Teaching is a profession in which teachers are accustomed to being in the spotlight. In this paper we meet ''Tina''--a newly employed teacher at a Norwegian public junior high school--who is engaged on an hourly basis to teach Arts and Crafts, including a seventh-grade class which has been called ''challenging'' by other members of the staff.…

School rules in Japan are consequential in prescribing socially accepted patterns of students' lifestyles both within and outside schools. This article discusses how school rules were interpreted as a social problem in the 1980s and the 1990s. Social constructionist perspectives of social problems call for sensitivity to the plurality of people's…

If there was one theme essential to the historical scholarship of Stanford professor Susan Moller Okin, it was the oppression of females. In imbuing political theory with feminism, Okin wrote, for instance, that modern American women are "second-class" citizens in a society where biological differences should count for nothing. Such declarations…

Drawing on Vygotsky's (1997a) concept of "fossilized behavior", this study examines the cultural fault lines between the imagined community (Anderson, 1991) of early childhood education and some Australian Indigenous families. Through creating a social space within which Indigenous families could examine dominant and taken-for-granted…

When discussions of at-risk students arise, Asian-American students are rarely mentioned. The stereotype of the model minority hurts at-risk Asian-American students. While their successful counterparts dominate honor rolls, at-risk Asian-American students are often overlooked and underserved. This paper discusses at-risk Asian-American students…

Contemporary Russian society is going through complex stages of internal change and integration into the world civilizational process. This process includes profound structural and functional changes in the economic, sociocultural, and intellectual spheres. Under these conditions, Russian society is observing the emergence of a whole complex of…

This paper provides a critical review essay of Ajay Sharma's "Portrait of a science teacher as a bricoleur: A case study from India." The main focus is two fold. First, arguments are presented to draw attention to how little advances in science teaching and science learning research have impacted teachers' practice and student…

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America." This detailed study showed that Americans in almost every demographic group were reading fiction, poetry, and drama--and books in general--at significantly lower rates than 10 or 20 years earlier. The declines were steepest among…

This book contains selected papers and excerpts from books by Seymour B. Sarason which chronicle the development of his ideas on educational change. Early papers addressed several themes that were later incorporated into a perspective of educational change: (1) professionalism is a combination of making mistakes and valuing one's own knowledge;…

This book argues that the literature on leadership, especially business leadership, has neglected ethical issues by focusing on approaches and strategies that emphasize individualistic concerns. The book calls for an end to the traditional separation of personal and public morality. It also argues that ethics of leadership is consistent with the…

A discussion, in French, of second language grammar instruction looks at the differences between a traditional linguistic approach to grammar learning, used less and less with the advent of communicative language teaching methods, and a sociolinguistic approach, which focuses more closely on the sociocultural context of functional variants of a…

This paper explores the overt and covert forms of racism in American institutions of higher education and focuses on racism at one graduate school in psychology. Though the nation as a whole decries racism, overt racial acts are on the upswing at institutions of higher education and covert racism exists across the nation. The paper argues that, in…

Prepared to assist the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges in the development of its "New Basic Agenda" for 1996, this report discusses several major statewide trends with important implications for California's community colleges. Data are reviewed on population growth, labor market and technological changes…

In response to the rapidly changing environment of the state of California, the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges (CCCs) developed the Basic Agenda in 1991 to convey the vision of the state's community colleges and provide broad direction at the systemwide and local levels. This report provides the New Basic Agenda,…

At community colleges, women currently comprise approximately 20% of all chief executive officer (CEO) positions. The single most important source from which new community college CEO candidates are selected, however, is the pool of deans of instruction and since 21% of current deans are women, it is likely that these numbers will rise. Moreover,…