Spring 2002 Issue
Spring 2002 Reviews of Current
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Harvard Educational Review
Spring 2002 Article Abstracts:
Eliminating Ableism in Education
Thomas Hehir, Harvard Graduate School of Education
In this article, Thomas Hehir defines ableism as “the
devaluation of disability” that “results in societal attitudes
that uncritically assert that it is better for a child to walk than
roll, speak than sign, read print than read Braille, spell independently
than use a spell-check, and hang out with nondisabled kids as opposed
to other disabled kids.” Hehir highlights ableist practices through
a discussion of the history of and research pertaining to the education
of deaf students, students who are blind or visually impaired, and students
with learning disabilities, particularly dyslexia. He asserts that “the
pervasiveness of . . . ableist assumptions in the education of children
with disabilities not only reinforces prevailing prejudices against
disability but may very well contribute to low levels of educational
attainment and employment.” In conclusion, Hehir offers six detailed
proposals for beginning to address and overturn ableist practices. Throughout
this article, Hehir draws on his personal experiences as former director
of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education
Programs, Associate Superintendent for the Chicago Public Schools, and
Director of Special Education in the Boston Public Schools. (pp. 1-32)
"Not Bread Alone": Clandestine Schooling and Resistance
in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust
Susan M. Kardos, Harvard Graduate School of Education
In this article, Susan Kardos speaks to the importance
of education by looking at the forms and purposes of clandestine schooling
in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. Building on archival evidence
and survivor accounts, Kardos recreates the moving spirit and multiple
endeavors of schooling that prevailed in the Ghetto. Despite horrific
conditions and great danger, individuals and organizations within the
Ghetto devoted themselves to ensuring that educational activities would
continue. According to Kardos, schooling became a form of resistance
against Nazi attempts to eradicate the Jews and their culture. She argues
that schooling was oriented simultaneously to the past, present, and
future: to the past by defying cultural and historical annihilation;
to the present by providing a sense of normalcy that helped Jews survive
their daily struggles in the Ghetto; and to the future by providing
a sense of hope for the Ghetto inhabitants. Kardos unearths this heroic
and inspiring historical episode to illustrate the importance of schooling
as a means of survival and resistance by people who would not allow
themselves to be erased. (pp. 33-66)
Against Repetition: Addressing Resistance to Anti-Oppressive Change
in the Practice of Learning, Teaching, Supervising, and Researching
Kevin K. Kumashiro
In this article, Kevin K. Kumashiro draws on his experience
as a teacher, teacher educator, and education researcher to analyze
how anti-oppressive educators may operate in ways that challenge some
forms of oppression yet unintentionally comply with others. Drawing
on Butler’s work, which views oppression in society as being characterized
by harmful repetitions of certain privileged knowledge and practices,
the author examines how theories of anti-oppressive education can help
educators learn, teach, and supervise student teachers, and conduct
educational research in ways that work against such harmful repetitions.
Kumashiro describes incidents in which his students sought knowledge
that confirmed what they already knew, and when he as the teacher unintentionally
missed opportunities to resist this repetition and guide his students
through an emotional crisis. Using the framework of repetition, Kumashiro
challenges anti-oppressive activists and educators to disrupt some of
their own unconscious commonsense discourses that serve as barriers
to social change. (pp. 67-92)
Madaz Publications: Polyphonic Identity and Existential Literacy
Transactions
Bob Fecho, University of Georgia, Athens, with Aaron Green, United
States Army
In this article, Bob Fecho and Aaron Green discuss issues of identity,
existence, and literacy, drawing primarily upon three pieces of writing
— a rap, an essay, and an op-ed piece — written by Green in
Fecho’s high school classes and during his first year of college.
Building on the work of Bakhtin, Delpit, Gordon, and Rosenblatt, Fecho
and Green examine the ways in which Green uses his writing to explore
his identities as provocateur, mainstream writer, and outsider. Green’s
writing and his ongoing conversation with Fecho, his teacher and mentor,
are used to show the polyphonic nature of identity construction, the
ways identity transactions are connected to literacy, and the importance
of such transactions for teachers and students. (pp. 93-119)
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Harvard Educational Review
Spring 2002 Reviews of Current Books
(Full Text)
The Gendered Society
by Michael S. Kimmel.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 336 pp. $30.00.
In The Gendered Society, Michael Kimmel examines
a wealth of empirical research and popular conceptions about gender
differences to argue from a sociological perspective that “gender
difference . . . is the result of gender inequality, not its cause”
(p. xi). The sociological aspect of his argument is founded on the idea
that “the social institutions of our world — workplace, family,
school, politics — are also gendered institutions, sites where
the dominant definitions are reinforced and reproduced, and where ‘deviants’
are disciplined” (p. 16). Thus, he argues, these institutions “express
a logic, a dynamic, that reproduces gender relations between women and
men and the gender order of hierarchy and power” (p. 95). As Kimmel
sees it, an examination of gender should attempt to explain not only
perceived differences between men and women but also male dominance.
The book is organized in three main parts. In Part One,
Explanations of Gender, Kimmel discusses some of the theories and beliefs
about gender that have emerged from the disciplines of biology, anthropology,
psychology, and sociology. For the most part, Kimmel rejects the idea
that gender differences are based solely on biological heritage, using
cross-cultural studies to show the variation in societal beliefs about
the proper roles and responsibilities of women and men and in their
behavior across societies. Kimmel demonstrates that the U.S. model of
gender relationships is not universal. The chapters on psychological
and sociological explanations of gender include an informative critique
of sex-role theory (based on the arguments of various sociologists),
and this critique serves as the foundation for moving “toward an
explanation of the social construction of gender relations” (p.
106). Fundamental to this sociological perspective is the examination
of relationships between identities and institutions.
In Part Two, Gendered Identities, Gendered Institutions,
Kimmel delves into the institutions of family, school, and work to discover
how they contribute to the gender inequality that creates gender differences.
In the chapter “The Gendered Family,” Kimmel considers marriage,
parenting, child care, housework, teenage pregnancy, fatherlessness,
divorce, child custody, gay and lesbian families, and family violence.
He makes a strong argument for more balanced participation of women
and men at work and at home, citing numerous studies finding that women’s
increasing participation in the labor market outside the home has not
been matched by an equal increase in men’s involvement in work
inside the home (including housework and child care). Kimmel states
that “without a concerted national policy to assist working women
and men to balance work and family obligations, we continue to put such
enormous strains on two sets of bonds, between husbands and wives and
between parents and children, and virtually guarantee that the ‘crisis’
of the family will continue” (p. 133). He identifies “inadequate
funding for education, inadequate health care for children and adults,
inadequate corporate policies regarding parental leave, and ‘family
unfriendly’ workplaces — with inflexible hours, rigid time
schedules, and lack of on-site child care facilities” (p. 148)
as contributing to the maintenance of a “gendered division of household
labor that reproduces male domination in society” (p. 148). This
theme is reiterated from another angle in “The Gendered Workplace.”
One of Kimmel’s goals in this book is “to build upon the feminist
approaches to gender by also making masculinity visible” (p. 5)
in order to illuminate an “understanding [of] men as gendered”
(p. 6). This attempt becomes one of the strengths of the book and is
demonstrated in the ways Kimmel reveals the effects on men of current
gender expectations and arrangements.
Kimmel frames the chapter on “The Gendered Classroom”
within questions about the appropriateness of single-sex education for
girls/women and not for boys/men, looking particularly at the cases
where all-male military academies — the Virginia Military Institute
and the Citadel — were challenged legally to admit females. The
rest of the chapter explores gender inequities in education in the United
States, leading Kimmel to conclude with a strong argument for why it
may not be “feminist hypocrisy” (p. 150) to advocate for all-female
schools and oppose all-male schools in the current climate of gender
inequality. He explains:
What women often learn at all-women’s colleges is that
they can do anything that men can do. By contrast, what men learn is
that they (women) cannot do what they (the men) do. In this way, women’s
colleges may constitute a challenge to gender inequality, while men’s
colleges reproduce that inequality. (p. 166)
Kimmel does not oversimplify the issue, nor does he conceive
of separate schooling for females as any kind of ultimate solution to
gender inequality. However, this chapter offers a thoughtful example
of an analysis of the relationships between gendered institutions, gender
inequality, and gender difference.
Friendship, love, sexuality, and violence are the subjects
of Part Three, Gendered Interactions. Unlike previous chapters, the
synthesis of findings on friendship and love in chapter nine seems to
contain a greater number of unresolved contradictions. For example,
at times Kimmel attempts to downplay the importance of gender in determining
some of the reported differences between men and women regarding friendship
and love; yet, he also states after discussing friendship styles of
lesbians and gay men that “gender, not sexual orientation, is often
the key determinant of our intimate experiences” (p. 213). The
effort to downplay gender differences in some instances comes at the
expense of providing satisfactory explanations of gender socialization.
Unlike previous chapters where Kimmel makes a solid case for how institutional
gender inequalities fashion gender differences, in this chapter the
structural explanations offered are misdirected and furthermore lack
an adequate psychological component.
Chapter ten, “Gendered Sexualities,” also contains
some noticeable contradictions, which arise primarily in the section
on homosexuality as gender conformity. While research cited in chapter
nine supports the point that relationships, specifically friendship
styles, “vary depending on the gender of the person one is befriending”
(p. 209), in chapter ten Kimmel asserts that it is a “deep logical
flaw” to assume “that the gender of your partner is more important,
and more decisive in your life, than your own gender” (p. 235).
Rather, “our own gender — the collections of behaviors, attitudes,
attributes, and assumptions about what it means to be a man or a woman
— is far more important than the gender of the people with whom
we interact, sexually or otherwise” (p. 235). Kimmel’s subsequent
assertion that “gay men and lesbians are true gender conformists”
(p. 235) is extreme and unconvincing, particularly since what he means
by “gender conformity” is undefined. This argument potentially
conflates biological sex with gender and relies on an assumption of
two genders, neglecting the possibility of multiple genders earlier
mentioned in the chapter on cross-cultural studies (see pp. 58–60
on “How Many Genders Are There?”).
Part Three concludes with a powerful chapter on “The
Gender of Violence,” in which Kimmel argues that “from early
childhood to old age, violence is the most obdurate, intractable behavioral
gender difference” (p. 243) and reveals how the gendered nature
of violence is often ignored or suppressed. The book ends with a hopeful
outlook as Kimmel predicts that “the transformation of the twenty-first
century involves the transformation of men’s lives” (p. 267)
and urges the equality of men and women. (His particular emphasis on
equality is notably reminiscent of liberal feminism.)
The Gendered Society offers a terrific introduction
to gender studies. Furthermore, as a synthesis of a great deal of important
work on gender and as an intelligent sociological argument, it could
be a valuable addition to university and high school courses. Works
by scholars Judith Butler and Nancy Cott would be interesting companions
for this book, expanding on some of the theoretical and historical material
presented.
Kimmel uses a storytelling style and conversational tone
that make the book an engaging read, and his thought experiments provide
opportunities to reverse common assumptions based on gender and imagine
alternatives to current gendered relationships. The book is eye-opening
and important reading for all in this gendered society.
M.P.H.
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Honored but Invisible: An Inside Look at Teaching
in Community Colleges
by W. Norton Grubb, with Helena Worthen, Barbara Byrd, Elnora Webb,
Norena Badway, Chester Case, Stanford Goto, and Jennifer Curry Villeneuve.
New York: Routledge, 1999. 392 pp. $ 75.00, $24.99 (paper).
Community colleges in the United States have traditionally
been viewed as “teaching colleges,” which refers to institutions
where the focus is largely on teaching and its improvement. Yet what
is known about the nature of teaching in the community college? Is teaching
being improved, and if so, how? How is classroom practice responding
to an increasingly diverse student population, with high concentrations
of low-income and minority students? The collection of ten articles
in Honored but Invisible: An Inside Look at Teaching in Community
Colleges, written by W. Norton Grubb and seven coeditors, provides
a compelling and incisive examination of these basic questions, offering
valuable guidance to those invested in enhancing the quality of education
in community colleges.
At the core of Honored but Invisible are the perspectives
of over three hundred community college administrators and instructors,
along with descriptions of classroom teaching. This kind of documentation
represents a refreshing departure from much postsecondary literature
that tends to highlight what teaching should look like, rather than
what actually happens. The need for such evidence, the authors argue
in the introductory chapter of the book, is clear:
There’s almost no information about what teaching looks
like in the “teaching college.” Teaching is invisible in several
senses, then: Not only does it take place behind closed doors, out of
sight of other instructors and administrators, but it has never been
the subject of sustained description, or any analysis of what happens,
or why it looks as it does. The lack of evidence has been a central
motive for our writing. It’s difficult to think about improving
the quality of these institutions . . . without knowing more about what
instructors do and what shapes their teaching. (p. 11)
The interviews with and observations of nearly 260 instructors
in thirty-two U.S. community college yield a comprehensive discussion
of teaching beliefs and practices, “ranging from wonderful classes
— fast-paced, innovative in their use of both in-class activities
and assignments, highly engaging to the students — to the absolute
worst” (p. 18). Chapter one, “Instructors’ Approaches
to Pedagogy and the Multiple Conceptions of ‘Good Teaching,’”
provides a discussion of approaches to teaching and the many forms “good
teaching” may take, as reflected in the theoretical literature
and the interviews with the community college instructors. This chapter
familiarizes the reader with various approaches to teaching in the community
college: the “traditional” approach, also referred to as “the
conventional wisdom” (p. 28), or the “drill and kill”
approach; the “meaning-making” approach, often characterized
as “constructivist” or “student-centered”: the “student-support”
approach, which emphasizes the “caring” component of teaching
and the ideals of inclusiveness in community colleges; and approaches
that take on elements of any of these three. The authors illustrate
that instructors can be “good” and “bad” using any
one of these approaches; they also argue that judgments about teaching
cannot be made without sufficient “hard data” about the effectiveness
of certain approaches. As the authors describe, the grim reality is
that instructors are largely alone in their teaching and their
struggles to improve their classroom practice, typically relying on
trial and error to develop their teaching approaches. “Community
colleges need not be this way” (p. 57), assert the authors, but
the tide will not turn until more systematic institutional support is
directed toward instructional quality.
In chapter two, “The Modal Classroom: The Varieties
of Lecture/Discussion,” and chapter three, “Lecture/Workshop
and ‘Hands-on Learning’: The Complexities of Occupational
Instruction,” the authors discuss the most commonly observed teaching
dynamic in their sample of community colleges: the lecture/discussion,
“a hybrid approach in which the instructor devotes some time to
lecture and structures some time for discussion” (p. 61), or its
adapted form, lecture/workshop, used in occupational courses. These
two chapters raise important questions about the instructor’s role
and the quality of student learning, especially when the lecture/discussion
or lecture/workshop structure devolves into teacher-centered, teacher-controlled
instruction. Have instructors been trained to know how to achieve an
effective balance between lecture and discussion (or workshop)? Is there
time and motivation for teachers to reflect on the kinds of questions
they ask in class, or on the level of student engagement their practices
promote? Chapters two and three send a message emphasized throughout
the entire book: If community colleges, as institutions, do not place
greater priority on teaching, answering these questions will remain
an individual struggle for the instructor, or worse, will go unexamined.
Chapter four, “Literacy Practices in the Classroom:
The Foundation of Schooling,” includes an interesting discussion
of a familiar college activity, note-taking. The authors highlight the
social dimension of this common study skill, using their observational
data to illustrate how instructors’ implicit and explicit expectations
about the purpose of note-taking affect the quality of student learning
and the locus of authority in the classroom. Another useful discussion
in this chapter focuses on the differing orientations toward literacy
between academic and occupational programs. For example, instructors
in academic classes typically do not expect their students to master
the discourse conventions of a particular field (e.g., anthropology),
since the courses are viewed as introductory. In contrast, students
in occupational classes often “actually [rehearse] in class the
vocabulary, verbal practices, and register of the field they [are] studying”
(p. 155). As the authors point out, the differences in literacy practice,
while perhaps predictable, are rarely recognized or discussed. This
silence creates a barrier to the successful integration of academic
and occupational courses, and denies instructors the opportunity to
develop a more sophisticated understanding of the literacies at work
in their teaching.
Chapter five, “Remedial/Developmental Education:
The Best and the Worst,” tackles the persistently controversial
issue of “whether remedial education should be maintained within
any institution that calls itself a college” (p. 172). The authors
respond with a strong repudiation of claims that remedial education
“dumbs down” higher education, arguing that “once we
recognize the distinction between an unsystematic collapse of student
and instructor expectations and a rigorous course of remediation, then
we can see that developmental education is one of the most difficult
teaching challenges and needs to be rescued from its second-class status”
(p. 174).
The authors expand their defense of remedial education
in chapter six, “Standards and Content: The Special Dilemma of
Community College,” calling attention to the confusion around “the
need for remedial education, which is necessary in open-access institutions
and which can be both demanding and sophisticated, with the very different
problem of supposedly college-level courses that have been stripped
of their content” (p. 19). This chapter also contains an insightful
discussion of four structural elements that make the standards issue
particularly thorny for community colleges: 1) the commitment to an
open-access policy, “which brings . . . both students who are not
academically well prepared and instructors with a substantial allegiance
to these nontraditional students” (p. 239); 2) the hiring of faculty
who may be experienced in a particular discipline, but lack any preparation
in teaching; 3) the pressure to maintain high enrollments or risk losing
precious revenues; and 4) the awkward alignment of high standards with
the primary goals of open-access institutions. The authors raise a critical
question with this last structural feature: Can community colleges pursue
their educational goals — namely, the promotion of “individual
mobility” and “social equity” — and yet institute
high standards that do not look like “gatekeeping mechanisms”
(p. 241)? While the authors contend that “community colleges are
institutions where multiple standards operate simultaneously,
reflecting the vast variety of students and their purposes” (p.
211), they also emphasize that the creation of meaningful standards
requires institutional leadership.
The next chapter, “Innovative Practices: The Pedagogical
and Institutional Challenges,” describes four areas of instructional
change in the community college: 1) attempts to move away from the standard
lecture format; 2) the use of technologies to enhance teaching and learning;
3) the creation of learning communities (LCs) or “linked courses,
where a group of students takes two or more courses at the same time,
and instructors coordinate their teaching” (p. 261); and 4) efforts
to integrate academic and occupational courses (also discussed in chapter
four on literacy practices). As a believer in instructor collaboration,
I greatly enjoyed the discussion of the latter two areas as they revealed
great possibilities for curriculum reform. As the authors point out,
instructor initiative alone will not sustain these curriculum changes;
rather, these innovations necessitate institutional support.
Moreover, in cases where these innovations have been successful, it
is clear that the changes satisfy the instructors’ longing for
greater collaboration with their colleagues.
Chapters eight and nine, “The Institutional Influences
on Teaching: The Potential Power of ‘Teaching Colleges’”
and “Funding and Policy: The Neglect of Teaching,” emphasize
points made in other chapters in the book about the ways the teaching
and learning enterprise is influenced by institutional forces. Chapter
eight focuses on the roles of individuals in the community college,
from the instructor to the administrators, in shaping the institutional
culture, while chapter nine looks into the interplay of funding with
local and federal policy. The authors illustrate that, while community
colleges are definitely in need of increased funding and additional
resources, it is equally critical that the institutions determine how
those resources can be directed toward the improvement of instruction.
The final chapter, “Alternative Futures: Creating
the ‘Teaching College,’” represents perhaps the most
challenging chapter for the authors, as it wrestles with a range of
conflicting pressures on community colleges. For example, how will community
colleges preserve the ideals of “open access” and “yet
still be part of higher education and the ‘collegiate sector’”
(p. 350)? How will community colleges recover from “practices that
encourage fragmentation rather than coherence” (p. 351) in their
curriculum? The authors conclude that “good teaching is necessary
to reconcile the conflicting demands placed on community colleges”
(p. 362), but until such questions are opened up to public examination,
teaching in the community college will continue to be a haphazard and
lonely endeavor for many instructors.
In their concluding comments, the reader is reminded
that, relative to other educational institutions, “community colleges
are certainly the most varied in their students and purposes” (p.
356). For this reason, identifying what constitutes “good teaching”
is rarely obvious. The value of Honored but Invisible lies in
its ability to bring clarity and vision to what “good teaching”
can and should look like in the community college.
M.G.S.
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An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education
Research
by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 302 pp. $25.00.
How has education research come to have such low status
in academia and so little influence on policy and practice? Ellen Condliffe
Lagemann, an educational historian and the current president of the
Spencer Foundation, sets out to answer this question in her insightful
and illuminating book, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History
of Education Research. She chronicles how education research emerged
as a field of study in the United States during the late nineteenth
century, how it evolved over the course of the twentieth century, and
how various individuals, institutions, and historical circumstances
contributed to this evolution. Although organized more or less chronologically,
An Elusive Science is an interpretive history and, as such, Lagemann
is less concerned with being comprehensive than with presenting a well-argued
analysis that can inform current problems facing educational scholarship.
In telling her history, Lagemann discusses many of the
major figures who helped shape the field — G. Stanley Hall, John
Dewey, Edward L. Thorndike, Ellwood P. Cubberley, Lewis M. Terman, Ralph
W. Tyler, Jerome Bruner, and James S. Coleman, among others. Lagemann’s
sympathies clearly rest with John Dewey and his view of education and
educational inquiry as fundamentally social. She views the failure of
Dewey’s ideas to catch on within the education research field as
a missed opportunity and wonders what would have happened had he stayed
at the University of Chicago and systematically analyzed his work at
the Laboratory School there. Lagemann also documents the role that a
few central institutions — for example, the University of Chicago,
Teachers College, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation,
the Carnegie Foundation, and the National Institute of Education —
played in shaping the field.
Several themes run through Lagemann’s history of
education. One is the connection between education research’s low
status and the feminization of teaching during the latter half of the
nineteenth century. Much of the low status of education research, Lagemann
asserts, stems from its historic association with “woman’s
work” (p. 3). Also, as an applied field, it had less status in
higher education institutions than pure, or theoretical, fields.
A second theme is the role that both status-seeking and
money-seeking played in forming the character of education research.
These two pursuits pulled education researchers (or “educationists”)
in different directions. In practice, status-seeking involved attempting
to make the field more “scientific.” This led to an emphasis
on measurement, quantitative analysis, and narrow, behaviorist conceptions
of education. Education researchers also tried to gain status by promoting
a top-down model of knowledge transmission. In this model, there was
a strict separation between those who produced knowledge about education
and those who used it. Researchers would generate the knowledge and
then dispense it to administrators, who would then use it to tell teachers
what to do. This hierarchical arrangement was also a gendered one, since
most researchers and administrators were male, while most teachers were
female.
In order to pay the bills, many education researchers,
who worked in a poorly funded discipline, also had to seek funding.
One way of doing this was to work as a consultant for school districts
and their administrators. Opportunities for this type of work abounded,
for during the early part of the twentieth century school systems faced
exploding student enrollments and the challenge of educating an increasingly
diverse student population. Some education researchers thus became involved
in more practical matters, although interestingly enough, this also
led to narrow research pursuits. Rather than conducting research that
led to deep insights into the problems of educational practice, educationists,
inspired by the ideas of scientific management that were in vogue at
the time, tended to engage in “social bookkeeping,” or the
census-like collection of data on school conditions. This type of research
was descriptive rather than analytical.
A third theme in the book is the role that major historical
events — World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam
War — played in shaping the course of education research. The two
world wars, for instance, stimulated interest in intelligence testing
and sorting. Later, the Great Society’s enlargement of the federal
government’s role in education created a demand for program evaluation.
An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education
Research is not perfect. For example, Lagemann uses the term science
rather loosely and does not provide a clear working definition. In addition,
by organizing the book around the careers of specific researchers and
the roles of particular institutions, Lagemann somewhat obscures broader
changes in the field that might not have been attributable to, or exemplified
by, any in her cast of characters. The book does not, for instance,
explore the influence that technology might have played in the evolution
of education research. How have changes in the tools available to researchers
influenced the types of research they have conducted? The book also
does not, until the very end and rather cursorily, discuss how changes
in conceptions of knowledge affected education and all social science
research. Finally, at certain times the reader may feel that the analysis
draws upon a relatively narrow group of individuals or institutions.
Perhaps these were indeed the leaders who shaped the field during its
early years. However, one wonders what would have resulted from an analysis
of dissertation topics or journal articles and how they changed over
the decades. What types of research were being conducted outside of
the few elite institutions?
Of course, writing any history involves making selections
and drawing boundaries. As Lagemann herself acknowledges, she could
very well have written a different history of education research. Individuals
interested in the history of academic disciplines, in U.S. history in
general, or in the history of higher education should be thankful that
she wrote the one she did.
E.P.L.
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The Best for Our Children: Critical Perspectives
on Literacy for Latino Students
edited by María de la Luz Reyes and John J. Halcón.
New York: Teachers College Press, 2001. 258 pp. $58.00, $26.95 (paper).
The Best for Our Children is a book that, as promised
by its title, presents critical perspectives on literacy for Latino
children. Editors María de la Luz Reyes and John J. Halcón
include a wonderful array of authors that speak insightfully about issues,
theories, and practices of literacy that systematically exclude Latino
students from traditional academic discourse. These authors present
critical perspectives that expose systems of exclusion and propose alternative
and inclusive strategies that have been proven to work well with Latino
students and may work for other marginalized students as well.
The Best for Our Children is organized into three
general themes. Part One, Sociocultural, Sociohistorical and Sociopolitical
Context of Literacy, lays the theoretical foundations of literacy within
a cultural context. In chapter one, Luis C. Moll, professor of education
at the University of Arizona at Tucson, presents an overview of a cultural-historical
perspective on literacy. Moll describes a project called Funds of Knowledge,
in which researchers, university professors, and teachers worked with
the community to develop a theoretical vocabulary to find common knowledge
in mechanisms of social exchange. These funds of knowledge are examples
of what Moll calls “mediating structures,” which he defines
in the Vygotskian sense as the places where theory and practice are
discussed within a community of parents, teachers, and learners. For
example, Moll depicts teachers visiting their students’ households
and communities as learners seeking to understand the ways of these
households and to learn how people use resources of all kinds (what
he calls funds of knowledge) to engage in life activities. Moll also
gives an example of how a cultural-historical approach works in La Clase
Mágica, an after-school program in which this approach is put
into practice.
In chapter two, Esteban Díaz and Bárbara
Flores, both professors of education at California State University
at San Bernardino, depict the sociocultural and sociohistorical approach
at the micro level through a case study of a teacher and a student.
Díaz and Flores discuss how this teacher and her student engage
in the mediation of knowledge using the example of the teacher who moves
away from a model of “negative proximal development,” the
idea that teachers traditionally ignore the “proximal” or
positive potential of children by focusing instead on “dead-end”
skills.
In chapter three, Lilia I. Bartolomé, a professor
at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and María V. Balderrama,
a professor at California State University at San Bernardino, explicitly
point to the political nature of education and stress the need for “political
and ideological clarity” in the teaching profession. In a case
study of a successful high school, they identify four teachers who share
the “recipe” for the academic success of minority students,
as well as various ideological beliefs that operate in practice to structure
success.
In chapter four, John J. Halcón, a professor at
the University of Northern Colorado, recounts the historical trajectory
of bilingual education. He focuses on the negative political motivations
and strategies utilized throughout history, such as language control
in literacy instruction, to impose mainstream ideologies.
Part Two, Biliteracy, Hybridity, and Other Literacies,
addresses the issues of Latinos as linguistic minorities and the use
of language dominance (Standard English in this case) to strategically
exclude other languages and dialects. The authors in this section offer
a range of possibilities and success stories under the theories of critical
pedagogy and cultural-historical perspectives.
In chapter five, María Echiburu Berzins, a professor
at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Alice E. López,
a bilingual teacher in the Colorado public schools, describe a program
in which language status is negotiated in a two-way bilingual program
by focusing on the communicative properties of language. They describe
in detail how they believe that their students use two linguistic codes
(Spanish and English) to construct meaning and to engage in learning
activities. They also describe some of the “survival strategies”
that they address in teaching their students how to explicitly distinguish
between different discourses, and how they build a collaborative partnership
with parents in planting the seeds for biliteracy.
In chapter six, María de la Luz Reyes, a professor
at the University of Colorado at Boulder, presents four case studies
of students as examples of unleashing possibilities in literacy acquisition.
Through these students’ writings and their own interpretation of
their bilingualism, one can appreciate how language use is determined
by sociocultural factors. The “unleashing of possibilities”
for these four students is made possible by conceptualizing language
as a meaning-driven system, as opposed to the form of linguistic symbols
in which teachers contributed to concept-acquisition activities or activities
that were contextualized and children were free to use their “natural
linguistic resources” to build meaning in a sociocultural context.
In chapter seven, Kris Gutiérrez, professor at
the University of California at Los Angeles, Patricia Baquedano-López,
a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Héctor
H. Alvarez, a graduate student researcher at the University of California
at Los Angeles, view literacy not only as a learning goal, but also
as the central means of appropriating knowledge. These ideas are the
basis for the organization of Las Redes, an after-school club in which
all prejudices are put aside to truly negotiate a zone of proximal development
— in other words, defining the zone of proximal development between
what the child knows and his or her potential, and not what the adult
thinks the child should know. The authors present some writing samples
from children to illustrate how a “cultural-historical perspective”
takes a student beyond bilingualism to play with language across cultures
and codes.
In chapter eight, Eloise Andrade Laliberty, a former
teacher in the Colorado public schools, remembers her own feelings of
inadequacy as a learner of English. Now a teacher, she tells the story
of how her students get “hooked on writing.” She recognized
the exclusionary effects of focusing on English as the language of instruction,
and realized that by opening the writing projects beyond language codes
she was including the students learning English, who were being systematically
marginalized in an English as a Second Language pullout program. Through
sharing personal narratives, focusing on the process of writing instead
of on the product, and linking literacy to students’ lived experiences,
she inspired and guided students to become authors.
Part Three, Reading the Word by Reading the World, is
a collection of success stories of literacy, reflections on linguistic
codes, and the voices of Latino parents. In chapter nine, Robert T.
Jiménez, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
presents the case of Sara, a bilingual Latina student, to demonstrate
strategic reading for language related disabilities. Sara was a student
at risk of being referred to special education due to her reading problems.
She represents those Latino students who are systematically ignored
and omitted from the curriculum due to their language background and
cultural identity. Through methods grounded in critical reflection,
Jiménez uses specific reading strategies that worked with Sara
in improving her literacy and that he recommends for other Latino students.
In chapter ten, Carmen I. Mercado offers her reflections
on the power of Spanish as a vital language among our youth: “When
Latino youth enter the schoolhouse door, so does the language that introduced
them to the world” (p. 170). In four case studies, she highlights
some of the multiple dialects of Latinos in the United States to demonstrate
Latino youth’s bilingual and multidialectal capabilities. Mercado
quotes Heath and McLaughlin to express the value of using Spanish to
lessen the social distance between Latino students and their teachers.
They claim that creating a sense of belonging and community “depends
much more on how those in one’s immediate environment ask questions,
give directions, frame time and space, and reflect expectations than
it does on verbal declarations of collective or acceptance” (p.
170). Thus, Mercado’s research focuses on dialect differences and
cultural meaning rather than on an ubiquitous definition of Spanish.
By recognizing these differences as linguistic abilities, Mercado argues,
the communicative repertoires and career opportunities of Latino students
would be improved.
In chapter eleven, Roberta Maldonado, Title I coordinator
of the Boulder Valley Public School District in Colorado, applies a
truly critical perspective when she expands her literacy lessons to
help students with real-life struggles by applying the Freirean idea
of taking learning to the real-world level. She focuses on reading not
as an academic skill but for a purpose, and sees herself as a learner
reading the lives and needs of her adolescent students. Maldonado relies
on a concept of “two-way” background knowledge, in which both
student and teacher learn about the other’s background, to move
students from the reality of their lives to classical literature and
back again to their own lives. She helps the students to make culturally
meaningful connections to the classics and to world culture, and teaches
them to critique these connections and understand the intrinsic value
of literacy — all through a critical lens.
In chapter twelve, Robbi Ciriza Houtchens takes the approach
of situating literacy in her students’ realities by first providing
them with a wide variety of texts and genres (i.e., classics, comics,
novels, plays). Although she explicitly addresses some of the basic
strategies that her students should have been taught earlier, Houtchens
focuses on inclusion as a literacy strategy by providing readings and
discussions that reflect the lives and aspirations of her students.
In chapter thirteen, María E. Fránquiz,
a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, presents the program,
It’s About YOUth!, which explores alternative ways of achieving
literacy. Fránquiz analyses three ways in which a community takes
literacy to the community level and builds a community identity, which
includes the youth’s own value and definition of literacy: first
by disseminating these through public access television, representing
conocimiento (knowledge) in a mobile mural sculpture, and emphasizing
the role of social responsibility of their audience. As students appropriate
these media, they develop a unique academic identity in which they do
not feel they need to “sell out” to succeed academically.
In chapter fourteen, Alma Flor Ada, a professor at the
University of San Francisco, and Rosa Zubizarreta, a former bilingual
teacher, present a collection of parents’ narratives to illustrate
parental interest and commitment to their children’s education,
and some of the cultural values they instill in their children to help
them succeed in school. Ada and Zubizarreta set the narratives in the
context of their analysis of the ethnocentric nature of “social
capital,” and they stress the need to include parents as partners
in their children’s education.
With a foreword by Sonia Nieto, a professor at the University
of Massachusetts Amherst, and an afterword by María De La Luz
Reyes, I felt I was reading in the pages of this book my history and
the reality of my children as Latinos growing up in this wonderful yet
confusing time of negotiation. The voices of these authors made me feel
hope and a sense of solidarity and belonging that is seldom available
for minorities and language minorities in the academic world. Others
can find in this book, if not the echoes of their own realities, the
reflections of their own teaching practices and the theoretical foundations
that could inform their research. I recommend this book as a unique
example of bridged practice, research, and theory, and a faithful application
of critical pedagogy and of cultural and historical perspectives.
B.Q.
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Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher
and His Students
by Gregory Michie.
New York: Teachers College Press, 1999. 204 pp. $19.95 (paper).
“The popular notion of what it’s like to teach
in urban America is dominated by two extremes,” writes author and
teacher Gregory Michie:
On one hand are the horror stories, fueled by media reports
that portray schools in chaos: incompetent administrators, hallways
that are more dangerous than alleyways, students who lack even the most
basic skills, parents who are uneducated and unconcerned. On the other
hand is the occasional account of the miracle worker, that amazing super-teacher/savior
who takes a ragtag group of city kids and turns their lives around overnight.
Somewhere in between these two, between the miracles and the metal detectors,
is where I teach. (p. xxi)
In Holler If You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher
and His Students, Gregory Michie succeeds admirably in rendering
his teaching experiences in the complicated reality between these extremes.
His portrayal deftly avoids the simplification either extreme would
demand. The first book in the Teaching for Social Justice series
(edited by William Ayers and Therese Quinn), Holler If You Hear Me
contains vivid stories of Michie’s first seven years as a teacher
in public elementary schools on Chicago’s South Side. Each chapter
begins with a story told by Michie, followed by the reflections of his
former students who figured prominently in the story. For example, in
chapter two, Michie’s perceptions of Hector, a 12-year-old boy
with a tough bravado, are transformed when, after an argument with another
student at camp, a sobbing Hector reveals that he is frightened because
his little sister became sick earlier in the day and he did not know
if she was okay. In the second half of the chapter, Michie visits a
17-year-old Hector at his home and finds him angry and having problems
with his mother due to his gang involvement, violence at home, and unwillingness
to go to school. Hector, who dropped out of school during seventh grade
and has been in and out of various programs since, reveals his feeling
that teachers “looked at me and saw a dumb gangbanger. A kid that
needed to be put away forever” (p. 38). His desperate desire for
a more restful existence are expressed in his wishes “to go far
away. Real, real far away . . . away from this environment for a long,
long time. Someplace different. Someplace where I can go and fish for
the rest of my life” (p. 39). Michie realizes how, “as a sixth
grader, Hector had seemed so grown up to me much of the time. Now, as
a 17-year-old, he seems unprepared to give way to adulthood” (p.
37).
Michie’s purpose in this alternating format is to
“shed light on the education of a teacher” and “to allow
space for my students to speak their minds, tell their stories, raise
their voices” (p. xxi). These first-person reflections make Michie’s
students come alive for the reader as even the author’s insightful
and caring descriptions cannot. Because Holler If You Hear Me
does not follow one classroom or group of students throughout, the student
reflections serve to deepen the reader’s understanding of particular
students but also to encourage the reader to wonder about the future
lives of each student that Michie mentions.
Holler If You Hear Me touches on a variety of
the fundamental challenges of teaching — classroom discipline,
teacher frustration, relationships with students, relationships with
other teachers, racial and ethnic differences, student apathy, and navigation
of restrictive school policies, among many others. Throughout the book,
Michie balances his tales of struggle with moments of joyous success.
Not surprisingly, the successes are often related to the development
of deeper connections between teacher and student. Michie presents his
successes with a genuine modesty that comes from the experience of other,
less effective teaching moments. Michie’s reported mistakes and
difficulties are some of the most instructive parts of the book. At
times, though, the reader may want to hear even more introspection from
the author about the reasoning behind his actions or why he thinks a
particular moment worked well or did not work at all.
Michie’s concern for and commitment to his students
shines in Holler If You Hear Me, and his questioning, wonderment,
frustration, passion, and humor pull the reader along this journey of
embodied education. While many of the issues raised are familiar, Holler
If You Hear Me is a book of ordinary inspiration that will appeal
to both teachers and students.
M.P.H.
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