Article Abstracts:
Also in this issue:
In this article, Rubén Donato explores the experiences of Hispanos, a segment of the Mexican American population, in four southern Colorado school systems — San Luis, Del Norte, Monte Vista, and Trinidad — between 1920 and 1963. Through a combination of historical research; interviews with former students, teachers, and administrators; and examination of public records, Donato finds that Hispanos with similar backgrounds had different educational experiences in each of these school systems. In examining why this occurred, Donato argues that the presence or absence of Hispano autonomy was a powerful factor in determining the relative success or failure of Hispanos in these school systems. Essentially, he maintains that whoever controlled the schools determined who taught in them, who administered them, what sorts of social and academic environments were created, and which students were prepared to pursue post-secondary education. (pp. 117-149)
Modern and Postmodern Racism in Europe:
Dialogic Approach and Anti-Racist Pedagogies
In this article, Ramón Flecha discusses the growth of racism in modern-day Europe and the challenges it poses for education and educators. The author distinguishes between two kinds of racism: an older, modern racism and a newer, postmodern racism. The former is based on arguments of inequality and the existence of inferior or superior ethnicities and races. The latter holds that ethnicities and races are neither inferior nor superior; they are merely different. It emphasizes the impossibility of equitable dialogue among different races and ethnicities to establish common rules for living together. Although a tradition of anti-racist education exists in Europe, educators often do not have the intellectual and educational tools to combat this form of racism. Flecha suggests that educators have tried to combat racism by developing anti-racist pedagogies that use the relativist approach advocated by contemporary thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. He argues that this approach challenges modern racism but actually promotes postmodern racism. Drawing from works of dialogic theorists such as Paulo Freire and Jürgen Habermas, Flecha recommends instead that educators use the dialogic approach, which emphasizes the need for equal rights among all people, to develop effective anti-racist pedagogies that can deal simultaneously with both forms of racism. (pp. 150-171)
Charter Schools as Postmodern Paradox:
Rethinking Social Stratification in an Age of Deregulated School
Choice
For the last two-and-a-half years, authors Amy Stuart Wells, Alejandra Lopez, Janelle Scott, and Jennifer Jellison Holme have been engaged with a team of researchers in a comprehensive qualitative study of charter schools in ten California school districts. They have emerged from this study with a new understanding of how the implementation of a specific education policy can reflect much broader social changes, including the transformation from modernity to postmodernity. Given that much of the literature on postmodernity is theoretical in nature, this article invites readers to wrestle with the complexity that results when theory meets the day-to-day experiences of people trying to start schools. In their study, the authors examined how people in different social locations define the possibilities for localized social movements, and how they see the potential threat of greater inequality resulting from this reform within and among communities. They started with a framework that questioned how charter schools came into being at this particular time that is characterized by global economic developments and demands for a more deregulated state education system. This framework allowed the authors to examine the particularistic nature of a reform that defies universal definitions. Their purpose was not to definitively state whether or not charter school reform is “working,” or whether or not it is leading to greater social stratification across broad categories of race, class, and gender. Rather, the authors focused on understanding how modern identities and postmodern ideologies converge and, thus, for whom charter school reform is “working,” under what conditions, and on whose terms. (pp. 172-204)
by Vivian Gussin Paley.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 129 pp. $18.95.
In The Kindness of Children, her most recent book, Vivian Gussin Paley seeks to fill us with stories of mitzvot, or good deeds: “My audience is about to hear a story that will remind them of who they are and can become again” (p. 129). As in her prior books, Paley weaves her experiences together into a coherent tale full of connected anecdotes. Paley relates how, having retired as a kindergarten teacher, she feels lost without her own classroom and students. Used to telling the stories of the children in her classroom and the lessons she learns from them — as illustrated in her numerous other books — she feels at first that she should now learn how to write of something else. But, she says, “only a classroom of children can organize my experiences into a story. Like a child, without a story I cannot explain myself” (p. 4). Then, in a journey that takes her through classrooms in urban London, Chicago, Oakland, New York City, and a small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she spoke with teachers about the craft of dramatizing children’s stories, Paley finds her raison d’être.
Through “Teddy’s story,” Paley is able to weave together a whole series of stories that in different ways reveal to her the kindness of children. Teddy is a young, severely disabled child whom Paley encounters in a visit to a London nursery school classroom. Teddy, strapped into a wheelchair with his head protected by a padded helmet, provides the starting point for Paley’s story. With the aid of a small red car in which he sits strapped and cushioned, Teddy is able to “play store” with the other children in the class, and is included in the story that his classmate Edmond has written and that is being acted out in front of the class. The children decide that Teddy will be the young puppy in the story who had not learned how to walk yet, and who will be frightened by a monster. Paley is deeply moved by the nursery school children’s acceptance of Teddy and by their kindness, and feels compelled to share this story.
Paley continues to visit kindergarten and elementary school classrooms, presenting and modeling the activity she has “pursued for so many years, the dramatization of children’s stories” (p. 43). On those visits, Paley tells and retells “Teddy’s story,” which touches the hearts of everyone, and leads children and adults to relate their own and others’ stories of kindness: Marianne letting Lucy, a newcomer to the school, take her turn with the jump rope; Harry giving Martin, a child he constantly fought with, his two oatmeal cookies when Martin was punished and made to sit outside the classroom; Tovah feeling so full of happiness when she heard of the gorilla at the Brookfield Zoo who rescued a toddler that fell into her compound that she gave her seat to an old lady on the bus. Such stories of kindness remind Paley of her own elderly mother, Yetta, who arrived in the United States from Russia speaking no English. Because she only spoke Yiddish, Yetta was placed in a first-grade classroom rather than the fourth-grade classroom with children her own age. Masha, a fourth-grader, visited Yetta every day in the first-grade class, translating everything into Yiddish and then back into English for her. After hearing others’ stories of kindness, when telling “Teddy’s story” Paley includes and attaches those stories of kindness, expanding the original story of Teddy.
These interconnecting acts of kindness remind Paley of her own Jewish background and the Hasidim who “taught people to think about goodness by telling them stories of holy men performing mitzvot, good deeds” (p. 20). In this way, carrying “Teddy’s story” and its offshoots wherever she goes, Paley feels like the Jewish mystics from her past. But, Paley wonders, “which part is the mitzvah? The original story or the retelling of it?” (p. 48). By the end of the book, we are also left asking this question.
In retelling the “Teddy stories,” Paley is constantly reminded of spiritual connections — to her mother who reads the Torah every day, to her Hasidic ancestors who believed that every act of kindness we witness constitutes a spiritual moment. Mr. Flambeau, Tovah’s teacher, who hears her tell the story of giving up her seat on the bus, tells Paley: “I’d call what just happened to Tovah a spiritual experience. . . . I’ve always been saddened by the absence of spirituality in school. No, the potential is here, wherever there are children, but we avoid the subject. . . . You avoid it yourself, Vivian, in your books. To me, they’re all about spirituality, but you never say so” (p. 27). In spite of these comments, Paley does not think of herself as spiritual and feels uncomfortable with Mr. Flambeau’s image of her. She sees acts of kindness in ordinary people and everyday events, and although she still wonders why she doesn’t call the events spiritual, she insists that her language and place will always be that of the secular classroom.
The power of young children and their acts of kindness is almost overwhelming to Paley and the readers of her book. Paley reads from the Torah about “the spiritual power that comes from the mouths of babes and sucklings. ‘The moral universe rests upon the breath of schoolchildren’” (pp. 57-58). Then, in an Annie Dillard novel, she reads, “No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks” (p. 82). Paley wonders if “this could be interpreted as resting upon what we teach children when they are young” (p. 58). But she thinks not; she prefers to think, typical of her style, that “it refers to what the children already know and can teach us” (p. 58).
Paley ends her story wondering what would happen “if we got in the habit of talking about [kindness and the opposite of kindness] every day, the way we examine our sentences to see if the grammar is correct? Kindness and the opposite of kindness. Wouldn’t we become more sensitive to each other’s feelings?” (p. 128). Paley suggests that maybe kindness is about reconnecting to who we were and remembering just how kind we used to be and could be.
This book will appeal to those who have followed Paley’s writing throughout the years, and to teachers and professionals who work with young children. It reveals the important ways in which children can have an impact on our lives. It is also an important reminder, to all of us, of the power of mitzvot, good deeds, and the wonderful things that can happen with an act of kindness.
B.M.B.
by Eunsook Hyun.
New York: Peter Lang, 1998. 192 pp. $29.95.
As teachers and educators approach the new millennium, we are urged to change our approaches to educating a diverse spectrum of young children. In response to this growing expectation, Eunsook Hyun contributes to this important movement with her book, Making Sense of Developmentally and Culturally Appropriate Practice (DCAP) in Early Childhood Education. In this book, which reports the results of her study of prospective early childhood teachers, Hyun provides a process by which teacher educators can conceptualize developmentally and culturally appropriate practice in the education of early childhood teachers. The goal is to bring awareness to diversity in the form of students’ races, genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and religions. In addition, Hyun supports the idea that teachers teach and learn in environments that require in-depth reflection of their own lives and values. She argues that having a personal understanding of our own biases is an important step toward truly legitimizing developmentally and culturally appropriate practice in the education of young children.
Hyun cautions that educators have advocated multicultural education without grappling with the multiple ways in which they define and actualize this in educational practice and philosophy. To include preservice teachers among those educators who have bypassed this important step, she writes, “Most multicultural educators and researchers agree that to function cross-culturally and to ensure an education that values diversity and multiple/multiethnic perspectives, prospective teachers must be helped to reflect on and examine their own cultural identity and values” (p. 31). Hyun proposes that teacher educators should encourage prospective teachers to focus on their own definitions and understandings through writing their autobiographies.
To illustrate her ideas and demonstrate them in practice, Hyun provides the reader with a well-organized description of how she conceptualized a process by which teacher educators can enhance the teacher education process. This process, outlined chapter by chapter, includes ways that preservice teachers can think more deeply about their own practice. For example, she begins the book with an overview of her understanding of “What Is Appropriate Practice” (ch. 1). In this chapter, Hyun provides a thorough review of the existing literature that deals with cultural considerations in classroom learning and teaching. She cites various researchers who, in the study of multicultural education, have called our attention to the influences of culture on learning. She adds to this literature by arguing that developmentally and culturally appropriate education should be experienced by all children and that all children, not only children of color, should experience an anti-biased curriculum.
In chapter two, “Culture and Development in Children’s Play,” Hyun discusses the inherent links between play and culture by presenting cross-cultural perspectives. She finds in her review that play is culturally grounded, that is, it influences development and cultural learning. While play may be seen as supplemental to the classroom, it is important for teachers to realize that play has been demonstrated to influence how children see and understand the world around them. Hyun believes that if teachers were able to clearly identify “emerging cultures” found in children’s play, “it would allow early childhood practitioners to interact with children in culturally relevant and congruent modes” (p. 21). At the heart of this book lies the argument that teachers need to foster ways in which they can develop the ability to have a multiethnic perspective.
In chapter three, “An Autobiographical Approach toward Developing Multiple and Multiethnic Perspective-Taking Abilities,” Hyun introduces autobiography as a way for teachers to begin to articulate their multiethnic perspective-taking. She states, “The autobiographical approach with field-based teacher preparation courses creates room for prospective teachers to experience and develop multiple and multiethnic perspective-taking in relation to their growing sense of critical pedagogy” (p. 41). In the process of reflecting on and writing about their experiences, prospective early childhood teachers can explore how they develop an understanding of diverse cultures and how this understanding relates to their teaching. Hyun further suggests that this approach might be used together with practitioner internships and coursework in teacher education programs. In addition to the writing of their autobiographies, teacher educators are encouraged to provide theory to support their beliefs that prospective teachers should engage in such reflections. In chapter four, Hyun cautions teacher educators about teaching about ethnic characteristics. She warns educators to use their knowledge about specific ethnic cultures “extremely carefully so as not to make any assumptions about cultural characteristics in a way that would negatively influence a truly pluralistic society” (p. 68). Also in this chapter, Hyun suggests ways in which teachers can add to their own growing understandings of cultural diversity by observation and interaction with families of diverse cultural backgrounds. Important in all of this is the critical feedback provided through supervision of teacher educators that is addressed in chapter five.
In chapters six and seven, Hyun reports how she introduced prospective teachers to Developmentally and Culturally Appropriate Practice (DCAP) teaching approaches. Using a social phenomenological approach, Hyun explores how teachers construct and reconstruct their understandings of their world. First, she provides a thorough description of the methods by which she helps teachers make sense of DCAP. Then she presents the cases of two preservice teachers, Ana and Carrie, who participated in the study and explored their practice as it relates to DCAP. Into these Hyun weaves the existing research on this topic that corroborates her findings.
Making Sense of Developmentally and Culturally Appropriate Practice (DCAP) in Early Childhood Education is an important book for those interested in diversifying their instructional approaches. It highlights the importance of teachers’ reflecting on their practice and the effect of cultural influences on educational practice. While Hyun states that this is a book for both students and teachers of early childhood education, I believe teachers at other educational levels can benefit from this work as well. It makes a strong case for DCAP as it documents the process by which teachers come to understand, in their terms, what DCAP means to them and to their practice.
T.Y.
by Sonia Nieto.
New York: Teachers College Press, 1999. 207 pp. $22.95.
In the introduction of her newest book, Sonia Nieto establishes that multicultural education is not something that schools “do” by simply devoting a segment of the curriculum to “diversity” or filling bulletin boards with posters of multicolored children. She sees multicultural education rather as a perspective from which to focus on achieving excellence in student learning.
The title of the book, The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities, underscores Nieto’s view of the illuminating power of education for both teachers and students. Her previous work, Affirming Diversity, brought student voices to the foreground as they commented on their educational experiences. The current volume complements the previous one by highlighting the voices of teachers — gathered from journals they kept while enrolled in Nieto’s graduate class — who comment on their own educational transformations.
The book focuses on teacher practices, attitudes, and values, as well as on the policies and practices of schools that she believes will promote the learning of all students — especially those who have traditionally not met with much success in school. Instead of referring to such students as “minority,” “at-risk,” “disadvantaged,” or “disempowered,” Nieto uses the term “bicultural,” which emphasizes what these students have rather than what they lack. The author sees multicultural education, indeed all good teaching, as transformative. To this end, she advocates that teachers transform their practice on three levels — individual, collective, and institutional — in order to improve the educational potential of all students. Nieto is also convinced that “unless and until teachers undergo a personal transformation, little will change in our schools” (p. xx). The transformation that she sees as “indispensable for the learning to take place” is based on an attitude that blends “hope and critique” (p. xxiii).
Throughout her book, Nieto gives clear working definitions for many problematic terms (for example, multicultural education, culture, critical pedagogy, empowerment). In addition, she provides explicit descriptions of the social and political conditions in public schools that impede the achievement of bicultural students, and makes logical, cogent arguments for change, which are supported by numerous examples from research. The teachers’ reflections lend authenticity to the book.
Chapter one, “Learning the Social Context in Multicultural Education,” identifies five principles that inform Nieto’s view of learning. She believes that learning is “actively constructed,” connected to experience, influenced by cultural differences, developed within a social context, and created within a community (p. 3). Chapter two, “Learning and Inequality,” presents an analysis of conditions in U.S. society and schools that have been “consistently, systematically, and disproportionally unequal and unfair for students who are different from ‘the mainstream’” (p. 20). Also included in this chapter is a discussion of group and individual responses to inequality. The first two chapters set the theoretical and sociopolitical context, while the remaining chapters deal more directly with what happens in classrooms and schools.
In chapter three, Nieto looks at “Culture and Learning,” giving a thorough, detailed definition of culture and then discussing language as culture. After offering examples of culturally responsive practices that work to enhance student learning, however, she cautions that this approach can be misguided if applied superficially or if cultures are rigidly defined. On the other hand, she cites several examples of students who do well in schools that are quite different from their home culture and effectively counters the assumption that “cultural discontinuities” inevitably lead to school failure. Stressing the necessity to look at structural inequalities as well as cultural responsiveness, she concludes the chapter by suggesting several issues for teachers to focus on to encourage effective connections between language, culture, and learning. The title of chapter four asks, “Who Does the Accommodating?” Here, Nieto suggests that improving connections between students’ home and school lives can ease the way for the creation of positive learning communities. A number of examples illustrate how teachers and schools can change practices and policies to allow accommodation to be shared between the institution and the home.
In chapter five, Nieto delves into critical pedagogy, empowerment, and learning. First she defines these terms and then makes persuasive arguments for viewing multicultural education as critical pedagogy and for linking empowerment with learning. This chapter is full of examples of approaches to teaching that engage students actively in “both the content and context of their education” (p. 129). Although teachers’ voices are interspersed throughout the book, chapter six, “The Personal and Collective Transformation of Teachers,” focuses specifically on their stories of coming to terms with one’s identity, learning from and with students, and challenging bias within both oneself and one’s school. The last chapter, “Creating Learning Communities: Implications for Multicultural Education,” summarizes themes that have emerged throughout the book and suggests characteristics that school reform should reflect in order to be effective “for students of all backgrounds and all situations” (p. 176).
The Light in Their Eyes offers a comprehensive and convincing argument for multicultural education as an important conceptual framework for improving student learning. As the author notes, “There are lessons to be learned from the many stories about student learning, teacher transformation, and school change . . . that might serve as models for other teachers and schools committed to developing demanding, caring, and inclusive learning communities” (p. 162).
Teachers, administrators, and members of school governance bodies will find this volume useful, as will teacher educators. The book is written in a clear and engaging style that will also appeal to any reader interested in gaining a better understanding of this affirmative approach to schooling.
C.S.S.
by Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 318 pp. $26.00.
History is, as the authors of this book remind us, “hot” (p. 7). In fact, history became front-page news in 1994 as the result of a public and political debate over what version of the past would be taught in U.S. schools. That debate echoed from the halls of high schools to the halls of the U.S. Senate. In History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past, authors Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn — themselves central players in this political spectacle — detail the conflict that erupted over the creation of national history standards.
In 1991, the movement for national educational standards was in full bloom. Backed by national political leaders in the Bush administration and funded by agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, a consortium of nine educational organizations that included the Organization of History Teachers (OHT), the National Council for History Education (NCHE), and the Association for Supervision, Curriculum, and Development (ASCD) launched the National History Standards Project. The authors of History on Trial, three of the many developers of this project, chronicle the challenges involved in such a task, reveal the complexity of setting standards in such a value-laden project, and record the battles that resulted.
Although nonfiction, History on Trial bears the mark of high political drama. As such, the first six chapters are the exposition, presenting the cultural conflict that underlay the development of the standards and that grabbed public attention in 1994. To recreate the intellectual, social, and political contexts in which this debate occurred, the authors explore the changes in the discipline of history during the first half of this century as a result of new scholarship that expanded history education’s venue from Western civilization to world history. These chapters examine the ongoing battle during this century over the purpose of history and history education in a democracy, both in the United States and in England.
The remaining chapters play out that drama as they detail the war that erupted with the publication of the history standards in 1994 and carry it to its climax on the floor of the U.S. Senate. By the 1990s, according to Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn, the roles in this drama had already been cast. On one side were the “militant monoculturalists of the Right” who demanded that history promote “Ozzie and Harriet patriotism and exclusive celebration of the Western tradition” (p. 99). On the other were “militant multiculturalists . . . [who had] romanticized the history of their particular group or region out of all recognition, and stigmatized Western civilization as the world’s oldest evil empire” (p. 99).
Although the authors and educators involved in this project recognized its potential to become an ideological battleground, it seems certain they did not anticipate the attack that would follow the release of the standards in 1994. An assemblage of public figures ranging from Lynne Cheney, head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, assailed the integrity of the standards and their creators. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Senator Slade Gorton of Washington denounced the standards as an “ideologically driven anti-West monument to politically correct caricature” designed “to destroy our Nation’s mystic chords of memory” (p. 234). By a vote of 99 to 1, the Senate recommended rejection of the standards, a move that had more symbolic than instrumental effect.
This drama, unlike many, has no neat conclusion; even in the last act the drama was not over. The authors of History on Trial remind us that the struggle to define history continues, even though this episode in the battle over history standards has ended. In the concluding chapter, the authors remind us that this battle was and remains a cultural war. One wonders if perhaps the title and subtitle should have been reversed to “Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past: History on Trial,” for it is that war and its warriors who are highlighted in this nonfictional drama. Still, the book presents a complex view of an ongoing battle over curriculum that, as Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn remind us, has been fought before and will be fought again as each generation struggles to define what the past is, what it means, and how that interpretation will be passed on to the next generation.
J.P.S.
by Michelle Knobel.
New York: Peter Lang, 1999. 288 pp. $29.95.
Much recent research in the field of adolescent literacy has focused on the connections — or lack thereof — between students’ literacy practices inside and outside of school. Michelle Knobel’s first book, Everyday Literacies: Students, Discourse, and Social Practice, contributes to this inquiry. Knobel uses a case study approach in which she portrays the language and social practices of four adolescents who differ in socioeconomic backgrounds, type of school they attended, and academic success. This work is one of many recent studies that expands the conception of literacy beyond just reading and writing. Knobel bases her analysis of these students’ experiences with language and schooling on Jim Gee’s notion of Discourse — with a capital “D” — which refers to ways of using language and other symbolic forms of expression that identify one as a member of a social group. This theory allows Knobel to explore the “multiple social identities and subjectivities” and interpret “what often appears to be contradictory memberships in Discourses enacted in adolescents’ lives; such as between displays of concurrent membership in academic and streetcorner Discourses” (p. 37). Although Knobel and the teenagers she studies are Australian, readers will recognize many similarities between Australian and U.S. “Discourses,” and will probably find many of her conclusions relevant to adolescents’ educational experiences in North America and Western Europe. Alluding to similarities between Australia and the United States in terms of the climate of educational reform, Knobel reminds us that any serious conversation about educational reform must consider the Discourses that shape adolescents’ everyday literacy practices.
An articulate and lucid interpreter of theory, Knobel is also a keen observer of the students’ everyday lives. After establishing the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the study in the first two chapters of this book, Knobel presents the four adolescents in fluent, descriptive language, into which she subtly interjects analytical commentary. Her willingness to share her own life experience with certain Discourses and to reflect on how this experience may have affected her interpretations makes this work especially appealing as a qualitative study. For example, in deliberating about how to make sense of apparent contradictions in the Discourse practices of one of her subjects, she writes, “I attribute some of the initial difficulties in interpreting Layla’s Discourse coordinations in part to my own close familiarity with the Discourses that constitute and coordinate Layla” (p. 152). Such reflections remind the reader of the standpoint from which Knobel conducts her investigation — that of a White, female, Lutheran academic researcher whose own teenage years are still fresh in her memory.
This collection of case studies is as much about Knobel’s research methodology as it is about the lives of the four adolescents whose Discourse practices she studied so carefully. She gives a clear explanation of the analytic method of “event mapping,” and of the other methods she used to interpret the data. She writes, “Deliberate strategies used to enhance the communicative validity of the present study include: cross-examination of multiple sources of evidence, member checks, and description of the research methodology (which includes researcher self-reflexivity)” (p. 15). Knobel makes these strategies visible to the reader when she reflects upon, questions, and presents alternatives to her interpretations of the discourses that shape the adolescents’ experiences, thus rendering her argument all the more convincing.
Everyday Literacies will be of special value to language and literacy researchers, particularly those who are interested in qualitative research methods. It may also be interesting to general readers in the field of education who appreciate a theoretically oriented glimpse into the language practices of adolescents.
S.W.B.