Reports on three studies of playground fighting among elementary and middle school age students in Great Britain. Finds that the most common cause of fights were disputes over some aspect of a rule-governed game; teasing; retaliation to an accidental injury; and, to a lesser extent, disputes over space. (CFR)

Court-ordered desegregation never happened in Woodville, Mississippi, and Black and White students continue to attend separate (public versus private) schools today. Analysis of local newspaper stories, 1959-70, suggests that the racial identities of residents remained relatively unchanged and that the local media played a major role in…

Structural variables differentiating kinship identities, such as sex, generation, and type of relationship (lineal, collateral, conjugal), are reflected in sentiments about family identities. In particular, componential variations in kinship terms predict Evaluation, Potency, and Activity ratings of the terms fairly accurately. Between 44 and 92…

Using data from 82 in-depth interviews with a randomly selected sample of college students, we explore how these students are forming felt identities in the following domains: intelligence and knowledgeability, occupation, and cosmopolitanism. We study the formation of students' identities by considering college an arena of social interaction in…

As more U.S. youth claim "mixed" heritages, some adults are proposing to erase race words altogether from the nation's inequality analysis. Yet such proposals, as detailed ethnography shows, ignore the complex realities of continuing racialized practice. At an urban California high school in the 1990s, "mixed" youth…

This article examines community practices, in particular oral discourse practices, in a junior high school classroom in an urban area of Western Canada. The purpose of the research was to determine what contribution a "community of practice" (COP) framework could make to the study of social interaction in a classroom setting. Qualitative…

This study attempts to evaluate the impacts of macro-structural factors on political freedom in developing countries (DCs). Political freedom is conceptualized as civil liberty and political rights the general population of a society can enjoy in influencing public policy. The Freedom House indexes are used as measures of freedom. In explaining…

The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of attitudes held by parents of Jewish Hebrew students at a Boston area Sunday school. Five parents of diverse backgrounds were interviewed in-depth to discuss the nature of their attitudes. Three common themes emerged related to the reasons for their high levels of involvement with the Sunday…

This paper takes the position that the main premise of "The Bell Curve" (by Richard Murray and Charles Herrnstein) is that significant advantages exist for possessing an IQ toward the top of the range--advantages that pertain to school success, career, and income. The premise is that people with high IQs have naturally acquired scholarly…

This position paper explores the issue of violence in northern Canadian schools and personal perceptions and reactions to the violent events. Spindler's phrase "sociocultural contextualization" is viewed as placing and examining education and the educative process within the social and cultural environment of the community served by the…

This paper identifies the historical factors that played a key role in the rise of mass popular education and describes how these factors relate to education in Southern Africa in the 21st century. The broad overview of developments since the Renaissance begins with the Protestant Reformation, which established a theoretical basis for elementary…

Population studies show that teachers of the 21st century will be educating an urban clientele from a great variety of cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic, and family structures, and probably, more students who are living in poverty. In view of these projections, a Division of Teacher Education has been implemented at the University of Missouri…

This preliminary report examines the complex relationship between black adolescents' school performance and black Americans' intragroup social organization, as well as the intrusive influence of the larger social structure. It is based on a two-year ethnographic study of high school students in a black section of Washington, D.C. Emphasis is on…

The literature of psycholinguistics and multilingualism is reviewed to examine the relationship between macrological social variables such as social class, and individual variables related to language behavior in a multilingual setting. The growing body of evidence assessing the link between certain social and community dimensions and specific…

Most previous research on the social organization of schools neglects to consider that such organization may vary depending on several factors, including size, staff composition, and environment. This study utilized two images of school identified by Corwin: the rational bureaucracy (formally organized social structure in which activities have…