, particularly in terms of realising socially just pedagogic practices and outcomes.