The real world of schools is a political world of power and influence, bargaining and negotiation. Teacher development must therefore take place within the micropolitical realities of schooling. This book describes how the micropolitics of educational leadership affect the working world of teachers and develops four approaches to leadership. Part…

This study used feminist poststructuralist analysis to examine ways in which the relationships between college students and faculty influenced the enactment of feminist teaching. It used open-ended interviews with 22 faculty, the majority of whom were either affiliated with the women's studies program or were in a department in the School of…

A cultural profile of the French-Canadian business community of Quebec is presented, focusing on seven aspects of business communication: language; environment and technology; social organization; degree of contextual understanding; authority conception; nonverbal behavior; and temporal conception. The history of French and English language use in…

A popular image today is that students are "consumers" and teachers are "producers" and "sellers" of education. Many in academia claim that economic metaphors distort and corrupt the true nature of education and they offer a variety of alternative images of the relationships between teachers and students: traveler/guide, worker/boss, artistic…

Within the literacy education community, the focus on decentralizing curriculum decisions, i.e., returning to teachers the authority to make many decisions, including those about which texts to use, has garnered much attention. But the issue is not quite so straightforward, given the power structure currently found in most K-12 educational…

Teachers in "good" schools often provide considerable input into curriculum decisions and other types of school policies. They are considered to be "empowered." This paper argues that the apparent empowerment of teachers in these situations is actually the opposite: In good schools superordinates do not empower teachers; instead, teachers empower…

Part 1 of this book reproduces the second edition of Seymour Sarason's work, "The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change," in which he described how change affects a school's culturally diverse environment, either through the implementation of new programs or as a result of federally imposed regulations. First published in 1971, the book…

Students' non-participation in tutorials seems to be more widespread in certain cultural environments than others. This paper investigates the usefulness and effectiveness of tutorials as pedagogical tools and cultural links. It is postulated that the conflict results from face-considerations and the students' definition of tutorials within an…

Research demonstrates that along with the usual filters for skills and competence, aspiring administrators also encounter the profession's gender filters. Gender filters appear as deeply shared understandings among female and male professional school administrators. Gender filters maintain the privilege of the dominant white male culture by…

Scarce resources have facilitated increasing interdependence among organizations. This paper describes the group dynamics of the cooperation and collaboration models and examines which one is most suitable for maintaining effective group involvement. The cooperation model is comprised of two organizations that reach a mutual agreement; however,…

Writing centers are one place where expert-novice interactions are likely to occur. Students often assume that tutors possess expertise by virtue of their appointment as tutors. The tutor, for his/her part, often assumes that the student's knowledge is deficient in the area in which the student is seeking advice. The complex interactional and…

Drawing data from academic counseling encounters in one university, a study examined the practice of invoking others' voices as displays of how the participants have come to know about some particular information, and of their stances toward what they report. The study focused on voicing and its associated linguistic features in several different…

This book is part of a continuing study of dysfunctional bureaucracy. Chapter 1 provides the framework for organizing the discussion on the dysfunctional bureaucracy as it occurs in academia. This chapter covers such topics as the protective strata of dysfunctional bureaucrats, the judiciary as part of the protective strata, bureaucratic…

The chapters in this book originated in an invited seminar at the Griffith University Gold Coast (Australia) campus on the occasion of a visit by Philip Wexler in December 1993. The seminar explored ways and means of transcending a postmodernist analysis of education. Although the examples are predominantly Australian, the issues are…

This study contributes to discourse surrounding equity in opportunities for constituencies who are under-represented in the decision making process surrounding interactive television (ITV) adoption, yet account for a great portion of faculty and students who must then use it. The paper touches on the material expression of a culture's value…