Article Abstracts:
In this article, Deborah Brandt discusses two cases from a larger study in which she documents the changing conditions of literacy learning as experienced by ordinary people in the twentieth century. Her discussion of the lives of two women, Martha Day and Barbara Hunt, is grounded in principles of oral history and life history research. She presents the analytic concept of a "sponsor" to identify any agent who supports or hampers opportunities for literacy learning in the lives of her subjects. Her discussion of sponsorship in the lives of these two women highlights the relationship between literacy learning and economic change. Though these women were born two generations apart, they both witnessed, albeit from different points in time, the steady decline of a farm-based economy and its transformation by the forces of industrialization and consolidation of land under corporate control. Brandt argues that the accounts of these two women can aid speculation about how economic changes impact the processes of literacy learning. She also discusses how the concept of sponsorship can be useful to teachers as a way of helping students to recognize who is interested in their literacy, and why. (p. 373-394)
Sofía A. Vernon and Emilia Ferreiro
In this article, Sofía Vernon and Emilia Ferreiro present the results of an experimental study that looks at the relationship between the development of phonological awareness and the development of writing in Spanish-speaking kindergartners. The results of this study speak to the ongoing controversy about approaches to early literacy instruction - that is, whether children's ability to segment words into phonemes (phonological awareness) is a prerequisite for learning how to read and write. These results show that phonological awareness is not an either/or phenomenon, but that it develops across levels and that this development is related to children's writing development. Vernon and Ferreiro discuss several important educational implications based on their findings: first, that children's ability to benefit from systematic phonics instruction depends on their level of writing development; and second, that encouraging children to write in kindergarten and first grade is an important way to stimulate the analysis of spoken words or other meaningful units. (p. 395-415)
Arthur B. Powell and Marilyn Frankenstein
In this interview, Arthur B. Powell and Marilyn Frankenstein elicit a perspective on the importance of teacher-student relationships for academic, social, and political learning through the voice of mathematician and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Emeritus Dirk Jan Struik, who was 103 years old at the time of the interview. Through his words, we gain insights into European schooling from the end of the 1800s to the present, and into the intellectual and political life in the early part of this century. We learn about the impact of McCarthyism on intellectual freedom in the United States and about the importance of ethnomathematics from a man who not only lived through these times, but who also became an active political intellectual during this period of history. In this context, Struik discusses his intellectual, academic, and political trajectories, relating stories of his life as a student, teacher, mentor, colleague, professor, political activist, and Marxist intellectual. (p. 416-446)
Robert H. Bell
In this article, Robert H. Bell, a professor of English at Williams College for over twenty-five years, reflects on his experiences as both a teacher of undergraduates and a mentor to his junior colleagues. Using a historical lens, he traces the decline of pedagogical training in higher education over the course of his own career, and notes the absence of mentoring programs that would encourage senior academics to assist their younger peers in the classroom. Having been asked in 1994 to develop such a program in order to provide guidance and support to newly hired - and often untested - faculty members, Bell describes and deliberates about the obstacles and issues raised by both its creation and its implementation. (p. 447-455)
Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families,
1900–1940
by Brenda J. Child.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. 145 pp. $35.00.
Brenda J. Child’s first book powerfully reveals the experiences and perspectives of American Indian students who attended federal boarding schools. In Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940, Child skillfully uses primary documents, personal letters, and school newspapers to unveil the important stories of Ojibwe children who attended the Haskell Institute in Kansas and the Flandreau School in South Dakota. The historical context in which the Ojibwe lived is vividly captured in actual letters and documents from the schools and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). This book provides a glimpse into Ojibwe families’ thoughts, motivations, and hopes for the future — perspectives that have often been overlooked in historical research. “Letters are at the heart of this story” (p. xii), Child writes, referring to the hundreds of letters written by Ojibwe children and their parents.
Each chapter introduces a theme that shapes and further explains cultural nuances and knowledge familiar to, and shared by many, Ojibwe families impacted by the boarding school experience. In chapter one, “Star Quilts and Jim Thorpe,” the author states, “The boarding school experience spanned several generations and affected dozens of tribes in the United States and Canada. The experience . . . has become part of our common heritage as North American Indians” (p. 8).
Child writes in the first person, welcoming the reader into an experience shared among Native peoples. She does this by bringing the reader’s attention to specific letters sent from child to parent, thereby personalizing and acknowledging their experience of “our common heritage.”
“From Reservation to Boarding School” (ch. 2) is an overview of the transition from reservation life to boarding school life experienced by Ojibwe families. Child writes about the impact of legislation passed to redistribute land into individual allotments and the resulting depressed economic conditions on Indian reservations. Ojibwe families living on reservations were not the only ones affected economically, however. Child writes, “Boarding school became a solution for many urban Indian women when they were not able to support a family” (p. 21). This research also reveals how Native families turned to the federal Indian boarding schools as a way to meet their children’s social, medical, and educational needs. Child’s presentation of letters weaves together both the personal and the historical, helping to place the Ojibwe people within a broader history that encompasses most American Indian families.
Child brilliantly brings together the letters of Ojibwe parents and students, school superintendents and BIA agents regarding “homesickness.” Taken together, this correspondence tells a story of how difficult it was to acquire permission to visit children attending boarding schools far from their reservation homes. As an example of how much control the school and BIA officials exercised over relationships, they often denied parents’ requests to visit their children. More generally, children were not allowed to leave the boarding schools until they had completed their programs of study, which usually spanned four to five years, depending on the child’s age. Although these letters are evidence of emotional hardships, they also indicate how both children and parents desired “proper” industrial training and education. In addition to its discussion of the letters and school documents, the book displays photos of some children attending these schools. One photo shows two young men working on a car; another depicts a sewing class. The most endearing photo is that of the “Haskell Babies,” a kindergarten cohort and the youngest group of children enrolled at the Haskell Institute.
Child has rewritten a part of American Indian history in a way that encourages further exploration. The many letters revealing the experiences, emotions, and hopes of Ojibwe families are treated with respect and care. Initially conceived as a book contributing to Child’s own Ojibwe tribal history, Boarding School Seasons is also a powerful contribution to the field of American Indian education and the history of American education.
T.Y.
Sharing Words: Theory and Practice of Dialogic
Learning
by Ramón Flecha.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 128 pp. $60.00, $23.95 (paper).
In Sharing Words: Theory and Practice of Dialogic Learning, Ramón
Flecha provides a unique example of the theory and practice of dialogic learning.
By mixing educational and social theory with literature, life narratives,
and personal accounts, Flecha creatively narrates the practice of dialogic
learning in a seemingly utopian reality: a literary circle in which low-literacy
adults enjoy reading books by authors like Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and García
Lorca.
The book opens with an extensive theoretical introduction to the foundations of dialogic learning, providing a comprehensive synthesis of current developments in social, human, and educational sciences relevant to the dialogic approach. Drawing from an interdisciplinary approach, Flecha’s theoretical framework includes the works of sociologists such as Catells, educators such as Freire, psychologists such as Vygotsky, and philosophers such as Habermas. It also includes a critique of authors such as Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, and Heidegger. Flecha uses this theoretical debate as the foundation for what he describes as the seven principles of dialogic learning: egalitarian dialogue, cultural intelligence, transformation, instrumental dimension, creating meaning, solidarity, and equality of difference. This introduction also sets the stage for the rest of the book, as each chapter guides the reader to a deeper understanding of one of the seven principles.
The central topic in Sharing Words is the promotion of reading. In the literary circle described in this book, people with diverse educational backgrounds come to enjoy reading classical literature and to engage with others in dialogue regarding issues of history, politics, friendship, family, love, and multiculturalism. Most participants are people without a high school or university background; in fact, most of them are attending a school for adults or are people whose children or grandchildren are in school. Keeping that in mind, the author wrote this book to be accessible to a wide audience, from practitioners and scholars to the very participants in the literary circle he describes.
Through the book’s seven chapters, readers can explore different aspects of an uncommon learning experience and see how people who are often labeled “illiterate” come to understand and enjoy reading books like The Odyssey, Ulysses, or Don Quixote, which even some teachers and professors find difficult to read. Sharing Words narrates the learning experiences in the reading group in a profound and subjective manner that enables us to see how these individuals are transforming their cognitive, social, and emotional development. Flecha does this by focusing in each chapter on one of the seven participants: Manuel, Lola, Chelo, Rocío, Juan, Rosalía, and Antonio. We see two very different women (an educator and an unlettered woman) express their consent and dissent about various feminist matters. We also witness a member of the Gypsy community contributing to the circle’s dialogic learning, some urban citizens’ search for meaning, and the story of a school dropout who overcomes seemingly insurmountable barriers to learning.
It is difficult to classify a book like Sharing Words as belonging to a specific type, genre, or discipline because it crosses many borders. It highlights both theory and practice; it is both expository and narrative; and it refers as much to educational and social science works as to classical literature. In this way, Sharing Words may be an example of a new way of writing about educational theory and practice, one that results in a captivating and enjoyable experience that invites the reader to share and comment with colleagues, students, and friends.
M.S.G.
White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in
America
edited by Joe L. Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, Nelson M. Rodriguez, and
Ronald E. Chennault.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 355 pp. $27.95.
Many Whites in the United States today, including a significant number of White college students, believe that the goal of equal opportunity has already been achieved, that prejudice and racism have been eradicated from mainstream society, and that affirmative action or special minority programs are gross examples of reverse racism. As a result of their ignorance of both the nature and the extent of inequality faced by most people of color, many majority students (as well as faculty and staff) are often unsympathetic to the avowed problems of minorities. Their sympathies have been further eroded during the past decade as conservative leaders have deliberately presented themselves (and their constituents) as the victims of false charges of racism and sexism, “political correctness,” and reverse discrimination. By portraying the White, middle-class male as an innocent casualty of the politics of identity and difference, insisting upon his lack of real “bias” and emphasizing his distress at minorities’ hostility towards him, the Right has managed to produce what Michael Apple calls in the foreword to this volume “retrogressive white identities.”
The editors of White Reign have deliberately set out not only to refute and counteract the destructive messages of the Right, but also to provide an antiracist educational tool that “places the spotlight of critical scrutiny on the power of whiteness and how it can be understood, interrupted, and transformed” (p. x). To this end, they have compiled sixteen pieces that address the social and cultural construction of racial identity on the individual and group levels; the critical power of politics in the development of these identities; the importance of “denormalizing Whiteness”; and the necessity of generating “a sense of pride in the possibility that white people can help transform the reality of social inequality and reinvent themselves around notions of justice, community, social creativity, and social/political democracy” (p. 21).
The book is divided into two sections. The first is devoted to essays on Theory and Pedagogy, and the second to Culture and Pedagogy. Section one covers a range of themes and topics, including classroom-based examples of critical multicultural pedagogy, an analysis of the relations between the Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia and the European Australians (a global example of the social construction of whiteness), and Henry Giroux’s remembrances of his own racial identity formation, which he describes as emerging “pedagogically and performatively through my interactions with peers, the media and broader culture" (p. 131). Section two is, if anything, even more eclectic. It includes pieces on the construction of whiteness in Las Vegas, racism in technology (particularly in cyberspace), and the trials, travails, and identity crises of Okies during the Great Depression.
Given the current racial tension and misapprehension on many college campuses and within American society in general, it seems imperative that educators at every level begin seriously teaching about and discussing issues of racial identity and power in their classrooms. White Reign is a well-organized and articulate tool with which to begin some of these conversations. Although the editors’ political bent and purpose are obvious from the outset, the overall tone is refreshingly unapologetic and never strident. Moreover, the book speaks directly about and to the experiences of many of the students whose voices and feelings are so seldom acknowledged in the classrooms and corridors of our educational institutions.
L.N.N.
Small, isolated country schools were the major educational institution in rural America for more than 250 years until the last of them were replaced by consolidated schools by the second half of the twentieth century. Lost forever is the opportunity to study these rural schools as observers or participants. Country School Memories by Robert Leight and Alice Duffy Rinehart taps a rich storehouse of memory held by forty-seven individuals who participated in one-room school experiences as teachers or students from 1900 to 1955, most of them in the northern part of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Because these country schools reflected the rural lifestyles and habits of the farmers within the communities in which they were embedded, for some of these individuals they were “institutions of great stability and continuity” (p. 4).
Beginning with an overview of rural education during the twentieth century in chapter one, Leight and Rinehart analyze the pedagogy of rural schoolteachers, the character of these teachers, and the culture of the schools. They discuss the school consolidation movement that ended the reign of one-room schoolhouses and draw conclusions about lessons that can be learned by contemporary educators from old-time schools. For example, without necessarily returning to one-room schools, “many existing school teaching faculties are attempting to create smaller functional subunits within present larger buildings” (p. 136). The authors recommend that such strategies as “schools-within-a-school” could work if they focus on achieving identity and community among the students and faculty.
Leight and Rinehart use oral history techniques to capture the insights of these individuals in a laudatory undertaking to preserve their recollections of country school experiences. In chapter two, the authors present the “voices” of seven participants — that is, long streams of data that present the school tales of these individuals — followed by a brief commentary that identifies the themes found within each narrative. For example, the authors present Ruth Hackman’s story of “Teachers Remembered,” in which she describes an assortment of teachers from her own schooling experience. Hackman also reflects on the multifaceted aspects of their work: “They [the teachers] taught every subject, every grade, . . . [while] tending the fire to keep it going . . . and keep[ing] twenty-eight kids organized” (p. 32). Leight and Rinehart conclude this particular narrative saying, “In this story we have a rich description of the schoolroom and of the school program. This theme and others . . . will be developed in Chapter 4” (p. 35). These superficial commentaries disappointingly interrupt the flow of the text because they are disjointed and terse. Instead of using these commentaries to elaborate, albeit briefly, on key themes, the authors solely identify the themes that are further explicated in the succeeding chapters, which focus on the experiences of teachers and students.
Although Leight and Rinehart attempt to weave the threads of these commentaries into chapters three and four in order to draw lessons from the past in their final chapter, these attempts appear superficial, given the richness of their oral history data. Although these narratives shed some light on valuable dimensions of one-room schooling, readers are still left largely in the dark because the authors fail to highlight and scrutinize key aspects in their participants’ “country school memories.”
R.G.C.
Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California,
1850–1950
by Kathleen Weiler.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. 339 pp. $49.50.
Focusing on the lives and work of women teachers in two rural counties in California — Tulare and Kings counties — from 1850 to 1950, Kathleen Weiler, in Country Schoolwomen, explores the social context of teaching and seeks to understand what teaching meant to women teachers, what it provided them, and how it shaped their teaching experiences. Weiler introduces us to women who taught in isolated one- and two-room schoolhouses and in the migrant schools of the Depression years, and in the process witnessed the profound upheavals brought about by two world wars. The author probes these women’s life histories by exploring local archives and interviewing retired teachers through the lens of critical and feminist theory, and focusing on “the ways in which [these women] construct meaning from the images and assumptions of the culture in which they move[d]” (p. 6). By centering on the figure of “the woman teacher,” Weiler examines the growth of state control over schools and the irrevocable impact of powerful economic and political changes on small-town life in order to challenge a number of assumptions about the lives and work of women teachers.
For example, many assume that the work of women in schools has always been controlled by men, that education has, with rare exceptions, remained a patriarchal space in which women care for children in classrooms while men hold positions of authority, define issues, and set policy. Country Schoolwomen introduces us to a network of women “who held positions of power at the state level, who supported one another, and who defined an alternative and positive meaning for the woman teacher” (p. 4). The work of these women puts forth a vision of classroom teaching as a serious and stimulating profession. For example, one of the more influential of these women was Helen Heffernan, head of elementary and rural education at the California Department of Education for forty years (1926–1965). Through the use of “personal narratives” and “popular memory” — that is, a means that “reveals the past . . . as a discursive construct expressing power conflicts and competing meanings”(p. 159) — Weiler reveals how Heffernan and the women supervisors she led showed classroom teaching to be valuable and intellectually challenging, particularly in relation to progressive and democratic education ideals. Indeed, for many of the women in Weiler’s study, teaching clearly did provide material resources and intellectual satisfaction.
The historical record thus suggests that teaching has afforded women a potential source of power; it has offered them respect, autonomy, and financial independence. Weiler argues that women have had to struggle — not always successfully — to claim this potential, which male educators have often sought to deny or disregard. In addition, both university experts and local communities have persisted in viewing classroom teaching as “women’s work” and have consequently been slow to acknowledge divergent perspectives on the profession. Country Schoolwomen ultimately reveals, then, not a homogeneous tradition but a dense ideological landscape, one in which representations of “the woman teacher” were often caught among contradictory and contested visions. By referring to these competing visions, readers can broaden their understanding of what teaching has meant to these particular women teachers in a larger social, historical, and political context.
R.G.C.
The Incredible Journey to the Planets by Nicholas Harris is a science resource picture book that should appeal to beginning astronomy students of any age. Lavish artwork of our sun and the heavenly bodies that orbit it is accompanied by cutaway illustrations that show colorful mantles and cores, as well as relational depictions of planets with their moons. For example, there is a picture of Uranus as seen from its own moon, Miranda, and a fascinating series of Saturn with its rings at different angles as seen from Earth.
Illustrators Sebastian Quigley and Gary Hincks devote at least a full technicolor page in this oversize, hardback book to each of the following: the Milky Way, the solar system, the Sun, the nine planets, asteroids, and comets. The author includes special text boxes filled with “fun facts” about each celestial sphere that augment the narrative of planetary descriptions. One such fact is that it takes more than 200 million years for our sun to orbit the galaxy. The descriptions read smoothly, though they are a far cry from the travelogue suggested by the voyage imagery of the book’s title.
In keeping with the metaphor of “reader as space traveler,” the book has windows cut in the middle of each page. This allows the reader who begins the journey at the sun to see the sunlit faces of all the planets as she travels toward them. While this is an unlikely scenario, it does not necessarily contribute to a basic misconception of our solar system. Unfortunately, as the reader looks back from a further planet toward the sun, she can see the well-lit faces of the planets she has already “visited” with the sun beaming from behind them. Though it is certainly not the intention of the authors or illustrators to suggest that planets are so brightly lit by some source other than the sun, the layout of these illustrations can contribute to the confusion that many students have when they look into the night sky and see both stars and planets shining.
This example demonstrates both a major strength and a potential weakness of using artwork rather than photographs for this type of resource. On the one hand, illustrators can express planetary images and highlight relationships in ways that photographs are unlikely to capture. This is especially true for expressing theories of planetary creation and composition. On the other hand, artwork allows for more chances to misrepresent what understandings we have about the astronomical system where we live.
Though the text cites minimal source material, the glossary and suggested further readings are geared to pre-K to college, reflecting the wide audience that the author and illustrators engage. Though The Incredible Journey to the Planets is an ambitious title, the combinations of text and art, and the short list of further readings and glossary at the book’s end, make this teacher resource a fantastic window through which students of all ages can sample the marvels of our solar system.
W.M.S.
In The Art and Science of Portraiture, sociologist and portraiture pioneer Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and cognitive developmental psychologist Jessica Hoffmann Davis map out the history, purposes, and dimensions of the qualitative research methodology known as portraiture. Portraiture shares some features with other qualitative research methods, and the book places portraiture within this larger field of inquiry. However, it does not take long to realize that there is a dimension to portraiture that separates it from traditional ethnographic research. The authors have managed to capture the artistic and deeply personal aspects of portraiture that make it a unique form of social science inquiry.
The structure of the book exemplifies these unique aspects of portraiture. A casual glance at the table of contents reveals what one might expect from a standard book on research methodology: “Chapter One: A View of the Whole: Origins and Purposes . . . Chapter Two: Perspective Taking: Discovery and Development . . . Chapter Three: On Context . . .” etc. The topics taken up in these chapters are central to the development of good qualitative research and therefore necessary for any book that is methodological in intent. However, a closer examination of each chapter reveals a text that is as discerning, original, and informative as the portraits for which Lawrence-Lightfoot has become famous. Each chapter is divided into three sections: “Illumination,” “Implementation,” and “Artistic Refrain.” In the “Illumination” section of each chapter, Lawrence-Lightfoot delineates the unique manner in which the concept under discussion is explored in portraiture, comparing it to the ways it is used in other research realms. In the “Implementation” section, Davis describes practical structures for engaging in the process of collecting and interpreting data, and creating the product, the portrait. Finally, the “Artistic Refrain” of each chapter, written by Davis and illustrated with the drawings of children and professional artists, is just what the title implies — a moment to reflect artistically upon the discussion contained in the chapter.
The Art and Science of Portraiture is an immensely important resource for the researcher interested in portraiture specifically and qualitative methodology more generally. While it is filled with practical information on strategies and techniques, as well as the history and origins of portraiture, it also holds a unique place among books on methodology in that it is actually a pleasure to read.
R.D.