“Who are your Friends?” Complexities in Multicultural Education

In this paper, I explore the experiences of fourth and fifth grade students engaged in Beyond Today, an urban after school program, that aimed to enact a social reconstructionist multicultural curriculum. The program gathered White, Black, and Latino/a youth to explore issues of discrimination and social justice and develop leadership towards social change. This paper focuses on the complex nature of students’ responses to a multicultural curriculum that foregrounded conversations about race and inequity. Students were seen to build ties of friendship across racial lines and develop activist skills of social critique. On other occasions, they maintained borders, distancing themselves from students of different races. After an overall review of the students’ varied reactions to the Beyond Today curriculum, I highlight specific vignettes that show how these tensions can simultaneously emerge within particular incidents. This research can be of use to teachers and teacher educators when envisioning and planning for student responses to multicultural curriculum.     

Constructions of mathematicians in popular culture and learners’ narratives: a study of mathematical and non‐mathematical subjectivities

In this paper, based on a project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council considering how people position themselves in relation to popular representations of mathematics and mathematicians, we explore constructions of mathematicians in popular culture and the ways learners make meanings from these. Drawing on an analysis of popular cultural texts, we argue that popular discourses overwhelmingly construct mathematicians as white, heterosexual, middle‐class men, yet also construct them as ‘other’ through systems of binary oppositions between those doing and those not doing mathematics. Turning to the analysis of a corpus of 27 focus groups with school and university students in England and Wales, we explore how such images are deployed by learners. We argue that while learners’ views of mathematicians parallel in key ways popular discourses, they are not passively absorbing these as they are simultaneously aware of the clichéd nature of popular cultural images.     

Media Nostalgia

Frank Buxton and Bill Owen's The Big Broadcast: 1920-1950 (New York: Viking Press, 1972---$12.95)

Summers' A Thirty-Year History of Programs Carried on National Radio Networks in the United States (1958: reprinted by Arno Press, 1971---$10.00)

Hello Again (Mr. Jay Hickerson, 6 Koczak Court, North Haven, Conn. 06473)

Mary E. Bickel's George W. Trendle: An Authorized Biography (Jericho, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1972---$5.00)

Joe Morella, Edward Z. Epstein, and Eleanor Clark's Those Great Movie Ads (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972--- $14.95)

Ron Goulart's Cheap Thrills: an Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972---$7.95)     

Celebrity Endorsements and Their Potential to Motivate Young Voters

Although scholars have long indicated concern regarding disaffected young voters, the 2004 presidential election tallied record turnout among this age group. This study explored how and why celebrity-endorsed, get-out-the-vote campaigns may have helped to persuade young voters aged 18 to 24 to participate in an election campaign by examining campaign influence on individual decision-making factors. During the fall semester of 2004, a convenience sample of 305 college students from introductory general education classes completed surveys assessing their political efficacy, involvement, complacency, and apathy. Findings indicated that receptivity to celebrity spokespeople predicted lower levels of complacency and higher levels of self-efficacy. Complacency had independent effects on involvement and self-efficacy. The results therefore suggest that these campaigns can potentially influence positive change in political engagement of the younger citizenry.     

Bringing the Text to Life and Into Our Lives: Jewish Education and the Arts

This article explores how arts-based learning can facilitate understandings of Jewish religious texts. Through practical examples drawn from our own research, from the worlds of dance, drama, and the visual arts in education, we demonstrate the ways in which arts can allow for the transmission of information and knowledge, as well as offer a “transformative” learning experience; a student can bring the text to life while bringing the text into his or her life. We stress the primary importance and centrality of sacred text within Jewish tradition and assert that the written text should serve in Jewish education as the starting point. The ultimate goal, however, is to enable learners' personal connection with texts. We argue that learning through the arts opens up opportunities for multiple shared interpretations of text, as well as accentuation of the “affective” dimensions of Jewish textual learning. By becoming more aware of the varied possible paths for generating learning activities, educators might choose learning strategies that enable an integration of both the cognitive and affective domains. The examples of Arts Reflective learning demonstrate possibilities for the structuring of “teaching towards transformation.”     

The National Network of Partnership Schools: How Research Influences Educational Practice

The National Network of Partnership Schools was initiated in 1996 to assist schools, districts, and states in developing comprehensive programs of school, family, and community partnership as part of their school improvement efforts. Members of the National Network are provided with tools and strategies to implement partnership activities that promote students' success. These tools and strategies are based on over 15 years of research conducted by Epstein and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. Through a discussion of the development of the National Network, this article illustrates how research can be used to inform and improve educational practice in schools, districts, and states. It does so by highlighting the center's research on family and community involvement conducted since 1987 with elementary, middle, and high schools; school districts; and state departments of education across the United States. This research generated the knowledge needed to establish the National Network of Partnership Schools, which presently works with over 1,100 schools, 130 districts, and 12 states to help them develop permanent and productive school, family, and community partnership programs.     

The Effects of Socio-scientific Instruction on Pre-Service Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy for Learning and Teaching Controversial Family Health Issues

This research investigates the effects of socioscientific instruction on pre-service teachers’ sense of efficacy in the teaching and learning of controversial family health issues. For this purpose, a total of 251 students from two teacher training colleges participated in the study and were randomly assigned as experimental and control groups. The experimental group was taught the contents of the controversial family health issues using socioscientific instruction approach and the control group was taught the same content using a more traditional approach. Quantitative data were obtained from both groups after responding to the ‘Teacher sense of Efficacy Scale’ as instrument used for data collection before and after the treatments. Analysis of covariance was used in data analysis of which the pre-treatment scores were used as covariates. Qualitative interviews were conducted with ten participants randomly selected from the experimental group before and after the treatment to deepen and elaborate the quantitative data. The quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that the integration of the socioscientific instruction have significantly affected the pre-service teachers’ sense of efficacy in favour of the experimental group that shows a more stronger sense of efficacy. It was concluded that the socioscientific instruction is significantly effective in changing the pre-service teachers’ weaker sense of efficacy to a stronger one in the controversial family health issues.