Common Carrier

Sonny Kleinfield's The Biggest Company on Earth: A Profile of AT&T (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981—$14.95)

Roger Sherman, ed. Perspectives on Postal Service Issues (American Enterprise Institute, 1150 Seventeenth St. NW, Washington D.C. 20036—price not given, but available in handback and paperback formats)

Alan L. Sopkin's The Economics of the Postal System: Alternatives and Reform (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1980—$22.95)

John T. Tierney, Postal Reorganization: Managing the Public's business (Boston: Auburn House, 1981—price not given)     

The Agenda-Setting Function of National Versus Local Media: A Time-Series Analysis for the Issue of Same-Sex Marriage

This study compares the agenda-setting effects of national and local media on public salience in a market where an issue was both local and national with the effects in a market where it was primarily national. A new measure of public salience is also introduced. Results indicate that agenda-setting effects of local and national media are very different, with local media exerting a stronger agenda-setting influence when the issue is both local and national.     

Pistols and petticoats,piety and purity: To Wong Foo,the queering of the American monomyth,and the marginalizing discourse of deification

–Recently, the mainstream media have begun to include positive portrayals of gays and lesbians. This essay suggests that these positive portrayals demand critical scrutiny to determine how they redefine mainstream culture and how they serve to challenge and/or reinforce heterosexual bias. In an analysis of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, we examine how a narrative film negotiates the practice of drag and represents gay male “drag queens” through a progressive refiguring of the monomythic themes which inform the popular genre of Western film.     

In search of a purpose for school history

Taking into account the merits of anticipatory reflection, instructional planning is perceived as an important process in the professionalization of teachers. When implementing a complex instructional strategy such as collaborative learning (CL), a thorough preparation becomes even more important. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the quality of lesson plans focusing on CL implementation. Based on the literature, a scoring rubric with 17 criteria in three domains (instruction, organization and evaluation) was developed and applied to analyse 323 lesson plans of second-year pre-service teachers. The results reveal both strengths (e.g. designing appropriate learning tasks, developing adequate learning materials) and weaknesses (e.g. including social objectives, rules and agreements for collaborative work) in the lesson plans. The rubric proves to be a useful instrument both for research and practice-oriented reflection. The findings provide significant insights for teacher training with regard to CL implementation.     

Open‐mindedness and the University Curriculum

This paper discusses the conditions for selecting and structuring media education in the Swedish comprehensive school, with citizenship education at the core. With reference to John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, different conceptions of the nature of the public are elaborated, which also have inherent in them the tension between a modern and a postmodern interpretation of communication. These conceptions, called ‘communication discourses’, affect the selection and structuring of the content of media literacy when interpreted on the basis of curricula, syllabuses and teaching materials. In the paper communication discourses are also considered from a more overarching angle of socialization ‐ how education and media affect the individual's conceptions of his/her own and other individuals’ relationship to society. The question put here is to what degree differing (social) subjects ‐ identities defined on the basis of social class, gender, race and so on ‐ are found in the texts of the institutions: how are subjects presented and represented?

If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between ‘facts’ and the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussions.

(John Dewey, 1991: 3)

     

The situations bank, a tool for curriculum design focused on daily realities: The case of the reform in Niger

In the context of the curriculum reform in Niger, the authors describe the process of developing a situations bank which focusses on everyday life situations in Niger. The bank plays a central role in the formulation of new study programmes guided by the so-called “situated” approach. The authors also describe various issues that arose throughout the process.     

What are open universities for?

This article proposes a framework within which the question as to the purposes of open universities should be examined. It argues that the question has become submerged over time through the establishment of so many open universities that have become natural elements in a higher education landscape rather than remaining radical and innovative institutions. The article looks at a number of innovative distance teaching higher education institutions from the nineteenth century through to the contemporary period, and examines case studies in a wide international range. The outcome of the argument is that open universities should articulate their purposes within a discourse of development, and engage with the ethical and political questions as to how development is understood and advanced.     

Migrating metaphors: the globalization of flexibility in policy

Trends towards greater flexibility are to be found in the reform of post-school education and training around the globe. They are part of a wider profile of changes to workplaces and labour relations within which greater flexibility is pursued. This paper charts our journey, through which we have sought to locate flexibility as a globalizing and globalized policy metaphor. Drawing on recent policy texts, we illustrate the multiple meanings of flexibility. The latter is explored within the growing debates about the globalization of education policies and the metaphors which have been deployed to frame these practices. Finally, we outline the role that metaphors have in policy texts and the readings to which they are subject. We argue for metaphorical readings of the texts of flexibility and globalization as a way of countering attempts to inscribe certain meanings and in order to sustain policy openings.