Journals

Home Broadband 2008

The title of the series in which this book is published is “Education, Politics and Culture” which suits the lively and politically committed content very well. Fundamentally, the book is about how a progressive educational movement aimed at facilitating smaller and more democratic urban schools in America became hijacked by the neo-conservative agenda of the Bush administration and its many powerful allies. In so doing it cannot fail to tackle the wider educational and political issues of the last eight years and their antecedents, which it does with admirable clarity and detail.   Although school size is important, the small schools movement has traditionally been more about a democratic ideology of education that rejects the mass, bureaucratised authoritarianism of many large publicly funded schools. Smaller schools potentially make it more possible to organise education in a more supportive, inclusive, egalitarian and humanitarian way. Moreover, this smaller scale is also seen to... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Currently, there are 103 historically Black colleges and universities in the United States.  These institutions graduate roughly a fourth of all African American students.  Research tells us that Black colleges provide a nurturing learning environment that empowers students to succeed.  Although many scholars have examined the current contributions and early history of Black colleges, they have paid little attention to Black colleges in the mid-twentieth century.  In effect, historians have virtually ignored one of the most interesting and volatile periods in the life of these important institutions. In her newest book, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower: Black Colleges and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi, Joy Ann Williamson examines the nation’s Black colleges against the backdrop of the Black freedom struggle of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  What is entirely unique about Williamson’s treatment of Black colleges during this time is her emphasis on students as activists.  Whereas many historians have... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Imagine culturally responsive education across the country. Imagine classrooms and programs that are built to honor children’s strengths and are succeeding in an age of accountability and testing. Imagine the promise of schools, classrooms, and curricula built upon culturally grounded and informed child development. Now, stop imagining and open Diversities in Early Childhood Education: Rethinking and Doing, edited by Celia Genishi and A. Lin Goodwin. By reading this book, in addition to seeing culturally responsive education taking place in classrooms across the country, readers have the opportunity to learn about policies and programs that honor families and communities as experts, adapting common notions of “best,” working with the communities to which children belong to rethink and come to a shared ownership of what best truly means. Through the exploration of diverse studies, the editors and authors invite readers to rethink and do diversity in teaching, policy-making, programming, and educating teachers. How... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

The Internet and the 2008 Election

What does it take to turn around a low-performing school system? Interest in this question has increased substantially since the advent of the landmark No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and other state and federal measures aimed at greater educational accountability. Daniel Duke’s The Little School System That Could: Transforming a City School District is a compelling example of the new realities confronted by superintendents who engage turning around low-performing school systems. Duke shares a decade’s worth of organizational change, transformation, and reform movements invoked by a new superintendent in a small city school system - Manassas Park - in northern Virginia. Faced with a variety of problems that ranged from inadequate resources, deplorable buildings to mismanagement, incompetence, and personnel turnover, low staff morale and subpar student achievement, newly hired Superintendent Tom Debolt and his allies transformed this fledgling school system in ten years. Debolt’s experiences, challenges, obstacles and support... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

This is a book about ideas and about the action those ideas might bring into play. It focuses on the purpose of doctoral education and is intended to be a resource for doctoral programs as well as an “owner’s manual” (p. 16).  This work comes to us following five years of effort conducted as part of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID), using “a highly collaborative” approach led by a five-person team working with the financial support of Atlantic Philanthropies and under the auspices of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  Members of this interdisciplinary team were: a physicist, an anthropologist, two educationalists, and an English scholar, one of whom was a senior program officer with the Spencer Foundation and the rest high-ranking officials in The Carnegie Foundation. They worked with the support of an Advisory Committee of thirteen notables, led by Donald Kennedy, former president of Stanford... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

In the Academic Community: A Manual for Change, Donald Hall puts forth a persuasive call to action, arguing that, “…unless we [the faculty] also explore the extent to which we are responsible for our own behaviors, attitudes, and life situations, we will often remain complicit within the very hierarchies and norms that oppress us” (p. 4). The “hermeneutic circle” – a dialogue that engages issues and concepts on the macro and micro level -- foregrounds the argument of the book and situates faculty as having an agency in the ways in which our departments and institutions function. During a time when higher education is facing dramatic budget cuts, the diversifying of faculty work, and questions in their roles as a public good, Hall provides a framework for how faculty, can use their power to create change within academic departments. Specifically, Hall notes the ways that faculty can engage colleagues, students,... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

This book deserves close attention by those artists, teachers and academics who identify themselves with art education not simply as a subject in the curriculum but as a way of understanding and engaging with a wider meaning in life. Richard Hickman’s Why We Make Art And Why It Is Taught presents art’s educational context from a broader approach than that of the school or the so called ‘creative and culture industries’. In Antony Gormley’s words “Hickman makes the critical distinction between learning about art as opposed to learning through it. Learning from the experience of making is an organic and therefore evolutionary practice—nothing to do with copying concepts or given forms but everything about interpreting things” [Foreword, p. 10]. This distinction between learning about and making art is very crucial and although many do not think twice to agree with Hickman’s argument, the practices of art education and the policies... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

In 1973, Burton Clark published what must have seemed at the time an audacious essay in which he took stock of the emerging field of the sociology of higher education.  Writing in the determinately scientific journal Sociology of Education, itself only a few years removed from its roots in the practitioner-oriented Journal of Educational Sociology,  Clark sought a middle ground for the development of a sociology of higher education that avoided a lapse into either atheoretical and overly descriptive “managerial sociology” on the one side, or what he saw as arid and trivial preoccupations with statistical and ethnographic research removed from the world of practitioners on the other.  Clark’s prognosis was more hopeful than not that the conceptual richness of Weber and Durkheim could enrich and enliven a sociology of higher education capable of meeting the practical problems of America’s ever-expanding system of higher education. Much has, of course, changed since... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Tammy Shel believes that “it is essential to understand how different individuals and societies understand love, caring, leaders, masculinity, and femininity.”  Such understanding will help to bridge differences “because violence stems from an individual’s distress and from her basic understanding of survival within society” (p. 2). Her Ethics of Caring is replete with such argumentation which, as far as I can see, amounts to nothing more than confusion.  The lack of connection among the various lines of investigation and reasoning in this volume is truly stunning.  While Shel’s underlying concern seems to be to promote a gentler, more child-empowering pedagogy, her jumble of ethnography, vague references to philosophy, psychologizing, and simple opining provides no insight into how pedagogy might be brought to bear on her concern. The core of the text is a collection of five case studies of male and female teachers from two public schools and one private school.... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Current K-12 education policy proposals from the Presidential candidates may actually do more harm than good to local school districts. In an attempt to assure that particular policies are adopted, the likely legislation will dictate results from Washington rather than allow local district to adapt best practices to the situation on the ground.

The rural studies literature is dominated by a tale of non-diversified economies, underdevelopment, and steep population loss. While a waning optimism is evident, volumes upon volumes tell of a pattern where the countryside’s “best and brightest” migrate to metropolitan centers. The centralized and bureaucratized rural school is often characterized as a mediating agent of this rural-to-urban migration. A competing educational literature romanticizes place-based pedagogy and local decision-making. Scholars from this tradition describe a culturally sensitive rural school responsive to the needs of local families and communities. At the intersection of these distinct yet complementary themes is Michael Corbett’s ethnographic account of schooling and migration in the fishing villages of Digby Neck, Nova Scotia. In Learning to Leave: The Ironies of Schooling in a Coastal Community, Corbett honors the place-based priorities of rural sociologists as he answers the question: “who stays, who goes, and what role did formal education play in... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Minding the Gap, the new book of case studies and policy analysis edited by the leadership of Jobs for the Future along with Andrea Venezia, is an entirely necessary if not yet fully sufficient guide to understanding the state of efforts to more fully integrate high school and college education. It is necessary because of the rapidly growing interest in establishing programs that bridge high school and college. To the degree that it is not sufficient, its failings are due to the sheer scope of the current activity, and, as the editors rightly note, to the limits in what a book of manageable size can address. As its title suggests, the book aggressively promotes the emerging efforts to more fully integrate college and high school work. To be sure, this is not a difficult case to make. The challenges of making the transition from high school to college -- whether through... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges sets out decisively against the more drastic critiques of higher education, such as those that cast political correctness as the root of everything wrong with colleges today or those that blame faculty research for causing neglect of student needs. Bok’s effective use of data produces a nuanced view of higher education. On the one hand, student learning does improve during college, and most undergraduates and alumni report satisfaction with their college experience. On the other hand, colleges still have much room for improvement. A historical summary of American higher education in Chapter 1 shows how colleges and universities have arrived at their present-day purposes. Prior to the Civil War, college instructors taught a prescribed curriculum oriented toward religion and the classics. As the nineteenth century wore on, older models of a college education gave way not only to secular land-grant universities and growing enrollments but also... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Catherine McLoughlin and Mark J. W. Lee discuss the new pedagogical landscape made possible by the emergence of Web 2.0 social software, which allows users to become active contributors. Web 2.0 tools offer unparallelled opportunities for participation, productivity, and interaction. Through a discussion of emerging learning scenarios enabled by social software, McLoughlin and Lee posit that future learning environments must capitalize on the potential of Web 2.0 by combining social software tools with connectivist pedagogical models. The combination produces what the authors call Pedagogy 2.0, a model of learning in which learners are empowered to participate, learn, and create knowledge in ways that are personally meaningful and engaging.

The pace of technological change has challenged historical notions of what counts as knowledge. Dave Cormier describes an alternative to the traditional notion of knowledge. In place of the expert-centered pedagogical planning and publishing cycle, Cormier suggests a rhizomatic model of learning. In the rhizomatic model, knowledge is negotiated, and the learning experience is a social as well as a personal knowledge creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.

In the past, copyright and education have evolved together in response to technological advances from the book to the videocassette, and copyright law has been designed to allow educators to use a wide range of media with their students. Stephen Marshall describes how digital communication technologies threaten these accommodations, not as a direct consequence of the technology itself or even of copyright law but rather as a result of the growing prevalence of control technologies aimed at extracting profits from every conceivable use of information. Marshall argues for a rethinking of copyright in the face of Web 2.0 technologies that do not fit into traditional conceptualizations of copyright and suggests that, if educators do not speak up, copyright law will be taken over by corporate forces interested only in profit, to the detriment of educational uses of media.

Technology adoption in any sector is rarely uniform. Understanding the drivers and constraints associated with technology adoption makes it easier to anticipate how technology will be used and what populations will benefit the most. Robert G. Henshaw examines factors likely to influence technology adoption within U.S. higher education over the next 30 years and their impact on education providers and consumers. Progress, and the way progress is defined, will be uneven and will continue to reflect disparities across organizational cultures, socioeconomic demographics, and other variables. Technology will have the greatest impact on learning outside of classrooms and other formal educational constructs.

Founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, YouTube has revolutionized the Internet, marking a change from the static Internet to the dynamic Internet. In this edition of Places to Go, Stephen Downes discusses how the rise of a ubiquitous media format--Flash video--has made YouTube's success possible and argues that Flash video has important educational applications. Video sites like YouTube and the education-focused site TeacherTube transform learning not only by providing a new channel for educational content but also by creating new opportunities for students to express themselves--with the distinct advantage of seeing their own learning reflected back to them in a familiar environment.