In the new peer tutor training sessions at a northeastern university, a high level of interaction among the tutor trainer and trainees is one way the staff measures the success of the sessions. Within the limited time frame of 2 hours, however, the trainer must impart a great deal of information about the center and tutor position requirements.…

Notes that critical-cultural studies have had little impact on journalism and mass communication education for a number of reasons. Surveys 100 journalism and mass communication programs. Examines how critical-cultural faculty interact with the university community. Finds that scholars, as a whole, were open to critical-cultural perspectives.…

One of the most perplexing quandaries that has continually confronted proponents of democratic governance centers around the question of how to protect the right of the majority to govern while simultaneously protecting the fundamental rights of those who are, at least temporarily, in the minority (Martinson 1996, 163). The author of this paper…

This article presents the theoretical underpinnings of critical literacy and related principles. It also provides ideas for creating environments to promote reading from a critical stance, teaching strategies, sample classroom applications, and annotated lists of theme-related texts. When engaging in critical literacy, readers move beyond…

This essay turns to feminist ethnography and postcolonial theory to address how the figure of "the stranger" haunts the project of community service learning. By explicating the immediate and broader relations of power that structure these "strange(r) encounters," we are more likely to produce the kind of agitated pedagogy that creates…

The text for this article derives from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, which contain the central elements of his extensive critique of education in Benito Mussolini's Italy. In prison from 1926 to 1937, he produced a remarkable amount of writing on many political and cultural subjects, all of which were scribbled out in student notebooks and…

In order to examine how large-scale testing affects writing pedagogy and students' composition processes, the author conducted a study that centered on two high school senior English classes in the state of Kentucky. Since 1991, Kentucky has implemented a large-scale writing assessment and system of teacher and school accountability. Generating…

Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this article explores the writer-identity of a college ESL student in order to understand how embedded ideologies and power relations shape understanding of writer identity. Using a poststructural and sociocultural perspective, the author takes a stand regarding the politics of language and the teaching of…

The idea of collective decision making in schools has been a popular democratic educational reform model. One of its claims is that participation in school decision making empowers teachers and improves teaching. This research investigates this claim by exploring seven teachers' experiences with a unique democratic school reform in Porto Alegre,…

The purpose of this case study was to describe the role of teacher knowledge in the instructional methods of a community college developmental literacy instructor and determine in what ways that knowledge may have impacted the perceptions of the student participants regarding their authority over their academic progress in the class. Therefore,…

Topic 6, The Rise of Modern Dictators, in a theme issue on Teaching History Through Science Fiction, utilizes a 1962 story to dramatically demonstrate for students how one man can develop in himself the feelings of a dictator. (JB)

Discusses a study in which 50 introductory college-level sociology textbooks were examined to determine how the concept of power was treated. Findings indicated that power is generally presented as a macro-level phenomenon, with emphasis on institutionalized and legitimated forms of power. (Author/DB)

Argues that the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer provides a useful theoretical framework from which to discuss ethical issues in the technical communication classroom. Analyzes a previously published case study to demonstrate how hermeneutics can shed light on the ways that writers can be unconscious of ethical problems in their…

Scholarship on dialect diversity in classrooms has yielded two seemingly incompatible lines of research. Although numerous pedagogical approaches have been shown to provide productive alternatives to traditional responses to stigmatized dialects, research on public perceptions and teachers' attitudes suggests that negative beliefs about…

In this activity, students will be able to apply the concepts of stories and rituals to an analysis of the ritual in the short story "Harvest Home" by David Bradley, gaining understanding of how stories and rituals affect and reflect family values, power structures and identities. "Harvest Home" talks about the rituals involved in a…