What's Meat Got to Do with It? Some Considerations for Ecologizing Education with Respect to Diet

Even in a society of meat‐eaters such as the United States, when diet is addressed in school at all, it is widely treated as matter of personal choice, the consequences of which are borne by individual consumers. Overlooked are myriad connections involved in human diet and the implications of consumption for other entities. In the first part of this essay, Suzanne Rice discusses ways in which diet, particularly meat‐eating, is connected to animal suffering, environmental harms including climate change and pollution, and risks to the health of agricultural workers and consumers. In the second part, she discusses ways in which education might be “ecologized” in efforts to help students gain insight into such connections. There are many ways to ecologize education, but regardless of how teachers proceed, they are likely to encounter not only simple ignorance, relatively unproblematic gaps in students' knowledge linked to youth and inexperience, but also willful ignorance, more problematic gaps linked to avoidance, manipulation, or rejection of evidence perceived as threatening.     

The words of children's television

The dialogue and nonverbal formal features of six children's television programs are described. The findings of this study have implications for models of young viewers' information processing when viewing, and possible effects of the medium on children's language development.     

The Integrating and Segregating Effects of School Choice

We evaluate the integrating and segregating effects of three distinct school choice programs in San Diego. We go beyond the traditional question of racial integration and examine the integration of students by test scores, parental education levels, and language status. In addition to measuring the net integrative effects of school choice, we also examine the underlying motives behind student participation in school choice programs and the limiting influence of supply-side constraints. Two of the programs that we consider are rooted in 1970s integration-based reforms that provide public transportation for program participants. The third program is a state-mandated, open-enrollment program that requires participants to find their own transportation to and from their choice schools. We find that the two programs with underlying integrative objectives do indeed integrate the district, but the open-enrollment program segregates the district along most dimensions. Provision of busing and geographic preferences appear to be important factors in promoting integration.     

Woodward Paths: Motorizing Space

This essay takes up the call for a rhetoric of distributed space by proposing a folksonomic rhetoric. Folksonomies, systems in which users may name any object, space, idea, or image any name they want, offer technical communicators new possibilities for how they work in network environments. As a way to explore the possibility of a folksonomic rhetoric, this essay examines 1 specific space, Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, as if it were a folksonomic space.     

New Media/Internet Research Topics of the Association of Internet Researchers

This study summarizes prior reviews of new media and Internet research, and the growth of the term Internet in academic publications and online newsgroups. It then uses semantic network analysis to summarize the interests and concepts of an interdisciplinary group of Internet researchers, as represented by session titles and paper titles and abstracts from the 2003 and 2004 Association of Internet Researchers conferences. In both years, the most frequent words appearing in the paper abstracts included Internet, online, community, social, technology, and research. The 2003 papers emphasized topics such as the social analysis/research of online/Internet communication, community, and information, with particular coverage of access, individuals, groups, digital media, culture; role and process in e-organizations; and world development. The 2004 papers emphasized topics such as access; news and social issues; the role of individuals in communities; user-based studies; usage data; and blogs, women, and search policy, among others.