Springgay, Stephanie and Freedman, Debra. (2007). Curriculum and the Cultural Body. Reviewed by Peter Appelbaum, Arcadia University

Springgay, Stephanie and Freedman, Debra. (2007). Curriculum and the Cultural Body. NY: Peter Lang. 296 pp.       ISBN 978-0-8204-8686-4 Reviewed by Peter Appelbaum Arcadia University December 19, 2007 Snap this one up before they’re all sold out. Hold it in your hands. Taste it; savor it. Change as it touches you. Unlike so many edited compilations, this one can really be used as an introductory text in educational research and curriculum studies courses. You may even learn a thing or two, if you give yourself the gift of experiencing this book. Embodiment and curriculum has emerged for our field, finally and coherently in this new century, even if Merleau-Ponty and others were deconstructing mind-body dualisms more than 60 years ago. It is mainstream, it seems, to note the place of the body in learning. For example, one can find a host of research studies dating back more than a decade on gesture and learning (Brittan 1996; Field & Olafson 1999; Roth 2001; Cook and Goldin-Meadow 2006), body language and teaching (Daniels, Zemelman & Bizar 1999; Black 1999; Friedman & Gilles 2005; Osborne 1997; Stevenson, Yashin-Shaw & Howard 2007), the situated cognition of teaching and learning (Kirshner & Whitson 1997; Hansman & Wilson 1998; Hedegaard 1998; Moore 1998; Seel 2001; Pitri 2004; Smith & Semin 2007), and the phenomenology of technology (Haraway 1991, 1992; Oberg & McElroy 1994; Plant 1997; Badmington 2001; Oliver & Lalik 2001; Hoogland 2003; Shiling & Mellor 2007). “Body knowledge” as a term is certainly not new (Koren 1994; Elbaz-Luwisch 2004). Indeed, The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing devoted a special issue in 2004 to the theme of “Transgressing the Curricular Body,” edited by Lucy Fabrizio, and including articles by Erin Soros, jan jagodinski, Jackie Seidel, Sharon Rosenberg, Carl Leggo, Mebbie Bell, Brian Hodges, Faith Shields, Peter Taubman, and William Pinar. These other works, however, either perpetuate the false dualisms of mind and body which this new collection avoids, or presume a certain familiarity with the theory that makes them less accessible to newcomers. If there is one theme that this extremely diverse gathering of talented scholars shares, it is an understanding of “body” as meaning, rather than as a container for storing meaning. Each is committed to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh,” that is, that the body does not and cannot exist independent of the world. The body is always in the world, of the world, with the world, part of the world. “A body” is never taken as material substance; instead, materiality is the intertwining of the body and the world, or enfleshment. We never touch without being touched. The experience of the world, of other bodies, and so on, is part of the enfleshment of our own bodies. In most of the existing literature on gesture, body language, situated cognition, and technology in education, we unfortunately find the Cartesian dualisms of mind and body, self and other, body and world, alive and flourishing. The authors here take a very different position that enunciates a parallel discourse. They do something different from peeling back the layers of skin to reveal ‘true and natural’ insides of teachers, learners, and curriculum goals. The body – whether of a human or of a subject of study – is thought through as a bodied curriculum, an interdisciplinary study of experience. Sadly, one still seems to need to introduce all of the terms of this well-developed phenomenological discourse. In our field, concepts such as enfleshment, inter-embodiment, intercorporeality, even something as innocuous as “cultural body,” are received as exotic and marginal. Hence the authors in this volume each introduce the ideas over and over again. They need to. They cannot assume a minimally educated reader. Rather than seem repetitive, however, this repeated introduction of the ideas serves in this case to be significantly useful as a primer. Each chapter takes such a different stance and works through contexts so different from the others, that the discussion of these ideas rarely gets boring. (Instead, the reader feels smart, understanding and appropriating the ideas by the end of the book. Inter-embodiment, by the way, refers to the experience of being bodied: this experience is always mediated already by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies. Intercorporeality emphasizes the interrogation of difference, a characteristic of the bodied experience that unfolds through the imaginary body that forms and limits how we conceptualize the body in various ways; the imaginary body denotes those ready-made images and symbols through which we make sense of social bodies and which determine their value or status and what will be deemed their appropriate treatment.) While this fundamental critique of a psychologistic view of human experience has been part of the intellectual landscape for more than a century, it serves as a flamboyant challenge to most educational research and practice, which assumes that each actor in the educational encounter is positioned as an isolated individual, and further, that learning is about a collection of minds severed from their bodies. Thus, much of the existent literature on gesture, body language, and situated learning treats the body as a site of investigation, perpetuating the dualisms between mind and body, self and other, teacher and student, and so on, rather than seeking to understand the cultural location and specificity of the body. Likewise, the mainstream discourse renders the body as a stand-alone entity, complete in its duality, a sign of what is written on the body through visual, textual and cultural discourses, in contrast to self-reflexively questioning the isolation of a stand-alone body, or challenging the naturalized, cultural constructions. In mainstream educational theory, bodies are interchangeable – there are universal ‘students,’ ‘teachers,’ ‘curriculum developers,’ etc. The authors in this book work within the alternative tradition where universal identity is subsumed by subjectivity; the body is a signifier of multiplicity existing within a complex web of cultural understandings rather than an immutable signifier of identity. What this enables is the intertwining of what we see explicitly as bodies observing and participating in the world with the less visible and sometimes invisible characteristics of those experiences. Thus, as Yvonne Gaudelius and Charles Garoian write in their chapter, “… the pedagogies of culture and power are not inscribed as curriculum on the body as if it was an empty slate … on the contrary, the body’s biological predisposition is always already implicated in the cultural assumptions that construct it insofar as the body cannot be understood without understanding the cultural conditions with which it is intertwined.”(18) (Furthermore, the historical and social conditions of culture cannot be understood separate and apart from the contingent circumstances of the body.) Knowledge and learning are also transformed in this alternative tradition, from treasures and collectable capital into effective cognitive structures that can only be constituted in and through individual bodies. Knowing becomes something one is rather than something one has. Along these lines, books and curriculum materials do not contain knowledge, but rather evoke, organize, provoke, or perhaps reconfigure knowledge, but only in bodies already capable of reorganizing themselves or repositioning themselves in ways that are consistent with these effects, and only in a world able to produce such bodies. (Equally interesting, of course, is the desire for disembodiment that surfaces in so much of our intellectual work, a form of embodied experience nevertheless.) The book unfolds in four parts: Part I, “Flesh moves: technology and virtual bodies;” Part II, ”Un/Structure: narratives of bodies and schooling;” Part III, “Public spaces: mediating embodied difference across the curriculum; and Part IV, “Intersticial states: performing bodies.” As Madeleine Grumet notes in her introduction, the ordering is not what one would typically expect. Rather than moving from most familiar contexts to more challenging extensions of the topics at hand, the editors begin with an analysis of Gunter von Hagen’s exhibition of plastinated bodies, Bodyworlds, and place the section on technology and virtual bodies before the more pedestrian sections on schooling and curriculum. Grumet “soon discovered that the very defamiliarization achieved by these initial essays is the project of this entire collection and the antidote to the awe and perhaps defensive hypostatization of our early responses to the sight of the body in the room” (xvi). What the careful reader soon finds out, as well, is that the more familiar topics related to schooling are just as deeply informed by these ideas as the earlier chapters with the less obviously curriculum-related titles, so that Grumet’s surprise is redoubled in the experience of reading this book. “Flesh Moves” begins with the chapter by Gaudelius and Garoian, which analyzes the performances of the Australian Stelarc and the Californian La Pocha Nostra collective to develop concepts of embodied pedagogy and curriculum. The chapter does a good job introducing the basic concepts from Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler’s ideas of performance and identity politics, theories of art and performance from Katherine Hayles, Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, Susan Sontag, and Ivan Illich, and applications to thinking of experience as an embodied curriculum. The examples of Stelarc and La Pocha suck the reader right in, and draw out the main themes. Curiously, however, in a chapter on the need for art to avoid representation and interpretation, this one seems to be a counterexample, using the performance art to represent critical concepts of art, technology and the body as a curriculum of experience. Can such representation be avoided? One wonders. The statement from Sontag lingers vividly in my mind: “Interpretations, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is comprised of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article of use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories … To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become (“merely”) decorative. Or it may become non-art.” (from Sontag 1966, quoted p.7) Playing with these ideas in my mind, I decided all of the chapters in this book are a clever performances in themselves, avoiding becoming art via representation and interpretation, didactic in its technique, and hence a parody of art as performance. An edited volume is not performance art, and hence cannot void the reduction to use, the telescoping of itself into a mental scheme of categories. I yearn for a collection of performance art rather than a book I can hold in my hand. Or, I ask, what would I experience if this edited anthology were performance art that would be better described as parody, abstract, or merely decorative? Are there other conceptions of “non-art” besides what our culture takes as didactic essays? John Weaver and Tara Britt write on the work of film scholar Vivian Sobchak, and of the bodied experience of film. Debra Freedman, Iris Striedieck and Leonard Shurin explore the bodied experiences of seemingly disembodied on-line learning environments. And Karen Keifer-Boyd interrogates the curriculum of the body via simulation and virtual articulation. Taken together, these three chapters provide a powerful counterpoint to the bodied performance art of Stelarc and La Pocha, working with bodied experiences of bodies apparently disembodied from those experiences through or because of technology. As these authors clearly demonstrate, even so-called technology-mediated experience is richly embodied. Heidegger would be proud that we can see how technologies are ready-to-hand, made part of our being in the world and hence merely transforming our bodied conceptions of that world rather than removing us from that world. Weaver and Britt make this point clearly with Sobchak’s clarification of cinema as transposing our modes of being alive and consciously embodied in our world, our direct experience, without completely transforming those modes of being. Experiencing film is “an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood” (Sobchak 1992, quoted p. 22). They also examine the nature of digital imagery in fostering a post-human experience where one experiences technology as an enhancing or extending tool, the capacity of the body to experience itself as “more than itself” and thus to employ its sensorimotor capabilities to create the unpredictable, experimental and new. Freedman, Streidieck and Shurin provide the strongest case against Luddite worries that technology disembodies. They tell the tale of an on-line university course where bodied experience was central to the unfolding curriculum. The course sought to develop a learning environment reflective of democratic practices, built on trust, inclusiveness, freedom, self-determination, human development, reflection through deliberation and scrutiny, and the consideration of multiple understandings of ideas and experiences. The goals included the experience of a “genuine participation” (49) which moved students to new pedagogical awareness. Moments of stillness allowed for a pedagogical thoughtfulness in this course, a thoughtfulness mindful of the ways that thought and soul become embodied with/in a moment. Further pedagogical attentiveness enabled perception of the ways that stillness causes us to face ourselves. Bodied memories and embodied learning were interwoven through the warp and weave of on-line participation. Meanwhile, Keifer-Boyd’s study of “mutual articulation,” of the body with virtual objects and of the body with simulated environments, points to our cultural moment, where pre-service teachers live in this post-human world but have not had the privilege of a curriculum that helps them to think about its implications for body knowledge. As Sadie Plant (1997) wrote, technology is not a strap-on enhancer of perceptions, nor is it a constraining and isolating device; technology simply changes the bodied experience of humans. As Keifer-Boyd’s students discovered, experimenting with virtual environments helps us to think more reflectively about the nature of this human, embodied experience, just as Sobchak has argued film can do for us if we let it. The possibilities of body-knowledge that might be developed by movement and interaction in simulated and virtual spaces help us as well to consider the role of the interface in the kinds of body knowledge that we live with. Part II of this book, “Un/Structure,” includes contributions by Dalene Swanson on difference and disadvantage, Daniel Barney on a curriculum of art and clothing, and Daniel O’Donoghue on the historical construction of male bodies in boys’ schools in Ireland. Each challenges us to consider the bodies of students and teachers in specific places, and how the location of bodies and the performance of the body is a critical curriculum of a culture. The overt tale of Swanson’s research project is the teaching of mathematics in a South African township school. Her feelings and emotions, and those of the administrator, teachers and students in the school, are the focus of this essay. Her point is that the location of these bodies in this cultural, historical place is critical: experiential, situated, sensory and somaesthetic awareness provide meaning and possibility within sociocultural contexts of teaching and learning, and being in research” (76). Through reflexive narrative that calls upon the social, spiritual, embodied, and emotional domains of experience, misconceptions and prejudices can be analyzed, felt, and innately understood within the terms of a particular set of embodied performances. Unlike the traditional research on situated learning, Swanson’s reflexive narrative allows the body to make visible seemingly incommensurable discourses that collide and confound meanings in situated contexts. Her work makes clear the earlier theoretical points in this book relating performance art with the curricular body: rather than knowledge as representation or interpretation, as things, with the learner as the object of teaching practices, embodied curriculum emphasizes the learner as enunciator of subjectivity. The body is seen here as the site of intentioned and knowledgeable action, which in Swanson’s case offers the opportunity to embrace an understanding of the political and cultural body. Subjectivity in this sense is multiple, fragmented, and situated. It modulates its forms as it is mediated in and across contexts. While Swanson’s primary focus is the processes of research, Barney informs his secondary art classes with these ideas, and O’Donoghue applies the same ideas to the history of masculinity in schools. Barney’s art students were challenged to explore the themes of embodiment and experience via the design of clothing. They were challenged to perform their experiences and commitments through dress, in order to make more explicit how the adornment of the body is critical to everyday experience, but also to help students shift from objects who represent themselves through dress into actors who perform their subjectivities. An essential concept of embodied curriculum revisited in this chapter is the possibility of avoiding the inside-outside dualism so common to mainstream educational discourse. Clothing is an ambiguous demarcation of boundaries: inside and outside of a person, inside and outside of a social group, and so on. Likewise, a body is not a container for the person in the approach that this book takes. Instead, touching is simultaneously being touched; thinking is simultaneously action that sets up social assumptions and ideological perspectives. In the introduction to the book, Springgay and Freedman use Hagen’s Bodyworlds to demonstrate how a common method of investigation, to look inside of something, does not capture knowledge; instead, the knowledge is the experience of confronting the limits of such an investigation for learning about the relationships between inside and outside, among situated contexts and actions, and so on. In the case of clothing, the actual creation of the piece of clothing by a body which becomes marked by the craft of creation, the experience of wearing the clothing, and the performance of someone wearing the clothing are only some examples of the bodied curriculum. Clothing is a component of performance in the historical work of O’Donoghue as well. University students preparing to become primary teachers were routinely judged on their appearance, both sartorial and physical demeanor. A certain set of assumptions about a masculine combination of bodily composure, attitude, dress, and voice constituted a vision of the good teacher, someone who is knowledgeable, able to command respect, and to offer a model of manhood to his students. O’Donoghue analyzes notes from supervisors on how they are grading the teachers in training, and demonstrates the continued construction of a cultural expectation that a teacher perform a particular style of masculinity that many readers will recognize as prevalent beyond the situated context that O’Donoghue studied. Of critical importance is the ways that teaching and knowledge are imbricated with a sense of bodied authority; it is clear here that training for teaching, ostensibly intellectual and disembodied, is actually significantly body knowledge, carrying messages of gender, authority, performativity, and subjectivity. The authors in Part III turn our attention to the curriculum of popular culture and everyday life. Julie Maudlin writes on disability as learned through popular culture; Aisha Durham and Jillian Báez interrogate bodied, specifically gendered and differentiated, enunciations of sexuality; Diane Watt looks at the mass media experience of veiling; Cris Mayo explores the experience of teaching against homophobia without teaching the subject; and Natalie Jolly writes on popular conceptions of the female body and childbirth as articulated and developed in the context of a university course. This third section of the book interrogates the social construction of normalcy and difference in the cultural body. Each of these chapters is a strong contribution to our field, and each deserves a large audience beyond the readers of this book. Maudlin reads a variety of popular film and television texts to locate disability and difference in representations of the body. She argues that isolation and inclusion are transpositions of popular desires for “safe” distancing of our own bodies from difference, constructed in bodied terms. She further notes how this popular curriculum is conservative in character, leading life to “go on” with little change in order not to disrupt normalcy. Durham and Báez make exquisite use of their reading of the Bootylicious phenomenon, brought to the forefront by Beyoncé Knowles and Jennifer Lopez. This chapter makes clear how the discourse surrounding their bodies, and in particular their booties, is an extension of the overall commodification, paranoia, and policing of the sexuality of women of color. They further ask how these booties represent the national body, in the sense that women represent the additive element as well as the forever-hyphenated ethnicity of Americans that mark them as Other. Media industries use commodified bodies to market difference, since they need to make their products stand out as different. Knowles and Lopez are bodied features of this larger social, cultural, and economic multiplex of connections and combinations. In Watts’ discussion of the media curriculum on Muslims, and in particular the veil, we read echoes of the sartorial and the gendered body, but in this case, the preoccupation with the veil tells us a great deal more about ourselves than about the Other. If we move toward an understanding of ourselves in relation to others, recognizing that no self is possible without an other, in fact that a self does not exist in isolation, then a stereotype based on the others’ bodies becomes more than an instance of power relations; the relationship is also one of desire, in which a sense of “useness” is at stake in how we represent and interact with others. This is for Watts a curricular call: if curriculum provoked readings of self and other that had no closure, open to possibility, then we would not be creating understanding as the wielding of knowledge over others. That is, when we claim to understand another (think of a teacher understanding what a student is thinking, or of a student learning about cultures that are “other” to him or her), we are exercising knowledge over the other. “The other becomes an object of my comprehension.” (160) On the other hand, when we are exposed to the other, we can listen, attend and be surprised, so that the other is affecting us. This model of curriculum has the participants sinking into the lived spaces of difference, where both are present with each other. Such a curriculum is represented in the following chapter by Cris Mayo, who does a delightful calling out of the act of representation itself at the start: after all, in the experience of anti-homophobia education, the representation and confession has been the central crisis of such work, he maintains, brings us back to the central question of how this work can avoid representation and interpretation in the first place. It can’t, says Mayo. Mayo finds solace in a quote from Deborah Britzman: “pedagogical thought must begin to acknowledge that receiving knowledge is a problem for the learner and the teacher, particularly when the knowledge one already possesses or is possessed by works as an entitlement to one’s ignorance or when the knowledge encountered cannot be incorporated because it disrupts how the self might imagine itself and others.” (Britzman 1995, quoted p. 173) I don’t want to give the story away, but when you read this you will see that Mayo uses this idea to move from tales of confession and coming out to tales of accusation and recruitment as pedagogical strategies. Given that a common experience of women is that they have been taught to relate to their own bodies as others, can such accusative and recruitment strategies be useful concepts for a curriculum that centers on childbirth and female bodies? In fact, Jolly finds that university students typically employ a language of choice regarding issues of childbirth and women’s bodies, which enables an avoidance of systematic sociological investigation, and instead removes women’s and babies bodies from culture. She argues that this language of choice prevents students from connecting medicalized birth to larger feminist projects, reconstructing a social curriculum that teachers distrust of women’s bodies. The moral here is that discourses of the female body are negative and distrustful, and undermines women’s body confidence. “Intersticial States,” the fourth and final part of this book, features three contestations of body-self boundaries. The performing body in these chapters is located in performance art. The book ends by examining the construction of embodied identity in both discursive and material senses. Stephanie Springgay writes on body art and intimacy; Barbara Bickel experiments with a montage of curricular inquiries of exile that can be reproduced in this textual and photographic format; and James Sanders finishes off the book with a retrospective on his personal development as a performance artist. Like Watts and Mayo, Springgay is searching for an alternative to curriculum that is based on certainty and familiarity; she wants to nurture a curriculum that is open, responsive, and sensitive, comprised of inter-subjectivities, experiences, and lives. For that sense of intimacy that she wishes to foster, she focuses here on the artistic work of Janine Antoni, and the analogy between Antoni’s body art and art as a metaphor for a reconceptualized curriculum. In body art, most boundaries between self and art are dissolved, in ways that might be analogous to dissolved boundaries between self and knowledge. The key feature of Antoni’s work is intercorporeality, the medium of the art is a site of subjectification where self and other intertwine in an exchange of a mobile and performative process of meaning making. The processes are not static. Bickel turns to trance and ritual as the basis of her work as an artist/researcher/teacher. Trance opens one up to what Bickel considers a rich and provocative dreaming state that allows a person to step outside of the “normal” self; ritual allows someone to move in and out of the trance. Curriculum for Bickel is an invitation. It is an invitation to expanded notions of being, knowing, and doing. She invites sacred awareness into learning environments. Sanders revisits autoethnography as critical curriculum inquiry. He experiences the body as both site and medium through which a broad array of pedagogical possibilities are practiced and presented. “Through shared moving, poetic, and filmic creations we recreate our (self)understandings and (re)position ourselves to encounter out own otherness in and through a cultural bodily (self)recognition that may only fleetingly be known through an aesthetic experience.” (234) Believing or knowing thought the body, “feeling the ever present threat/promise of death,” writes Sanders, illuminates that mysterious absence where all that remains is memory and artifact(s) indefinitely recording an excess(ive) curiosity of isolation. For Sanders, “this continues to be a queer and (dis)comforting journey, one that struggles to acknowledge sexualized differences experienced in shared social and political commitments, estrangement, stigmatization, and yes, pleasure.” (234) Conclusion We’re a far cry from curriculum as a body of knowledge. Yikes, never say that again! Unless you are referring to a common sense notion of curriculum that objectifies knowledge, teachers, learners, curriculum workers, in fact all bodies! By the end of this book our experience of the body and of the curriculum is akin to performance art. It is embodied experience. Embodies experience is curriculum. Technology does not remove experience or embodiment from the encounter. Embodied experience is situated and therefore constitutive of difference and injustice as well as possibility and action. Why performance art? Because it emphasizes an alternative to representation and interpretation as the center of experience. Representation and Interpretation foster objectification of the body as a site, rather than treating the body as a subject, already present and acting in the world. I personally think this is the critical idea to take with you into this book. Many educators and curriculum designers already think about learning as an embodied experience. But they do not necessarily break down the intellectual categories of inside and outside, body and mind, person and other, that are so powerfully assumed in the work featured in the book reviewed here. Instead, such educators and curriculum desigers further construct learning and knowledge as others to the body, and in so doing, perpetuate each individual learner as other to the others in their classroom, indeed alienated from their world. For example, a science educator might create a simulation where students are situated in an imaginary ecosystem and are tricked into engaging in the solution of an ecological mystery (Barab, Zuiker ,Warren, et al. 2007). Much of their design language might be of a situated body in a communal context. But their epistemology is not informed by Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler, Jones and Stephenson, or Springgay and Freedman. They remain disappointed in the results of their work, striving to create a new “beta version” of the curriculum that will lead to better performance on tests of learning. Or, a mathematics educator might work to incorporate embodied theories of learning into her work with children learning arithmetic (Murphy 2007). Because her conception of the body is as a tol for conceptual metaphors rather than as an acting subject, she finds the central questions about conceptual metaphor and analogy remain open. In other words, the project of mathematics education research is self-perpetuating as a practice of unsolved questions (Appelbaum 1995) rather than an enunciative engagement with the world; students remain subjects of teaching, unable to become artists of mathematics. Why the chapters on technology and the body? Because technology is so often conceived as prosthesis, expanding perception, or as a tool of disembodiment. It is neither. First of all, strapping on technology does not give someone superpowers to become an enhanced human (Appelbaum 2002; Appelbaum 2007). My one critique of this book is that it too simply embraces Merleau-Ponty and the role of perception as the stuff of human experience. (Gaudelius and Garoian do note the feminist critique; mine is a bit more philosophical.) Is learning nothing more than a perception of something new? Surely we can see that human experience might be better understood in ways different from replacing sight with touch in our model (Appelbaum 2007). Sure, we can see a difference in our model when we realize that touching involves an interconnection, whereas sight is done from a distance. But really, in the end, it’s just a minor shift, And, I would argue, our model for sensory perception is so dominated by sight that we still use sight metaphors to talk about touch or taste or smell, and so on. What if perception is merely a conceptual landscape that we need to break out of in order to creatively explore the curricular body and the body of the curriculum? One might claim I was returning to a disembodied intellectual discourse … I can “see” that one might take the phenomenology of human existence, the enfleshment, to be fundamentally grounded in perception. I am personally not so sure. At any rate, technology might enhance perception but it does not remove the body from the experience of the world. And, finally, why the intersticial body? Why does this book leave us there? Remember that these authors are extending the position of curriculum as artistic practice. Curriculum theory is a performative process, a form of critical pedagogy that engages both the artist and the “engager” in a process of critical citizenship. As I read this, I thought back to the editors; introduction, where they critique Hagen’s Bodyworlds exhibit. This is that traveling exhibit where plastinated bodies are on display. There are many controversies with this exhibit; the editors use it to discuss the ways that the insides of the bodies are used to communicate ideological messages about the outsides, reproducing a discourse of inside and outside. They go on to think through what it would mean to take the phenomenological stance seriously. How would we interrogate the curriculum of the body if we experienced the permeability and mutuality of the inside/outside relationship of the body? Well, I wondered, what if we imagined Bodyworlds to be a parody rather than a mimetic representation? I doubt this was Hagen’s intention, but surely the editors read the exhibit as text in this way? Then in some ways the introduction to this book would be a representation, and not a critique. Instead of an action as artistic practice, this introduction would be a museumification of art! It’s all in the reading, in the presumption of intention, in the placement of the artist as actor in the world, versus the editor as re-presenter of knowledge. As Sontag wrote, parodic mimesis renders the visible invisible and the invisible visible. What if we approached curriculum in this way? We would be performance artists! But watch out. Performance art is not easy nor safe. Stelarc pierces himself with technology, blurring the boundaries of body and world, machine and human. Some would describe Antoni’s body as debased of defaced, as she mops the gallery floor drenched in dye, or pokes her partner’s eye with her tongue. Be ready to feel things, and to realize, as did Swanson, that feelings are indicators that your body is learning about difference and injustice. References Appelbaum, Peter. 1995. Popular culture, educational discourse, and mathematics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Appelbaum, Peter. 2002. 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Are your eyes neon? Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 115-29. Stevenson, John, Yashin-Shaw, Irena , & Howard, Peter. 2007. Reclaiming bodily dispositions through the humanities: Homeless people learning. Journal of Vocational Education and Training. 59 (4): 419-434. Taubman, Peter. 2004. Reasonable bodies. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 15-28. About the Reviewer Peter Appelbaum is Associate Professor of Education, Coordinator of Mathematics Education and Curriculum Studies Programs, Director-at-Large of General Education, and Director of the Strangely Familiar Music Group at Arcadia University, in Philadelphia, USA. While he wrote this review, he was on sabbatical as a Guest Professor at the Friei Univerität, Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Children’s Books for Grown-up Teachers: Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory, and Embracing Mathematics: On Becoming a Teacher and Changing with Mathematics.

Robinson, S. N. (2004). History of Immigrant Female Students in Chicago Public Schools, 1900-1950. Reviewed by Karen Monkman, DePaul University, and Angelica Rivera, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Robinson, S. N. (2004). History of Immigrant Female Students in Chicago Public Schools, 1900-1950. N.Y: Peter Lang. Pp. ix + 131 $24.95   ISBN 0-8204-6720-0 Reviewed by Karen Monkman, DePaul University, and Angelica Rivera, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign January 2, 2006 Introduction Stephanie Nicole Robinson’s monograph is an important contribution to scholarship dealing with the history of education, gender and education, and immigration and education. Robinson expands the historical narrative of European-American women in mid-twentieth century Chicago through her analysis of oral history archives which privilege the voices and experiences of Jewish, Italian, Polish and Irish women. Robinson tells stories of schooling and cultural adaptation from 1900 to 1950, and traces some cultural beliefs regarding education to their countries of origin. Chapter One includes a broad overview of existing historical scholarship related to Irish, Polish, Italian, and Jewish immigration. From this existing literature, the author extracts educational data from those sending countries/regions (e.g., literacy rates, drop-out patterns), and also discusses justifications for educating girls (or not) in particular ways (e.g., family beliefs about traditional gender roles or the lack of need for educating girls). The author also states four points she intends to develop through the presentation and analysis of her data: (1) Americanization experiences were often different for women and men, (2) schools did not adequately address the cultural beliefs and practices of female students, (3) Americanization/assimilation programs were resisted by parents who sought to convey their own cultural systems to their children, and (4) parental beliefs and attitudes are based on gender and rooted in native cultures (p. 13). Following the introductory chapter, the next three chapters present historical data organized around issues of Americanization experiences, school policies and practices related to Americanization, and beliefs and attitudes toward the education of girls. The second chapter includes a discussion of issues related to Americanization and gender, including women’s enrollment in night classes, factory classes, and mothering classes; experiences of learning English; entering the workforce; and making use of newly available social options such as divorce. The author talks about how immigration laws required women to depend on male sponsors, and how social security laws benefited male workers more than female workers when they retired. These kinds of conditions influenced how women were encouraged to or discouraged from assimilating, and how their assimilation patterns differed from those of men. Chapter Three focuses on Americanization activities—citizenship and character education—in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Politicians and various interest groups, as they fought for power over school policy, promoted Americanization through education in this period when the numbers of immigrant students and students who spoke languages other than English were increasing rapidly, and when many teachers were Protestants of British descent. This chapter is organized around three objectives related to civic training: (1) learning about American culture, (2) learning “socially desirable habits” (learning how to act American), and (3) learning how to participate in group life (how to become integrated into American society). Tensions arose in some settings due to the strong ethnic (cultural) and religious orientation of many immigrants that made Americanization efforts problematic; these efforts were experienced as a rejection of who they were and where they came from. At the same time, however, there was (seemingly willing) participation in Americanization activities, and evidence that change did occur generationally but with societal barriers to acceptance. For example, the author concludes the chapter by stating that, while Americanized students were “different” from their extended (non-immigrated) families and parents, they were not accepted as Americans by other populations due to xenophobic curricula and beliefs; “they were outsiders in two cultures…” (p. 53). While cultural change (Americanization) did occur, this book’s focus on 1900-1950 limits discussion to only the first two generations, so we do not have a longer-term perspective of how, for example, Irish immigrants became Irish-Americans, and then became un-hyphenated Americans (Lieberson, 1991.n Chapter Four, entitled “Old World Influences on Attitudes toward Schooling in the New World,” presents data on the four immigrant groups related to (a) attitudes and schooling experiences prior to immigration, and (b) attitudes and schooling experiences in the U.S., primarily in relation to women’s roles and educational attainment. The preference for boys’ education over girls’ was a common thread for all of these groups in their countries of origin as well as in America upon their arrival (p. 55). Robinson also looks at some of the historical and political factors that shaped women’s education in their countries of origin. Jewish women, for example, were not allowed to advance in educational pursuits prior to migrating especially if they came from the working class. In Italy, educational opportunities were more available to and sought out by Northern Italians, who had power in Italian society. After migration, Southern Italians had a harder time “assimilating” because of their darker skin color and lower social class status. This perpetuated negative stereotypes about Italians in the U.S. which were sometimes reinforced by the educational system and its leaders. The author describes how, in the U.S. the roles of immigrant women were challenged by an economy where women’s wages were needed in order to sustain the household. For this reason, many women had to enter the workforce, thus upsetting traditional expectations that women not work outside the home. Compulsory education laws also challenged traditional notions of women’s place in the home by keeping girls in school longer. The final chapter states that “contrary to past historical scholarship, … immigrant parents were not against education” (p. 92), and that parental beliefs and attitudes were “gender based and culturally rooted in their native homelands” (p. 93). The author argues that immigrant women were able to continue their roles as their children’s first teachers, passing down cultural traditions and practices and thereby promoting cultural continuity. She further distinguishes her study from others by saying that “many of the studies done on immigrant attitudes toward education do not take into consideration the lack of opportunities to receive formal education due to politics, social norms, and financial circumstances…” (p. 93). Robinson suggests that historians should focus more “on the role of women within their families and society” (p. 93) and should delve more deeply into schooling experiences and attitudes toward education of female immigrant students. She also lists other locations from which data could be collected (e.g., Hull House, Catholic school records, ethnic museums), and argues that cultural deficit models should not be the basis of educational policies and that policy makers should strengthen their understanding of the role of gender in educational dynamics. Her list of recommendations also includes a more gendered approach to understanding enculturation and acculturation processes and school experiences. While her conclusions and recommendations are pertinent, further discussion of and support for each would have been welcomed. The fairly extensive endnotes (17 pages) and references (15 pages) are useful for readers to both better understand the source of some of her statements and to pursue particular issues further, if so inclined. This book raises a variety of issues, relevant in the first half of the 20th century, and still relevant now. Following an overview of immigration in today’s Chicago, we will discuss methodological and theoretical issues in Robinson’s work and in the broader intersections of history of immigration, gender and education.. Recent Trends in Chicago’s Immigration Immigration to Chicago continues to shape the social fabric, although the sending countries have changed to some degree. Eastern European immigration has continued and many more countries of the former USSR have significant populations in Chicago, although numbers decreased between 1960 and 1980 before increasing again. The Polish-born population in Chicago was about 90,000 in 1960, decreasing thereafter, and then increasing to 137,670 in 2000. Irish and Italian immigration slowed between 1960 and 2000 from 25,795 and 61,930 respectively in 1960, to 10,562 and 25,934 in 2000. Immigration from Mexico has out-paced all other regions, representing over 40% of the foreign-born population in the Chicago area, totaling 582,028 in 2000 (Paral & Norkewicz, 2003). Asian and African populations also increased during the second half of the 20th century, to 320,239 and 23,087 in 2000 respectively. The rise in Latin American immigration to the United States has been spurred by the promise of employment and educational opportunity, in part in relation to political agreements (e.g., NAFTA), and prompted by civil war and poverty (as in the cases of Salvadorans and Guatemalans, for example). With the gendered nature of immigration (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994), we can also expect a gendered nature in which families interact with schools and engage in educational processes. The ways that American teachers engage in gendered educational processes (cf., Stone, 1994) comprise another aspect that could be analyzed in relation to the gender dynamics involving immigrant families and students. Like the groups studied by Robinson, Mexican women also enter the workforce in the U.S. in order to contribute to their family income, experience limited opportunity to further their schooling, and encounter Americanization programs at school. Ruiz (1998), for example, whose work focuses on Mexican immigrant women from the 1920s to the 1950s, finds that Mexican women in the southwestern U.S. were also targeted for assimilation programs since they were seen as the transmitters of culture and child rearing. During this point in time Americanization programs were promoted by the Methodist Church and other Christian organizations in order to promote the conversion of Mexican Catholics. It was a different approach to assimilation as religious clergy and staff learned Spanish in order to develop trust and promote conversion. However, Ruiz points out that Mexicans were not passive subjects who simply accepted a new culture; instead they participated in what she has coined “cultural coalescence” (p. 50), meaning that Mexican immigrants choose what they want to borrow, retain what they want to keep, and, at the same time, create new cultural forms. Thus, culture is fluid and not fixed. It varies depending on one’s generation, gender, social class position and/or region. Robinson’s study contributes to scholarship that reveals particular aspects of this diversity. One difference between the populations discussed by Robinson and more recent immigrant groups from Mexico and Central America relates to the proximity of the U.S. to the sending countries and the political relations between the countries. Unlike the European immigrants in Robinson’s study, deportation of Mexicans to Mexico has been quite prevalent during the mid-twentieth century and continues to this day. Mexican men and women have been defined as “laborers” but not as “citizens,” thus making “Americanization” efforts more problematic. The U.S. educational system attempts to “Americanize” students by assimilating them and avoiding what conservatives such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1991) have coined “The Disuniting of America.” In other words, Mexican students should participate in “subtractive schooling” (Valenzuela, 1999) not necessarily for the purpose of citizenship, but instead to qualm fears of an increasing Mexican population in the United States. This also raises important contemporary questions about issues like assimilation for immigrants from areas where travel is relatively easy. Additive cultural change (Valenzuela, 1999) and transnational identity (Schiller, Basch & Blanc-Szanton, 1992; Basch, Schiller & Szanton Blanc, 1994) can become priorities over subtractive assimilationist agendas that seek an Anglo-conformity (Gordon, 1964, citing Cole & Cole, 1954) verson of Americanization. Cultural change processes are much more complex than simplistic linear notions of assimilation, particularly for some groups who seek to retain some of their ethnic and cultural heritage, and for those faced with discrimination which limits their ability to assimilate (Gordon, 1964). Robinson reveals the existence f this tension in her study. We need to understand the depth and nuances of this social dynamic more fully, however. Interdisciplinarity and Theoretical Conceptualizations In order to gain an in-depth and broad understanding of social phenomena such as immigration, gender and education, it is important to discuss historical data in relation to other types of data, other disciplines and particular theoretical frames. Immigration has been studied by sociologists, economists, policy analysts and anthropologists for many years, yet Robinson mentions primarily the contributions of historians. (This was her intention and, as such, should not be considered a weakness.) In the social sciences a variety of issues have been debated for decades; among them are assimilation, adaptation, acculturation, identity, transnationalism, and factors that influence migration. Embedded in Robinson’s study are various assumptions about assimilation as a goal or outcome of immigration. Assimilation is a contested issue in sociology and anthropology, as it is argued by some that many immigrants are not interested in, and even reject, an assimilationist agenda. This issue is reflected in Robinson’s data, which illustrates that many women and families strive to maintain their cultural heritage while also seeking to gain the abilities to become more integrated in American society. This tension—cultural continuity vs. cultural change—is all but ignored in many of the early studies of immigration, in which researchers assume that those who immigrate wish to assimilate, and thus abandon their cultural histories. Robinson’s focus on gender enables the reader to gain a glimpse of this struggle to balance the new with the old, as it is often in gender relations where this struggle plays itself out. Readers should be reminded that notions such as assimilation, Americanization, cultural change, and the like, are not simple or benign concepts, but are contested by immigrants in the processes of constructing their lives and by scholars in their academic analyses. Some of the lack of attention to the ways that these concepts are contested in this monograph is undoubtedly due to the limits of the data in these archives. The act of immigration, for example, seemed to be motivated, in large part, by unquestioned assumptions of economic push and pull factors in Robinson’s book. This is rarely the whole story, however. (See Massey et al.’s Return to Aztlan, or Hondagneu-Sotelo’s Gendered Transitions, for example, for more nuanced discussions of these social processes.) The converse is, of course, that much social science research lacks the historical depth of studies such as Robinson’s. Historiography: Researching Gender, Immigration & Education Robinson looked at both primary and secondary sources in order to gain an understanding of the experiences of Jewish, Italian, Polish and Irish immigrant women. Primary sources were used to get a better understanding of the Polish and Italian immigrant experience. The Immigrant Protective League papers at the UIC Special Collections are some key archives that helped to reveal their lived experiences. However, in the case of the Immigrant Protective League papers it was not clear whether archives on all four ethnic groups were available. Secondary sources were used to fill in the gaps for the Irish and Jewish experience. Reports and Proceedings of the Board of Education from the archives were also used to complement the secondary sources. Robinson also examined oral history archives entitled, “Chicago Polonia” located at the Chicago Historical Society, and looked at the “Italian Oral History Project” located at the UIC Special Collections. These archives provide key insights that have not been explored by many other scholars. Robinson provides a brief review of the literature in her introductory chapter regarding European immigrant education in order to explain how her work fills the gap. By using these archives the author privileges the voices of women who have been traditionally excluded in previous literature. Conclusion This monograph can inform scholars who are interested in issues related to immigration, gender studies, history of education, comparative education, and educational policy studies. A strength of the book is the comparative approach that was taken regarding understanding the immigrant experiences of Jewish, Polish, Italian and Irish immigrant women, with information about their lives pre- and post-migration. A weakness is that recent oral interviews were not conducted to corroborate the experiences that are salient in the oral history archives. Many people who migrated in the first half of the 20th century are still alive and many undoubtedly live in Chicago. In addition, the book could have been strengthened by a more direct dialog with existing scholarship beyond historical studies of immigration. Overall, however, Robinson’s contributions are useful in enabling us to better see the gendered dynamics in the interface of schooling and immigrant communities. She should be commended. References Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Luxembourg: Gordon and Breach. Garcia, Mario T. 1981. Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gordon, Milton M. 1964. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins. New York: Oxford University Press. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 1994. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lieberson, Stanley. 1991. A New Ethnic Group in the United States. Article 23 in Normal R. Yetman (ed.), Majority and Minority: The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in American Life. 5th edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, pp 444-56. Massey, Douglas, Rafael Alarcón, Jorge Durand and Humberto González. 1986. Return to Aztlan: The Social Process of International Migration from Western Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press. Paral, Rob, and Michael Norkewicz. 2003. The Metro Chicago Immigration Fact Book. Chicago: Roosevelt University Institute for Metropolitan Affairs. Ruiz, Vicki L. 1998. “From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century America.” New York: Oxford University Press. Schiller, Nina Glick, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (eds.). 1992. Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered. Vol. 645, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. 1991. The Disuniting of America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Stone, Lynda (ed.). 1994. The Education Feminism Reader. New York: Routledge. Valenzuela, Angela. 1999. Subtractive Schooling: US–Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany: State University of New York Press. About the Reviewers Karen Monkman is an Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Research at DePaul University, with specializations in sociology and anthropology of education, comparative education, and gender. Her interests relating to education include migration, immigration, and transnationalism; immigration and cultural dynamics; and globalization. Angelica Rivera is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the field of History of Education. Her dissertation topic deals with documenting the educational experiences of Mexican women in 1950s Chicago. Her interests relating to education include immigration, history of education, gender studies, and educational policy. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Slaughter, Sheila and Rhoades, Gary. (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher Education. Reviewed by Rebecca Barber, Arizona State University

Slaughter, Sheila and Rhoades, Gary. (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Pp. xii +370 $39.95   ISBN 0-8018-7949-3 Reviewed by Rebecca Barber Arizona State University January 3, 2006 Commercialism in higher education is not a new topic; it has been covered by a number of authors focusing on research (Etzkowitz, Webster & Healey (1998)), interaction with industry (Soley (1995)), marketing (Kirp (2003)), and sports-related commercial ventures (Sperber (2000)). This book, however, takes a different and more sophisticated approach. Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie wrote the first book on this topic in 1997: Academic Capitalism: Policies, Politics and the Entrepreneurial University. At that time they focused on research universities in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia, looking primarily at technology transfer activities. The definition of academic capitalism remains the same: “…the pursuit of market and market-like activities to generate external revenues” (p. 11). But this definition is too simplistic a summary for Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Slaughter and Rhoades focus heavily on the blurred lines between markets, states and higher education, as well as the entities and actors who span and blur those boundaries. In this book Slaughter has a new writing partner and puts forth a formalized theory of academic capitalism. The focus of Slaughter and Rhoades’ research is strictly public and not-for-profit institutions in the U.S., but the topics are more thoroughly investigated and the conclusions more nuanced than in the first, more broadly focused volume. While considerable attention (Chapters 3 and 4) is paid to patent issues and technology transfer, chapters 5 and 6 are devoted to exploring the issues around copyright and its impact on instruction, educational materials, and courseware. Chapter 7 is devoted to departmental market activities such as on-line programs, professional Masters degrees and independent development officers. Another (Chapter 8) is devoted to activity at the level of Administrators and Trustees, with focus on the networks that link these managers to the new economy. Finally, two chapters are devoted to students as both the target market and what is being marketed. The first of these chapters, Chapter 10, deals with the status of students as a captive market once they enroll and the way institutions take advantage of the situation to make money through deals with outside companies. The second, Chapter 11, discusses the activities involved in recruiting students and the ways in which marketing is directed at current and potential students. Immediately following the introduction is a chapter covering the policies and politics that enable the move to academic capitalism. Slaughter and Rhoades divide policy into two principal groups, focusing first on student financial aid and then on research, patent and intellectual property policies. These two sets of policies show some interaction in the growth of academic capitalism, and familiarity with the political and policy environment provides a good foundation for the more specific subjects enumerated above. While Slaughter and Rhoades do not spend an extensive amount of time discussing or defining the “New Economy,” they do touch on the characteristics most relevant to colleges and universities. First among these characteristics is the global scope of the new economy. Globalization increases complexity in all types of transactions and produces a greater reliance on technology to support those transactions. While universities have long formed global learning communities and made contact with colleagues in far away lands, this new globalization brings with it increased choice for students, increased mobility in the global labor force and increased technologically enabled delivery of instruction than had previously been possible. They also see the growth of what they refer to as “non-Fordist manufacturing” as an issue. In short, this is the move away from mass production, out of an industrial economy and into a knowledge-based economy. This change appears in areas such as the management of faculty, as both the growth of part-time, adjunct or non-tenure track faculty and the unbundling of professorial work in areas such as on-line or distance education. However the change also impacts the next key characteristic, the need for educated workers and technology savvy consumers. The changing nature of the majority of work has caused a change in the nature of the undergraduate curricula. Business has become the most popular field while science, engineering, medicine, and law have all seen substantial growth in order “to create and protect knowledge-based products, processes and services” (p. 19). Further, students are exposed to blatant consumerism and new technology throughout their college experience, such as mini-malls in student unions and the use of colleges as technology test beds. The final key new economy concept is that of knowledge as a raw material. “Corporations in the new economy treat advanced knowledge as a raw material that can be claimed through legal devices, owned, and marketed as a product or service” (p. 17). The implications of this change are staggering, since it is the key change that has moved us from what the authors previously saw as a “public good” paradigm to one of “academic capitalism”. As the authors define it, “the public good knowledge regime was characterized by valuing knowledge as a public good to which the citizenry has claims” (p. 28). This is directly in conflict with the view of knowledge as something that can be owned. Slaughter and Rhoades point out that the change values privatization and profit making, and gives the institution, faculty inventor, and potentially corporations claim on this newly created knowledge over and above any claim made by the public. The authors do not see one regime as having replaced the other but do see an overlap and uncomfortable intersection of the two. That intersection has led to a substantive change in the way institutions are run and the reasons behind many of the decisions they make. One feature of the new economy is increased complexity, scale, and the need for specialization, all of which is grounded in the global scope of the new economy and move away from a mass-production model. While the historic role of faculty was comprehensive (anything related to the instruction and academic progress of a student was under their purview), the tools used were simpler and easily learned. As we evolve from chalkboards through overhead projectors and Powerpoint to HTML and Flash, the need for professionals to assist faculty greatly increases. The same applies to patent and copyright lawyers, who work in a constantly evolving field that requires the expertise of a professional to navigate. Slaughter and Rhoades attempt to make the case that the very need for these types of professionals is a concern. It is only through the transition of knowledge from being public to it being private that these roles even become necessary. The authors acknowledge that this is not a change that can be easily undone, and this concept of privatized knowledge is as much a part of the new economy as the technology that symbolizes it. The authors use a standard set of lenses to view each subject and present their findings in a structure that uses each lens in turn. They begin with a look at the “New Circuits of Knowledge” that have been created during the move to the new economy. The implication here is that we have moved away from teaching being the work of faculty and peer review being an activity for academics to one where the administration and industry play a larger role. The influence of different rating systems (such as U.S. News and World Report) on how schools choose to allocate their resources in order to compete is another example. With these connections established, the authors move on to examine the internal changes caused or encouraged by the new economy requirements as well as the organizations that mediate between universities and colleges and industry. Finally the authors look at the enhanced managerial capabilities emerging to deal with these new economy functions. One concept that the authors return to repeatedly is the intermediation of non-faculty professionals in the education process. The authors cast the use of these managerial staff in a negative light, implying for example that faculty should be making the decisions about the purchase of technology for use in instruction (p. 318). This presumes, however, both the interest and the technical knowledge to make good decisions of this type. Given the complexity of the technology involved, it is unlikely that most faculty have either the technical knowledge or the desire to acquire the knowledge needed to make these decisions. The author’s implication is that by giving up control of these decisions, faculty give up control of the options and ultimately the pedagogy of classes that use the tool. Yet it seems clear that the best use of faculty time is in creating content and learning to take advantage of the capabilities of the available tools rather than burying themselves in the technical minutia of choosing the tool itself. They conclude by illuminating their concerns with the new market-oriented activities of universities. The blurring of boundaries between the public and private sectors is seen as an issue due to the heavy subsidization that occurs for university research and the fact that universities are not particularly effective or efficient entrepreneurs. There are also concerns about the extent of patent and copyright use, as the development of knowledge becomes more “propertized” (owned) and less available for enhancement of the public knowledge base. They would at least like to see more thought to the public good being put into the type of research projects chosen; there is no need for universities to research cosmetic products when pharmaceutical companies will do that themselves. However, there is a great need to research AIDs vaccines and other types of less profitable items that would have a great deal of social benefit. The authors also see issues arising related to educational equity and access as schools pursue students who can pay regardless of whether they were inadequately served before. Examples of this include new professional programs and on-line programs that are targeted at working adults, theoretically taking resources from underserved populations. “The heavy attendance of low-income and minority students at community colleges is in part a reflection of the marketing strategies of elite colleges and universities” (p. 335). However it is difficult to make a strong case that resources are being taken away when there are far more low-income and minority students in higher education than at any time in the past. Finally, they see less interaction with the community as institutions expand their focus to the global market. Slaughter and Rhoades touch on the replacement of full-time faculty with part-time and contingent faculty, turning over the bulk of the teaching to those who have fewer vested interests and are not as stably involved with the institution. These faculty also are given fewer resources and are less available to students. In addition, the extensive growth of middle management, specifically “managerial non-faculty professionals who manage infrastructure, economic development, endowment, and entrepreneurial activities” (p. 332), is less focused on what they see as the core mission of the university, teaching and instruction. The authors see a core shift in why students come to college and the mission of the institution. “The idea of a college or university as a space for public discussion, debate, commentary, and critique is pushed to the background. Instead, colleges and universities focus increasingly on preparing students for new economy employment” (p. 333). Again, the question comes to mind as to whether these concepts cannot be accomplished concurrently. There is nothing inherent in a program directed toward gainful employment that silences debate or critique; rather the opposite as more companies list communication skills and problem-solving skills as critical for employees. The authors place much of the blame for the presented problems on a set of changing societal values. They write about a state that “focuses not on social welfare for the citizenry as a whole but on enabling individuals as economic actors. To that end … states move resources from social welfare to production functions” (p. 20). This is one of the classic objections to neoliberal economics and as such is an ideology as much as an argument. The counter is that by moving resources to production we make the resources available in the future to improve social welfare. Which ideology is more convincing is left to the reader. While obviously concerned about these issues, the authors are also realistic. They see a change from what, at the time of the Slaughter and Leslie book, was referred to as the profit motive “encroaching” on institutions to it having become embedded. They understand that academic capitalism is unlikely to go away and does have some potential benefits if implemented with more care. A change in focus from pure monetary profit to one of social profit and advancement could go a long way toward addressing many of their concerns, as could bringing the global economic focus back to a local one through programs that address local issues (e.g., combining ESL and computer technology classes, as they suggest). The authors do miss some of the efforts to educate faculty about these issues and their rights that organizations such as the Association of American Universities and the Associations of Research Libraries have started. They portray faculty as often oblivious to the changes when in many cases they are driving them. They also miss the point that it is only through providing faculty the opportunity to be entrepreneurs and get some personal gain from their research that the same faculty have stayed within the academy rather than left for private industry. This could even be to society’s benefit since the faculty are then available to train new generations of researchers. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy is a very thorough, nuanced coverage of the issues but not at all accessible to the average reader. Between the off-putting and confusing vocabulary (ranging from neologisms such as “marketizing,” “propertized,” and the like) to esoteric terms (such as “academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime” and “neoliberal state”) and the dry tone (broken up with the occasional economics pun just to see if the reader is still paying attention) this would be a slow and difficult read for a nonacademic. Given the importance to the academy of the issues it presents, one hopes eventually to see a more treatment of these issues that can appeal to a wider audience. References Castells, M. (1996 - 2000). The information age: Economy, society and culture. Volumes 1 - 3. Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishers. Delany, J. E. (1997). "Commercialism in Intercollegiate Athletics." Educational Record, 78(1): 39-44. Dill, D. D. (1997). "Higher Education Markets and Public Policy." Higher Education Policy 10(3-4): 167-185. Etzkowitz, H., A. Webster, P. Healy (Eds.). (1998). Capitalizingknowledge: New interactions of industry and academe. Albany, NY, SUNY Press. Kirp, D. (2003). Shakespeare, Einstein and the bottom line: The marketing of higher education. Boston, MA, Harvard University Press Slaughter, S. and Leslie. L. L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sperber, M. (2000). Beer and Circus:How Big-time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. New York, NY, Henry Holt & Company. Soley, L. (1995). Leasing the ivory tower: The corporate takeover of academia. Boston, MA, South End Press. About the Reviewer Rebecca Barber is a PhD student in the Education Leadership and Policy Studies program at Arizona State University. Her research interests include the economics of higher education, the transition from secondary to post-secondary education, and the businesses that surround and profit from education at all levels. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Freire, Paulo. (2004). Pedagogy of Indignation. Reviewed by Ramin Farahmandpur, Portland State University

Freire, Paulo. (2004). Pedagogy of Indignation. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. pp. 129 $18.95   ISBN 1594510512 Reviewed by Ramin Farahmandpur Portland State University January 11, 2006 Throughout his life and in his work as an organic intellectual and a philosopher, Paulo Freire fought fiercely against social oppression and injustices. Since the publication of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire’s work has profoundly influenced and shaped the way in which teachers and educators frame political and ideological questions concerning teaching and learning in their classrooms. There is no question that the ethical and moral dimensions of Freirean pedagogy has inspired and motivated a new generation of educators and activists to courageously defend democratic principles, values and practices in their classrooms and schools against the neoliberal onslaught in an age marked by terror, fear and permanent war. Freire’s final book, Pedagogy of Indignation, is composed of a series of pedagogical letters in which he explores the importance of education in the struggle to build a democratic society. The book, primarily intended for students, parents and educators, begins with a discussion on the inevitability of change. Freire believes that change and mobility are defining characteristics and traits of culture and history. He writes that in the absence of change there is no culture or history. Freire argues that change can be understood only in relationship to risk. Without risks, change is impossible. Thus, for Freire, making history and culture involves taking risks. However, Freire warns against taking spontaneous risks. Instead, he encourages educators to take risks; risks informed and guided by a study of history, politics and culture. Freire sees human beings as a “presence in the world.” He writes that taking risks is an essential characteristic of our “existing being.” He believes that education, both as a political and ideological activity, also involves change and risk. Our presence in the world is not a neutral presence. As political and ideological beings, we are compelled to take a stance toward the world. As Freire notes: “Nobody can be in the world, with the world, and with others in a neutral manner”(p. 60). Thus, for Freire “being” is a being in the world. Freire sees history impregnated with possibility and hope. However, to make that possibility tangible, he believes that we must actively engage and intervene in the world. What does ‘being in the world’ entail? Freire suggests that our presence in the world is not to adapt to it, but to transform it. Freire emphasizes that adapting to the world is only process—a temporary phase—toward intervening and transforming the world. Thus, adaptation is a “moment in the process of intervention”(p. 34). In addition, Freire believes that we live in an ethical world. Our ideological and political orientation forces us to make moral and ethical decisions. Our actions have a universal dimension. ‘Being in the world’ means recognizing our responsibilities and our commitments towards others human beings in the world. For Freire, human beings are both subjects and objects of history. In other words, he believes that although the forces of history shape our past and present, we can change the course of history, and in the process make history. As Freire puts it, “the future does not make us, we make ourselves in the struggle to make it”(p. 34). Freire asserts that we can break away from the chains of history passed down to us from previous generations and make our own history. In short, Freire acknowledges that human beings are conditioned by history, but he refuse to accept that they are determined by it because for Freire history is possibility. Freire maintains that a critical reading of the world involves denouncing the existing oppression and injustices in the world. At the same time, it involves announcing the possibility of a more humane and just world. Thus, Freire sees the pedagogical act of reading the world as a dialectical process involving denouncing the existing world and announcing the possibility of a new world. For Freire, reading the world is both a pedagogical-political and a political-pedagogical undertaking. Denouncing the world is an act that involves criticizing, protesting and struggling against domination and domestication. On the other hand, the act of announcing a new world entails hope, possibility and envisioning a new democratic society. Elsewhere, Freire makes an important distinction between the role of education for helping students develop critical thinking skills and education for training and preparation of students for the workforce. He cautions us against reducing education to a set of techniques or skills. Freire believes that education is a tool that can be employed to “make and remake” ourselves. Education, as Freire conceives it, involves knowing that you know, and knowing that you don’t know. Education involves developing a “critical curiosity” and a radical reorientation toward the world. The final chapter of Freire’s book ends on a high note. Freire offers a social and political reinterpretation of prophecy. He writes that “prophetic thought” involves examining, analyzing and reflecting upon our social, cultural, political and historical circumstances. It requires us to learn to question the world by cultivating an “epistemological curiosity.” Freire explains that prophets are those who muster the courage to imagine, dream and struggle toward building the foundations of a new democratic society. Prophets are those who are willing to be a “presence” in the world, and are prepared to critically engage in reading the word and the world. It is worth quoting Freire at length: Thinking of tomorrow is thus engaging in prophecy, except that the prophet in this case is not an old man with a long and gray beard, with lively open eyes and stave in hand, hardly concerned about his attire, preaching incensed words. On the contrary, the prophets here are those who are founded in what they see, hear, apprehend, in what they understand, who are rooted in their epistemological curiosity exercise alert to signs they seek to comprehend, supported in their reading of the world and of words new and old, which is the base of how and how much expose themselves, thus becoming more and more a presence in the world at a par with their time. (p. 104) Some educators may be disappointed to find that Freire’s book does not offer a blueprint or a ‘how to’ manual for social change. That was never Freire’s intention. Freirean pedagogy is not a discreet set of prescribed methods, doctrines or practices that provides teachers quick and easy solutions to problems and challenges they may face in their classrooms. Freire’s main goal was to help educators recognize and link the moral, ethical and political dimensions of education to their daily teaching and learning practices in their classrooms. Freirean pedagogy is a praxis-oriented pedagogy in which there is a dialectical relationship between theory and practice, and action and reflection. Freirean pedagogy provides us with a toolbox (a set of analytical skills, theoretical vocabulary, and practices) that enables us to decode, deconstruct and name the world. And by naming the world, we can take action to intervene and transform the world. About the Reviewer Ramin Farahmandpur is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy, Foundations and Administrative Studies at Portland State University. His interests include critical pedagogy and multicultural education. He is the co-author of Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, (2005). Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Henderson, James G. and Kesson, Kathleen R. (2004). Curriculum Wisdom: Educational Decisions in Democratic Societies. Reviewed by Laurel K. Chehayl, Kent State University

Henderson, James G. and Kesson, Kathleen R. (2004). Curriculum Wisdom: Educational Decisions in Democratic Societies. Upper Saddle River, NJ and Columbus, OH: Merrill/Prentice Hall. pp. iii + 228 $32.67 (paperback)   ISBN 0-13-111819-6 Reviewed by Laurel K. Chehayl Kent State University January 14, 2006 In the current educational environment in the United States, high stakes testing and accountability are paramount in prevailing legislation. It is almost common knowledge among U.S. educators and citizens alike that No Child Left Behind has in place a variety of tools to measure and evaluate students, teachers and schools across the country. Many politicians and educational legislators tout the virtues of these laws and are standing devoutly behind them. Perhaps consequently, much of the general citizenry also looks favorably upon No Child Left Behind and its concerted effort to standardize education. On the other hand, numerous educators across the country, many firmly dedicated to and immersed in student-centered reflective practice and democratic curriculum studies, do not. Inherent flaws in the institutionalized standardized curriculum supported by the legislation may concern them. James Henderson and Kathleen Kesson are two such educators. This review will examine their book, entitled Curriculum Wisdom Educational Decisions in Democratic Societies, in which Henderson and Kesson extrapolate their grounded observations and beliefs about current U.S. curricular decision-making and present a viable alternative to the reader for consideration. I will begin with an overview of the text and a summary of their seven modes of inquiry designed to scaffold curriculum inquiry. I will then examine the strengths and weaknesses of the book, and finally its potential uses for those engaged in contemporary curriculum decision-making. In Curriculum Wisdom, James Henderson and Kathleen Kesson invite the reader on a journey of considerate reflection. They purport that the inherent purpose of curriculum decision making is to create for teachers and students a learning environment that embodies what the authors identify as the “democratic good life” (p. 12). After briefly examining the current condition of U.S. curriculum and curriculum-decision making, they offer a constructive alternate curriculum decision-making framework from what they identify as a “wisdom” orientation. They ground their work and the wisdom orientation in three foundational assumptions. Prefacing the book, the authors write Curriculum workers who adopt a wisdom orientation are…challenging themselves To consider the “good conduct” and “enduring values” implications and consequences of their decision; To think about the relationship between educational means and ends; and To engage in sophisticated practical reasoning (Henderson and Kesson, 22004, p. ix). The authors first take a cursory yet critical look at the condition of predominantly institutionalized U.S. curriculum decision-making and pose for the reader cogent concerns about the challenges facing the democratic ideals of U.S. society. They concisely suggest to the reader that institutionalized curriculum decision making does not nurture or support democratic living in U.S. public schools. They also offer the reader a succinct definition of curriculum wisdom. “The concept curriculum wisdom”, Henderson and Kesson write, “…(is) a concise way to convey the subtle and complex challenges of approaching curriculum work as envisioning and enacting a good educational journey” (p. 4, emphasis in original). They lay emphasis on the charge for those who seek to engage in curriculum wisdom oriented decision making to remain focused on “envisioning” a democratic good life and “enacting” those significant visions. Too often, they observe, educators get lost in our often rigid and doctrinaire educational goals and objectives, losing sight of the significant and humane purpose of their work. Henderson and Kesson explain, “[e]nvisioning and enacting are incomplete without each other. When in play, they constitute ‘the Tao of curriculum wisdom’” (p. 47). The authors do not belabor the perceived weakness of institutionalized curriculum, but instead focus the attentions of the reader on the wisdom orientation they posit. Further expanding on the definition of curriculum wisdom, Henderson and Kesson offer for their readers the “5C’s of wise curriculum judgments: collaboration, character, challenge, and calling” (p. 12). It is through these 5C’s, they posit, that curriculum decision makers can remain focused on securing the democratic good life for themselves and their students. They encourage curriculum decision-makers to rise to the considerable challenge of maintaining reflective self-awareness while thoughtfully and compassionately working together with diverse others. Through their explanation of the 5Cs, the authors provide for the reader a more clearly articulated examination of the multifaceted curriculum wisdom approach from an experiential point of view. They expand upon the idea of curriculum wisdom as a way of life, or more personal approach to curriculum decision-making for the democratic good. The authors readily acknowledge that approaching curriculum from the wisdom perspective for the purpose of achieving democratic education is neither easily nor immediately mastered. Instead it is a considerable challenge. They write, “[b]ecause democracy is an interpretive term – because it has many meanings that are not anchored in any specific moral doctrine – the decision-making process must necessarily be multifaceted. Problem solvers must be playfully light on their feet,” (p. 12). Furthering their position, they cite for the reader several foundational curriculum ideas that are in keeping with this multifaceted playfulness. For example, they touch upon Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery and Taubman’s (1995) “complicated conversation” and Schwab’s (1978) “eclectic artistry”, to firmly under gird the notion that curriculum decision-making for the democratic good is an exercise in patience and deliberation. Chapter three is the logistical heart of approaching curriculum decision making from the wisdom orientation. Embedded in a holographic map, Henderson and Kesson introduce what they identify as the 7 modes of inquiry foundational to curriculum decision making from a wisdom orientation. The map pictured in the book, intended to convey the non-linear, recursive and hermeneutic wisdom approach to considering curriculum, unfortunately does not achieve its end. I believe the authors would have better served the reader had they simply omitted the figure of the map and instead allowed readers to imagine the image for ourselves. That aside, the text gives the reader a firm and clear grasp on the 7 modes of inquiry. In sum, the 7 modes include: Techné: the concrete skills or abilities involved in creation; Poesis: the meaningful and soulful characteristics of creation; Praxis: the reflective interplay between knowledge and action; Dialogos: the construction of understanding through various perspectives; Phronesis: deliberative, moral and considerate decision making; Polis: a fluid interplay between political and ethical issues; and Theoria: rooted in the concept of “theory; envisioning possibilities and inquiring for the democratic good. While this truncated explanation of the 7 modes of inquiry does not fully express their complexities and value, it does serve to provide a clear and concise picture of their distinct overarching purpose. They are intended to provide for the reader a guide to embark upon curriculum decision making from a wisdom orientation. By remaining conscious and considerate of these modes, or using them as a guide to evoke democratic curricular decisions, the reader may find his or her way to the wisdom orientation. According to Henderson and Kesson, the 7 modes of inquiry are always present in every curriculum decision; it is their predominance that varies. In addition, the modes do no exist in isolation of one another. Again, even though the map may give some the impression that one cycles through the 7 modes during the decision making process, the modes are not intended to be perceived as situated in a linear fashion. They should not be taken as a step-by-step guide to decision making. The 7 modes of inquiry ebb and flow, fluidly dancing their way through the decision making process. The authors even confess that it may appear artificial to separate them. To this end, Henderson and Kesson state “…it is useful to have a deep understanding of the parts to better understand the whole, but now that we have separated these modes of inquiry out for analytical purposes, it is time to put them back together again” (p. 63). After this close examination, they proceed to give concrete suggestions for employing the 7 modes of inquiry to scaffold thinking and implementing a curriculum wisdom approach to curricular decision-making. It is through the candid reflections of practitioners that the significance of the wisdom approach is elucidated. Curriculum Wisdom includes many authentic personal narratives written by teachers and administrators. The authors have also included three commentaries that examine curriculum wisdom from an international perspective. Taking a wisdom approach to curriculum decision-making is, of course, to benefit the students in the classroom. The authors could have presented the effects of the wisdom orientation by describing hypothetical or intended outcomes. Instead, they wisely chose to demonstrate the potential of applying the wisdom orientation to curriculum decision-making through practitioners’ actual experience. Authentic and understandable, these reflections read like they could be written by at teacher or administrator in the reader’s hometown. They bring genuine and personable depth to the book with sincere practitioner language and thoughts. Additionally, Henderson and Kesson are fully cognizant of the fact that this approach to curriculum decision-making may not resonate with everyone. To this end, they candidly address that curriculum wisdom oriented decision-making may present challenges for practitioners. They not only elucidate these challenges, but also again scaffold them with real-life examples from curriculum decision-makers. All in all, Curriculum Wisdom is relatively easy to understand. Entry into the prevailing ideas of the text is smooth; the authors clearly articulate their understanding of the contemporary institutionalized curriculum decision-making process. While a deep examination of the current state of curriculum decision-making by the authors in this text might have been excessively time consuming and redundant for many, it is important for the reader to have a relatively firm grasp of current institutionalized and standards based curricular decision making practices when making entrance to this text. Should a reader lack this understanding, the heart and purpose of the text may prove to be especially, albeit not completely, elusive. Henderson and Kesson draw the reader in to Curriculum Wisdom with a defensible argument for their idea that the decision making process is in need of reexamination. The terminology throughout the book appears easily accessible to practitioners at every level, and the reflective narratives give the wisdom approach the authentic clarity most necessary for understanding. In addition, the authors take the time to deliberately and clearly explain concepts and words that may be unfamiliar to the reader. For example, to illustrate the shift from one curricular decision making orientation to another, the authors explain paradigmatic shifts. While I personally was already familiar with the notion of paradigm shifts, I found their explanation to be a useful review of the concept that was neither oversimplified nor condescending to the reader. Curriculum Wisdom does, however, pose for the reader some distinct challenges. First, as stated earlier, the holographic map of the 7 modes of inquiry is difficult for the reader to envision in the way that the authors intend. Instead, my own thinking was ensnared as I attempted to understand the map itself instead of its significant and central purpose in the text. Frankly, though, I am hard-pressed to conceive of a viable alternative. For this reason I would suggest that a reader not struggle at length to grasp the map presented, and instead imagine or construct a map for his or her own use. To some readers, a map of the 7 modes of inquiry may serve little if any purpose. Second, the wisdom orientation may be illusive to those practitioners who are unfamiliar with various existing approaches to curriculum decision-making and curriculum studies at large. While Henderson and Kesson make an effort to examine problems present in contemporary institutionalized curriculum decision-making practice, they do not fully explain to the reader what exactly that process entails. It is necessary upon entering the text to possess an at least cursory understanding of how curriculum decisions are made in U.S. public schools at large. Additionally, the authors have chose not to address other curriculum decision making points of reference that may serve as intermediaries between institutionalized curriculum and a wisdom orientation, such as constructivist best practice. It may be difficult for some readers to make the potentially significant conceptual leap from institutionalized curriculum as standards and benchmarks handed down from state departments of education to a wisdom orientation. For these reasons, as an instructor of preservice teachers, I believe this book would not work well as a singular text in the undergraduate classroom. To engage preservice teachers in the Curriculum Wisdom text, it is first necessary to closely examine contemporary institutionalized curriculum decision-making, as well as other orientations. Before engaging in the wisdom orientation, preservice and practicing teachers, as well as other curriculum decision-makers, must have a relatively firm grasp of what curriculum decisions are and how they are made. With this exceptionally important scaffolding in place, however, there is great value to employing this book in the teacher preparatory classroom. I firmly believe that Curriculum Wisdom is an invaluable asset to the current conversation of curriculum decision-making. I am in keeping with the authors’ opinion that institutionalized curriculum decision-making in the U.S. today is in desperate need of close examination and restructuring. In this book, Henderson and Kesson deliberately and clearly pose for the readers a viable alternative to contemporary institutionalized curriculum decision-making. They embed within their ideas the authentic and sincere voices of practitioners who have chosen to subscribe to the wisdom orientation and subsequently negotiated their curriculum decision making from that perspective. Much to their credit, Henderson and Kesson do not propose that the reader in any way disregard or disengage in today’s curriculum conversation. Nor does their wisdom orientation exclude or isolate individuals from that conversation. Instead, the authors thoughtfully invite all readers -- including but not limited to teachers, administrators, and legislators – to reconsider the way practitioners and others approach and consider important curriculum decisions in the U.S. Like the democratic decision making process they present to the reader, Henderson and Kesson have created a text is in all ways inclusive; Curriculum Wisdom addresses a broad spectrum of reasons that readers may engage in the wisdom orientation, as well as clear and supportive guidance to navigate that engagement. Furthermore, unlike some other books in the field that propose change in almost vehement battle cries, Curriculum Wisdom approaches reexamining contemporary curriculum practice one school at a time, or even at the individual level. This book gives voice to a conversation that I believe has been quietly uttered in the minds of practitioners across the country that have felt the marginalization of their students by the institutionalized curriculum. Its distinct and significant purpose is to provide for the reader a viable alternative to passive acceptance of the contemporary institutionalized curriculum, and scaffold the journey to achieve that end. Once more accentuating that I think it is necessary for the reader to have or pursue the aforementioned background knowledge to authentically engage in the text, I believe this book may serve as a valuable tool in teacher preparatory undergraduate and graduate classrooms. I imagine it would be most useful to an instructor or facilitator that has the time and inclination to also support students as they examine the seminal writings that ground Curriculum Wisdom. While Henderson and Kesson cite many curriculum theorists to establish and support their position, the foundational work of Dewey, Schwab, and Kegan are significantly complementary. This book gives rise to the reality of theory; it constructs a working model for practitioners to bring valuable but at times logistically illusive theory to life in curriculum decision-making. Most importantly, Curriculum Wisdom is a firm and reasonable starting point for one teacher, a faculty or administrative body to begin a conversation on how to reorient their practice to a lifelong deliberative journey of democratic, wisdom oriented curriculum decision making. About the Reviewer Laurel K. Chehayl Prior to engaging in her doctoral studies, Laurel Chehayl taught high school English and language arts, public speaking, drama, and journalism for six years. She is currently writing her dissertation, a qualitative study centered on how preservice secondary teachers consider urban schools and navigate an early urban field placement. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.