Article Abstracts:
-by Eric Margolis and Mary Romero
In this article, Eric Margolis and Mary Romero examine the effect of the "hidden curriculum" on women of color graduate students in sociology. They interview twenty-six women of color enrolled in Ph.D. programs in sociology to uncover how the graduate school curriculum not only produces professional sociologists, but also simultaneously reproduces gender, race, a class, and other forms of inequality. In their analysis, Margolis and Romero identify two forms of the hidden curriculum at work: the "weak" form, which is the professionalization process essential to "becoming a sociologist," and the "strong" form, which acts to reproduce stratified an unequal social relations. The numerous quotations from the women graduate students interviewed reveal that many elements of the hidden curriculum--such as stereotyping and blaming the victim--were painfully obvious to them. As Margolis and Romero argue, the women's stories, the authors' analysis, and the publication of this article are forms of resistance to the hidden curriculum, constituting "a lifting of veils to make visible what was hidden."
-- by Stephen W. Raudenbush and Rafa M. Kasim
Few would deny that the civil rights and women's movements have substantially changed U.S. society. Yet ethnic and gender inequality in employment and earnings remain large. Even when comparisons are confined to persons of similar educational attainment. African Americans and Hispanic Americans earn less than European Americans, women earn less than men, and African Americans suffer a substantially elevated risk of unemployment. One prominent explanation for ethnic differences in earning and employment is that, holding constant access to schooling, differences in economic outcomes reflect differences in cognitive skills that have become decisive in the modern labor market. A prominent explanation for the gender gap emphasizes gender differences in occupational preference, with women choosing occupations that are lower paying. Based on an intensive analysis of data from the U.S. National Adult Literacy Survey, the authors find that these two explanations are only partly successful in illuminating ethnic and gender inequality in employment and earnings. Alternative explanations emphasizing labor market discrimination and residential segregation cannot be ignored. In this article, Stephen Raudenbush and Rafa Kasim consider the implications of this new evidence for current debates about affirmative action and educational reform.
-by Karen Hale Hankins
We are pleased to inaugurate our new Voices Inside Schools section with "Cacophony to Symphony: Memoirs in Teacher Research," by Karen Hale Hankins. In this article, Hankins explores the connection between her personal history and her present classroom teaching through the process of journal writing. She records in her journal her observations about her class, her teaching, and her memoirs of her own past as they are sparked by present events, feelings, and challenges in her classroom. Hankins discovers that her past experiences, when carefully reflected on, can help her better understand, and thus reach and teach, her students, even those with whom she once felt she had little in common.
Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today's Youth
by Henry A. Giroux
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 248 pp. $22.95.
On a given day, who is responsible for educating the most people in the United States? I would argue that the answer is a toss-up between Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw. They each "teach" a class in current events for twenty minutes every day. What they say has a powerful impact on how we view our nation and our world. In Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of Today's Youth, Henry Giroux initiates a critical analysis of the mass media's role in how children in the United States form their self-image and the image of the world at large in terms of the often mentioned but, I would argue, rarely deeply discussed issue of race relations.
Giroux begins by delving into his own experience with race and racism as a youth. While growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, as a working-class White male, he confronted the type of in-your-face racism that pervades society outside the polite middle and upper-middle classes. After giving the reader a sense of who he is and where he comes from with regard to his view of youth and race, Giroux moves on to establish an image of American youth in terms of the mass media. He argues that television ads, movies, billboards, and the like perpetuate an image that encourages followers and discourages critical analysis of the forces of mass marketing. American youth are told what to wear, what to eat, and, in many ways, what to think. Giroux contends that these messages exploit not only youth as an image, but the youths that manifest the reality behind this image.
Beyond the mass marketing of and to youth, Giroux discusses the demonization of youth through the creation and perpetuation of a racialized image of "youth as a problem." He develops his ideas with examples of film images that include those in Larry Clark's controversial feature film Kids. Giroux exposes the lack of social responsibility on the part of filmmakers as they perpetuate images that stereotype American youth, perpetuate racial stereotypes, and support the continued dominance of White, middle-class social mores, lifting these mores above social critique. However, his discourse is not purely of what's wrong with Hollywood. For example, he praises Jonathan Stack's Harlem Diaries, stating:
Stack's film moves beyond the simplistic call for positive images of black youth; instead, it captures the complexities of how such youth are produced within certain social, economic, and political circumstances while simultaneously working to transform such conditions. (p. 62)
Through these feature films, exemplars of mass media images, Giroux lays a foundation for the development of a critical approach to race that provides an opening for White youth to struggle against racism. Giroux takes the position that many White youth would like to play an active role in confronting and struggling against racism, but often the rhetoric of multiculturalism leaves them in an emotional flood of guilt, confusion, and anger. He provides a framework for open dialogue among youth and those who seek to teach them based on a critical analysis of the mass media images that permeate U.S. society.
From the images of film and television, Giroux moves on to discuss the role of public intellectuals in the race and youth debate. He reviews the various schools of thought regarding the role of public intellectuals and, in particular, Black public intellectuals. My initial reaction to this discussion of public intellectuals was to question its continuity with the preceding text. What does this have to do with race, youth, and the mass media? But then I took a closer look. Public intellectuals serve as the foci for much thoughtful and intelligent debate in a forum larger than a classroom of thirty students. The fact is that these intellectuals can, and, Giroux would argue, should, play important roles in catalyzing thoughtful public debates. President Clinton has attempted to initiate a public debate on race relations in the United States, but his approach has come under criticism for being too much of a soft touch on a hard issue. In a recent public forum at the University of Akron, Ohio, a carefully selected audience watched as President Clinton attempted to broach the issue of race relations to the nation. But in reality, race and racism are not issues that can be so carefully and cleanly managed. Indeed, these issues have historically been unmanageable. Giroux begins to set up a theoretical framework for an intelligent and thoughtful debate about race within the group that will build the future of this country, the youth. They will have to deal with our mistakes and attempt to heal old wounds, as we adults have in some small way made fitful starts toward remedying the transgressions of our predecessors.
Channel Surfing may in a sense serve as a catalyst for social change in terms of race relations, but this is only possible if we take the initiative to critically address the media images that bombard us on a daily basis. We must realize that these images do more than just stir emotion; these images teach -- and what they teach is up to us to determine as educators, parents, and members of society.
Giroux takes important steps toward establishing a critical pedagogy that begins to address the racialized images projected by mass media through film. We live in a segregated society dominated by Whites, where often the only experience many White youth have with Black youth is through the mass media, films, videos, and television. Critically appropriating and analyzing these forms of communication opens a channel through which to disrupt mass media images.
r.h.t.
Against the Tide: Career Paths of Women Leaders in American and British Higher Education
edited by Karen Doyle Walton.
Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1996. 263 pp. $35.00.
In Against the Tide, editor Karen Doyle Walton offers twenty autobiographical stories or "profiles" that reflect on women's leadership and the role of gender in higher education in the United States and Britain. Walton's intent is to offer readers a look at the career trajectories of women working as university executives (presidents, vice-chancellors, and college principals in Britain) and to highlight commonalties and contrasts within their careers. In particular, Walton hopes that readers will recognize, within these stories, experiences that explain why academic women become interested in administrative academic career paths, as well as how they develop and then sustain these prestigious careers.
Walton's sample of twenty women is diverse not only in terms of the institutional cultures in which the women work -- for example, the self-contained U.S. college versus the university-regulated colleges of Cambridge and Oxford. It also represents diversity in terms of the women's backgrounds -- the types of institutions from which the women received their undergraduate training; the income, education, and ethnicity of their parents; terminal degrees received; and patterns of recruitment into and advancement within academe. Emphasizing the range of experiences, Walton has enabled each author to speak in her own voice by allowing her the latitude to determine the content, format, and style of her essay.
In her introduction to Against the Tide, Walton discusses the "steady increase in the percentage of women chief executive officers [in academe] over the last 20 years" (p. 4). Noting that few women have held top posts in Great Britain, she suggests that one of the barriers to women's advancement in the UK may be the lack of an academic career path comparable to that in the United States, a path on which a college presidency is considered to be the apex. In fact, because academicians in the UK regard a professorship as the pinnacle of their profession, women who head colleges are more likely to be recruited and appointed from high-level posts in business or government service.
In editing this collection, Walton has not attempted to identify any significant or compelling themes about the causes of development, advancement, or leadership across the women's careers. Thus, her book won't satisfy a reader interested in generalizable evidence of pauses, turning points, continuities, or discontinuities in the women's academic career trajectories. Other than a nod by most of the women to the existence of pressures of dual-career families in their lives, there is little attempt to explore more than superficial similarities among this group of women. Indeed, Walton does not make any claims about commonality other than that all of these women have followed highly successful and satisfying paths.
In asking twenty women to construct their own individual profiles to be edited under their own names, Walton risked ending up with a set of self-serving examples of high-level women executives in higher education. Nevertheless, among the portraits are several interesting stories that suggest that moving "against the tide" means more than women's beating the odds or making serendipitous progress towards a college presidency. For example, Ruth Deech, a lawyer and the only woman head (principal) of a coeducational college, St. Anne's College in Oxford University, is an interesting case. Her comments on coeducation include her determination to "behave as if equality between the sexes prevailed" (p. 83) and her belief that she was able to establish daycare at Oxford because "she seemed to lack the usual female fear of committee s and realized . . . the virtue of the university's overly democratic process [where] a good case is bound to win in the end, no matter how much it is disliked subjectively by members of the committee" (p. 85). Such comments suggest that researchers interested in the characteristics of women who become academic managers might want to explore the differences and commonalties between women managers' beliefs about gender.
Of course, almost any reader might expect that Walton would include in this collection of twenty portraits at least one woman who had made it to the top but was not able to sustain her work at this level, which she does. The final story in the collection is that of Dr. Judith Sturnick, former president of Keane State College and the University of Maine at Farmington who, although now sober, has waged a lifelong battle with alcohol addiction. Sturnick is an example of a woman who in swimming against the tide has had to redirect her career. Her comment that it is important that women "tell each other the truth of our individual lives, instead of our gilded, self-serving myths . . . [and that] her life has been wonderful, as well as marked with grief" (p. 256) contributes to our sense of the trustworthiness of the autobiographies in this volume.
m.c.
edited by Rob Cuthbert.
Buckingham, Eng: Open University Press, 1996. 225 pp. $29.95 (paper).
Working in Higher Education is a collection of articles that examines the contemporary experience of staff work in higher education in the United Kingdom from a range of social science perspectives. By drawing on many disciplines, the editor has sought to avoid what he describes as the "unduly familiar" and narrow single disciplinary approach that characterizes so much of the current literature on higher education in the UK and abroad.
Cuthbert has assembled the twelve articles in his collection into three main categories: the workers, their work, and their work context. Chapters on the "workers" describe the relatively new national statistical database in the UK (HESA-Higher Education Statistics Agency); the neglect of best practices in human resources management; the need for attention to financial rewards and policy; and the lack of attention in higher education to the literature of career patterns and trajectories. The "work" chapters include the nature of non-academic work, such as the work of libraries; new academic formats such as work-based learning; the changing boundaries of responsibility for academic work between professors and a professionalized support staff; and challenges to effective time management and quality time in open-ended research environments. "Work context" chapters emphasize occupational culture -- the complex web of underlying assumptions, attitudes, and values that characterize higher education. Within this category, authors discuss the validity of the idea that there is a single academic profession that crosses national boundaries , disciplines, and rank; the different concepts of access to higher education; and what academics take for granted about the higher education sector, including the view that work is not confined to a physical campus location or must be done during office hours.
There is a wealth of material on academic careers in this volume, even for educators working in universities in other countries. Literature reviews by each chapter author and the editor draw on North American as well as British scholarship and are informative sources of contemporary methodology and substance in the study of higher education work and careers. For example, Gaby Weiner's piece, "Which of Us Has a Brilliant Career?" begins by comparing conventional and more recent conceptualizations of "career" and concludes with an autobiographical example in which she presents her own career experience as a reflection "not only [of] changes in university conditions but the different life chances of female and male workers" (p. 65).
As a professional staff person, I think my favorite chapter has relevance for professional staff working in North American higher education and possibly for many others who have worked or studied in universities everywhere. Entitled "Work's Committees," it is a humorous and carefully crafted critique of higher education's habit of doing a lot of its work through the structure of democratic committees. The chapter's author, Ian McKay, has compiled a series of ridiculous but familiar committee "moments" such as one that begins, "It had been a long meeting" (p. 122). These "moments" are introduced with quotations and references to various scenes from Shakespeare's play Macbeth -- "Bloody business. . . . All is but toys. . . . Bring me no more reports. . . . These deeds must not be thought after these ways; so it will make us mad" -- to make readers reflect on committee work, the many functions of committees, and the sometimes not so obvious or hidden purposes committees serve. In addition, McKay uses parody to describe the various styles of committee chairs and members (including the machinations of alternative leaders) to suggest the possibility of some devious reasons for chairs' selection of meeting places and seating arrangements and to focus attention on the importance of process in meetings. McKay concludes with the tongue in cheek suggestion that we need to add two more stages -- "transforming and mourning" -- to Tuckman's well-known stages of small group process: forming, storming, norming, and performing. In other words, though good committees do exist, the many committees that we have in universities ought to be reviewed regularly and, when necessary, disbanded.
Taken together, the articles in Working in Higher Education are an interesting and informative foray into the world of higher education in the United Kingdom. There is a lot of material here that describes trends and problems in higher education today. The book raises challenges for both scholars and practitioners of higher education and, perhaps most importantly, given the pressures and conflicts in higher education, permits a reader the occasional laugh while learning.
m.c.
Making School by Hand: Developing a Meaning-Centered Curriculum from Everyday Life
by Mary Kenner Glover
Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997. 138 pp. $19.95 (paper).
In Making School by Hand: Developing a Meaning-Centered Curriculum from Everyday Life, Mary Kenner Glover, principal and second-grade teacher at the Awakening Seed School in Tempe, Arizona, uses the metaphor "making things from hand" (p. xix) to reveal how her childhood memories connect with teaching and learning in a unique text that combines reflections on practice and curriculum studies. The author states, "If we are to begin viewing school as a handmade process, we have to give our students daily opportunities to use their hands to help them construct an understanding of what they come upon in the world" (p. xx). Glover begins the "handmade" process by acknowledging the children's prior knowledge, interests, and needs as she and her students create a community of learners in the classroom. There are examples of how Glover and her students create curricula based on the children's everyday experiences, including such topics as the environment, homelessness, and AIDS. Illustrations of students' work demonstrate "making things by hand" through a variety of activities, such as an air pollution board game, a report on the immune system, and heat-making experiments. Through her students' discovery and imagination they are supported in becoming readers, writers, environmentalists, and scientists.
Through the many examples in the book, the reader becomes aware of how children are empowered to make meaning, and to construct their learning in ways that are relevant to their daily lives. This reflective and thoughtful book will be helpful to classroom teachers and administrators who want to empower students to take more ownership of their own learning in authentic and meaningful ways.
c.a.
Teaching Reading and Writing in Spanish in a Bilingual Classroom
by Yvonne S. Freeman and David E. Freeman.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997. 256 pp. $28.50 (paper).
In Teaching Reading and Writing in Spanish in the Bilingual Classroom, Yvonne S. Freeman and David E. Freeman, professors at the Graduate School of Fresno Pacific University, pose a fundamental question that bilingual teachers face every day: "How do I teach reading and writing in my classroom?" (p. 1). The authors attempt to answer this complex question by presenting a thoughtful and comprehensive discussion of literacy theory, particularly children's biliteracy development in grades K-6, and by showing how what children know in their native language of Spanish supports them in their acquisition of English reading and writing skills. Using interesting classroom examples, the authors present and critique traditional Spanish reading and writing instruction and then recommend alternative literature-centered methods. Many children's writing samples demonstrating the natural development between Spanish and English literacy are also included in the text.
This book outlines clear steps on how to support children's literacy development in Spanish and English. Checklists for effective reading and writing instruction techniques help bilingual teachers evaluate their practice. Useful thematic units, such as an animal unit for kindergarten and fourth grade, are useful for bilingual teachers during language arts instruction in their classroom. Each unit includes a list of Spanish children's books that bilingual teachers will find invaluable.
This is a good resource for teachers, administrators, and program directors to have on hand. Teaching Reading and Writing in Spanish in the Bilingual Classroom is a powerful reminder that effective reading and writing instruction in children's native languages supports the acquisition of biliteracy tools that help them succeed.
c.a.