ARTICLES
VOICES INSIDE SCHOOLS
EDITORS' REVIEWS
Understanding Schools as Intelligent
Systems
edited by Kenneth Leithwood
Escaping Education: Living as Learning
within Grassroots Cultures
by Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo
Esteva
Schools that Learn
by Peter
Senge
Storylines: Craftartists’ Narratives of
Identity
by Elliot G. Mishler
Gramsci, Freire, and Adult Education:
Possibilities for Transformative Action
by Peter Mayo
Robert T. Brennan, Jimmy Kim, Melodie Wenz-Gross, and Gary N. Siperstein
Which is more equitable, teacher-assigned grades or high-stakes tests? Nationwide, there is a growing trend toward the adoption of standardized tests as a means to determine promotion and graduation. "High-stakes testing" raises several concerns regarding the equity of such policies. In this article, the authors examine the question of whether high-stakes tests will mitigate or exacerbate inequities between racial and ethnic minority students and White students, and between female and male students. Specifically, by comparing student results on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) with teacher-assigned grades, the authors analyze the relative equitability of the two measures across three subject areas - math, English, and science. The authors demonstrate that the effects of high-stakes testing programs on outcomes, such as retention and graduation, are different from the results of using grades alone, and that some groups of students who are already faring poorly, such as African Americans and Latinos/Latinas, will do even worse if high-stakes testing programs are used as criteria for promotion and graduation. (pp. 173-216)
Vivyan C. Adair
In this article, Vivyan Adair argues that educators committed to fostering social and economic equity through education must challenge themselves to understand how crucial postsecondary education is to low-income single mothers, to recognize that this student population is increasingly "at risk," and to work against legislation that at best discourages, and at worst prohibits, these students from entering into and successfully completing postsecondary degree programs. Integrated into her discussion of recent welfare reform legislation are findings from her research. She presents data from interviews, in which students describe their desire to further their education and the frustrating obstacles that make this endeavor difficult and often impossible. Adair demonstrates that low-income, single-mother students experience dramatic and enduring benefits from completing college degrees, but that the opportunity and support required to do so is increasingly limited. She concludes that we must take steps toward ensuring that education remains a truly democratic project that has the potential for enacting social change and fostering economic equity. (pp. 217-239)
Carmen M. White
In this article, Carmen M. White analyzes the debate about affirmative action policies in education in Fiji and explores the impact of colonial discourses on the debates. She asserts that, much like in the United States, affirmative action policies in Fiji have been intended to correct past injustices to minority and underprivileged groups. She shows how proponents of affirmative action use a colonial discourse that undercuts the power of their argument and yet paradoxically fails to acknowledge the historical roots of the lower educational attainment of the Fijian population. In considering similarities of debate on this issue between the United States and Fiji, White offers an additional perspective from which to understand the affirmative action debate. (pp. 240-268)
Barbara Vacarr
Much of the diversity work on college campuses has focused on training multiculturally competent teachers and on transforming the curriculum to embody multiculturalism. Nevertheless, a gap remains between conceptual understandings of diversity work and teachers' abilities to respond to challenging moments of encounters with difference. Drawing on her own experience, Barbara Vacarr analyzes a pivotal and tension-filled moment of encounter that took place in a graduate course examining the dangers of remaining silent in the face of others' oppression. The author suggests that multicultural competence requires leaving behind the elevated position of teacher and confronting one's own fear of vulnerability and ineptitude. Vacarr's experience with the practice of Buddhist meditation provides a strategy for entering both the interpersonal encounter of the classroom and an intrapersonal encounter with oneself. (pp. 285-295)
Understanding Schools as Intelligent
Systems
edited by Kenneth Leithwood.
Stamford, CT: JAI Press,
2000. 303 pp. $82.50.
Understanding Schools as Intelligent Systems, a collection of articles whose authors employ an organizational learning framework to analyze schools, presents several perspectives on the capacity of schools to improve themselves. Broadly speaking, “organizational learning” refers to a group of people learning new processes, practices, and structures in order to reorganize their work. Editor Kenneth Leithwood distinguishes between organizations that are “smart” (i.e., highly skilled) and those that are intelligent — that is, those with the capacity to learn new skills and knowledge. Bringing clarity to what this capacity means and looks like in practice is the primary contribution of this compilation of articles.
Leithwood introduces this volume by arguing that individuals, groups, and organizations must experience some form of disequilibrium in order to devote the time and other resources necessary for learning new practices. Specifically, he identifies three potential sources of disequilibrium — environmental shifts, a gap between desired and actual outcomes, and/or an ethic of continuous improvement — and outlines three levels of analysis that serve to organize the book’s contents. The first level of analysis centers on the learning capacity of individuals and teams; the second examines this capacity in schools and districts. The third level of analysis investigates the effects or outcomes of learning for individuals, teams, and schools.
The first section of the book, “Developing the Intellectual Capacity of Individuals and Teams,” includes three articles on precisely what the section title indicates: one chapter focuses on the various factors that influence principal learning, while the other two focus on team development and learning (one in the context of a school leadership team and one in the context of a secondary school administrative team). While these three chapters do not use precisely the same framework for understanding learning, collectively they offer a range of ways to understand and assess learning processes by organizations, and the groups and individuals within them. For example, the author of the chapter about principals conceives learning as being nonroutine and “situated” (p. 20) and evidenced by an increased capacity to solve problems, to “exploit positively the social, symbolic and/or physical environment” (p. 21), and to make use of existing expert knowledge. In contrast, the authors of the chapter that focuses on school leadership teams conceive learning as an increased ability to develop a shared vision of improvement efforts, set standards, think systemically, and create effective learning environments for students.
How to develop the learning capabilities of schools is the focus of the second section, “Building the Intellectual Capacity of Schools and Districts.” These six chapters are devoted to understanding both organizational and systemic learning. This section focuses on the impact school, district, state, and federal programs and policies have on the learning capacity of teachers, administrators, and the schools in which they work. While chapters five and six attend to understanding the conditions under which schools are likely to build their own capacity (i.e., to learn), chapters seven and eight outline intervention strategies directly targeted at improving the learning capacity of schools. Chapter nine examines the role state and federal policy play in school learning; specifically, it analyzes the assumptions regarding practitioner learning often made by policymakers — that teaching is primarily a technical profession and that, therefore, one best solution exists — and outlines a different set of premises that are more conducive to truly building capacity — that professionals’ learning must be taken seriously (e.g., supported by additional resources) and that policymakers need more information from practitioners. Finally, chapter ten provides a literature review focused on describing a plausible series of stages that schools might pass through on their way to becoming learning organizations. Taken together, the chapters in this section provide an array of strategies for developing the learning capacity of schools, as well as several methodological approaches for understanding the impact of such efforts.
Instead of examining the conditions under which schools do or do not learn, the last section of this volume concerns the question, learning about what? Each of the three main chapters in “Organizational Learning Effects” presents empirical data in the service of understanding the direct and indirect effects of organizational learning in schools. Chapter eleven, the first chapter in this section, tackles the question, “Does the capacity for organizational learning increase the ability of schools to deliver high quality instruction and strong student performance?” (p. 239). Relying on survey and classroom observation data, as well as measures of student achievement (such as National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores), the authors conclude that the capacity for organizational learning is related to desirable outcomes (high-quality pedagogy and demonstrated student learning). The authors conceive organizational learning as being comprised of six dimensions — the presence of democratic structures, shared commitments and collaborative activity, appropriate knowledge and skills, supportive leadership, and feedback and accountability. According to the authors, realizing the promise of organizational learning is dependent upon the simultaneous presence of all six dimensions.
The authors of chapter twelve, using questionnaire data collected from Australian secondary schools, identify some links between organizational learning, leadership, and student outcomes (specifically, student engagement in school). These authors operationalize organizational learning as a function of the capacity to establish shared goals, to collaborate, to encourage risk and innovation, to carefully monitor and evaluate school progress, to know and understand specific resources and challenges, and, finally, to provide ongoing opportunities for professional development. These authors argue that the primary benefit of organizational learning for schools is to “make sense of paradox” (p. 288). According to these scholars, organizational learning can help schools find stability in change, to “move ahead without losing . . . roots” (p. 288).
Chapter thirteen features two case studies of Canadian high schools, focusing on how each one adapts to outside pressure for change over the course of a decade. The authors argue that creating “shared knowledge structures” (p. 312), additional financial resources, and competent leadership are necessary for building the learning capacity of schools. When these are in place, schools can learn to maintain focus on a few key improvement areas over time, even when administrative leadership changes. The capacity to maintain such a focus is, according to these authors, a key outcome of school learning.
Understanding Schools as Intelligent Systems illustrates some important ideas for practitioners and policymakers interested in helping schools build the capacity to develop skills and knowledge on their own. Because a common criticism of organizational learning research is that it is too theoretical, it is important that nine of the twelve main chapters are based on original empirical data. Nonetheless, the utility of this volume is compromised because, despite Leithwood’s attempt to create a common framework, the authors operationalize organizational learning in several different ways. This variation makes comparison across chapters difficult, as it is unclear whether the same terms are being used in similar ways (in the words of the field, the authors appear to have different “mental models” of what organizational learning entails). This volume does not answer some of the epistemological questions that have slowed the maturation of the organizational learning field: What is an organization that it may learn? What kind of learning do organizations actually engage in? Such questions must be theoretically and empirically resolved if a more coherent literature, where scholars can meaningfully build on the work of others, is to emerge. In order for this to happen, however, scholars will need to employ some common definitions of organizational learning. Conceptual clarity cannot be achieved without attempts to operationalize and empirically measure organizational learning, such as those found in this fascinating if at times disconnected collection of articles.
T.B.
Escaping Education: Living as
Learning within Grassroots Cultures
by Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo
Esteva.
New York: Peter Lang, 1998. 147 pp. $22.95.
As Homer tells it, the Greeks of ancient times filled a large wooden horse with soldiers and sent it to Troy, an assault masquerading as a gift. This “assault as gift” tactic has been repeated throughout the ages in various guises. A current iteration, according to Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva, the authors of Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures, lies buried in the helpful-sounding rhetoric of international development education programs. The authors argue passionately that the gates that lead into the cultures and communities of the “social majority” — those who are traditionally seen as being on the receiving end of social programs — have been propped open for the twin Trojan horses of globalization and neocolonialism, with the wedges of educational development discourse and practice. Education, they say, is assaulting traditional cultures.
Readers who think of education programs by international development agencies as either the “fishing poles” with which the people will fish for themselves, or even as the “carrot” offered before “stickier” interventions, will be struck by the authors’ claims that the programs are not the fishing poles of the first adage, but, rather, the stick itself of the second. These authors interrogate the relationship between the socializing power of education and the bombshell of globalizing capitalist culture, a shell that destroys the integrity of independent communities and razes the possibility of sovereignty for native peoples. The authors portray the education stick not simply as a blunt instrument, but as something akin to a concrete, curricular column upon which rests the intellectual frame of an empire.
Escaping Education is a call to resistance. Its three chapters plus epilogue provide a set of thumbnail sketches that portray the battle scene as the structuring of intellectual space by educational design. Though the book is not linear in its construction, the chapters do have certain themes or refrains. In the first chapter, “Education as a Human Right,” Prakash and Esteva identify education, particularly at the margins of the industrialized world, as a form of colonialism, and rights as a Western construct that is alien to indigenous communities. Pointing to the indigenous communities of Oaxaca, where Esteva lives, as an example, the authors describe the classroom’s devastating effect on community cultures. In the second chapter, “Grassroots Postmodernism,” they weave a deeper analysis of the socioeconomic factors and actors at play in maintaining the global system with strands of the stories of those who resist it from their local sites. The third chapter, “After Education What?” focuses less on delineating an action plan such as the title could suggest and more on implementing a particular plan, that of resuscitating Ivan Illich as a “contemporary prophet.” Illich’s life’s work, including his famed Deschooling Society,1 has clearly played a central role in the intellectual formation of these authors.
This is an exciting polemical work. I find myself engaged by many of the authors’ goals and assumptions, in solidarity with their sense of urgency and rage, and fascinated by many of their arguments. At the same time, I feel less enthusiastic about certain elements of their tone and rhetoric.
At the heart of the authors’ claims against the institution of education is their critique of “development” as an imposition of foreign standards of appropriate living conditions on local cultures. Those cultures that have maintained a modicum of independence should have the right not to be consumed by a set of cultural practices and norms imposed by and tied into the foundation of modern society that propelled capitalism to its current warp speed. The authors critique the concepts of “development” and “rights,” pointing out the specific histories and origins of these ideas. They also distinguish “underdeveloped,” which ascribes characteristics to a people, from “oppressed,” which refers to the social and historical conditions that have an impact on people. While I agree with the authors that there must be a place in this world for communities that do not want to participate in the globalization project, and that people in these communities, by definition, will have a hard time being heard and understood by those of us who live at the center of the empire, their argument raises a philosophical contradiction — the rights of a people to self-determination are being fought on the grounds that rights are a Western, alien construct.
Another example where the book could have discussed some issues more deeply is the ascription of responsibility to U.S. President Truman for “underdeveloping” two billion people. It seems a bit hyperbolic to argue, as do the authors, that when Truman coined and used the word underdeveloped,
On January 20, 1949, two billion people became underdeveloped. In a very real sense, they ceased being what and who they were — in all their diversity. (p. 89)
By adroitly confounding the coining of a word with both the concept behind the word and the changing of people’s material conditions, the authors find a convenient scapegoat for righteous anger, but do a disservice to the creation of a legitimate theoretical frame.
Perhaps I have been so schooled in the discourse of the academy that I have become too quickly skeptical of prophetic style. That might explain some of my discomfort as I read. Or perhaps I’m harboring an internalized colonial mentality, which would not be so surprising; most of us are in one way or another. Perhaps what I read as an attack on “literate” cultures was merely a defense of nonliterate cultures, though sentences like “The literate started their fullest persecution of the illiterate in all of human history” (p. 89), gave me pause. If the authors are suggesting that we use literacy as quid pro quo for neocolonial aggression, I believe they are as mistaken as the ranks of the defeated Trojan army would have been had they blamed their demise on the wooden-ness of that Greek horse.
However, when I reach beyond some of the thorny aspects of the book to what I consider its essence, I find myself appreciating this book a great deal for the questions that it raises. When I read,
However passionately committed to cultural diversity, the classroom must necessarily be the cemetery of sensibilities cultivated in commons and communities, central to the transmission and regeneration of soil cultures. (p. 26)
I ask myself if it must be the case that classrooms stealthily kill indigenous culture. But even if this were only sometimes the case, which it clearly is, it would be incumbent upon us all to look that academic gift horse of development education in the mouth.
W.M.S.
1. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Penguin, 1976).
Schools that Learn
by
Peter Senge.
New York: Doubleday, 2001. 592 pp. $35.00.
Many policymakers and educational practitioners discuss “capacity building” as a treatment of sorts: building capacity around data analysis, strategic planning, or curriculum alignment are a few of the interventions designed to assist schools in developing the skills and knowledge necessary to improve. But what is capacity building? How do schools actually develop capacity? Capacity to do what?
In Schools that Learn, Peter Senge argues that teachers, administrators, and other members of school communities must learn how to build their own capacity; that is, they must develop the capacity to learn. From Senge’s perspective, real improvement will only occur if the people responsible for implementation design the change itself: “It is becoming clear that schools can be re-created, made vital, and sustainably renewed not by fiat or command, and not by regulation, but by taking the learning orientation” (p. 5, emphasis in original). Senge, author of the best-selling The Fifth Discipline,2 has written a highly readable companion book directly focused on education. Individuals familiar with his earlier work will immediately recognize the five skills or disciplines at the heart of the learning orientation he proposes: developing personal mastery, creating shared mental models, establishing a shared vision, engaging in team learning, and thinking systemically. Collectively, these five disciplines represent the component skills underlying the learning process. According to Senge, if an individual, group, or organization develops the capacity to do each of the disciplines well, they will have become proficient in learning itself.
Schools that Learn is a resource book, and as such includes numerous exercises, techniques, and stories designed to help the people who work with and within schools learn how to develop their capacity to find solutions to the problems that thwart improvement. This volume is not designed to be read cover to cover; rather, Senge organizes the book in “three nested systems of activity” (p. 11): the classroom, the school, and the school community. Within each section, Senge and some 113 contributing authors offer anecdotes about systemic thinking, exercises designed to facilitate learning the disciplines, and lists of resources to connect the reader to other relevant ideas.
Senge employs “margin icons” to help readers understand the material and enable quick reference to related ideas. Icons are used to denote individual and team exercises; the etymology of key words; practical techniques for learning the disciplines; lists of relevant books, articles, and videos; and opportunities for reflection. Three elements of “organizational architecture” are also indicated with icons: guiding ideas or principles, innovations in organizational design, and the theoretical underpinnings of the techniques for learning the five disciplines. These markings are highly useful in orienting the reader to help see the connections between the nested systems and find illustrative examples of the concepts that are explained. As an aid to systemic thinking, including such iconography is philosophically congruent with Senge’s overall approach: it provides substantive scaffolding to facilitate practical attention to details while keeping in mind the complexity of reform (e.g., the interconnectedness of policies and practice, of school culture and school performance, etc.).
Senge makes a powerful argument regarding the need for a systems approach and learning orientation by introducing Schools that Learn with a historical perspective on educational systems. Specifically, he details “industrial age” assumptions about both learning — that “children are deficient and schools should fix them” (p. 35), that learning is strictly an intellectual enterprise, that everyone should learn in the same way, that classroom learning is distinctly different than that occurring outside of school, and that some kids are smart while others are not — and schools — schools “are run by specialists who maintain control” (p. 43), knowledge is inherently fragmented, schools teach some kind of objective truth, and “learning is primarily individualistic and competition accelerates learning” (p. 48). These assumptions about learning and the nature and purpose of schools reflect deeply embedded cultural beliefs that must be considered, and in many cases directly confronted, if schools are to develop the learning orientation necessary for improvement.
Importantly, Senge offers no prescriptions for success. He believes that, in order to be effective, solutions must be developed locally, not by “specialists” who sit far outside classroom and school walls. Instead, Senge offers a set of principles and activities, along with illustrative stories, designed to engage the reader in a process of learning and reflection. While some may be frustrated by the lack of specifics, not offering easy answers is precisely Senge’s point: practitioners must experience the messiness of change in order for real improvement to occur. Others have called Senge’s vision for organizational improvement idealistic and unsupported by external research and evaluation. Schools that Learn offers no specific answers to such critics, but rather provides a much needed resource book for those working to “build capacity” in schools. Policymakers at all levels, school principals, teachers, parents, and students can benefit from the ideas, stories of inspiration, and many tools that are included. In Schools that Learn, Senge complexifies and scaffolds the conversation regarding what building capacity looks like in schools and offers practical suggestions for how to begin to do it.
T.B.
2. Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice the Learning Organization (New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1990).
Storylines: Craftartists’
Narratives of Identity
by Elliot G. Mishler.
Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999. 180 pp. $31.00.
We express, display, make claims for who we are — and who we would like to be — in the stories we tell and how we tell them. (p. 19)
In Storylines: Craftartists’ Narratives of Identity, Elliot Mishler uses narrative analysis to examine the complex, multiple, and sometimes conflicting identities of several craftartists. The term itself, craftartist, encompasses one contradictory or dual identity assumed by Mishler’s subjects: on one hand, they identify themselves as artists, creating original, one of a kind objects, but also as craftspeople, creating useful, handmade objects like furniture that would otherwise be made by machine. This book uses data from a brief interview study to begin building theory and a narrative methodology of adult identity that shifts from assuming “the autonomous individual as the locus of identity and the source of its stability and constancy over time and across situations, to the socially situated production of identity and to the ways individuals position themselves vis-à-vis others” (p. 111). The book contains multiple thematic layers that interconnect and inform each other and is as much about the narrative method Mishler develops to better understand his subjects as it is about the subjects themselves. In one analytical layer, Mishler locates craftartisans and their work within U.S. society. In the final pages, Mishler hints at another thematic layer when he asserts that the research process itself is a “craft or skilled practice” (p. 162). Placed at the end of the book, this statement leads to a new interpretation of the book as Mishler’s exploration of the multiple identities of research — especially his own work — within the qualitative “subgenre” of narrative analysis.
In chapter one, Mishler introduces the assumptions and theoretical tensions that he encountered in examining the interview data. As a researcher with a psychological, scientific background, Mishler recognizes that the traditional positivistic perspective assumes universality, continuity, and coherence, and locates identity within the individual. In this book, he begins to venture toward exploring ideas dialectically opposed to those assumptions, such as variability, discontinuity, and contradiction, locating identity as socially situated and relational. In chapters two through five, Mishler analyzes several case studies from these dialectic tension points. In chapter two, “Sources and Routes: Variable Pathways in Identity Formation,” for example, Mishler looks at how three different individuals relate to craftartistry. The chapter highlights differences in how each person became interested in the craftarts, how each negotiates their work in the contexts of their lives, and how each presents and represents their identities within the interview itself.
At the end of chapter five, “Identities in/as Relationships within the Family and at Work,” Mishler utilizes narrative data from a woman in a second study to illustrate a phenomenon expressed by another of his interview subjects: the “dialectic of opposition where one’s claim for a positive identity may be justified by contrasting it with another’s negative identity” (p. 136). This idea helps him to explain how the two women define themselves in opposition to or outside of their husbands’ worlds — both women feel compelled to “carve out independent and separate lives” (p. 144) socially or through work. Ironically, Mishler, as a qualitative researcher located within the larger psychological and scientific research context, also seems to define his own research through a dialectic of opposition.
In the final chapter, “Narrative Studies of Identity: A Forward Look,” Mishler recaps the theoretical arguments in his book, notes some of the weaknesses in his own study, and urges readers not to treat his methodology “as a template” (p. 145), but as a conversational beginning.
A fascinating exploration of craftartists and their multiple identities, Storylines would be a great read for anyone interested in the crafts/arts or in better understanding adult identity issues. The most interesting aspect of this book, however, is Mishler’s effort to come to terms with his own identity/ies within the opposing research paradigms of positivism and interpretivism. This work provides an important conversation between the two paradigms.
C.L.M.
Gramsci, Freire, and Adult
Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action
by Peter Mayo.
London: Zed Books, 1999. 211 pp. $22.50.
In counterpoint to those who proclaim that the practice of good teaching has neither a philosophical context nor an ideological framework, and subsequently suggest that we teachers should patch together whatever practice raises test scores, Peter Mayo introduces his book Gramsci, Freire, and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action by placing mainstream educational systems squarely at the service of global capitalism. Mayo’s assertion — that schools and other educational programs train a work force in performances that maintain and reproduce the current political order — frames the dominant educational paradigm as subservient to the interests of those who control the planet’s productive capacities. From this perspective, the works of Brazilian philosopher-pedagogue Paulo Freire and Italian sindicalist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci shine in a positively critical light. Though they wrote in different halves of the twentieth century, Gramsci and Freire both provided theoretical frameworks for redressing social inequities by arming the have nots with the skills to analyze their material and cultural conditions.
Early chapters examine the respective theoretical contributions of Gramsci and Freire to the field of education, with later chapters interrogating the relationship between these ideas and reviewing their utility in a new millennium. The book’s strengths lie in the author’s ability to articulate certain concepts from the educational theories of Gramsci and Freire in a way that sheds light on both their historic context and their current potentiality. Mayo’s descriptions of Gramsci’s organic intellectual and war of position and Freire’s praxis and dialogue are brief and tight, though not insular; moreover, his argument is clearest when showing how these authors were ahead of their time in combining issues of structural injustice with personal agency, that their work is complementary, and that their ideas should not be isolated from the goals of larger social movements.
A fine introduction to the ideas of this seminal pair, Mayo’s work is more accessible, if not quite as rigorous as another recent work that contrasts the two, Paula Allman’s Revolutionary Social Transformation. When Mayo weaves his own analysis of the current political landscape, the chapters tend to loosen in their focus. The book also falters in not doing more to establish the particular connection between these invaluable theories of education and their particular connection to adult education. In fact, the connection to adult education, suggested by the volume’s title, hangs on lists of ambiguous citations and the equally equivocal phrase, “I would describe a theory of transformative adult education as one which recognizes the political nature of all educational interventions” (p. 24).
It could be argued that learners of any age are engaged in adult education when they become implicated in the adult task of transforming the world. In any case, it is precisely the author’s determination to establish the political nature of education and to include his own political analysis and argument that transforms this book from a simple synopsis of great ideas to the kind of intellectual endeavor that would make Gramsci and Freire proud.
W.M.S.