In this article, Mary Kay Stein, Margaret Schwan Smith, and Edward A. Silver identify and describe the challenges that practicing teacher educators and professional developers are likely to encounter as they design and implement new programs to help teachers learn new paradigms of teaching and learning amidst current educational reforms. The authors call attention to the fact that, just as teachers will need to relearn their teaching practice, so will experienced professional developers need to relearn their craft, which traditionally has been defined as providing courses, workshops, and seminars. This article focuses on two professional developers who engaged in long-term efforts to work with teachers in new ways, identifying the tensions that each actually faced. The cases illustrate the challenges that professional developers may encounter in supporting the transformation of teachers, including learning how to work with groups of teachers in school settings, expanding their repertoires beyond workshops and courses, and balancing interpersonal sensitivity with the need to challenge prevailing practices and beliefs. The final section of the article looks across the two cases and begins to map out common features of the terrain through which practicing professional developers can expect to travel. (pp. 237-269)
James Diego Vigil
The relationship between streets and schools for Chicano gang youth is at the heart of this article. Author Diego Vigil argues that understanding how streets and schools intersect in ways that interfere with the learning and school performance of Chicano gang youth may be the key to offering them a more positive schooling experience. Using his multiple marginality framework, Vigil examines how gangs socialize Chicano youth to be gang members. He also examines how home and school are complicit in that socialization. Typically, street children exhibit behaviors in classrooms that interfere with their academic learning. In turn, educators are not well enough informed about gang culture to foster behaviors that result in successful academic performance. Vigil issues a call to parents and teachers to actively participate in the prevention, intervention, and suppression of gang activity. The author presents three Los Angeles-based programs as examples of how schools can successfully serve gang children. While Vigil argues that schools have exacerbated the problem, he remains convinced that schools - working in a concerted and respectful effort with the home and the community - present the best hope for countering street socialization. (pp. 270-288)
Michael Huberman
In this article, Michael Huberman explores the effect of sustained interactions with practitioners on educational researchers. He focuses his study on two specific cases: 1) an elementary-level mathematics project, known as the Cognitively Guided Instruction project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and 2) a set of intellectual biographies of math and science education researchers. Using a social-constructivist paradigm, he describes the conceptual and methodological shifts that some researchers undergo when they are confronted with the realities, constraints, and opportunities of practice. In addition to these shifts, Huberman also discusses how interacting with practitioners influences researchers' view of teaching and of how research should be used. He discusses how the "micro-worlds" of research and practice interact, and through their interactions determine the flow of knowledge. It is the interaction between micro-worlds, rather than the actors alone, that is the crucial unit of analysis in this study. Huberman concludes by suggesting that sustained interactivity between practitioners and researchers may be beneficial to both parties. In particular, sustained interactivity may allow researchers to refine, even recast, their conceptual frameworks, their methodologies, their teaching, and their modes of exchange with various audiences. (pp. 289-319)
Montse Sánchez Aroca
In this article, Montse Sánchez Aroca describes the philosophy, activities, and achievments of La Verneda-Sant Martí, a school for adults in Barcelona, Spain, where Sánchez has taught for ten years. Started as a grassroots project, La Verneda is exceptional as a school for adult education because of the level of involvement of the adults and the democratic process by which students (who refer to themselves as participants), teachers, volunteers, and community members take part in the school's decisionmaking process. Learning and creating are the responsibility of and for the benefit of the entire school community. This is accomplished through egalitarian dialogue, in which everything is discussed and decided collectively; there is no hierarchy in the school's structure. Sánchez illustrates why people in La Verneda say that the school is the realization of a dream. As an example, she describes how students with little formal schooling organize literary circles where they read books by authors such as James Joyce, and invite the best writers in the country to their gatherings. They also create associations that make their voices heard at the educational policymaking level. Some of the students at La Verneda go on to receive university degrees and become highly qualified professionals. Sánchez 's descriptions and examples clearly present La Verneda as an example of an emancipatory school for adult education. (pp. 320-335)
Teacher with a Heart: Reflections on Leonard Covello and Community
by Vito Perrone.
New York: Teachers College Press, 1998. 145 pp. $19.95 (paper).
Teacher with a Heart: Reflections on Leonard Covello and Community
is the first of a new series of books from Teachers College Press called
“Between Teacher and Text.” Series editor Herbert Kohl asks educators
to “choose a person whose work has been important to them and enter
into dialog with that work and by extension with that person” (p. vii).
In this first volume, Vito Perrone, a senior faculty member at Harvard
University’s Graduate School of Education, reflects on the life of Leonard
Covello, who was a teacher and principal in the New York City schools for
most of the first half of this century. The book’s unique structure
gives readers a window into the experiences and thinking of two great educators.
The first half of the book, written by Perrone, is an interweaving of his
own autobiography, his thinking about Covello, and the history readers may
need to fully appreciate the context of Covello’s life. The second half
of the book is an extended excerpt from Covello’s autobiography, The
Heart Is the Teacher. Perrone begins his reflection by explaining his
choice of Covello. He writes:
Covello’s story should be brought back into the educational discourse, not only for its social content related to the education of immigrant students and inspiring educational stance regarding the diverse cultures and social dilemmas of East Harlem but as a reminder that our work as educators is not without a history; that many of the problems we currently struggle with were faced by others before us, sometimes confronted differently, oftentimes more intelligently. (p. 1)
Perrone tells the story of his own discovery of Covello. Attracted to Covello’s metaphors and philosophy, Perrone saw some of himself in Covello’s experiences. He writes, “I was also drawn to Covello’s work because he was Italian, a person who had struggled with the immigrant experience, something I understood well as the son of Italian immigrants” (p. 2). Drawing for his readers the outline of Covello’s story, Perrone also tells us some of his own. Readers are introduced to Perrone’s parents as they leave Italy, see the struggles of growing up the only Italian family in a Michigan town, and watch Perrone find his own path as a teacher. Throughout his reflection on both his own experience and Covello’s, Perrone also makes clear his educational philosophy. Obvious is his dismay at the way schools often misunderstand immigrant students, his continuing wish that schools would work more closely with communities, his hope that teachers could try harder to understand the cultures and histories of their students. Perrone’s background as a historian is apparent, too, as he explores the context of Covello’s life, and as he draws connections between immigration and schooling at the beginning of the twentieth century and now at the beginning of a new millennium.
Perrone reminds us that “race, language, and cultural matters, alongside severe problems of housing, health care, and discrimination certainly dominated life in and around Covello’s schools.” He goes on to ask, “Can we really believe that the barriers that now exist, that keep us from achieving the democratic ideals, the social justice, the economic progress that we hold out in our public discourse, will ever fall away without confronting more directly matters of race in the schools and in the society? How many more generations of silence can we endure?” (p. 48). He connects present and past to show that Covello “has provided a working model for those of us who still struggle with a vision of possibility, who understand that America needs the best our youth can provide, who continue to believe that our newest arrivals give promise for a better America” (p. 74).
The second half of the book gives Covello’s perspective and story. We see his history as a young boy leaving Italy, his family’s struggle in the tenements of New York City, his early school experiences. Against the harsh odds of the day, Covello made his way to Columbia University and into the workplace, where he eventually became a teacher and, finally, a principal. Covello did not confine his community-building work to just the schools in East Harlem; he was also deeply involved in the activities of the community, helping to create spaces for children and adults to gather and work and play and learn together. He worked closely with immigrant students from all over the world and had a strong belief that students from any background can succeed and that the responsibility of schools is to make that success possible. He writes, “My many years at Franklin made me believe more firmly than ever in . . . the opportunity for boys to pursue their education far beyond the limitations sometimes imposed upon them because of the character of the neighborhood in which they happen to be born” (p. 138).
Perrone and Covello offer stories of challenge and hope. Their joint accounts point toward the possibilities of more just and fair schools. More than the stories of two individuals, Teacher with a Heart is a book for anyone who cares deeply about schools and children and who believes that more work could be done in our schools to improve society in general. Covello closes his autobiography with his deepest discoveries of his forty-five years in the New York City schools. He writes, “The teacher is the heart of the educational process and he must be given the opportunity to teach — to devote himself whole-heartedly to his job under the best circumstances. Half a century as a teacher leads me to the conclusion that the battle for a better world will be won or lost in our schools” (p. 144). All who hold such ideas to be true — or who would like to believe in the possibility of greater promise for our schools and communities — would benefit from this book.
J.G.B.
Political Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change
by Stanley Fish.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 146 pp. $14.95 (paper).
Whether one agrees with them or not, Stanley Fish’s books inevitably make readers think. Political Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change is no exception. In this collection of five lectures delivered in 1993 at Oxford University, Fish explores and occasionally expounds on issues regarding the nature of academic disciplines. He focuses on literary studies, a discipline whose landscape has often become an academic and political battlefield due to the clash of various camps within literary criticism, including new historicism, cultural studies, and interdisciplinarity. Readers interested in literary studies, in higher education, or simply in the nature of knowledge will find Political Correctness a thought-provoking exploration of these issues.
Fish begins with an analysis of John Milton’s poetry, more specifically, the first three words of Milton’s Lycidas: “Yet once more.” He brings his knowledge of literature, history, linguistics, and Milton into a discussion of these three simple words, which are the title of the first lecture. Fish twists, turns, and pivots around these three words to make meaning of them, looking at their literary, historical, political, and linguistic contexts. He uses these disciplines to understand the poem itself. His analysis of Lycidas thus demonstrates the lecture’s central point: the goal of literary studies is always the literature itself. He ends this lecture with the recognition that literary studies, like all academic disciplines, has “distinctive” (p. 17) and separate objectives. Fish’s opinion challenges the interdisciplinary focus of many scholars, among them new historicists or cultural studies scholars who regard history and politics as equally, if not more, important to literary studies than literature.
The subsequent lectures build on and expand Fish’s idea of the distinctiveness of the academic disciplines. In the second lecture, “Distinctiveness: Its Achievements and Costs,” he maintains that the academic disciplines are distinctive because each is driven by different basic questions. Fish, who held joint positions in law and literary studies at Duke University before serving as dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago, examines the study of tort law to conclude that its central questions are, What is at fault? and What is its cause? In both cases, the answer lies within the law. From here, he turns to the discipline of history, concluding that its basic question is, What happened? Teaching readers by analogy, he then returns to literary studies, concluding that its basic question is, “What does this poem (or play or novel) mean?” (p. 34). As with tort law and history, the answers to the basic questions of the discipline of literary studies are self-referential and lie within literature.
In the third lecture, “Disciplinary Tasks and Political Intentions,” Fish argues that the current emphases in literary studies on cultural studies, political agendas, interdisciplinarity, and new historicism ignore literature — the discipline’s central concern. Instead, they place related or peripheral issues and topics such as culture, history, and politics at the center of literary studies. The subsequent lecture, “Looking Elsewhere: Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinarity,” asserts that scholars who do so are no longer engaged in the discipline of literary studies. While they claim that moving the focus from the written text to culture gives literary scholars “a larger text or a more inclusive text” to study, in fact it merely creates “a different text, with its own emphases, details, and meanings which ‘naturally’ crowd out the emphases, details and meanings” (p. 79) of the literature. By shifting the center of the discipline from literature to culture, they have created a new discipline rather than expanding that of literary studies.
The final lecture, “Why Literary Criticism Is Like Virtue,” brings readers back to the literature by focusing on what literary studies is rather than what it is not. In this lecture, Fish concludes that “literary interpretation, like virtue, is its own reward” (p. 110). He acknowledges that politics are involved in literary studies, as are history, linguistics, and a myriad of other disciplines, but at its heart lies the literature.
As noted at the beginning of this review, readers may disagree with Fish about what literary studies is. Certainly there are many scholars who do, but getting through the delicious twists and turns of the lectures in Political Correctness is a wonderful and meaningful exercise in thinking.
J.P.S.
School Leadership: Balancing Power with Caring
by Kathleen Sernak.
New York: Teachers College Press, 1998. 179 pages. $46.00, $22.95 (paper).
To be effective leaders, school administrators must balance an “ethic of caring” with the need to make unpopular decisions and to use power, authority, and control, argues Kathleen Sernak in School Leadership: Balancing Power with Caring. Incorporating Nel Nodding’s “tenets of care,” Sernak suggests that educational leaders practice an ethic of caring when they create a nurturing environment in classrooms, establish and maintain internal and external relationships with teachers and businesses, make a commitment to “caring” for students and faculty, and strive to understand human behavior. Sernak argues that the existing hierarchy and bureaucracy typical of schools needs to be reorganized and restructured if an ethic of caring is going to have a role in schools.
School Leadership is about a study of an urban high school, “Division High,” and the changes it endured from the 1960s to current times, when urban institutions have had to struggle to survive due to changing demographics. Division High is described as a racially diverse school with a faculty divided between new and veteran teachers. A string of frustrated principals have left over several years, citing morale, leadership, and bureaucratic problems. The school struggles to maintain its identity amidst financial cutbacks, low academic standards, and a poor reputation. As a form of resolution, the district proposes a set of reform initiatives: site-based management and shared decisionmaking. These initiatives lack guidelines for implementation and thus are met with little enthusiasm. Caught in the middle is the first Black female principal, “Mattie,” a caring, nurturing, and understanding administrator who struggles to contain the divisiveness rooted in racial tension, low morale, and lack of leadership.
In the first chapter, Sernak argues that the ethic of caring is contextual and then identifies three characteristics of caring. In the second chapter, she posits that to instill the ethic of caring, school leaders must consider a vision of collective effort by recruiting resources and support from the school and community (p. 19). This diffusion engages the larger community in a collective effort to improve the school. Sernak concludes by suggesting that creating an ethic of caring within bureaucratic organizations also becomes a politics of caring. She notes that there are some barriers to establishing caring institutions, such as societal perceptions of male and female roles and social expectations.
Chapters three through six describe the history of Division High’s struggle and decline, introduce the current principal Mattie, and discuss the relationship between the positional power of the principal and caring. Although these chapters provide some detail as to how Division arrived at its current situation, the connection between successful leadership, power, and the ethic of caring is not apparent until the next chapter.
Chapters seven and eight address the school’s lack of organizational cohesion, both present and past. Issues touched on include the fact that factions have formed, racial tension has historically existed within departments, veteran teachers and new teachers are not unified, and reforms initiated by the district are without direction or guidance. Finally, chapter nine relates several theoretical issues around the concept of power to the ethic of caring. These two concepts are discussed in terms of how power is played out in a supposedly caring community through the hierarchy of the administration. The book ends with a summation of how the ethic of caring is practiced.
School Leadership convinces the reader that caring is a moral act, and that balancing and meeting the needs of the community with “care” is a political tightrope that school leaders must walk. However, this reviewer missed the personal voice of Mattie, and the voices of other stakeholders in the school community, which would have enriched the story greatly. Despite this shortcoming, the book provides a valuable theoretical framework and analysis of the ethic of caring at work in a school setting.
T.K.B.
The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract
by Theodore R. Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. 144 pages. $21.00.
Schools exist to change people, argue husband and wife Theodore and Nancy
Sizer in The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract,
their first coauthored book. They maintain that if we intend for children
to learn and grow while they attend school, then change is inevitable. Drawing
on their school experiences as teachers and administrators and on observations
culled from countless visits to schools across the United States, the Sizers
illustrate the ways that schools formally and informally teach the lessons
that change students. In contrast to other books concerned with moral education,
The Students Are Watching does not espouse a particular curriculum
or pedagogy. Instead, it aims to promote thoughtfulness on the part of school
people.
The Sizers structure this volume according to a series of verbs. After arguing that the nouns schools regularly use to set out their moral education goals — respect, integrity, and the like — are too large to be properly approached, they proffer several verbs that describe the practices, some real and some desired, of U.S. secondary schools. These verbs — modeling, grappling, bluffing, shoving, sorting, and fearing — are also the chapter titles and are intended to show how the design of schools can hinder or promote moral growth. Unlike other books about morality and youth, The Students Are Watching does not lambaste schools, teachers, and/or students for so-called immoral acts, but instead illustrates, through a series of vivid anecdotes, how the traditional structure of secondary schools, despite the best intentions of educators, can make real growth, learning, and change difficult for students. For example, the Sizers demonstrate compellingly that the huge teaching loads carried by most teachers in most schools mean they cannot know their students well. Structural changes that allow close relationships between teachers and students, the Sizers argue, would benefit the intellectual and moral growth of students. “Nothing is more important than that each student is known well and that the people who know each student have the authority and flexibility to act on that knowledge” (p. 110). One particular example, that of Dick Tomasino in the “Fearing” chapter, exemplifies this point clearly. Worried that his students are not keeping up with their reading, Dick threatens the class with a test of the book’s content. This threat propels some students to action, while it effectively paralyzes others. Dick’s huge teaching load makes it impossible for him to know which students are propelled by fear and which are shut down, and he therefore cannot know how best to motivate students or how to help them contend with imposed external pressures.
In addition to demonstrating how a school’s structure and practice can hinder student learning, the Sizers make clear other powerful lessons students learn from the structures of their schools and from the practices and actions of their teachers. For instance, what is the lesson when students are taught to call the custodian by his first name and the teachers by their last names? Or, what do students learn when their teacher, due to the overwhelming nature of her job, is forced to limit her preparation for class?
The structure of U.S. high schools is not regularly submitted to scrutiny. Instead, we take for granted the eight-period day, the traditional disciplines, the unnamed lunch lady. Many of the practices, and indeed the lack of scrutiny itself, offer students powerful lessons — some good, but many bad. A closer study of the habits of schooling might well benefit our students. The Sizers successfully show their readers that moral education is not a separate curriculum, but is instead deeply embedded in the life of a school.
A.H.C.
Black Power/White Power in Public Education
by Ralph Edwards and Charles V. Willie.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998. 128 pp. $45.00.
What are the guiding principles that make community action more likely to
succeed? Who provides the critical leadership in local African American
communities? How is such leadership provided? How do these leadership
characteristics and actions of local African American communities play out
in the post–civil rights era? Are subdominant people powerless to change
their conditions? These are some of the fundamental questions that are posed
and analyzed in Black Power/White Power in Public Education by Ralph
Edwards and Charles V. Willie. In this book, Edwards and Willie present two
fascinating and informative community case studies of educational issues
in Boston’s public schools. They focus on two main issues — the
hiring and firing of Boston’s first African American superintendent
and the shift of the Boston school committee from an elected body to a
mayor-appointed body. Edwards and Willie analyze these two issues as a way
to understand “how community structures and processes limit or facilitate
the choices of individuals and influence people to take action either consistent
or inconsistent with their group interests” (p. 11).
Too often, researchers and social commentators look to national issues to understand how communities function and the ways that structures support or detract from community actions. Edwards and Willie’s book is a well-written, clear, and compelling reminder that, as Tip O’Neill said, “all politics is local” and power is possessed by all in a given community. While some groups may be more dominant than others, effective community actions teach us that subdominant people (those without formal power) can use their power to disrupt and stop processes that do not serve their fundamental interests. In this sense, Edwards and Willie argue that the dominant and subdominant play complementary roles.
Using Manuel Castell’s principles of community organization as their guiding framework, the authors identify the presence and absence of his principles in African American community efforts in Boston during the post–civil rights era. By investigating “Black leadership and decisionmaking and the responses of Whites” (p. 10), Edwards and Willie add to our understanding of how internal power structures develop, take shape, and are acted upon in a particular local African American community. This book is a must read for researchers, community organizers, and school officials seeking to understand the crucial role that community participation and cooperation can play in the effective decisionmaking process of our public schools.
J.F.M.
Learning in the Field: An Introduction to
Qualitative Research
by Gretchen B. Rossman and Sharon F. Rallis.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. 271 pp. $31.50 (paper).
The tools of the qualitative researcher are increasingly important in the search for ways to study complex issues in education today. For novice researchers, Learning in the Field: An Introduction to Qualitative Research is a thorough, friendly introduction to the task of becoming a qualitative researcher.
As with many other qualitative research methods books on the market right now, this one has chapters that take the new researcher through the process of engaging in a research project — from a look at what qualitative research really is (ch. 1) and how it can be ethical and valid (ch. 2), to sections on planning research, asking questions, and gathering, analyzing, and reporting data (ch. 3-8).
The book has an easy conversational style and some additions that reflect the years authors Gretchen Rossman and Sharon Rallis have spent teaching introductory qualitative research classes. Each chapter begins with a conversation among a fictional trio of characters enrolled in a fictional qualitative research class. These characters struggle with their research, dealing with issues that Rossman and Rallis have found are the “puzzles and tensions that beginning students encounter” (p. xii). Along with these fictional characters, Rossman and Rallis have included examples from their own research and the research of their students as they demonstrate the complexities of engaging in qualitative research. Each chapter ends with a section called “Using the habits of mind and heart,” which highlights the most important lessons from each chapter. The appendices present the data and analysis from the research projects of the fictional characters. There are examples of interviews, field notes, analytic memos, and final projects, along with commentary from the authors about the strengths and weaknesses of the data and analysis.
Learning in the Field is a helpful introductory book for qualitative researchers. Students who learn more from stories than textbooks will especially appreciate following the fictional characters and their research projects while undertaking their own.
J.G.B.