Many school systems today find themselves in amazingly complex and puzzling environments. They are increasingly expected to turn direction quickly in response to changes in their environments, but they cannot change direction because they are bound by the arthritic bureaucratic designs of their systems, by old mental models of hierarchical power…

Student self-assessment is a popular practice for enhancing student empowerment in the assessment process. However, in recent times various writers have questioned whether the practice of student self-assessment automatically enhances student autonomy. Some writers have even warned that students' participation in the assessment process may…

This article offers a critical examination of the relations of power that exist in educational contexts in which the teacher is a member of an ethno-racial "minority". By interrogating the concept of the "minority teacher", this study explores some of the ways human beings become subjects and how individuals come to occupy…

Feminist therapy has revolutionized clinical practice and offered a model of empowerment for all therapy approaches. However, the long-assumed claim that feminist therapists are more likely to engage in power-sharing behaviors with their clients has not been supported by published quantitative research. In the current study, 42 female therapists…

The difficulty in communicating what is meant by the word "dialogue" is one that faces all those who use language. The word "dialogue" itself clearly carries with it notions of exchange, a verbal intercourse of thought. It also suggests balance and hints at a discursive to and fro among speakers. Consequently, the "dialogistic" suggests a…

This article draws on a reanalysis of findings from two separate qualitative studies that examined a possible relationship between school board members' and curriculum directors' conceptions of power and the way they made decisions (Mountford, 2001; Ylimaki, 2001, respectively). The findings from both studies were then compared to the extant…

History as a school subject in Hong Kong is often assumed to have been a vehicle for "colonialist" indoctrination under the British, and for "nationalist" indoctrination under the post-retrocession Chinese regime. This chapter challenges such assumptions by examining the ways in which history syllabuses have (or have not) dealt…

As organizational change at community colleges becomes the norm, presidents leading these campuses play a heightened role in guiding successful initiatives. The research reported here investigated the relationship between leader cognition and power levers of two presidents as they framed change for campus members. These leaders' underlying…

This paper discusses the ways in which inner-city, ethnically diverse, working-class girls' constructions of hetero-femininities mediate and shape their dis/engagement with education and schooling. Drawing on data from a study conducted with 89 urban, working-class young people in London, attention is drawn to three main ways through which young…

While students generally recognize that racism exists on an individual level, the instructor's challenge is to both elucidate patterns of discrimination and to expose their corollary: unearned and unrecognized systemic privilege of the dominant group. Unaware that their sense of entitlement advantages them at the expense of people of color, some…

Public schooling has been kidnapped. The author examines how this happened--since we all know very well who did it. How did public schooling become a hostage of world's neo-rightist political processes? This article attempts to unveil some of those strategies that underpin the very core of the neo-rightist current triumphalistic posture. To…

Three studies were conducted to (a) re-examine the internal properties of Roach's Power Base Measure (PBM), (b) test the PBM for measurement invariance across different samples, and (c) develop an alternative measure of observable teacher behaviors that communicate power in the classroom. Results of Studies 1 and 2 provide some support for the…

This study examines autobiographies of American teachers of French in order to make explicit their beliefs regarding French language and culture. The themes of class and power are prominent in these teachers' belief systems, as is the desire for self-transformation through mastery of French and miming a subset of French behaviors. These notions…

The Couples Emotion Rating Form assesses 3 types of negative emotion that are salient during times of relationship conflict. Hard emotion includes feeling angry and aggravated, soft emotion includes feeling hurt and sad, and flat emotion includes feeling bored and indifferent. In Study 1, scales measuring hard and soft emotion were validated by…

This paper presents five tools for librarians to use in building effective intercultural communication that reaches out to diverse populations. Librarians can more successfully cross intercultural boundaries if they are aware of the key tenets of intercultural communication and information provision, and then apply the five leadership tools in…