Summer 2002 Issue
Summer 2002 Reviews of Current
Books (Full-Text)
Order
the Summer 2002 issue
Click here
to browse back issues of Harvard Educational Review
Back to top
Harvard Educational Review
Summer 2002 Article Abstracts:
What Do We Know (and Need to Know) about
the Impact of School Choice Reforms on
Disadvantaged Students?
Dan D. Goldhaber and
Eric R. Eide
In this article, Dan Goldhaber and Eric Eide consider what we do and do not know about the impact
of school choice, focusing particularly on the potential impact of choice on minority students in urban
school settings. They observe that many argue that school choice is a necessary component of any
educational reform designed to improve educational outcomes for students. While public pressure
has yielded a tremendous expansion of choice options, Goldhaber and Eide contend that the
empirical evidence on the academic effects of school choice reforms is mixed. They propose that
relatively little evidence exists that these schools are having a clear-cut positive or negative impact on
the achievement of either the students who attend them or those who remain in traditional public
schools. They conclude that the mixed evidence on choice suggests that choice in and of itself is
unlikely to be the solution that revolutionizes urban school systems. (pp. 157-176)
Buying Homes, Buying Schools: School Choice
and the Social Construction of School Quality
Jennifer Jellison Holme
In this article, Jennifer Jellison Holme explores how parents who can afford to buy homes in areas
known "for the schools" approach school choice in an effort to illuminate how the "unofficial" choice
market works. Using qualitative methods, Holme finds that the beliefs that inform the choices of such
parents are mediated by status ideologies that emphasize race and class. She concludes that school
choice policies alone will not level the playing field for lower-status parents, as choice advocates
often suggest. (pp. 177-205)
The Economy of Literacy: How the Supreme
Court Stalled the Civil Rights Movement
Catherine Prendergast
According to critical race theorists, legal rights in this country have been compromised by the
recognition of White identity as having property value. In this article, drawing on these analyses as
well as the observations of literacy scholars questioning the outcomes of literacy and education,
Catherine Prendergast argues that the designation of literacy and education as "rights" is more
rhetorical than real. Prendergast pays close attention to the arguments and court proceedings of three
U.S. Supreme Court cases in which the value of literacy and the reality of racial discrimination have
both been contested. Through an analysis of these landmark cases - Brown v. Board of
Education, Washington v. Davis, and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke - the
author deconstructs "the lofty prose equating education with equal opportunity" to uncover the
ideologies of literacy that informed these cases. According to Prendergast, "this rhetoric has laid the
foundation for the recent legal challenges to affirmative action." She concludes by suggesting that
these crucial court decisions have stalled the civil rights movement by perpetuating the economy of
literacy as White property. (pp. 206-229)
Seeing Student Learning: Teacher Change and the Role of
Reflection
Carol R. Rodgers
In this article, Carol Rodgers describes a four-phase reflective cycle that she uses in her professional
development work with teachers. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Hawkins, Carini, and Seidel,
Rodgers explores the roles of presence, description, analysis, and experimentation in helping groups
of teachers slow down and attend to student learning in more rich and nuanced ways. She also
encourages teachers to solicit structured feedback from their students so they can begin to distinguish
between what they think they are teaching and what students are actually learning. Ultimately,
Rodgers argues that supportive and disciplined reflective communities of teachers can help teachers
understand that their students' learning is central, and that their own teaching is subordinate to and in
service of that goal. (pp. 230-253)
Back to top
Harvard Educational Review
Summer 2002 Reviews of Current Books
(Full Text)
Pregnant with Meaning: Teen Mothers and the Politics of
Inclusive Schooling (Adolescent Cultures, School, and Society, Vol. 13)
by Deirdre M. Kelly.
New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 257 pp. $29.95.
While many authors have written a variety of books about
teenage motherhood that deal primarily with its causes and consequences,
Deirdre M. Kelly approaches the topic from a new angle by focusing on the
overlooked issue of inclusive schooling for teen mothers. In Pregnant with
Meaning: Teen Mothers and the Politics of Inclusive Schooling, she defines
“inclusive schooling” broadly as “the ideal of including a wide
variety of students, particularly those who have been traditionally excluded,
either formally or informally” (p. 6). Kelly describes the historical
background for her study of inclusion, explaining how pregnant and mothering
teenage girls were customarily expelled from U.S. and Canadian public schools
prior to the 1970s. In 1971, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling made this practice
illegal, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (which did not take
effect until 1975) strengthened this position in the United States. Many
Canadian school districts, such as those in British Columbia, made similar
changes, “mov[ing] from a policy of formal exclusion to formal inclusion
of pregnant and mothering students in the early 1970s” (p. 11). However,
Kelly explains that, despite the move away from expulsion of teen mothers, most
of them continue to receive their education in self-contained programs, either
in separate classes in regular public high schools, or in alternative settings
such as high school equivalency programs or more comprehensive alternative
programs that combine schooling with child care, counseling, parenting classes,
and other health and social services. Few schools offer adequate support,
particularly on-site day care, that would enable teen mothers to attend and
participate fully in regular public schools.
Pregnant with Meaning is based on Kelly’s
ethnographies of two public secondary schools (grades 8–12) in British
Columbia where, unlike the situation in most school districts, “increasing
numbers of teen mothers have been encouraged to attend mainstream high schools
with day care and other support on site” (p. 3). The Teen-Age Parents
Program at “City School” was founded in 1982; the Young Parents
Program at “Town School” was founded in 1994. During the time of the
study, thirty-one women aged sixteen to nineteen were enrolled in the Teen-Age
Parents Program at City School, and nineteen women aged seventeen to twenty in
the program at Town School. Both programs follow a model of “supported
integration” (p. 93), with special services for teen mothers located on
site and different levels of integration into regular classrooms. These
schools’ programs served teen mothers across their respective
school districts — that is, not only those teen mothers enrolled at City
School or Town School prior to their pregnancies. (Teen fathers were eligible
for participation in the program at City School, but none had enrolled since
its founding.) Both programs provided on-site day care for infants and
toddlers; the day care along with other program components, such as a weekly
support group at City School and informal counseling at Town School, were
administered and staffed by nonprofit community organizations. At Town School,
most program participants were fully integrated into regular classes. At City
School, participants chose either “self-paced instruction in [a]
self-contained classroom or various degrees of integration into regular
classes” (p. 5).
After introducing the book and setting the context of the
study in the first chapter, in chapter two Kelly delineates some pervasive
stereotypes that stigmatize teen mothers — namely, “stupid
sluts,” “children having children,” “teen rebel,”
“the girl nobody loved,” “welfare moms,”
“drop-outs,” and “neglectful mothers.” In chapter three,
she discusses the tendency to criticize the “choices” of teen
mothers, showing how this “good choices” discourse “fail[s] to
acknowledge the complexity of the human decision-making process” (p. 50)
and “lead[s] those with relatively more power in society to think about
limiting or controlling the choices of those with the least power while
appearing on the surface to be neutral with regard to gender, race, and
class” (p. 64). Throughout chapters two and three, Kelly critiques the
stereotypes and cites research that offers a more complex picture of teen
mothers and the different contexts of their lives. Chapter four follows with a
discussion of media images of teen mothers, highlighting the stereotypes and
stigmas against which teen mothers position themselves. Unfortunately, Kelly
does not fully return to the topic of inclusive schooling until chapter five,
which feels like a long wait for those expecting it to be the focus of the
book. Certainly, the book’s organization relates to the author’s goal
of showing “how the politics of inclusive schooling shape, and are shaped
by, the politics of representation” (p. 7). It may also relate to her
advocacy for the teen mothers in the study who “made clear that they did
not see themselves as my book’s primary audience. Instead, they wanted me
to counter stigmatizing representations of teen mothers, and single mothers
generally” (p. 206). However, the connections between the
“stigmatizing representations” in general and the particularities of
the inclusive schooling attempts at City Schools and Town School were not
always clear. Until chapter five, readers barely begin to get a sense of what
inclusive schooling of teen mothers is like at the two schools.
Chapter five addresses many of the key questions about how
inclusive schooling was implemented at City School and Town School. Kelly found
that “City School tended to emphasize the difference [between teen mothers
and the rest of the students], while Town School was more inclined to ignore
it” (p. 92). In this chapter, Kelly briefly discusses topics such as
initial reasons for resistance to inclusive schooling at each school; location
choices; effects of tracking; relationships with teachers; student-mother
attendance and academic progress; and the use of teen mothers as role models.
Chapter six then focuses on the Teen-Age Parent Program at City School and
explores the significant tension (including related benefits and problems)
between envisioning the program as
a microcosm of the “real world,” where the
student and future worker identities took precedence and teen mothers were
expected to give birth, return to school, and adjust to the status quo . . .
[or as] a therapeutic haven, where the mother identity took precedence
and students were provided a safe space, albeit sometimes at the expense of the
confidence and skills they needed to succeed in the wider world. (p. 121)
The remaining chapters depart again somewhat from a close
focus on inclusive schooling. In chapter seven, Kelly identifies telling
“silences” at Town School about sexuality, particularly in the
school’s sex education curriculum, that contribute to constructing a view
of teen mothers as “cautionary symbols” (p. 158). Chapter eight
highlights the difficulties of portraying a collective identity that remains
true to the individual experiences of teen mothers in an analysis of a
play-building activity in which some teen mothers at City School took part. The
teen mothers were asked to create a play about teenage motherhood to present to
their school community. They struggled to incorporate their diverse experiences
of pregnancy and motherhood into a cohesive narrative within a single play that
they knew would give only a snapshot view of what it is like to be a teenage
mother. With the guidance of a play-building facilitator, they discussed what
messages they wanted to convey and found many differences in their feelings,
experiences, and approaches to the play. This chapter provides one opportunity
to hear more directly from teen mothers about how stereotypes affect their
lives as they choose to focus their play on dispelling these stereotypes. It
also demonstrates how stereotypes affect their experiences in school as Kelly
presents the responses of teachers and fellow students to the play. In chapter
nine, Kelly explores “dilemmas of a critical feminist ethnographer,”
relying on (though questioning) the framework of “studying up, down, and
across.” This chapter spends too much time explaining the issues a
critical feminist ethnographer should consider and not enough showing
how the author dealt with the particularities of each consideration in
her own research process. Although she mentions some of the difficult
situations she faced during her research at each school, these episodes are not
well connected to the rest of the narrative, making it unclear how they
ultimately affected the project as a whole. Nonetheless, the author’s
intention to present her reflections on her research process is commendable.
In chapter ten, Kelly concludes that “the ideal of an
inclusive school is impossible to separate from the ideal of an
inclusive society” (p. 220), which explains why the book’s
contents are weighted toward critiquing societal representations of teen
mothers. Pregnant with Meaning assembles most of the cutting-edge
scholarship on teenage motherhood, which makes it an excellent resource for
further references about this topic. This book is ideal reading for school
administrators, teachers, policymakers, program developers, and all those who
want to find ways to make schools more hospitable places for teen mothers or
who simply want to learn more about teenage motherhood. Deirdre Kelly has
written a book that combines her advocacy for teen mothers with insightful
analysis and makes a meaningful contribution to the literature on teenage
motherhood and inclusive schooling.
M.P.H.
Latinos: Remaking America
Edited by Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 502 pp. $55.00 (cloth),
$19.95 (paper).
In Latinos: Remaking America, the editors —
anthropologist Marcelo M. Suárez Orozco and educational researcher
Mariela M. Páez — have brought together some of the leading minds
in the study of the U.S. Latino population. The book has twenty-one chapters,
organized in two parts. Part One addresses Histories, Migrations, and
Communities, and Part Two discusses Health, Families, Languages, Education, and
Politics. The book contains a thought-provoking epilogue by Silvio
Torres-Saillant, an English professor at Syracuse University and director of
CUNY’s Dominican Studies Institute, and an afterword by Doris Sommer,
professor of Latin American literature at Harvard University. The book presents
landmark research on Latino histories, education, health, language, and
politics. It is to date the best and most comprehensive book systematically
examining major aspects of the Latino population in the United States, now the
nation’s largest minority.
One of the gems of the book is the introduction by
Suárez-Orozco and Páez. In just a few pages, they cover an
impressive historical and current territory. The introduction frames the book
and provides invaluable background and demographic information about Latinos in
the United States. The editors present a compelling perspective in analyzing
the pan-ethnic Latino construct. The introduction also raises some of the
critical issues and broad questions that will frame the future research agenda
for the study of Latinos in this country. Some of these issues are the state of
Latinos’ mental health in the process of immigration, access to health
care, the consequences of family separation during immigration, and the study
of anti-immigrant attitudes.
In the first three chapters of Part One, the cultural and
sociopolitical history of Latinos is unfolded. Historian George Sanchez takes
the historical approach of defining Latinos in the context of the current
racial discourse. Cultural theorist Juan Flores analyzes the Caribbean Latino
diaspora through a cultural interpretation of music and literacy tradition.
Anthropologists Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick examine the extraordinary
journey of Miami Cubans from a dynamic cultural and historical perspective.
These authors bring to the forefront the development of the Latino identity in
a transnational context.
Chapters four through six address Latinos’ identities
in the United States and in the midst of labor negotiations in the new
millennium. Anthropologist Diego Vigil describes the continuum of Mexican
American history in the Southwest and its implications in the dynamics of
identity formation through racialization and multiple marginalities experienced
by Mexican and Central American youth. Sociologist Robert C. Smith examines the
evolving dynamics of the Mexican immigrants on the East Coast as he describes
the privileging of girls in school performance in that region. John Trumpbour
and Elaine Bernard, directors of the Harvard Trade Union Program, present their
analysis of the role of labor organization in the context of the new
millennium’s politics of international labor.
The last three chapters of Part One broaden our
understanding of how geographical and historical lines are merged by
immigrants’ experiences in the United States. Sociologist Peggy Levitt
describes how the transnational boundaries are erased by the religious
organizational skills that immigrants bring with them and that transcend the
lines of race and language. Political scientist Wayne A. Cornelius examines the
factors influencing anti-immigration sentiments, especially in California,
where the impact of Latinos has transformed the U.S. context. Sociologists
Jacqueline Hagan and Nestor Rodríguez present their documentation on the
impact of immigration reform laws at the community and family levels in the
Texas border.
The second part of Latinos: Remaking America
presents the theoretical and empirical work that have defined Latinos’
experiences in the United States. In chapters ten through twelve, David Hayes
Bautista presents an overview of Latinos’ health, which reveals a
paradoxical relation between Latinos’ access to more wealth and the
worsening of their health due to their living conditions in the United States.
Health policy researchers Richard Brown and Hongjian Yu also present a
saddening summary of Latinos’ access to the health-care system and
forecast the devastating consequences on their health and on the cost of
intervention measures.
The next three chapters provide an overview of the major
issues presently impacting the experiences of Latino immigrant families
transnationally and in the U.S. context. Sociologist Piarrette Honagneu-Sotelo
addresses the Latina female role in the U.S. economy and integrates the
interacting effects of the economic desirability of domestic workers and their
role in the U.S. gender movement, as well as the effects of these roles on the
family due to immigrant women leaving their children behind. Psychologist Celia
Falicov discusses the cross-cultural adaptation of immigrant women and the
psychological constructs that their new experiences provide. Psychoanalyst
Ricardo Ainslie presents the psychological aspects of adaptation from a
psychodynamic perspective and other innovative approaches to illuminate the
complexity involved in studying Latino families, immigration, and cultural
change.
Chapters sixteen to eighteen are devoted to the study of
language and linguistic variation that Latinos bring with them and invent in
the context of the U.S. politics and cultural dynamics. Psycholinguist Barbara
Zurer Pearson brings forward the importance of studying Latinos’ language
acquisition in a report of her research on bilingual children’s language
acquisition trajectory. Sociolinguist Ana Celia Zentella confirms the
importance of this research and expands upon it by looking at the role of
identity in linguistic varieties of Spanish and “Spanglish” as
embedded in economic, political, and social forces. Educational researcher
Patricia Gándara reports on the implications of the post-antibilingual
movement in California by analyzing the statistics related to changes in
bilingual educators, demonstrating the demoralizing effects of antibilingual
political movements.
The last four chapters of Latinos: Remaking America
describe the educational trajectory of schooling for Latinos in the context
of standardized testing and other new policies. Educational researchers Luis
Moll and Richard Ruiz present an overview of the various indicators in the
schooling experiences and outcomes of Latino youngsters and the impact of
policies around bilingualism and language instruction. Demographer Jorge Chapa
dismantles this argument in the context of the same policies in the Texas
educational school systems and presents a compelling argument for affirmative
action in the face of the gap between the number of Latinos and the total U.S.
population in acquiring a bachelor’s degree or pursuing graduate studies.
Historian Oscar Handlin comments on the role of Latinos as a demographic entity
in the political arena and points to the important role of this population in
influencing this country’s political future. Political scientists Louis
DeSipio and Rodolfo O. de la Garza continue this discussion with actual
patterns of Latino participation in political elections and point to the role
of elites and institutions in guiding the political processes for this
population. In the last chapter, political scientist Lisa Montoya examines the
factors that influence political participation, such as gender, citizenship,
and institutions, and that determine the pattern of Latino political
involvement.
The clear strengths of this book is the commentaries
written by a variety of Harvard scholars from different fields. While not
experts in Latino issues, they were invited to comment on a group of chapters
related to their research work. Thus, the authors provide an outsider’s
perspective and place the particular work within the larger context of their
academic field. These commentaries offer rich and thoughtful ideas and add to
our understanding of the theoretical and empirical work on Latinos.
This book is an essential read for students, educators,
scholars, and policy-makers who are trying to understand the Latino experience
in the United States. The comprehensive focus of the book will surely attract a
broad audience of students and academics.
B.Q.
Arts with the Brain in
Mind
by Eric Jensen.
Alexandria, VA: Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2001. 139 pp. $22.95.
Ever since arts instruction was introduced into our
schools with drawing and singing in the middle of the nineteenth century, a
fiery debate has raged over the role of the arts in education. Countless
position papers, articles, letters to the editor, and other documents have been
created to put forth the arguments in favor of and against arts education in
our public schools. Since the middle of the twentieth century, in the face of
cuts in arts education due to budgetary constraints and educational movements
from “Back to Basics” to high-stakes testing, arts educators have
cast themselves in the role of advocates as they have lobbied for arts in
education at school committee meetings and public hearings. In the late 1960s,
researchers in cognitive development began to turn their attention to the arts
and education with the founding of Project Zero, an educational research
organization devoted to the study of the arts and education. Buoyed by Project
Zero’s groundbreaking efforts, many artists, arts educators, and
researchers have published books and articles about the educative value of the
arts. Over the last two decades, a growing body of research on the arts,
learning, and the brain has received international attention. Educators,
parents, administrators, and policymakers are struggling to make sense of these
well-publicized studies and what they may or may not suggest about the place
for the arts in public education.
Eric Jensen, the author of Arts with the Brain in
Mind, is neither an arts educator nor an artist, but a researcher. Jensen
has compiled and reviewed research studies on the arts, the brain, and
learning, which has convinced him that the arts are vital to educating our
children and should be taught every day in our schools, just like language
arts, math, science, and social studies. In effect, by conducting his review of
the research, Jensen has become an advocate for the arts in education. Arts
with the Brain in Mind serves as Jensen’s treatise for his newfound
advocacy.
The bulk of the book focuses on a review of the research
on the arts, the brain, and learning. This review is divided into three
sections: musical arts, visual arts, and what Jensen calls kinesthetic arts
(including dramatic arts and dance, industrial arts and design, and
recreational activities and physical education). Two short chapters serve as
bookends on either side of the research review — an introductory chapter
about the arts as a learning discipline and a chapter on assessment and the
arts.
In the first chapter, “The Arts as a Major
Discipline,” Jensen outlines his main argument: that research on the arts,
learning, and the brain demonstrates that the arts merit a place in public
education equal to the other disciplines. Jensen compares the arts with what he
considers major disciplines or essential curriculum areas that should be
studied every day. He frames his comparison within seven basic features of
major disciplines, which he says 1) are assessable (measurable
criteria for success have been developed); 2) are brain based (places in
the brain can be identified that respond only to the discipline); 3) are
culturally necessary (they serve the needs of a culture); 4)have little
to no risk (there is little to no negative effect of study in that
discipline on learning); 5) are inclusive (they can be learned by the
masses); 6) have survival value (they are necessary for survival of the
species; and 7) are wide-ranging (are composed of subdisciplines that
lend breadth and depth to their study). As the chapter proceeds, Jensen
demonstrates that the arts share all seven of these features, thus qualifying
as a major discipline of study.
The next three chapters all take shape in the same format.
After defining the type of art that he is addressing — musical, visual,
and kinesthetic arts, respectively — Jensen outlines several themes that
have emerged from his review of the research on learning and the brain that are
related to activities in that particular artistic domain. These themes form
arguments that support a relationship between artistic activities and learning
or brain development. For example, themes from the section on the musical arts
include claims that music enhances our cognitive systems, emotional systems,
perceptual-motor systems, and stress-response systems. As he discusses each
theme in turn, Jensen provides short summaries of various research studies that
support the theme’s main argument. In the section on the musical arts, for
example, he describes correlations that have been found between music and IQ
through a study of brain coherence, or connections among sections of the brain,
as measured by electroencephalogram (EEG) readings of four-year-old children
who listened to classical music for one hour a day, as well as another study of
EEG readings of male and female musicians.
The pages of each of these chapters are peppered with
sidebars that provide what Jensen terms practical suggestions or ideas for
activities that parents or educators can facilitate with students or young
people. One practical suggestion from the chapter on the musical arts is that
learning days begin with a vocal toning warm-up, including humming and making
sounds using various vowels. Jensen also suggests that teaches and parents
introduce structurally and harmonically complex music to their students and
children. He lists a number of classical works by Mozart and Haydn and names a
few jazz and popular music artists whose repertoire meets this criteria.
Finally, each of these chapters dealing with a specific type of art concludes
with a summary that sets forth implications for policy. For example, Jensen
summarizes the section on musical arts, saying, “The message with music
education is, start early, make it mandatory, provide instruction, add choices,
and support it throughout a student’s education” (p. 48). He mentions
that music education is required of all students in other nations, including
Japan, Hungary, and the Netherlands, and is quick to point out that students in
those three countries boast some of the highest mathematics and science test
scores in the world. Regarding the visual arts, Jensen concludes,
“Research from the studies discussed in this book and the experience of
countless classroom educators support the view that visual arts have strong
positive cognitive, emotional, social, collaborative, and neurological
effects” (p. 68). He notes that teachers whose students receive regular
visual arts instruction report stronger academic skills on the part of their
students, including increased retention, higher levels of student confidence,
and more highly developed independent thinking skills. At the end of the
chapter on kinesthetic arts, Jensen offers the following summary:
“Here’s the bottom line on the kinesthetic arts: The research, the
theory, and real-world classroom experience clearly support sustaining or
increasing the role of movement in learning” (p. 102). He argues that
schools should take advantage of the cognitive, emotional, social,
collaborative, and neurological benefits of the kinesthetic arts.
The concluding chapter of the book is devoted to the
thorny issue of the arts and assessment. While Jensen notes that arts educators
have developed forms of assessment that measure content knowledge, evaluate
students’ responses to works of art, and grade young peoples’
artistic performances or products, he argues that these forms of assessment do
not address what he believes to be what the arts are about. For Jensen, the
arts “are about life, growth, and expanding who we can become as human
beings” (p. 110). Further, linking this chapter to the research studies
that he cites earlier, Jensen claims that the arts defy conventional notions of
assessment because what he considers to be the primary benefits of
participating in artistic activities — the development of complex
neurobiological systems — are difficult to measure and unfold over long
periods of time. Citing Waldorf schools and other schools as sites in which new
forms of assessment have been taking place, Jensen calls for arts courses to be
pass/fail and for arts educators to develop new forms of assessment that take
students’ long-term progress into account through the use of portfolios of
their best work and “processfolios” of drafts, sketches, and works in
progress.
Arts with the Brain in Mind will appeal to those
interested in knowing more about what the recent research has shown regarding
the potential for the arts in education. Researchers might be frustrated by the
brief descriptions of the studies that Jensen cites, but the extended
bibliography provides the resources that might be of interest. Jensen’s
clear, readable style makes the book easy to follow. Arts educators like myself
might wince at the practical suggestions that he offers, as they sound more
like quick fixes for educational ills — listen to an hour of Mozart and
your test scores will rise — than like practical ways the arts can benefit
teachers, students, and parents. Furthermore, Jensen’s definition of the
arts appears suspect. While he reaches far and wide when he speaks of the arts,
including physical education, industrial arts, auto repair, and health programs
in his kinesthetic arts category, Jensen ignores literary arts. Artists, arts
educators, and researchers would consider music, visual arts, dance, drama, and
creative writing to be artistic domains, thus defining the arts more narrowly
and including the literary arts. Still, Arts with the Brain in Mind
makes a substantial contribution to the dialogue on arts education and research
into the brain and learning.
R.B.
Bodily Discourses: When
Students Write about Abuse and Eating Disorders
by Michelle Payne.
Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2000. 166 pp. $20.00.
In Bodily Discourses: When Students Write about Abuse
and Eating Disorders, Michelle Payne reports on her dissertation study of
twenty-five college student compositions about sexual abuse, physical abuse,
anorexia, and bulimia. In addition to analyzing the texts, Payne interviewed
many of the students, members of the writing faculty, and campus counselors.
She also observed two of the students for ten weeks of their first-year
composition courses. Students were referred to the study by their teachers
after submitting an essay on one of the topics in their writing courses. Payne
also analyzed some historical documents written by women about their
experiences of abuse.
This book responds to teachers’ concerns and
questions about how to assess essays in which students describe painful or
traumatic experiences. For example, many teachers wondered how to offer
suggestions about the writing without hurting a student perceived as sensitive
and vulnerable. As one teacher told Payne,
I’m not a therapist. I don’t feel qualified to deal
with this, but I don’t want to shut her out and tell her never to bring it
up again. . . . How do I respond to a paper like this? Ask her to go into more
detail in this paragraph? That doesn’t seem right. I can’t deal with
this paper as a piece of writing. I don’t want to hurt her in any way.
I’m concerned about her fragility. (p. xvii)
Teachers may feel they should respond to papers about
trauma, violence, or suffering differently than they would to other papers.
Payne explains that many teachers may be “concerned that focusing on
style, genre, argument, or detail may be interpreted as insensitivity to the
emotional and often traumatic experience the content may describe” (p.
xviii). Furthermore, she argues,
these types of essays confront teachers with their very
raison d’etre: If I don’t want a student to write about
this subject, then why do I want her to write about others? On what
basis am I deciding what is appropriate in my classroom? In what ways am I
using my authority and power? What am I teaching about language and
communication? (p. xvii)
As a graduate student, Payne recognized that
“teachers rarely discuss publicly their struggles with students who write
about abuse — experiential knowledge . . . is hidden within their offices,
rarely integrated into the community discourse” (p. xvi). Bodily
Discourses interrupts this unhelpful silence within the teaching community
and provides teachers with a thoughtful resource to help them reconsider their
approach to written work about sexual and physical abuse, eating disorders, and
other forms of suffering.
One of the strengths of this book is the way it critiques
and challenges usual assumptions about what constitutes appropriate academic
student writing. In chapter one, “This Weepy World of Confessions,”
Payne discusses some teachers’ vehement opposition to “confessional
writing” in the classroom. These teachers may assume that writing about
experiences of suffering, trauma, or abuse will have ”little critical
reflection or framework” (p. xxiv) or, as one author quoted by Payne
writes, that they are “a fundamentally egocentric sort of self-absorption
. . . teeth-gnashing and soul-baring . . . [that] will do little in the way of
developing a sophisticated communicative ability, analytical skills, or a
clear-sighted understanding of the world” (p. 2). One of the themes of the
book is that students’ writing about bodily violence was not necessarily
subsumed by unreflective emotion. Rather, many of their texts followed
customary academic writing conventions and patterns, making it reasonable for
teachers to consider using at least some of their usual responses to student
writing. Payne questions the notion of what is considered “personal”
writing and reveals how some emotions are deemed more “personal” than
others. Furthermore, she criticizes the dichotomy between reason and emotion
and demonstrates that many of the students “are engaging in sophisticated
analyses and critiques of the social and institutional contexts in which they
live their lives” (pp. 23–24). In chapter one, Payne also discusses
the relationship between writing and emotional control. She challenges the idea
that a psychotherapeutic lens is the only appropriate means of viewing writing
about bodily violence.
Another assumption Payne challenges is that this type of
student writing is “solicited by teachers who use an expressivist
approach” (p. 9). In fact, Payne found, “the students in this study
wrote about bodily violence regardless of the kinds of assignments
required . . . and regardless of whether the teacher focused on personal
or academic essays or on any combination of the two” (p. 23). Contrary to
her expectation that developing comfort or trust with the teacher is a
determining factor when such essays are submitted, Payne found that students
tended to submit these essays either near the beginning of the semester or at
the end.
Chapters two, three, and four focus on writing about
sexual abuse, eating disorders, and physical abuse, respectively. In chapter
two, Payne reports that “a recurring theme in the student essays . . . is
the process of sorting through conflicting notions of truth” (p. 40).
Payne recommends introducing students who write about sexual violence to the
“long discursive tradition” (p. 33) of such writing. She analyzes
some historical material in this chapter, in particular The Memoirs of Mrs.
Abigail Bailey, written by a woman in 1792. Payne suggests that historical
resources will help students consider alternative approaches to writing and new
ways to think about their own experiences. Payne reiterates similar
recommendations — “to introduce [students] to the writing tradition
they are becoming part of” (p. 74) — in later chapters as well.
While Payne saw a variety of student approaches to writing
about sexual violence, “the essays about eating disorders made similar
arguments, followed similar organizational patterns, and rendered their writers
almost indistinguishable” (pp. 50–51). This form tended to follow a
“crisis/resolution plot” (p. 70), narrating the events from the
beginning of the eating disorder through the damage caused to relationships and
self and finally to recovery. Payne notes, “These writers pay close,
detailed attention to the particulars of their rituals . . . and of their
bodies. . . . And they never fail to note how much weight they have lost”
(p. 62). The essays “are often intended to be warnings for other
women” (p. 62).
In chapter five, Payne focuses intensively on one student
and her writing teacher. The student wrote an initial essay about her
experience of being physically abused by her boyfriend. Payne conducts a
detailed analysis of this essay. Meanwhile, she explores the writing
teacher’s approach to teaching based on classroom observations and
interviews with the teacher and tries to make connections between the
student’s development as a writer and the teacher’s pedagogy.
Throughout the book, Payne models how she would respond to
students’ writing about bodily violence and acknowledges some of her own
uncertainties and hesitations. She also models a way of reading these essays as
critical texts, examining their structure and analyzing the details of the
writing, not simply reacting to them from a psychotherapeutic framework. In the
conclusion, Payne offers additional suggestions and specific examples of ways
to respond to student writing about bodily violence. Bodily Discourses
is an asset for all those who teach and read students writing. Hopefully this
book will lead to more dialogue among teachers and further scholarship in this
area.
M.P.H.
Young Children Learning at
Home and School: Beginning Literacy with Language
edited by David K.
Dickinson and Patton O. Tabors.
Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 2001. 432
pp. $29.95.
Young Children Learning at Home and School: Beginning
Literacy with Language, edited by David K. Dickinson and Patton O. Tabors,
reports the findings from the Home-School Study of Language and Literacy
Development. This project explores the association between oral language skills
and literacy development in young children, at home and in school programs. The
authors document the reciprocal relationship between language development and
early literacy and the role of adults in supporting, balancing, and
interconnecting the two. The authors also identify how parents and teachers can
support a child’s optimal development and learning with research-based
practices at home and in school.
The book reports on the findings of the first three years
of data collection on seventy-four children and their families who maintained
their connection with the study through participation in preschool programs
such as Head Start. Although the book focuses on the preschool-to-kindergarten
period of the Home-School Study, the research team continued to visit the homes
and classrooms of the children in the study until their sophomore year in high
school. This “kindergarten sample” of seventy-four children was split
evenly in terms of gender. Forty-seven of the children were Caucasian, sixteen
were African American, six were Latino, and five were biracial. All of the
families were eligible for Head Start or subsidized child care or health care,
and all spoke English at home. Furthermore, twenty-eight of the mothers were
single parents, eighteen of whom were receiving public assistance.
During the first three years of the study, when the
children were three, four, and five years old, each family was visited once a
year at home and at the preschool program. The researchers describe the crucial
features of both of these environments as they relate to the children’s
accomplishments at the end of kindergarten. This study revealed that a focus on
the beginning of reading development at the end of kindergarten partially
predicts future reading success.
The research team collected two types of information
during home visits: language data and interviews with the mother. Language data
included audiotaping interactions between parents and children during book
reading, telling stories about recent events, playing with toys, and
conversations during meal times. Mothers were interviewed about their own
backgrounds and the types of activities their family participated in. During
preschool visits, three types of data were collected: language data, classroom
curriculum data, and teacher interviews.
When the children in the project were five years old,
several measures and tasks were administered to capture the process of their
individual literacy acquisition. The SHELL–K (the School-Home Early
Language and Literacy Battery–Kindergarten), which is a series of language
and literacy tasks, was administered at home to the child without the
assistance of the mother. Other measures that evaluated literacy acquisition
included the picture description task, definitions, story comprehension, and
the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, which assesses receptive vocabulary.
Information from mother and teacher interviews and the observations from school
visits were entered into databases, and the audiotapes of home and classroom
conversations were transcribed using software that allowed for computer coding
and analysis.
The main types of analyses used on the larger data set
included descriptive analyses, correlational analyses, and regression analyses.
Aside from this technical information, the researchers highlighted the stories
of children who represented the results for the whole kindergarten sample. A
subset of four children was chosen to better understand the quality of their
environments and the influences that shaped their language and literacy skills.
In the introduction of this detailed report, Harvard
Graduate School of Education’s Catherine Snow and Patton Tabors, and David
Dickinson of the Education Development Center in Newton, Massachusetts, do an
excellent job describing the goals, rationale, and design of the study. Using
language accessible to a general audience, these scholars present explicit and
clear explanations of the analytic tools and the theoretical background
employed. They also present the rationale behind the selection process of the
four focus children and give the reader a succinct yet holistic illustration of
these cases.
The book is divided into three parts. Part One reports on
the analyses of data collected in the home environment; Part Two focuses on
data collected from preschool classrooms; and Part Three investigates the
relationships between homes and schools.
Chapter two, by Jeanne DeTemple, discusses language skills
related to book reading. Jane Katz highlights the relevance of the talk of
pretend play to the development of early definitional skills of the focus
children in chapter three. In chapter four, Diane Beals focuses on explanatory
talk and narrative skills at the microlevel during mealtime conversations as
predictors of academic language skills. Patton Tabors, Diane Beals, and Zehava
Weizman conclude Part One with an analysis of vocabulary used by the focus
children in conversational settings.
Part Two presents the analyses of data collected in the
school the focal children attended when they were four years old. In chapter
six, Patton Tabors, Kevin Roach, and Catherine Snow summarize the group’s
findings of three specific types of extended discourse: non-immediate talk
during book reading, pretend talk during toy-play, and narrative and
explanatory talk during meal times. They show how these conversational skills
are related to a common standard measure of language and literacy skills during
kindergarten. By providing descriptive examples from the data of the focus
children, the authors support their group findings and display a more
comprehensive picture of the relationship between these home conversational
skills and academic performance in the public schools.
In chapter seven, Miriam W. Smith further describes the
sites in which this project took place. She draws on previous research to
connect actual school environments with the design of the study and the
particular factors that seem to influence literacy and language development at
school. In chapters eight through eleven, David Dickinson and Linda R. Cote
present their findings through an analysis of how children’s experiences
at school relate to their literacy and language levels. They focus on many
aspects of literacy development, such as content of talk, social aspects of
literacy, and teachers’ pedagogical beliefs, by observing focus teachers
and children during specific school activities, such as free play and small
groups.
Part Three of Young Children Learning at Home and
School examines the relationship between the project’s home and school
data. In chapters twelve and thirteen, the various authors summarize their
findings in a coherent narrative and go over the implications for child
development and the development of early literacy skills. The researchers also
examine the role of parent involvement in the link between home and school. The
editors conclude the book with a descriptive story of how homes and schools
together can support language and literacy development.
Young Children Learning at Home and School is
helpful at many levels. Besides being a comprehensive summary of research in
this area, it is a report on new and groundbreaking research on language and
literacy development that will inform policymakers and researchers. This text
is an excellent resource for an academic course on child development, as it
presents a broad picture of the applications of language development theory in
education. It also has an instructive quality for the practitioner who may want
a summary of theories regarding language and literacy development and empirical
findings organized and presented by influential figures in this area of child
development. Parents will also find this book useful. After each chapter, the
editors present a series of recommendations of best practices for home and
school environments.
B.Q.
Renaissance in the
Classroom: Arts Integration and Meaningful Learning
edited by Gail
Burnaford, Arnold Aprill, and Cynthia Weiss.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 2001. 265 pp. $29.95 (paper).
In recent years, classroom teachers, arts teachers, and
administrators have banded together with community arts organizations, artists,
institutions of higher education, and cultural organizations to form arts
education partnerships. Though what each party can offer or expect to gain from
these partnerships varies widely, arts education partners often share similar
goals. Community arts organizations, artists, and cultural organizations enter
into these partnerships hoping to expand the audience for their art and thus
try to make a difference in the lives of young people. Schools forge these
partnerships hoping to expose their students to the arts and to experience
making and responding to art. Institutions of higher education embark on these
partnerships to provide sites where faculty can conduct research or settings
where students can gain valuable work experience in internships.
Over the last fifteen years, curricular endeavors have
moved to the forefront of the aims and activities of arts education
partnerships. Among their efforts is the creation of projects or lessons that
integrate the arts into the academic curriculum. While not intended to serve as
a substitute for art classes, these integrated curricular units often electrify
classrooms, as reported by those involved in the partnerships. Further, their
experiences in these units provide teachers, students, and artists with rich
opportunities to develop as makers and perceivers of art.
Yet while many organizations across the country and around
the world boast compelling anecdotes about successful partnership projects
involving curriculum integration, there has been surprisingly little systematic
research into successful partnerships, and few developed and documented
coherent models for designing and using an integrated curriculum. Given the
rising popularity of arts education partnerships, there have been remarkably
few opportunities for the leaders of these partnerships to share information
with one another. As a result of this dearth of research and conversation,
those who design them find a disappointing paucity of resources available as
they undertake their earliest efforts to form a partnership.
With Renaissance in the Classroom: Arts Integration and
Meaningful Learning, Gail Burnaford, an associate professor and action
researcher at Northwestern University, Arnold Aprill, executive director of the
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), and Cynthia Weiss, CAPE’s
director of professional development, strive to address this lack by presenting
a comprehensive primer on arts education partnerships and curriculum
integration through the arts. A pioneer in curriculum integration through such
partnerships, CAPE was formed in the early 1990s as a school improvement
initiative with the aim of
making culture a true part of school culture by forging a
clear connection between arts learning and the rest of the academic curriculum.
This was to be done by insisting on the ongoing participation of classroom
teachers and arts teachers in planning the role of the arts and visiting
artists in CAPE schools, and by facilitating long-term partnership
relationships between individual schools and arts organizations. (pp.
xxxv–xxxvi)
As they prepared Renaissance in the Classroom,
Burnaford, Aprill, and Weiss gathered data on the work of CAPE’s
partnership network by interviewing classroom teachers, arts teachers, visiting
artists, and parents and by collecting samples of student work and curriculum
planning documents. The resulting text offers a compelling argument for arts
education partnerships and integration by presenting numerous examples of
success: curricular success, in the form of stories about lessons and projects
that worked in real classrooms; collaborative success, as illustrated by
descriptions of rich coteacher interactions and fruitful planning documents;
and partnership success, as demonstrated by discussions of mutually beneficial
relationships among arts and education institutions of various types.
The bulk of the book takes the form of two interlocking
guides. The first, in chapters two, three, and four, is a guide to creating,
implementing, and assessing curricular units that integrate the arts and the
academic subjects. The second is a guide to forging, nourishing, and
maintaining productive and successful arts education partnerships to support
arts integration curricular projects. The book’s introduction and first
chapter situate these two guides within the context of the field of arts
integration as a whole and the work of CAPE in particular. Chapters two, three,
and four address the nuts and bolts of arts integration by presenting the
issues involved as these curricular units unfold over time. Chapter two,
“Getting Started with Arts Integration: Finding the Elegant Fit,”
explores the design of arts integrated curriculum. Chapter three, “Moving
Through the Curriculum: Doing the Work in Arts Integration,” presents the
execution of these lessons and projects, and chapter four, “Beyond the
Unit: Assessment and the Learning Cycle,” focuses on the assessment of
student work in arts integrated curricular units. Interspersed between these
chapters are “Arts Education Snapshots,” where teachers and artists
write about lessons and projects that they have designed and implemented in
their schools. Chapter five, “Science and Art: Lessons from Leonardo da
Vinci?” is devoted to descriptions of a number of projects that integrated
science with the arts. The next chapter, “You Don’t Have to Do It
Alone: Initiating and Sustaining Collaboration,” focuses on arts education
partnerships by examining how the various constituencies involved can work
together to develop and sustain an effective collaboration. Throughout, the
book is peppered with samples of student work and examples of documents used by
arts education partnerships. Numerous photographs of student work and students
at work bring the curricular units to life in the text. The book’s
extensive appendices, which include samples of lesson plans, partnership
planning documents, assessment templates, and an overview of CAPE’s
various partnerships, as well as an extensive list of resources, make the
authors’ discussion of arts education partnerships concrete and vivid.
In chapter five, “Science and Art: Lessons from
Leonardo da Vinci?” the authors offer an illustration of the various
phases of their guide to creating, implementing, and assessing arts integrated
curriculum. They begin by building an argument for integrating the arts with
science by listing the benefits of arts integration. The first is increased
student motivation through the promotion of students’ engagement and
participation in learning activities, as well as the piquing of their personal
interest in what they study. The second benefit, the authors claim, is that the
community spirit often pervades classrooms where arts integration takes place,
as teachers, artists, and students collaborate to bring their ideas to life.
The authors say that the products students create in many arts integrated units
can become a catalyst for communication with and involvement of parents and the
school community. The authors also explore various aspects of the
implementation of arts integrated curriculum, from the collaborations between
classroom teachers and visiting artists, to the practical constraints of school
environments (such as overloaded schedules), to the compatibility between the
problem-solving orientation of arts integrated projects and the scientific
inquiry. Finally, the authors highlight specific arts integrated projects that
can be assessed in various ways. For example, one teacher vividly describes how
she graded her students’ work and details how students were asked to
evaluate their own and their classmates’ work through self-assessment and
peer-assessment activities. The authors conclude the chapter with a discussion
of the ways teachers reflect on and assess the long-term impact of the project,
including a presentation of the strategies that teachers have employed to
adapt, build on, and replicate the project in other settings or with other
students.
The authors note that the audience for Renaissance in
the Classroom includes K–12 classroom teachers, arts teachers, and
visiting artists. However, by limiting their stated audience to these three
constituencies, Burnaford, Aprill, and Weiss underestimate the allure of
Renaissance in the Classroom. While this text will surely appeal to this
audience, others will also find the book compelling. School administrators and
parents will gain a more complete understanding of what the arts can do for
their school community, and researchers will come to appreciate the programs
they evaluate and the practical day-to-day implications of the arts
partnerships they study. The book’s exhaustive list of resources and other
appendices add greatly to its appeal.
With their commitment to sharing ideas, resources,
suggestions, struggles, and successes, Burnaford, Aprill, and Weiss have
written their remarkably comprehensive book with a refreshing spirit that
manages to share their experience and expertise without ever giving the
impression that they have it all figured out. As someone who is part of a
fledgling arts education partnership, this book provided me with an education
in the work of arts education partnerships, what they can be, what they can do,
and what kinds of issues need to be considered and thought through along the
way. This book should be required reading for anyone who participates, or
wishes to participate, in an arts education partnership.
R.B.
|
