Florence, Namulundah. (1998). bell hooks, Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness. Reviewed by Caitlin Howley-Rowe

Florence, Namulundah. (1998). bell hooks, Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Pp. xxv + 246 ISBN 0-89789-565-7         $22.95 Reviewed by Caitlin Howley-Rowe Appalachia Educational Laboratory October 26, 1998             Students come to school in the morning wearing the social meanings associated with their various race, class, and gender classifications. They enter buildings, some rotting and others gleaming, in which many confront textbooks and teachers who overlook or undermine the lived substance of their social identities and struggles, and this is no accident. Moreover, they are schooled in deference to the status quo, whether or not it nurtures their burgeoning minds. At the same time, however, some classrooms are filled with passionate teaching and learning, with books and discussions that honor all students, with practices that empower students to become thinkers in their own right. It is to this dual nature of education that Namulundah Florence applies bell hooks' theory of engaged pedagogy.             Chapters 1 through 3 of Florence's book, bell hooks' Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness, describe hooks' thought on racism, sexism, and classism as they operate to limit the self-determination of various marginalized people in the United States. Florence offers a summary of how the interlocking oppressions by race, gender, and class together subjugate and garner persons’ complicity in their own domination, aided by the naturalization of white, middle-class, male values and norms via mass media, social myths, and education. Moreover, the author makes clear hooks' analysis of the ways race, class, and gender dominations pit various marginalized groups against one another rather than binding them together in "communities of solidarity in the struggle toward mutual growth" (p. xix).             In Chapter 4, the author reflects on the ways hooks' thinking accords or not with her own. She is sympathetic to hooks' contentions that black people internalize white norms, values, and aesthetics and thereby are not only alienated from themselves, but also experience self-hate, or a "negation of Blackness" (p. 64). Florence asks rhetorically, "since White' is about opportunity, privilege, and power, would not non-White people desire to be White?"(p. 64). Although the author places hooks' notions regarding "denial of subjectivity" and "separatism" under the subject heading "Issues hooks and the Author Agree Upon," she offers more critique than support for them (pp. 65-70). Florence argues that hooks is overly optimistic about the ability of marginalized people to attain subjectivity, that is, to move from being "objects" of domination to "subjects" of their own lives. Instead of offering "mere injunctions," she suggests that hooks might more usefully offer dominated folks "strategies to self- actualization" (p. 66). Florence then calls into question hooks' "self-proclaimed status of spokesperson for the marginalized," arguing both that hooks' professorship belies this and that objectivity (in the sense of fair and balanced analysis) is endangered when only marginalized people conduct scholarship about marginality (p. 69).             Florence makes two other critiques of hooks' social thought. First, she contends that hooks has not considered the possibility that, once dominations are eliminated, the previously dominated will become dominators themselves. Second, she suggests that hooks tends to essentialize the experience of racism, sexism, and classism by offering her personal trials as representative of all dominations. Therefore, Florence continues, hooks fails to address the myriad ways in which others experience and confront oppression, a lack which "is at variance with [her] proposition for cultural pluralism" (p.73).             Chapter 5 discusses similarities between hooks' engaged pedagogy and critical, multicultural, and feminist theories. Like critical theorists, hooks decries education where students are passive recipients of knowledge, masqueraded as value- free, that serves to reproduce social, political, and economic inequality. Florence aligns hooks' alternative vision for education with Freire's (1970, 1973) notion of "conscientization," in which students are liberated from domination by their own critical awareness. Resonating with multicultural theories of education, hooks' engaged pedagogy seeks to rewrite curricula that are monocultural and reinforce racial and cultural oppression. Last, Florence notes similarities between hooks' thought and feminist theory. Both, she writes, aim to nurture marginalized students as they "come to voice," as they claim their right to challenge privileged narratives.             The five major components of hooks' engaged pedagogy are elaborated upon in Chapter 6. These include a reconceptualization of what constitutes knowledge and how it is conveyed to students, linking theory more meaningfully to practice, empowering learners to think and speak critically, and committing to a multicultural perspective. hooks also, according to Florence, calls for passionate teaching that creates an exciting classroom, but more significantly queries the artificial separation of the affective and the rational--thereby challenging the hierarchical relationships that distort human interconnectedness.             Chapter 7 briefly discusses reasons teachers may not support an engaged pedagogy. According to Florence, hooks contends that such an approach is risky, demanding, and topples hierarchical arrangements in the classroom to which many teachers may be wedded. Florence adds that hooks has presumed that teachers are interested in challenging the status quo and are "self-actualized" (p. 133) enough to handle doing so should they wish.             Florence quite fleetingly discusses her sense of the limits of engaged pedagogy in chapters 8 and 9. Her main contention is that education is not a sufficient "lever for social transformation" (p. 136), and thus that hooks' prescriptions are unrealistic. Florence also argues that hooks simplifies the processes by which people confront their complicity in situations of domination. Finally, in a single paragraph entitled "Humanism over Standards," Florence makes the claim that public support for multicultural education is limited because students' growth as a result of such learning cannot be easily quantified for measurement. She writes, "despite charges of racial and cultural biases on various items, standardized tests are the most concrete measure for sorting' and selecting' students" (p. 141.). Her implication is that multicultural education will be viewed publicly as lacking "concreteness" (p. 140) until its worth can be assessed with conventional testing practices.             Chapters 10 through 13 attempt to illustrate the relevance of hooks' social and educational theory to an analysis of the third world country of Kenya. Focusing on hooks' analysis of the interlocking systems of race, class, and gender oppression, and using several sources of information about Kenya, Florence examines the ways in which Kenyan society is divided against itself. She first describes, however, the lingering effects of colonization on the country, which include cultural alienation, corruption, poverty, and political instability. Kenya, she notes, only gained independence from Britain in 1963.             hooks' contention that the social myth of white superiority supports the domination of non-white people in America is also true in Kenya, argues Florence in Chapter 10. But she points out that an often violent process of silencing those who challenge the status quo makes the Kenyan context quite different from the Western. Other myths legitimate the lack of public critique, including the myth of a pre-colonial "idyllic communal state" (p.150) and of tribal elders as pillars of wisdom whose judgment ought not be questioned. In such a context of suppressed political critique, racism, sexism and classism flourish. Racism operates through the use of degrading mass media images of blacks; differential distribution of privilege by race, tribal affiliation, and skin tone; and black internalization of white norms and values. Women in Kenya confront a sexism in many ways more powerful than that in America. Kenyan women generally have limited access to the means of production and few legal and property rights. In addition, Florence writes that polygamy, a common, if not legal, practice in Kenya, reinforces women's marginality because it reinforces conceptions of women as property. Citing several studies, Florence argues that Kenyan women's access to education is constricted both by socialization to conventionally undervalued feminine roles and by curricula that tend to exclude women. And classism, similarly to racism, operates via false consciousness, such that Kenyans emulate middle-class, Western behaviors, styles of dress, and norms. Like Fanon's analysis of the psychic impact of colonialism on black Martinique (1967), Florence contends that by equating freedom to material privilege, wealthy and middle-class black Kenyans strive to differentiate themselves from their impoverished countryfolk by adopting Western affectations. This process is exacerbated by tribal feuds over limited resources and transient access to power.             Four of the five major components of hooks' engaged pedagogy Florence deems to be moderately appropriate foci for rendering Kenyan education a pathway to justice and equity. In Chapter 11, she describes contemporary Kenyan curricula as Western, abstract, and irrelevant to the lived experiences of most Kenyan students. Thus, hooks' proposal for a reformulation of what knowledge is, how it is known, and who sanctions the knowing is germane to the Kenyan educational context, according to Florence. Likewise, she suggests that by linking liberatory theory to practice and empowering students to become full classroom participants, progressive educators may make education more meaningful to students. However, she notes that hooks' vision of education as the practice of freedom "takes on a totally different meaning in a Kenyan context. Freedom to most students promises relief from hunger, disease, and ignorance and not necessarily a critical interrogation of injustices embedded in prevailing social structures" (pp. 207-208).             Florence also sees hooks' call for education that honors pluralism as an important critique for Kenyan education, particularly given tensions between tribes. She points out difficulties in establishing a multicultural education, from the issue of how to include the more than 40 tribal languages in curricula to public perceptions of non-Western education as second-rate. As for incorporating passion into teaching, Florence suggests that this strategy is a luxury in Kenya because academic performance, as assessed by national exams, "has a tremendous impact on economic and social mobility" (p. 216). Her assertion is that the stakes are too high for students to spend time uniting the rational and the affective.             In her final chapter and epilogue, Florence distills her analysis of the relevance of engaged pedagogy to Kenya. She argues that hooks' notion of "talking back" to the oppressors "presumes the right of people to free speech" (p 225). Political oppression in Kenya, Florence writes, makes the act of critique far more dangerous than in America. She also notes that schools are not capable of effecting social transformation, that only organized political opposition can challenge systems of domination. Ultimately, however, her conclusion is that "commitment to bell hooks' engaged pedagogy and its primary aim of developing critical consciousness is both a challenge and hope for any marginalized group irrespective of location" (p. 227).             Florence's book, it seems to me, could have benefitted from more thorough editing. Typographical errors and inconsistencies in style strike me as minor blemishes, but disjunctions in flow, clarity and substance I find more troubling. In terms of substance, Florence's critiques of hooks could have been more fully elaborated. For instance, her implication that hooks' engaged pedagogy needs to be rendered accessible to conventional testing is addressed in a single paragraph, and her attendant claim that standardized tests are the best ways of " sorting' and selecting' students" (p. 141) made me question her proclaimed support of a pedagogy that sought not to classify students into hierarchies. Moreover, her concern with testing and accountability standards seems not to have taken into consideration the ways in which both serve the often narrow interests of politicians and profit-seekers; she fails to ask, "Accountability to whom?" But Florence does not expound on her claim, and I was left with an unresolved sense of dissonance.             Florence also occasionally misconstrues hooks' thought. For example, Florence's claim that education as the practice of freedom in Kenya may have less to do with challenging oppressive social structures than with providing relief from hunger, disease, and ignorance misses one of hooks' fundamental points: that education is a means to discover and confront the processes which create and sustain the hunger, disease, and ignorance of particular groups. Put another way, freedom from ignorance may support assaults on hunger and disease if education is conceived as having broad liberatory aims (as opposed to aims conflating economic privilege with freedom).             Similarly, Florence describes the way in which curriculum and pedagogy are kept in tight rein by pressures for students to perform well on national examinations. In Kenya, she argues, "empowering students takes the form of preparing them for exceptional performance on national exams as opposed to involving them in making and/or effecting a greater integration of subject matter to students' lives" (p. 210). While I found this information helpful for understanding the Kenyan context, it appeared to me at this point and at others that Florence confuses the relevance of hooks' thought to an analysis of Kenya with the palatability of hooks' thought to Kenyan practitioners. She does not, for instance, use hooks' thought to interrogate why Kenyan teachers might find themselves in such a stranglehold, but rather makes a quite broad claim about how Kenyan teachers might receive hooks' theory. The usefulness of hooks' engaged pedagogy is not as a prescriptive program, in my mind, but rather as an analysis of how education works as an arm of dominant groups. Given internalization of white, Western, middle-class, males norms and values, it should be obvious that many Kenyan educators would not find engaged pedagogy "relevant."             And this is what I find most troubling: many of Florence's criticisms are that hooks is idealistic or impractical (e.g., p. 137 & p. 215). While I certainly agree that schools cannot be a panacea for injustice, I read Teaching to Transgress not as an attempt to provide the critical silver bullet, so to speak, but as an effort to examine educational potential for liberation as seen from one of many possible critical perspectives. hooks' point, it seems to me, is that education will reflect the interests of dominant groups unless the dominated risk defining educational purposes oppositionally.             On the other hand, Florence's book is not without strength. She does a good job summarizing hooks' prolific work, and her respect for the author permeates her writing. Florence's use of hooks' analysis to examine Kenya was enlightening to this Western reviewer, but I found most valuable her elucidations of the ways hooks' thought is profoundly American. In sum, however, I finished the book knowing more about hooks' thought and wishing Florence had written more about her own. References Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York: The Seabury Press. Freire, P. (1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (M. Bergman Ramos, trans.). New York: Continuum. (Original work published 1970). hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. About the Reviewer Caitlin Howley-Rowe Caitlin Howley-Rowe works in the evaluation unit of the Appalachia Educational Laboratory in Charleston, West Virginia. Her interests include critical race theory, sociology, and ethnography.

Giroux, Henry A. (1997). Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling. Reviewed by Marina Gair

Giroux, Henry A. (1997). Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory, Culture, and Schooling. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 290 Pp. ISBN 0-8133-3274-5     (Paper)       $21.95 Reviewed by Marina Gair Arizona State University October 26, 1998             Henry Giroux's Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope is a collection of essays published during the last two decades. It is organized according to three major themes central to pedagogy and schooling: Theoretical Foundations for Critical Pedagogy, Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom, and Contemporary Concerns. Giroux's energy is initially invested in analyzing the structural and ideological constraints on public schooling. He addresses the political aspects of pedagogy, and then broadens to social and moral matters relevant to schooling that involve the larger society. Each section represents a particular phase in his development: late 1970s reflections on social class and schooling rooted in neo-Marxism and the Frankfurt School theory, the development of "critical pedagogy" in the early 1980s, and various new approaches to understanding the pedagogical process in the 1990s.             The first section, Theoretical Foundations for Critical Pedagogy, comprises four essays: "Schooling and the Culture of Positivism: Notes on the Death of History" (1979), "Culture and Rationality in Frankfurt School Thought: Ideological Foundations for a Theory of Social Education" (1982), "Ideology and Agency in the Process of Schooling" (1983); and finally, "Authority, Intellectuals, and the Politics of Practical Learning" (1986). Giroux pursues radical democracy by isolating the historical dynamics, prevailing hegemonic ideologies and structural forces that influence and shape the American educational experience. Most central for him are the epistemological, political, cultural, and social margins that confine and undermine knowledge and the process of schooling, and in particular the culture of what he calls positivism and technocratic rationality. He contends that this culture did not simply become the dominant ideological formation ex nihilo, but in fact evolved into a material force with oppressive features having important implications for the process of schooling. "This form of rationality," writes Giroux, "prevents us from using historical consciousness as a vehicle to unmask existing forms of domination as they reproduce themselves through facts and common-sense assumptions that structure our view and experience of the world. The logic of positivist thought suppresses the critical function of historical consciousness. For underlying all the major assumptions of the culture of positivism is a common theme: the denial of human action grounded in historical insight and committed to emancipation in all spheres of human activity. What is offered as a replacement is a form of social engineering analogous to the applied physical sciences. It is this very denial which represents the essence of the prevailing hegemonic ideology" (p. 12). Giroux charges that positivism, by ignoring the value of historical perspectives and thus contributing to the "irrelevance" of the past in understanding the future, freezes both human beings and history. His major aim has been to illuminate the workings of contemporary schooling by introducing into educational discourse cultural politics, notions of ideology, power, history, race, gender, and class struggle in order to illuminate the relationships among these factors and their relationships to the process of schooling.             Giroux sees a passive conception of humanity implied by the perspective of technocratic rationality. "Central to this form of rationality in the curriculum field is the notion of objectivity and neutrality. Guided by the search for reliability, consistency, and quantitative predictions, positivist educational practice excludes the role of values, feelings, and subjectively defined meanings in its paradigm" (p. 19). In the positivist pedagogical model, Giroux finds that there is a place neither for social history nor the generation of personal meanings nor respect for individual potential. This "methodology madness" as he calls it, "is rampant in public school pedagogy and has resulted in a form of curricular design and implementation that substitutes technological control for democratic processes and goals" (p. 20). Thus, Giroux believes that the manner in which teachers view knowledge, teach students to view knowledge, and structure classroom experiences reflects an impersonal, universalized, ahistorical, context- free knowledge that is driven by a positivist ideological undercurrent.             Giroux points to the work and insights of the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and new left thought as vital resources for undermining technocratic rationality and expanding the terrain for developing a reconstructed theory of pedagogy. Frankfurt School theorists on the whole rejected forms of rationality that subordinated human consciousness and adopted a perspective that supported critical thinking pursuant to individual emancipation and social change. They conceptualized schools as cultural sites that mirror societal organization and further explored the relationship between ideology, power, and class and how these shaped the process of schooling. Giroux credits the Frankfurt School with dismantling traditional and uncritical views of socialization in American education, and thereby making way for new types of inquiry. Frankfurt School theorists have helped us see schools as political rather than neutral, and in the process have revealed schools to be sites of cultural reproduction with a significant role in reinforcing and legitimizing the dominant social relations and their ideologies.             In the second section, Critical Pedagogy in the Classroom, Giroux develops his theory of border pedagogy with three essays; "Radical Pedagogy and the Politics of Student Voice" (1986); "Border Pedagogy in the Age of Postmodernism" (1988), "Disturbing the Peace: Writing in the Cultural Studies Classroom" (1993). Giroux tries to awaken not just educators but all Americans to create liberatory pedagogical possibilities through a radical form of "border crossing." Giroux proceeds to define and discuss transformative and emancipatory pedagogy and learning. Paramount to this discussion, he draws on the work of Paulo Freire and Mikhail Bakhtin, who articulate the notions of struggle, student voice, and critical dialogue, and he attributes central notions in the development of emancipatory pedagogy to these visionaries. He writes, "I believe that schools need to be reconceived and reconstituted as democratic counterpublic spheres as places where students learn the skills and knowledge needed to live in and fight for a viable democratic society. Within this perspective, schools will have to be characterized by a pedagogy that demonstrates its commitment to engaging the views and problems that deeply concern students in their everyday lives. Equally important is the need for schools to cultivate a spirit of critique and respect for human dignity that will be capable of linking personal and social issues around the pedagogical project of helping students become active citizens" (p. 143). Giroux writes that "the dominant school culture generally represents and legitimates the privileged voices of the white middle class and upper classes. In order for radical educators to demystify the dominant culture and to make it an object of political analysis, they will need to master the language of critical understanding. If they are to understand the dominant ideology at work in schools, they will need to attend to the voices that emerge from three different ideological spheres and settings: these include the school voice, the student voice, and the teacher voice" (p. 141). As pedagogical practice, border pedagogy underscores the need to challenge and resist existing boundaries of knowledge and create new ones. Thus, it is imperative to create classroom conditions that facilitate students' ability to speak, write, and listen in a "multiperspectival language". Within this discourse students are no longer marginalized but engaged as border-crossers who challenge, cross, remap, and rewrite borders as they enter into counter-discourse with established boundaries of white, patriarchal, and class-specific knowledge. Likewise, "border pedagogy provides opportunities for teachers to deepen their own understanding of the discourse of various others in order to effect a more dialectical understanding of their own politics, values, and pedagogy. What border pedagogy makes undeniable is the relational nature of one's own politics and personal investments. But at the same time border pedagogy emphasizes the primacy of politics in which teachers assert rather than retreat from pedagogies they utilize in dealing with the various differences represented by the students who come into their classes" (p. 158). In essence, teachers become border-crossers when they legitimize excluded social narratives, experiences and voices and make them available in the classroom. In this way, teachers enhance their own political, social and intellectual efficacy. Giroux urges educators to redefine their role from servants of hegemonic power to public and "transformative intellectuals" that reject dominant forms of rationality or "regimes of truth," and commit themselves instead to furthering equality and democratic life.             Giroux also promotes the use of "border writing," which he describes as a form of border literacy in which students are engaged as active learners in analyzing popular texts to challenge disciplinary borders. Giroux has found that in his own practice "border-writing" is also an attempt to "get the students to learn from each other, to decenter power in the classroom, to challenge disciplinary borders, to create a borderland where new hybridized identities might emerge, to take up in a problematic way the relationship between language and experience, and to appropriate knowledge as part of a broader effort at self- definition and ethical responsibility" (p. 176). In Giroux's view, it is essential to make everyday experience "problematic and critical" by exposing its hidden political assumptions. For Giroux, this critical undertaking takes on an emancipatory purpose by empowering students to develop the "social imagination" and "civic courage" necessary for them to participate in their own "self- formation." Giroux also argues that students should develop a counter-discourse that challenges and critiques established models of Western culture. Instead of a common culture, he calls for the construction of a new common language, a democratic language.             In the last section, Giroux examines contemporary issues including postmodernism and feminism, concentrating on cultural difference in the classroom. The essays of the last section include "Rethinking the Boundaries of Educational Discourse: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Feminism" (1990) and "Insurgent Multiculturalism and the Promise of Pedagogy" (1994). Giroux finds support in postmodernist and feminist theory for his vision of shaping academic disciplines and discourse through educational theory. What Giroux identifies as modernist sensibilities are by nature progressive and emancipatory. He writes that "postmodernism raises questions and problems so as to redraw and re-present the boundaries of discourse and cultural criticism. The issue that postmodernism has brought into view can be seen, in part, through its various refusals of all natural laws and transcendental claims that by definition attempt to escape from any type of historical and normative grounding. In fact, if there is any underlying harmony to various discourses of postmodernism, it is in their rejection of absolute essences" (p. 193). The criticism offered by contemporary theorists, argues Giroux, "provides an important service in assisting those deemed Other to reclaim their own histories and voices. By problematizing the dominant notion of tradition, postmodernism has developed a power- sensitive discourse that helps subordinated or excluded groups to make sense out of their own social worlds and histories while simultaneously offering new opportunities to produce political and cultural vocabularies by which to define and shape their individual and collective identities" (p. 198). Postmodernism, then, challenges the egocentricity of elite culture and legitimizes popular culture and everyday experience. Likewise, feminist positions "have challenged the essentialism, separatism, and ethnocentrism that have been expressed in feminist theorizing, and in doing so have seriously undermined the Eurocentric and totalizing discourse that has become a political straightjacket within the movement" (p. 205). Giroux does not dwell on the possible conflicts between certain forms of postmodernism and feminism, but rather focuses on how they complement one another and forge a practical partnership towards improving democratic life. Together, they offer emancipatory pedagogy a language that "offers educators an opportunity to develop a political project that embraces human interests that moves beyond the particularistic politics of class, ethnicity, race, and gender" (p. 226). "Central to such a politics and pedagogy," claims Giroux, "is a notion of community developed around a shared conception of social justice, rights, and entitlement" (p. 227). For Giroux, all this works in the service of democracy.             Finally, in a new essay, "Intellectuals and the Culture of Reaganism in the 1990s," Giroux identifies the conservative logic of the Reagan era as a cultural revolution that has redefined the role of education. Giroux writes, "one tragic legacy of Reagan's cultural revolution is that youth, especially poor urban youths, have become scapegoats in the neoconservative attack on welfare, civil rights laws, and health care policies. Demonized in the press as thugs and criminals, young black males in particular have been blamed for the breakdown of public civility while young, unwed mothers have been targeted as the source of all social evils in American society" (p. 255). Instead, he argues, these must be understood as inherited ones that are shaped by larger historical conditions. He claims that schools did not do well under Reaganism, where "neoconservatives have attempted to make the public school an adjunct of the corporation, offering its services to the highest corporate bidder" (p. 255). The marketplace mindset has withered political movements and the priority of democracy in both the academic and public arena. Essentially, the role of education has been redefined in terms of "privatization and standardization" (p. 255). This conservative trend thwarts efforts to make schools democratic spheres. In opposition, Giroux protests that there has been a "consistent attempt to remove schools from their role in educating students as social subjects who can take up the burdens and responsibilities of democratic public life. Instead, neoconservatives have largely defined education using a monocultural and commercial logic by which pedagogy serves primarily to produce consumers" (p. 256). "When not demonized, youths are viewed as merely filling market niches in commercial culture that uses mass media, especially television, to sell young children and adolescents toys, clothes, and every other conceivable product" (p. 256). Mainstream political leadership, he believes, ignores these questions of culture, identity, power and social responsibility, thereby stifling any real discussion of such topics as hierarchy, exploitation, and multiculturalism.             Against the rise of "corporate culture" and its push toward vocationalization of colleges of education, Giroux calls for the reconsideration and restructuring of the study of pedagogy within a cultural studies framework. He advocates a conception of educational policy that situates university education within a more expansive political and ethical discourse. For Giroux, such policies would "move away from an assimilationist ethic and the profoundly ethnocentric fantasy of a common culture to a view of national identity that includes diverse traditions, histories, and the expansion of democratic public life" (p. 268). Giroux makes an appeal for curricula that examine culture as it is actually lived rather than culture as it is "fixed" in the minds of certain elites. The establishment of Cultural Studies in the university is a political project that would develop what Giroux characterizes as an oppositional public sphere that should replace the established "fixed" disciplines with a scholarship of oppositional discourse. Such discourse legitimates rather than suppresses more radical forms of knowledge.             Giroux suggests that educators should become vigorously involved in social criticism so as to return universities to their most important task: creating a public sphere in which citizens exercise power over their own lives and learning: "Whether in schools or in other cultural spheres, public intellectuals must struggle to create the conditions that enable students and others to become cultural producers who can rewrite their own experiences and perceptions by engaging with various texts, ideological positions, and theories. They must construct pedagogical relations in which students learn from each other, learn to theorize rather than simply ingest theories, and begin to address how to decenter the authoritarian power of the classroom. Students must also be given the opportunity to challenge disciplinary borders, create pluralized spaces from which hybridized identities might emerge, take up critically the relationship between language and experience, and appropriate knowledge as part of a broader effort at self-definition and ethical responsibility" (p. 263). Higher education should engage in political education by "teaching students to take risks, challenge those with power, honor critical traditions, and be reflexive about how authority is used in the classroom" (p. 265). Such a political education would allow students to understand the workings of power and how it shapes their growth as critical citizens. Otherwise, "Lacking a political project, the role of the university intellectual is reduced to a technician engaged in formalistic rituals unconcerned with disturbing and urgent problems that confront larger society" (p. 265).             The collection under review reaches beyond traditional educational theory and into truly cross- disciplinary territory. By doing so, Giroux has broadened our understanding of the relationship between schooling and political life by challenging the traditional roles of students, teachers and schooling by conceptualizing new "spaces" for learning. Giroux thus helps democratic educators with one of their most pressing tasks: to develop a cogent critical language for articulating how race, class, gender, power and ideology impinge upon educational practice and experience.             In terms of style, there has always been controversy surrounding Giroux's use of language, particularly over linguistic clarity, or more appropriately, the utter lack of it. This collection of essays is continued evidence of the thorny, formidable, vigorous, and restless (to the point of frustration) kind of discourse that has been attributed to Giroux. Unlike some of his earlier essays which were more a pastiche, or accessible conversation pieces, this book is dragged down by an undertow of frustrating, alienating discourse that does not call upon the participation of the "average" reader. While he makes no apologies for the complexity of his style, arguing that "the call for clarity suppresses difference and multiplicity, prevents curriculum theorists and other educators from deconstructing the basis of their own linguistic privilege, and reproduces a populist elitism that serves to deskill educators rather than empower them" (Giroux, 1992, p. 220), his opaque language unduly burdens the reader. In that sense it hampers his proclaimed emancipatory cause. Through a language that is "critical, oppositional and theoretical," Giroux believes educators can be moved from deskilled, silenced, and subordinate positions, to a realm of discourse in which they labor intellectually at educational criticism. But for teachers and students, his words appear as "all talk"--"talk" that is predominantly addressed at intelligentsia. To question, define, and challenge --to become political activists in the spirit of Giroux, some sense of accessibility to his points is necessary. Giroux's work would be enhanced by what Habermas has called "nonrepressive dialogue" in which meaning and reality can be mutually negotiated. In this collection, Giroux does not provide for more "interpersonal" interaction with the reader.             Thus, his work would have been significantly enriched with sharper visions of how teachers as "transformative intellectuals" can survive in the classrooms and how is it that they are to transform classrooms from what seem to be pseudo-democratic spaces to authentic "democratic public spheres" in the face of constraints and competing forces. Namely, these often contradictory agendas include what preservice teachers were heavily schooled and socialized into believing upon entrance into their preparation program, what colleges of education attempt to redefine and inculcate in terms of expectations, and what the market in which teacher preparation programs are situated demands. Positioning his call for teachers to become transformative intellectuals within the context and interplay of these forces would better articulate how his vision might be realized. This means speaking not so much from an "intangible," theoretical, sociopolitical orientation, but from the stance of a teacher, perhaps personalizing his writing to include his own classroom experiences as a university teacher or that of others who survive within such established power structures.             Giroux's work lacks more focused inquiries into teachers' experiences or the undertaking of more ethnographic perspectives within institutional settings that might inquire into teacher, student, and institutional interactions. Participant observation, photography, and interviews with students and faculty to uncover and describe the nature of the teaching and educational experience from a more emic or insider's perspective would make more informed theory. In doing so, the answers to questions Giroux never asks, such as: 'how can my vision take effect where I direct it most?' or 'how can I help educators translate the ideals I espouse into real situations?' or 'how is a critical education possible?' can be answered more realistcally and helpfully. Educators cannot become the political activists Giroux wants unless he is willing to make himself more comprehensible to them on their own terms. Giroux projects a sort of militancy that pushes the reader (unaware of what position propels his distinct style) to take residence somewhere in the "margins"of the book, precisely where Giroux is calling for us not to rest. On occasion he appears to leave the lofty academic tower he has often denounced (but in which he has taken residence throughout the book), making himself almost accessible to the reader. One is left wanting more of these refreshing interludes.             The discourse remains largely on a scholarly and theoretical plane, directed predominantly at intelligentsia, and would probably be marginally enlightening to K-12 practitioners who need to understand the historical construction of contemporary schooling and the theory of critical pedagogy. It does not provide concrete or tangible pedagogical "practices" for critical pedagogy or on becoming critical educators; therefore, its "usefulness" to K-12 practitioners is going to be marginal. This does not mean that a critical pedagogy needs to be explained exclusively in instrumental terms, but rather that it should be presented more as a dialogue and less as a repressive monologue. Leaving the discussion exclusively on a scholarly and theoretical plane somehow depreciates the transformative nature of pedagogy or what has traditionally been and continues to be the commitment, focus and intent of Giroux's work.             While the essays are organized in terms of Giroux's theoretical progression, the sections, and in fact, the essays can be read independently and each serves as forceful and convincing evidence of the need to transform pedagogy into an emancipatory project. While Giroux is among the few scholars who have ventured beyond his counterparts in contributing to the interrogation of pedagogy, schooling, and educational theory, he still fails to address the potential consequences of some of his positions. Namely, if higher education becomes characterized as a "political education," does this mean teachers and professors should dissent whatever the cost (essentially facing Socrates' fate of altruistic suicide)? How do they yield to established structures and market realities, and at the same time not abandon his pedagogies of hope and possibility? Furthermore, Giroux needs to be careful that in so boldly driving his own critiques, he does not contribute to the sorts of relationships he fights against. In keeping with the spirit of Giroux, we must then question if critical reflection in educational frameworks offsets hegemonic relations and reverses the course of social reproduction towards autonomy. There is ample room left in Giroux's book for discussing hegemonic relations and how these relations function in the educational experience, yet the remedies Giroux defends need broader and more informed reflection. Gadamer's objection of the critical reflector alludes to that to which Giroux devotes little time: "the critique of ideology overestimates the competence of reflection and reason. Inasmuch as it seeks to penetrate the masked interests which infect public opinion, it implies its own freedom from any ideology; and that means in turn that it enthrones its own norms and ideals as self-evident and absolute" (Gadamer, Hermeneutics and Social Science, p. 315). Gadamer's point is that critical conversation and reflection are not fully possible because we cannot escape hermeneutical constraints, which includes hegemonic relations. Essentially, no critical pedagogical discourse can be benign and embraces some element of politics. Thus, Giroux's work embodies some inherent contradictions, namely underdeveloped questions of hermeneutics and critical theory in and of itself as well.             Giroux's is a utopian vision of schools and children that would have to be preceded by several small "revolutions" were it actually to occur. But for the pedagogically weary, Giroux's hope and vision of what is possible, serves as a source of strength. The essays of this book reflect trademark Giroux: an attempt at pedagogical empowerment. While Giroux can be sharply contested on a number of fronts, his critics ought to agree that he ranks as one of the most scathing critics and provocative educational thinkers of our time. In these essays, Giroux gives compelling support to his ongoing emancipatory project. Reference Giroux, Henry A. (1992). Language, Difference, and Curriculum Theory: Beyond the Politics of Clarity. Theory Into Practice, 31, 221-227. About the Reviewer Marina Gair Marina Gair is a PhD student in the Division of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies in the College of Education at Arizona State University. She specializes in Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education.

Eleanor Duckworth and the Experienced Teachers Group. (1997). Teacher to Teacher: Learning from Each Other. Reviewed by Helen Featherstone

Eleanor Duckworth and the Experienced Teachers Group. (1997). Teacher to Teacher: Learning from Each Other. New York: Teachers College Press 176 pp. $18.95 (Paper)       0-8077-3652-X $42 (Cloth)           0-8077-3653-8 Reviewed by Helen Featherstone, Michigan State University October 30, 1998         In the fall of 1993, Eleanor Duckworth and the 13 veteran teachers in the Experienced Teacher (ET) Program—a year-long graduate program for experienced teachers at Harvard—met for the first time. Many teachers escape their classrooms for graduate school in order to qualify for careers in school administration, college teaching, curriculum development or research. The teachers in the ET program came to Harvard to become better practitioners. Over the course of the next 9 months they would take 3 courses together (and 5 other courses of their own choosing), including 2 with Duckworth. In one of these two, T-322, the program's integrative seminar, they would meet for 3 hours every other week from September to May.         When the 13 teachers registered for T-322, all any of them knew about the course was how the catalogue described it: This course is required of and limited to students in the Experienced Teachers Program. It considers theories and collaborative strategies for inquiring into and improving school practice. The focus is on practice-based questions and the use of a variety of kinds of information that bear on these questions: for example, case studies, classroom observation, journals, clinical interviewing, video records, autobiography. Students will spend time in a school site. Readings will deal with relationships between theory and practice, and with specific issues that arise in the course of the year.         With some trepidation, Duckworth had decided to follow the lead of Catherine who had taught the seminar in previous years and turn over to the seminar's participants responsibility for deciding what the group would study and how they would do this. "My own inclination," Duckworth explains, "was always to plan all the readings, the assignments, the activities—even if there was wide scope for different people to go about them in different ways." However, Duckworth had been impressed by what had happened in previous years when Krupnick had handed students the reins, so she overcame her misgivings and invited the teachers to design the seminar. In Teacher to Teacher: Learning from Each Other , Duckworth and the other teachers who gathered in the classroom on September 23, 1993, tell the story of the course that they created together. Making it Happen         The group had major difficulties getting started. For one thing, they found it hard to find ways to talk specifically about practice. When the two teachers who planned the second meeting allotted fifteen minutes for "success stories," their classmates resisted. Duane Grobman, a teacher of primary grade children from New Mexico and one of the two planners of this meeting, recalls: There was strong consensus among the group that they did not want to share ‘success stories.' Hence we did not.... Thinking of the schools in which we taught, if we shared ‘success stories' with other teachers we feared being perceived as boastful, proud, arrogant, or prescriptive, all of which the culture of teaching (and perhaps our personal convictions) told us to avoid.         It is tempting to dismiss the reluctance Grobman describes here as an obstacle to be overcome, a feature of the culture of teaching that undercuts efforts to create a healthy culture of collective inquiry. But Teacher to Teacher also shows its human basis. Six weeks later, after the teachers have talked for several hours about strategies they have used to motivate reluctant students, Kristin Newton, who teaches physics at Cambridge (Massachusetts) Rindge and Latin School, writes: It was ...depressing for me to hear about the success stories. I don't feel I've had any "success stories" this year. I didn't get anything out of hearing about students who suddenly turned around and became wonderful. (What a selfish thing for me to say!!)         Newton's feelings (and the guilt and discomfort she feels in exposing them) make human sense and they remind us that change is complex precisely because existing norms and teaching practices almost always serve real needs.         Setting an agenda for the year proves to be just as difficult as setting norms that enable specific and useful talk about practice. When the October 21 session ends without a decision about "curriculum" for the course, many teachers feel discouraged although most seemed to recognize, at least in retrospect, the impossibility of nailing down a curriculum for the year in an hour-long discussion. Although the group does hammer out a kind of agenda two weeks later, frustrations do not evaporate. In early February Newton writes in her journal: Okay, here goes. I'm sick of it, I don't want to talk any more about what we are going to write, what we are going to talk about, or any more planning. We need a leader to make these decisions for us so that we can get on to whatever we are here to do.         Another teacher struggles to understand why the seminar "feels weird, " while a third observes, "I believe in student-driven curriculum, but am craving a clearer sense of purpose." A fourth teacher comments on the irony of her frustration: "If I could have wished for the perfect way to learn, it would be in a place where the learners are responsible for how that learning happens. Now that I am in that wishful place, I wish it were different."         In mid-February the class turns a corner. Several class members, in the course of a chance hallway encounter, decide to address the collective malaise by finding a nicer room for the Thursday evening meetings. They are amazed to discover how easy this is—they do not even need the permission of the instructor to make this change official. To highlight the potential importance of the change of venue, they organize a kind of treasure hunt to lead their classmates and instructor from the old classroom to the new one, where they have laid out a lavish meal (complete with wine). "What a great class!" exults a New York City high school teacher. "I feel good because it seemed like there was action taken in the class. People were feeling dissatisfied and they did something about it." Others echo her sentiments. In addition to celebrating the charms of the new room and the decisive action of those who relocated the class, seminar participants write enthusiastically about the evening's work. Following up on a decision made at the previous meeting, everyone spends the first half hour of class conferring with a partner about a piece of writing they want to share; the group then continues an earlier conversation about assessment by reflecting on their own experiences with grades at Harvard and discussing assessment strategies they have used as teachers.         The teachers responsible for the next class capitalize on the momentum by creating activities that involve their classmates in exploration and in reflection on that exploration; by mid-March the journal entries suggest that students are both enjoying and valuing their time together. At their next meeting seminar members begin to talk about writing a book about the work they have been doing together. They establish norms that seem to allow them to agree about what to pursue and how to conduct these joint investigations. The journal entries explore substantive issues rather than frustrations with the shape of the collective conversation. A learning community has apparently emerged from the angst.         And so the chapter describing the course's last formal meeting brings the reader up short. Planned as an exploration of multiculturalism, with a structure that seems to make good use of the community so laboriously achieved, the session becomes painfully embarrassing to several of the seminar's most conscientiously committed members and leaves others feeling angry, deceived, and manipulated. When the group gathers at Duckworth's house a week later to celebrate a year well spent, tensions linger. The way in which the group address the anger and hurt feelings that remained reminded this reader how rarely open discussion of loaded topics is achieved in the staff rooms of our schools. Multiple Perspectives         It would be impossible for any reader of Teacher to Teacher to compose a narrative summary of the events this book describes without seeing with inhibiting clarity that hers is but one possible account of what happened in T-322 between September 1993 and May 1994 and that each of the 14 teachers—and probably each reader—would construct the story differently. The book's architecture reminds the reader continually of this point. Sixteen chapters, each of which describes and documents one course meeting, form the narrative backbone of the book. Interleaved among these chapters are 7 "interludes," each written by a different teacher (as a part of the work for T-322) and each focused on the challenges facing a particular teacher in a particular classroom.         The group parceled out responsibility for the narrative chapters among its members: Ten of the 13 teachers are listed as authors of one or more chapters; in most cases at least one of the authors facilitated and planned the class the chapter describes. Because few classes were audio taped the writers must rely to some extent on memory and notes for their accounts of what they planned and what actually happened. Another data source, however, provides fascinating insight into what I think of as the inaudible classroom discourse: the unarticulated thoughts and feelings of participants. Members of the seminar wrote journal reflections after every class; they gave one copy of their journal to the classmate who had volunteered to respond to the journals that week and deposited a second copy in a folder in the library that others class members could read before the next class meeting. Authors of the chapters used these journals both to reconstruct what had happened in the meetings and to show what classmates made of these events. Text from the journals comprises more than two-thirds of most chapters.         The result is both fascinating and occasionally frustrating. Although these journals are surely not uncensored records of each teacher's thoughts, they do provide insights into responses that were not voiced in class discussions. The rich documentation of the inner conversation allows us to understand the frustrations of teachers who long to accept Duckworth's invitation to tailor a course to their own burning questions, who believe in this sort of responsive curriculum, but who have only nine months to get everything they have dreamed a year at Harvard could offer them and itch to get started on the probing investigations of teaching that they hope will enable them to return to their classrooms equipped to make a new start at a higher level. The journal reflections show how differently different people can see the same conversation. They also highlight the complexities of the apparently simple acts of speaking and listening. Here for example, is Doug Jones, a math and Latin teacher, reflecting on his own effort to step out of the center of the conversation in order to listen more: I was intrigued by Mark's attempt to participate less in class last night, and I decided to follow his lead. Unfortunately, I was not able to do this by listening more closely to the rest of the class, but instead I became distracted and disengaged with the discussion. I found it difficult to be quiet without being passive.         The frustration, for a reader passionately interested in teachers' professional development and in the challenges and possibilities faced by teachers who try to organize like-minded colleagues into groups for studying teaching, is that we get only glimpses of the conversations the journal writers are reacting to. Without audiotape of the meetings there can be no quotes from transcripts and, presumably because they are writing for others who were present at the meeting, the journal writers rarely paraphrase remembered dialogue or synopsize points made. So, for example, during the February 17 meeting, in an effort to deepen their understanding of assessment, the teachers discussed their own experiences of assessment as students at Harvard, and then talked about assessment strategies they had used in their own classrooms. About this second discussion the authors of the chapter tell us only that "Burry [Gowen] had brought several examples of student work, and we listened to him explain the assignments and his assessment of them." They follow this up with two teachers' journal entries; one (see below) reflects on the ways in which listening to Gowen's presentation has enlarged her own understanding assessment; the other teacher writes about "one assessment topic I wanted to discuss that was only alluded to": standardized testing. Both reflections are well-written and thoughtful, but neither explain what Gowen actually said.         But although we might wish to hear more about the in-class conversations, the reliance on the teachers' written journals allows us to hear the eloquence and insight of these teachers in a way that transcripts of conversation never would. This is an accomplishment of considerable importance. In much writing about education, the quoted words of teachers come from interview transcripts or taped discussions. The words on the page are written versions of spoken texts, and in consequence the teachers almost always sound less articulate and less logical than the academics who are writing about them. For it is in the nature of spoken language to rely on context, on tone and expression, on gesture, and on unspoken feedback from listeners to convey meaning; and it is in the nature of discussion—perhaps it is the defining mark of really good conversation—that people offer ideas that are still embryonic. Words that sparkle and inspire in the context of a conversation may barely make sense when represented on a transcript, complete with false starts, throat clearings, and unfinished sentences. But because the words of the teachers in the Experienced Teacher Group began life as written text, readers hear their eloquence clearly. What Do Teachers Learn from one another?         Because a number of reformers have suggested that teachers can learn a great deal from one another, and that groups of teachers committed to the creation and analysis of new reform pedagogies may provide answers to the enormous professional development challenges posed by the current reform movements, (see, for example, Ball and Cohen, in press, and Lord, 1994) most readers will hope to learn more about what teachers in a group like this one learn. The authors have not provided any simple answers to this inevitable question. Indeed, Teacher to Teacher reads in some ways more like a notebook of data documenting the life of a group than like the sort of analysis of this data that we might have expected from an academic press. To me, however, the lack of analysis makes good sense. The authors are at pains to communicate the texture of an experience that felt powerfully transformative to many of them. They are determined, as well, to convey its multiplicity: there is no one story of the year, or even of one meeting; there are 14 individual stories of an experience which, for all the efforts of participants to speak and write honestly about their thoughts and feelings, are experienced individually and privately. If we want to understand what teachers learn in such a group, we must approach our question one teacher at a time.         The extensive excerpts from journal reflections give the reader some help in doing this sort of thinking. Because they are written after and in response to each meeting, the journal entries represent the thoughts prompted by the meeting rather than its actual content. In some cases these suggest a good deal about what a particular participant learned on a particular evening. Consider, for example, Jane Kays's response to Burry Gowen's presentation on assessment: As Burry explained the various kinds of assessment samples he'd brought to class, I began to associate assessment with many different classroom activities. I began to see assessment differently, as a form of evaluation that follows a continuum from informal classroom interactions to more serious and planned testing procedures. Prior to this revelation, assessment meant "test." Now, I realize that when I engage my students (grade 4) in a discussion about all the characteristics of air, I am evaluating their understanding of air. From that point on we might predict certain outcomes pertaining to the properties of air. Again, I am assessing how well they make sense of a particular problem.... Simultaneously, another form of evaluation continues....I am wondering what I could have done differently to improve a lesson, or I reflect about the success of a lesson..... Many teachers (myself included) dislike non-teaching duties such as "yard duty." As I think about greeting the students as they arrive in the morning, it is easy to spot a child who did not have as cheerful a morning as we imagine young children to have. Here again is a form of assessment.... I guess the evaluative continuum begins as we enter the school each day and continues until we leave in the P.M. On second thought, does it ever end? Thanks, Burry for opening my eyes.         Gowen's presentation seems to have helped Kays to rethink her images of assessment and to formulate some ideas that might well have a visible impact on her teaching. Readers get a glimpse in this and certain other journals of what the subtitle, "Teachers learning from each other," might mean. But only a glimpse. There is probably more learning going on than we can see.         Much of what experienced teachers may learn from open-ended discussions with colleagues is difficult to define or describe. Learning about teaching is mostly quite different from learning to put buttonholes on a shirt, to compute the quotient of two multi-digit numbers, or to send a document by Email. This is especially true when the learners are experienced teachers who already know how to write a lesson plan and how to stop a conversation in the back row while continuing to explain an assignment. One participant in a group of elementary and middle school teachers who met biweekly for several years to work on issues related to their mathematics teaching reported that the group had helped her to improve and reflect on her practice partly by serving as an audience for that work. Rewarding as it was to create and orchestrate lessons in which her students worked together to make sense of mathematical ideas, she knew that this satisfaction alone would not compensate her for the toll taken by ongoing battles with her principal about coverage of the textbook; from her colleagues in the math group she got practical help, but also reassurance that her struggles were important not only to the children in her classes but also to the wider field of education. The group connected her to a larger professional conversation.         Many different voices— ranging from that of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to those of the school principal and little boy in the back row—try to influence what a teacher does in her classroom. Newton's Gravitational Law—which states that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between those objects—explains the forces acting on educators almost as accurately as it describes the action of the earth's gravity on the moon. A teacher is much more likely to be influenced by the behavior, visible needs, and desires of the students in her class than by the memos from the district curriculum committee because students make their wishes felt forcefully and continually within the confines of a small classroom. As nearly every commentator since Willard Waller has pointed out, teachers are isolated from other professionals. Meeting regularly with a group of colleagues to discuss ways to improve classroom practice creates another force field—an audience that raises a second set of issues. Unlike the children in the classroom, this audience considers questions drawn from a larger agenda,. Although such a group wields no political or practical power, it can influence a teacher's thinking—and practice—profoundly. Teacher Narrative as Genre         The final chapters of Teacher to Teacher caught me oddly off guard; as I closed the book I realized that it had not ended as I was expecting it to. The group's last formal meeting trails off in a tangle of hurt, anger, and confusion. The "interlude" that follows the account of this meeting, Jane Kays's "Outsiders Still," echoes its emotional tone in a way for which I was unprepared. Twenty-five years ago, before bitter bussing battles divided Boston, Kays taught in an inner city school; she recalls the warmth with which neighbors and merchants greeted her, a white woman, and her mostly African-American charges as they trooped along the sidewalks to the local library. She still teaches in Boston, but her current school is in a neighborhood of "neat single family homes on tidy streets." She still hopes that a class trip to the library will help the children to fall in love with books and to feel comfortable in an intimidating public building, but she knows that an expedition to the library a few blocks from the school will not be sufficient: Her students come from all over the city and are served by six different branch libraries. Kays decides to visit all six with her fourth grade class.         Her account of the class's first venture outside the neighborhood ends on an unexpectedly wrenching note: As the children waited at the first crosswalk, I inched off the crosswalk, instinctively knowing that the approaching sedan would pause and wave us ahead. Instead the driver glared and smeared his tires around the corner in front of us. I'm sure the children noticed nothing but the freedom of the autumn air; I felt the sting of a time two decades ago when whites were forced to send their children to schools in black neighborhoods and accept others into their neighborhood schools. Rather than send their children to a location they did not prefer, many fled the system and saturated the local parochial schools. However, they could not deny black students the right to attend the schools that they abandoned. Now, 25 years later, the attitudes that purged the schools of their whiteness are as strong as they were when busing was first implemented. I knew the driver who denied our passing was not harried by time but irked by the outsiders who continued to invade his space.         Here the essay ends. My open-mouthed response to Kays's final paragraphs has made me think hard about the predictable features of teacher narratives, the ways in which these stories—from The Thread that Runs So True (Stuart, 1949) to The Girl with the Brown Crayon (Paley, 1997)—tend to resolve tensions in the final pages, creating some version of a happy ending. Surely the conventions that led me to expect another chapter in Kays's account of the library trips shape not only how stories of teaching get told, but also who tells them. Teachers who feel simply saddened or confused by their experiences rarely write their own stories—and may even tell fewer of them at the dinner table.         A good teacher group deconstructs these conventions, and invites narratives that have neither resolutions nor happy endings It makes room for stories that do not yet make sense to the tellers. In doing so it breaches the loneliness of teaching and moves group members and those trying to listen in on their conversation towards a more complex understanding of teaching. References Ball, D. L. and Cohen, D. K. (in press). Developing practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice- based theory of professional education. In G. Sykes and L. Darling-Hammond (Eds.), Teaching as the learning Profession: Handbook of policy and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Lord, B. (1994). In N. Cobb (Ed.), The future of education: Perspectives on national standards in America. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, pp. 175-204. Paley, V. (1997).The Girl with the Brown Crayon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stuart, J. (1949). The thread that runs so true. New York: Scribners. About the Reviewer Helen J. Featherstone Ed.D., Harvard University Department of Teacher Education College of Education Michigan State University Helen Featherstone is an Associate Professor of teacher education who is particularly interested in teachers' efforts to change their practices. Her research is concerned with the teaching and learning of mathematics. She once facilitated a teacher group that met bi-weekly for 6 years and has, along with other members of the group, written about aspects of the work of the group.

Snyder, Ilana (Ed.) (1998). Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. Reviewed by Denise Johnson and Lynn Romeo

Snyder, Ilana (Ed.) (1998). Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-17465-1(Paper)           $17.24 ISBN 0-415-17464-3 (Cloth)           $56.25. Reviewed by Denise Johnson, University of Central Arkansas and Lynn Romeo, Monmouth University October 28, 1998           In her last book, Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth (1996), Ilana Snyder, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Graduate Studies at Monash University, admits that she is "fascinated by hypertext" (p. xii) (even though she does not 'assume much' expertise or experience in the use of technology, p. x). Even so, she remains skeptical of its commonly accepted possibilities, citing such claims as hypertext "enables students to understand fundamental aspects of contemporary literary theory" and "influence on intellectual development" (p. x). Snyder states: I alert readers, however, to the ways in which technological determinism permeates academic discourse about technology. By "technological determinism" I mean the assumption that qualities inherent in the computer medium itself are responsible for changes in social and cultural practices (p. x).           Thus, Snyder takes a post-critical perspective arguing that "it is futile to deplore the influence of electronic mediations on everyday life, because whether we like it or not we live now in a 'technoculture' " (p. xii). She does not discus whether the implications of hypertext for children's reading and writing processes are good, bad, or indifferent. Research has been limited and mixed in that area. She accepts the position that it is here to stay and if teachers want to be effective in preparing students for the new millennium, we must prepare our students to live and work in a hypertextual environment. Hypertext received mixed reviews by the media. The book was on the shortlist in the Literacy and Cultural Criticism section for the New South Wales Premier's Awards, which is the only award for books of this kind in Australia. On the other hand, Jose Borghino of the Australian Book Review (September 1996) stated, "Snyder bravely broaches complex issues in these early chapters but too often she is reduced to making sketchy summations of ideas that would take volumes to explicate" (18). John Nieuwenhuized in The Australian (July 24, 1996) states that Snyder argues positions that he describes as "nonsense" and "puerile."           In her most recent book, Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era (1998), Snyder still contends that literacy educators must, "consider ways in which the new technologies might be employed for useful purposes…" (p. xxiii). However, in Page to Screen, Snyder tries to pick up where Hypertext fell short. She states that this book "examines the implications of their use for pedagogy and curriculum in literacy settings" (p. xxi). The text also discusses the effect technology has on settings outside of the school.           The text is divided into four sections: The Spaces of Electronic Literacies, Emerging Literacies, The Problems and Possibilities of Hypertext, and Changing the Cultures of Teaching and Learning. The unifying thread that runs throughout the chapters is the belief that the relatively "new" influence of technology has changed the way children today think, process information, and interact in our culture. If educators choose to ignore the fact that change is taking place, then the gap between students and teachers will continue to grow. On the other hand, if educators choose to try to understand the implications the influence of technology may have, they can effectively adjust their teaching approaches.           The contributing authors are from both the United States and Australia and comprise mostly university professors of education with expertise in the areas of literacy, English, writing, communication, technology, and cultural and policy studies. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of various aspects of technology from different perspectives. Sometimes these perspectives are radically opposed, causing the text to be seemingly inconsistent and lacking cohesion. For example, understanding how to effectively guide students' learning experiences on the Internet and specifically the World Wide Web, is of great interest to teachers at all levels due to the central role it will play in the future of today's students. Several chapters in Page to Screen address the use of the World Wide Web. In his chapter, Rhetorics of the Web, Nicholas Burbles explores the need to reflect on the way that links within hypertext environments require the reader to "hyperread" the Web critically. He offers a way to reflect upon how links work that can enhance our capabilities of critically reading the Web and thus, "can give readers an enormous opportunity for discovery and synthesis" (p. 120). The chapter is very reader friendly and provides the reader with a better understanding of how Web links connect ideas and textual sources.           On the other hand, Michael Joyce's chapter entitled, New stories for new readers: Contour, coherence and constructive hypertext, states that despite its possibilities, "much of the promise of hypertext has been subverted within the crass, commercialised, multimedia wasteland of the world wide web, a name he deliberately represents in lower-case letters" (pg. xxvii). This chapter is very difficult to read and relies on the reader's understanding of works by authors such as Rick Furuta, Cathy Marshall, Neil Postman, Newton Minow and Nicolas Negroponte. Joyce also uses quite a few satirical statements that also rely on the reader's prior knowledge of works by other authors. For instance, when referring to his attitude toward the Web, he states "I'm not doing a 'half-Birkerts' from the high board, not suggesting that we 'Stoll' the car and go back to the future" (p. 169) requiring the reader to be familiar with the authors Birkerts (1995) and Stoll (1995) who have written critically of students' use of the Web. Without this knowledge though, Joyce's statement is simply gibberish.           As a result, instead of coming away from the book with a better understanding of the implications technology has for practice, one is seemingly more confused by contradictory beliefs. As university educators of literacy and practitioners of technology in the classroom, we were able to attain a semblance of unity between the chapters and the theme of the book. But, for those educators for whom the use of technology in and out of the classroom is "new" and unknown, this book may be confusing and frustrating. In this respect, Page to Screen fails to provide an avenue for communication among educators at any level with the exception of those who are well versed in the rhetoric and research of technology.           This is not to say that some chapters do not provide insight into the issues facing educators and the implications technology has for literacy. The following is a brief description of each section and a sampling of chapters in the book.           The first section discusses the "twenty-year history of the field of literacy and technology studies which is complicated by political, social, and cultural articulations" (p. xxiv). Hawisher and Selfe trace the research studies on word processing, hypertext, and electronic networks in regards to composition. The authors contend that very few studies have explored how computer use "affects students' interactions with their cultural context or their learning environment" (p. 5). Their conclusion about the dearth of current research and the need for appropriate questions and methodologies parallels the findings of Kamil and Lane (1998) who state, "There is relatively little systematic research focusing on well-defined problems related to literacy and technology. Problems related to technology and literacy need to become more a part of mainstream literacy research, instead of being considered secondary to more traditional strands of research" (p. 324).           In section two, Emerging Literacies, the focus is on the new literacies that are evolving from the use of technology. Kress explores the changes in semiotics in many areas of public communication in his chapter entitled "Visual and Verbal Modes of Representation in Electronically Mediated Communication: The Potentials of New Forms of Text." Kress purports that these changes "cannot be adequately described and understood with current linguistic theories" (p. 72). He also suggests that we question the present semiotic theories and take into account the newer use of visual forms of representation. Moran and Hawisher investigate the use of electronic mail and compare it to snail mail, telephone usage, and face-to-face communication. They indicate that the majority of the people do not yet have access to email due to technological or language restrictions. The authors conclude that email access needs to be increased dramatically. "Until it includes all voices and cultures, its discourse will not be as diverse, rich, and democratic as it should be and will not therefore be a world that we willingly inhabit" (p. 99).           Section three, The Problems and Possibilities of Hypertext, explores the use and misuse of electronic reading and writing. The editor, Ilana Snyder, reassesses the use of hypertext and its implications for instruction and learning. She indicates that although hypertext can be used to enhance literacy in a changing instructional, technological world, it can also promote more traditional text study. Teachers who are not responsive to its use or trained to effectively integrate it into their curriculum can also impede the potential of hypertext. "Hypertext will succeed or fail not by its own agency but by how people and institutions use it" (p. 140).           The final section, Changing the Cultures of Teaching and Learning, explores the "rapidly altering sociocultural settings in which education currently takes place" (p. xxviii). These chapters specifically focus on computer games. In "Children, Computers, and Life Online: Education in a Cyber-world," Smith and Curtin maintain that technological advances have changed today's young children both cognitively and attitudinally in a way that greatly impacts both general living and educational pedagogy. They discuss the challenges for educators and implore them to become involved in the current student literacy requirements, such as critical thinking and metacognition rather than to become immersed in an ideological battle over the requirements for successful literacy acquisition and student self-managed learning issues. Smith and Curtin suggest that curriculum modifications might include more authentic activities, which embrace student choice and control via technological interaction. They do, however, foresee much broader educational implications. "The ultimate challenge, though, does not concern this particular teaching method or that curriculum content, but the institution of education itself" (p. 231). Beavis, in "Computer Games, Culture, and Curriculum" extends Smith and Curtin's concerns regarding the dichotomy between current educational curriculum and students' life experiences in a rapidly changing world. Beavis adds a set of literacies to the four new literacies (multimedia authoring skills, multimedia critical analysis, cyberspace exploration strategies, and cyberspace navigational skills) that Lemke (1997) described. It focuses on being able to read and interact with images, which goes beyond critical analysis: "the capacity to negotiate and deconstruct visual and verbal images" (p. 244). Beavis suggests that computer games can help to bridge the gap between home and school learning at a time when we need to "nurture and challenge young people so that they can contribute actively to shaping the future as it evolves" (p. 253).           Page to Screen bravely broaches some important issues that must be considered by educators in today's society. Unfortunately, the lack of cohesion due to an occasional overt difference in perspective and overall sense of practical application will limit the audience of this book. This is unfortunate, given the importance of the theme of the book, which is the need for educators to consider the implications technology has for today's children in order for them to provide more relevant, meaningful and effective instruction in the classroom. References Birkerts, S. (1995). The gutenberg elegies. New York: Ballentine Books. Kamil, M.L. & Lane, D.M. (1998). Researching the relation between technology and literacy: An agenda for the 21st century. In D. Reinking, M. McKenna, L.D. Labbo, & R.D. Keiffer (Eds.), A handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world (pp. 323-341). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Lemke, J. (1998). Metamedia literacy: Transforming meaning and media. In D. Reinking, M. McKenna, L.D. Labbo, & R.D. Keiffer (Eds.), A handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world (pp. 283-301). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Reinking, D., McKenna, M., Labbo, L.D. & Kieffer, R.D. (Eds.). (1998). A handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Snyder, I. (1996). Hypertext: The electronic labyrinth. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press. Stoll, C. (1995). Silicon snake oil: Second thoughts on the information highway. New York: Doubleday. About the Reviewers Denise Johnson is an Assistant Professor of reading education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas, USA Lynn Romeo (email: lynnromeo@aol.com is an Assistant Professor of literacy and chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Special Education, School of Education, Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey, USA.

Carlson, Dennis and Apple, Michael W. (Eds.) (1998). Power/Knowledge/Pedagogy: The Meaning of Democratic Education in Unsettling Times. Reviewed by Catherine H. Glascock

Carlson, Dennis and Apple, Michael W. (Eds.) (1998). Power/Knowledge/Pedagogy: The Meaning of Democratic Education in Unsettling Times. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 356 pp + ix $60 (Cloth)        ISBN 0-8133-9026-5 Reviewed by Catherine H. Glascock Ohio University October 14, 1998             Carlson and Apple are the editors of a collection of essays on democratic themes in education. According to the editors, these themes are "emergent, contested, and consequently always in the process of being constructed and reconstructed as a historical production" (p. 1). The book explores these themes, which concern democratic renewal of culture and education, by construing them as various types of critical theory. Ultimately, the aim of the book is to relate these theories to policy and practice. This theoretical discourse, which is positioned historically to address a transformational time of crisis in education and society, is part of The Edge: Critical Studies in Educational Theory. The series examines progressive educational theory by offering a variety of discussions about theory and practice during an era of perceived radical paradigm shifts in education. Introduction             Carlson and Apple introduce their text as a discussion partially of the stress that exists within and among neo- Marxist/neo-Gramscian and postmodern/poststructural theories. The authors believe that the discussion must be set in the cultural and historical context of present day conflicts between neo-liberals desiring privatization of public education and neo-conservatives desiring more traditional curricula that ignore multicultural issues. Carlson and Apple view this frame as appropriate since two of the major crises of the time are the neo-liberal call for privatization of public education resulting ostensibly from the failure of urban schools to serve inner-city children and the attempt by neo-conservatives to wage a "cultural war" against multicultural and student-centered approaches to education (p. 2).             A new approach to research on educational issues is vetted as well. The recognition that qualitative research narratives are partial at best and may be contradicted by other and subsequent narratives is presented as a reason why researchers ought to adopt a modest stance, which acknowledges the democratic culture in education.             Interestingly, Carlson and Apple state that it is important to blur the lines between modern and post-modern theory. This blurring of the lines allows the theoretical discussion to revisit older practices in light of new theories. Carlson and Apple believe that post-modern theory dismisses "older practices" too quickly because many of the post-modern concepts are derived from existing culture and are therefore linked to existing practices. Further Carlson and Apple believe the language of postmodernism needs to become more inclusive and tied to the real world structures of every day life.             Another concern of the authors is the behavior of some "post-" theorists who appear to negate the possibility that more traditional approaches have value. The arrogance implied by such theorists' self-presentation of having the "right answers" to educational crises worries Carlson and Apple. Part One: State Educational Policy and Curriculum Reform in Unsettling Times             Chapters 2, 3, 4             This section deals with issues related to the state and its role in educational reform. In Chapter 2 Henry Giroux targets higher education as the center of the conflict between neo-conservatives and progressives. The clash, in his view, concerns cultural definition: which culture will be presented in schools? Will there be more than one culture accepted as the "norm"?             Jane Kenway examines the way that new technologies are transforming communication in the global community. Who is making the decisions? How are these communication networks being designed? What are the ethical ramifications of the choices being made? Are democratic processes being utilized in these decisions? These issues deal with the state's practice of instituting educational reforms from the top down to schools without discussion of the cultural implications of the purported improvements.             In Chapter 4, Geoff Whitty discusses the rhetoric of schools construed as businesses. Framed according to this rhetoric, schools compete for students and in so doing create new divisions among students based on their social circumstances. Claiming that the economic aims of schooling have become preeminent, Whitty calls for a balance in the use of schools to promote democratic and economic citizenship.             In a summary of the section Madeleine Arnot offers a discussion of the three authors' work, particularly as it relates to contextual issues of global import. Arnot believes that the major contribution of the three authors is their analysis of the social significance of the dominance of particular interest groups in participative democracy. Arnot elaborates on the points made by the authors when she addresses the impact of political, technological, and cultural forces on the educational system. Further, she considers the even greater impact of these cultural forces on democratic social structures in general (p. 110-119). Part Two: Education, Identity, and the Other             Chapters 5, 6, 7             This section of the book provides three views of how students' identity formation has been approached by different constituencies or through different lenses. Chapter 5 presents Michael Apple and Anita Oliver’s view of the traditional character of the Christian Right by analyzing an example case. In this analysis the authors offer a more complex picture of the Right-wing stance toward education than is typically acknowledged by liberal and Left-wing critics. The authors believe that it is important to understand the complexities of the conservative stance, first, because of the impact conservatives have had recently on curricula in the schools and, second, because progressives need to work with rather than place themselves in opposition to the Right.             Further, Apple and Oliver offer a new avenue for collaboration rather than conflict between neo-Gramscian and postmodern/poststructural theories. By combining the neo-Gramscian focus on the dominant groups' practice of exercising leadership in society through the state or "hegemonic blocs" and the poststructural focus on the local, formation of subjectivity and identity, Apple and Oliver believe illumination of critical issues in the politics of education will be achieved. This lens will allow for a more complex understanding of the Christian Right and its multiple purposes within the education arena.             Following Apple and Oliver's treatment of identity as defined on the traditional Right and on the reconceptualized Left, Michele Fine, Lois Weis, and Judi Addelston examine feminist views of identity formation. In particular, they focus on the formation of gender identity within the white working class especially during times of economic upheaval. Women are often grouped with "others" (African Americans, gays and other minorities) at these times to function as the "cause" of the difficulties. At the same time white working class males view the new political arena as inimical to their interests by promoting pluralism in ways that makes it difficult simply to blame the "other" for the economic woes of the era. Fine, Weis and Addelston posit that it is the responsibility of educators, researchers and others committed to a democratic society to be proactive when signs of scapegoating appear. They further alert educators that excluded and oppressed peoples are not the only ones whose concerns need to be addressed. Rather, educators should offer critique and analysis of identity formation more generally so that restructured identities and reconstituted alliances among different groups can be established.             In the final chapter of this section Philip Wexler offers a less traditional approach to educational research. Wexler rejects postmodernism and presents an argument for viewing self through a spiritual lens. Jewish mysticism is put forward as that lens, offering three unorthodox approaches: (1) creation is used as the lens with which to view "contemporary self/education dynamics;" (2) revelation is used to evaluate emergent self processes and education change; and (3) redemption is used as a process for speculations about the self and education in the future (p. 175).             Carlson concludes this section with a summary discussion of the views expressed. According to his analysis, the underlying distinction revealed in the chapters is between progressives, who view education as the process by which individuals shape themselves, and traditionalists, who view education as the transmission of knowledge that forms individuals. Carlson further sees a division in the progressive approach between one group that focuses on politics of the self and another group that focuses on identity politics. Part Three: Reading Curriculum Texts             Chapters 8, 9, 10             This section of the book deals with influences on contemporary curricula. These influences include traditional textbooks as well as the popular media such as television, movies, newspapers, and novels.             In chapter 8, Cameron McCarthy, Alicia Rodriquez, Stephen David, Shuaib Meecham, Heriberto Godina, K. E. Supriya, and Carrie Wilson-Brown present a discussion of the link between widely read cultural material and the way that race issues are presented in multicultural settings. Further the relationship between the popular media (i.e., television, movies, magazines) and commonly held beliefs about race identity and traits is discussed.             Linda K. Christian-Smith presents a similar argument for female gender identity by examining how the popular media portray "femaleness." She argues that the popular press and advertisers offer females an image of what being female is and prescribe what should be part of any female's possessions and attitudes.             Focusing on the identity formation that results from children's interactions with text, Patrick Shannon and Patricia Crawford discuss the cultural imperatives embodied in basal reading series. They call for an examination of the "old beliefs" promoted in basal texts and discuss the need to move beyond beliefs rooted in the dominant culture to beliefs that reflect cultural pluralism. The authors make a convincing argument that basal readers were first designed for white males only and that little has changed with regard to the premises of those texts.             William Tierney provides a summary discussion of the themes presented in this section, and he offers critical commentary on each of the chapters. Tierney believes that McCarthy and associates are too sweeping in their interpretation of the media's monolithic depiction of racial identifiers. In Tierney's view, the audience is not nearly so passive and accepting as McCarthy and associates portray it to be.             According to Tierney, Christian-Smith provides a compelling discussion of how text and the reading of text change over time. The example that a "Nancy Drew" mystery will be received differently by a young girl of the 1990's than it was by a young girl of the 1940's made sense to Tierney. He suggests that educators ought to make use of this insight when they think about the future.             Tierney takes Shannon and Crawford to task for their dismissal of the small improvements that have taken place in the content and context of basal readers. Whereas Tierney agrees with the authors' main point, he is concerned by their failure to acknowledge the good intentions of the publishers of contemporary basal series. Part Four: Pedagogy and Empowerment Chapters 11, 12, 13             This section of the text deals with the connection between pedagogy and power relationships. Pedagogy is viewed through three lenses: feminist, African-American, and political-economic. How pedagogy can empower or defeat students in a variety of ways and how that pedagogy can change over time are the continuing themes throughout the three chapters.             In chapter 11, Jennifer Gore opens with a discussion about the evolution of critical and feminist pedagogies over the past decade. Her argument is that whereas these alternative pedagogies have strong theoretical bases, they are weak with respect to their presentation of specific instructional guidelines. If these alternatives are to have an influence on mainstream pedagogy, then they must be presented in more detailed and accessible ways.             In contrast to Gore, Gloria Ladson-Billings argues that teaching techniques are not the key issue. More important, in Ladson-Billing's view, are teachers' underlying assumptions about the "educability" of every student. She believes that teachers' assumptions about the low levels of educability of African-American students and students from other oppressed minorities function to deny such students access to a challenging education.             Peter McLaren and Kris Gutierrez provide a study of Los Angeles' schools that examines critical pedagogy within the context of a particular political-economic environment. Their discussion considers the ways that power is deployed to support the status quo: Who holds power over education in a particular locale and who determines the opportunities that are provided and denied? Recognizing schools as sites of conflict, McLaren and Gutierrez' case studies offer anecdotal evidence of ways that students and teachers challenge the existing system of power in schools.             Kathleen Weiler provides the summary discussion of the last part of the text. Weiler views the chapters in this section as theoretical in nature, tying pedagogical practices to historical and social determinants of power relationships in schools and classrooms. She characterizes McLaren and Gutierrez 's case study as an attempt to explain the global culture in terms of "exploited" and "exploiter" (p. 335). According to Weiler, Ladson- Billings, as an African-American in the American educational system, writes from the perspective of nurturer and nurtured. Weiler believes that Ladson-Billings wants pedagogy to be a vehicle for sustaining African-American cultural identity in the present and into the future. Critique             This edited volume provides a complex set of theoretical premises and practical approaches for challenging the status quo in the education arena with regard to social and cultural issues. The audience intended for this book is an academic one familiar with the latest Left-wing jargon. Indeed, one problem with the book is its tendency to "preach to the choir."             A countervailing strength, however, is the use of summary discussions, which synthesize and evaluate the ideas presented in each section of the book. It is refreshing to have immediate critique available to assist the reader in placing strong arguments within an ideological context. By providing these critiques the editors offer a more balance view of the topics under discussion.             Despite this balance, the book construes its audience quite narrowly, rather than making the effort to reach an extended audience. Clearly the text invites discussion among academicians with similar points of view. Whereas such discussion does and probably ought to occur on a regular basis, it is not sufficient to provoke serious dialog about how schools should be transformed. The extended audience, however, properly includes teachers in the field who have daily interactions with children, parents, and administrators. These are the people who will take action--who will be responsible for putting theory into practice. An important foundation for teachers' action can be theoretical discourse, of course. But for discourse to function in this way it must be understandable to the broader audience and palatably presented as well. In the introduction to the book, the editors provide a brief discussion of this issue. Their discussion, perhaps, is as appropriately directed to the authors of the chapters as it is to the academicians who are likely to read the book.             Another weakness of the book is the tendency of some of its authors to regard research as a direct extension of political commitments. These authors call for research that examines educational issues on the basis of preconceived ideological premises. From the perspective of this reviewer, research should not be approached in a deliberately biased manner. Rather it should be approached openly, allowing for the possibility that the findings will confirm or disconfirm its original premises. The proper place for interpretation--for the inclusion of a subjective voice--is at the completion of research, not in advance of it. Given these concerns, the editors’ call for more modesty in educational research is well-taken. Researchers are properly cautioned to remember the dynamics --including the limitations--of their research designs.             For example, one ought not to draw conclusions about the ways that teachers in general are challenging existing power relationships in schools on the basis of qualitative data from selected schools in only one district. Overgeneralizing in this way ignores the influence of specific features of context such as urbanicity or rurality, characteristics of the student population, the dynamics between management and labor within the district, the intrusiveness of state education agencies, and so forth. The caution to be modest in one's claims applies to all researchers, but it is particularly germane to qualitative researchers. Providing in-depth analysis resulting from serious and prolonged study of a single site, such researchers are prone to overemphasize certain dynamics--resistance to the status quo, for example-- and underemphasize others--compliance to authority, for instance. If care is not exercised, these patterns of emphasis are likely to conform to the researchers' pre- existing ideological commitments.             Many important social and cultural issues are addressed in this collection, and the editors have provided a balanced forum for the discussions. The editors, in fact, have developed a format that encourages participation by an audience broader than an academic in-crowd. The chapter authors, many of whom appear to be writing for themselves and their friends only, would be well advised to adopt formats similar to the one modeled by the editors. About the Reviewer Catherine H. Glascock is an Assistant Professor of Educational Administration in the College of Education at Ohio University. Dr. Glascock received her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 1996. Dr. Glascock's areas of interest are organizational behavior, leadership, and school finance. She is specifically interested in rural, Appalachian schools. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) Florence, Namulundah. (1998). <cite>bell hooks, Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness</cite>. Reviewed by Caitlin Howley-Rowe Florence, Namulundah. (1998). bell hooks , Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical C... Burke, Sara Z. (1997). Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and Gender at the University of Toronto, 1888-1937. Reviewed by Theresa M. Richardson Education Review/Reseñas Educativas/Resenhas Educativas Burke, Sara Z. (1997). Seeking the Highest Good: Social Service and... Howe, Kenneth R. (1997) Understanding Equal Educational Opportunity: Social Justice, Democracy, and Schooling. 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