Meltzer, Lynn. (Ed.) (2007) Executive Function in Education: From Theory to Practice. Reviewed by John Geake, Oxford Brookes University, UK

Meltzer, Lynn. (Ed.) (2007) Executive Function in Education: From Theory to Practice.New York: Guilford Publications 320 pp.     ISBN-10 1-59385-428-5 (paper cover)     ISBN-13-978-1-59385-428-7 (hard cover) Reviewed by John Geake Oxford Brookes University, UK November 20, 2007 This book is a collection of informative, provoking and sometimes-disparate thoughts about the critical issue of executive functioning in education. ‘Critical’, because executive functioning, often referred to in the past as ‘cognitive control’, enables metacognition, the basis of education’s decades-long preoccupation with process over product. ‘Disparate’ because executive functioning can be conceptualised both pragmatically and theoretically at levels of behaviour, cognition and neural function, where research evidence at any one level offers ambiguous support at best for the constructs at another. A major difficulty is that executive functioning as an over-arching concept can be so easily partitioned observationally, psychometrically and experimentally, presumably reflecting our limited understanding of how the brain enables us to plan and execute the myriad cognitive tasks, including learning in formal institutions, which it does everyday. Partitioning behaviour does not map easily on to the various schemes to partition its underlying cognition, and these in turn do not map easily on to the available (albeit sparse) evidence of how executive functioning is partitioned in the brain. Unsurprisingly, then, the chapters in this volume do not explicitly inter-relate, or employ any single over-arching conceptual framework, but this is, perhaps ironically, a considerable strength. Through its divergent presentations, the book demonstrates the breadth of current understanding about executive functioning, together with the conceptual insecurities and conflicts, and evidential ambiguities and lacunae which characterise our present limited understanding of executive function. Whereas it is known that executive functioning as a brain process involves the activation of the prefrontal cortex, exactly how this is act of coordination is done is still a matter of conjecture (Gray, Chabris & Braver, 2003). Little wonder then that at the cognitive level, there as many ways to cut the cake as there are theorists wielding knives. For example, executive functioning is defined in Chapter 5 as involving “planning – organizing – prioritising – shifting – memorizing – checking”, whereas in Chapter 11, the required components are “activation, orchestration, monitoring, evaluation and adaptation.” Contrast the more parsimonious approach in Chapter 2, where executive functioning is simply a matter of “hill – skill –will”, or in Chapter 7 where overcoming deficits in executive functioning requires focus on “situation – action – outcome.” As conference delegates often quip: “Theoretical models are like toothbrushes – everyone has one but nobody wants to use anybody else’s!” However, this makes the professed aim of this volume - to explore and articulate optimal executive functioning strategies for academic success - all the more laudable. It is only with such educational aims to the fore can cognitive neuroscience progress towards relevant classroom applications. The Editor, Lynn Meltzer, is an internationally renowned researcher in SEN; her extensive experience in this area of education is reflected in the organisation and selection of contributions. The book is divided into three sections: Part I (Chapters 1 – 4) on theoretical frameworks; Part II (Chapters 5 – 7) on executive dysfunction in diagnostic groups; and Part III (Chapters 8 – 13) on pedagogic interventions to enhance executive function processing in educational settings. To begin Part I, Denkla (Chapter 1) provides a brief but cogent overview of the field, albeit with a strong ADHD and general learning disabilities filter, in which she presents some germane neuroscientific evidence for how executive functioning might be instantiated in the brain. This chapter deserves close attention by anyone venturing into this field. Denkla rightly points out that to equate executive functioning with prefrontal cortical functioning is to commit a category error, but she also notes that with the range of individual differences in neural development that she is familiar with, the phenomenon of high variance in executive functioning within an age cohort should not be surprising. Nonetheless, as valuable an introduction as this is, it is perhaps a pity that more of the neuroscience was not reviewed here, as several of the following chapters refer to brain functioning but without informative specificity. In particular, as perhaps the key aspect of executive function, working memory, which as a construct crosses the cognitive-neural boundary, deserves more attention throughout the book. Functional neuroimaging studies have shown that the functional neural correlates of working memory lie in the prefrontal cortex (Rypma et al, 1999). Consistently, structural neuroimaging studies have revealed individual differences in prefrontal cortical structures which correlate positively with differences in working memory capacity (Haier et al, 2004). Consequently, an argument could be mounted that working memory efficacy rather than executive functioning writ large could make a more tractable target for classroom improvement (Geake, 2007). The other chapters in Part I present a variety of conceptual perspectives. Chapter 2 seems curiously mis-named “Executive Functioning from a Multiple Intelligences Perspective“ since the authors (Moran and Gardner) argue that executive functioning is the sole preserve of intrapersonal intelligence, to the exclusion of the other hypothesised MIs. Chapter 3 makes the important point for education that executive functioning in children has a dynamic trajectory: throughout these early stages of the life span there is significant growth and development of the prefrontal cortex (Shaw et al, 2006), the most important area of the brain for executive functioning. Fisher and Daley note in Chapter 4 that executive functioning is not unitary, consisting of “independent but loosely coupled” sub-components. Therein lies the problem for neuroscientists, who are necessarily constrained to use stimuli from cognitive modelling in their neuroimaging experiments. For example, one study of the superior lateral prefrontal cortex concludes that this area seems to be involved in higher-order spatial processing within executive functioning, except when there is a high working load when it reverts to load-monitoring (Boisguenheneuc et al, 2006). But an earlier study of the same area suggests that its primary purpose is task inhibition (Konishi et al, 2003). It’s all very puzzling. Part II of Meltzer’s book is on executive dysfunction, and is the most solid section, mainly because executive dysfunction seems better operationalised, if not better understood, than executive functioning. Children with executive dysfunction are reliably diagnosed with a battery of validated neuropsychological tests which are predictive of observed behaviour, an approach notably progressed by Luria and the Russia Troika more than half a century ago. The chapters in Part II, along with Chapter 1, Chapter 10, and the closing Chapter 13, cover learning difficulties attributable to executive dysfunction. Chapter 7 argues that autistic spectrum disorders can also arise from executive dysfunction, although one could question the relative juxtaposition of cause and effect. Of course absence of dysfunction is not the same as the presence of efficacious function. Not that any of the authors is claiming that, but some evidence from the positive side of the ledger, such as gifted students whose executive functioning seems to enable then to enjoy comparatively effortless academic success, could be enlightening (a passing mention of high abilities in the Chapter 12 notwithstanding). The chapters in Part II are enriched by first person anecdotes from some of the authors’ referrals, so could chapters from the other Parts have possibly been enriched by anecdotes from gifted students? As it stands, the book could almost have been entitled Executive Dysfunction in Education without too much loss of intent. Part III gets to the nub – application. Although Meltzer, Pollica and Barzillai in Chapter 8 argue the case for curriculum-specific manifestations of executive functioning, it is in this section that it particularly seems a pity that the authors could not have seen drafts of the other chapters, and have been encouraged to make some substantive links. For example, Chapter 12 valuably considers meta-cognition over Grades 1 to 8, but without the neuro-developmental perspective provided by Chapters 3 and 4. Hence one might quibble that claims in Chapter 12 of how the brain works would be more accurately expressed as how the mind works. This is not a trivial quibble. In moving through the book from the lab (Part I) to the classroom (Part III) perspective, there is a noticeable conceptual shift along a spectrum of deliberation. Chapter 11 defines executive functioning as “conscious and purposeful”, whereas in neuroscience (as summarised in Chapter 1), executive functioning is regarded largely as being unconscious. There seems to be some confusion of executive functioning with meta-cognition, and what are and are not candidates for teacher-led intervention. In this regard, compared with its companions, Chapter 11 on mathematics is quite idiosyncratic, and disappointingly there is no mention of the post-TIMS studies on metacognitive strategies in Japanese mathematics classrooms. And having covered the 3-Rs, is there is anything to be said about executive functioning in non-3R curriculum areas such as science, or music, or visual art, as there are no chapters on these? Moreover, it would be interesting to see where the Baddeley model of working memory and/or the neuroimaging evidence for prefrontal cortical involvement in executive functioning fit into the various recommendations in Part III for teaching metacognition. Certainly the limited evidence for neural dissociations of some working memory processes raises the question of whether targeted educational interventions could improve these various components of working memory function for all children. For example, Miyake et al (2000) investigated the fractionation of executive functions, with three separable but moderately correlated attributes: mental set shifting, information updating and monitoring, and inhibition of pre-potent responses. Such fractionation of executive functioning in educational settings has been used to predict children’s mathematical ability (Bull & Scerif, 2001). Lower mathematical ability seems due to poor working memory affecting relevant goal setting and task switching, and lack of inhibition of irrelevant information. This dichotomy whereby differences in performance involves differences in strategies has been replicated in other studies; higher ability was due to reliance on constructive matching of information to task goal, whereas lower ability was due to limited matching of proximate information to task goal (Bunge et al, 2005). None of the above should be necessarily taken as negative criticism of this book, but rather indicative of how much this reviewer found the contributions to be stimulating. Although we don’t fully understand how working memory within executive functioning is fractionated or instantiated at a neural level, it has been suggested elsewhere that teachers and cognitive neuroscientists should join forces to research pedagogies to optimise working memory functioning, including: short term memory capacity; accessing appropriate LTM store; making creative connections; delaying closure; evaluating relevance; as a means of enhancing executive functioning in the classroom (Geake, 2007). Because it covers extant educational thinking about executive functioning without imposing a particular conceptual blinker, Meltzer's book Executive Function in Education is a good starting place for anyone, whether neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist or educator, to embark from on such research. References Boisgueheneuc, F. du, Levy, R., Volle, E., Seassau, M., Duffau, H., Kinkingnehun, S., Samson, Y., Zhang, S. & Dubois, B. (2006).Functions of the left superior frontal gyrus in humans: a lesion study. Brain, 129(12), 3315-3328. Bull, R. & Scerif, G. (2001). Executive functioning as a predictor of children’s mathematical ability: Inhibition, switching, and working memory. Developmental Neuropsychology, 19(3), 273-293. Bunge, S. A., Wendelken, C., Badre, D. & Wagner, A. D. (2005). Analogical reasoning and prefrontal cortex: Evidence for separable retrieval and integration mechanisms. Cerebral Cortex, 15(3), 239-249. Geake, J. (2007). Educating to optimise working memory function. Education-Line, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents.htm. Gray, J. R., Chabris, C. F. & Braver, T. S. (2003). Neural mechanisms of general fluid intelligence. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 316-322. Haier, R. J., Jung, R. E., Yeo, R. A., Head, K. & Alkire, M. T. (2004). Structural brain variation and general intelligence. NeuroImage, 23(1), 425-433. Konishi, S., Jimura, K., Asari, T. & Miyashita, Y. (2003). Transient activation of superior prefrontal cortex during inhibition of cognitive set. The Journal of Neuroscience, 23(21), 7776-7782. Miyake, A., Friedman, N., Emerson, M., Witzki, A., Howerter, A. & Wager, T. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex ‘frontal lobe’ tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41, 49-100. Rypma, B., Prabhakaran, V., Desmond, J. E., Glover, G. H. & Gabrieli, J. D. (1999). Load-dependent roles of frontal brain regions in the maintenance of working memory. NeuroImage, 9, 216-226. Shaw, P., Greenstein, D., Lerch, J., Clasen, L., Lenroot, R., Gogtay, N., Evans, A., Rapoport, J., & Giedd, J. (2006). Intellectual ability and cortical development in children and adolescents. Nature.440(7084), 676-679. About the reviewer John Geake, PhD, is University Professor of Education, Westminster Institute, Oxford Brookes University, UK, and member of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Oxford. His research interests focus on educational neuroscience. Dr Geake is the founding convenor of the Oxford Cognitive Neuroscience Education Forum (2001), an advisor to the House of Lords All Party Parliamentary Group on Science Research in Learning and Education, and a consultant on educational neuroscience to the United States National Science Foundation Science of Learning Centres Program.

Miller, John P. (2007). The holistic curriculum (2nd Ed.) Reviewed by Barbara Slater Stern, James Madison University

Miller, John P. (2007). The holistic curriculum (2nd Ed.) Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Pp. 200         ISBN 978-0-8020-9218-2 Reviewed by Barbara Slater Stern James Madison University November 30, 2007 Curriculum scholars and practitioners often struggle to define the field of curriculum. Is curriculum a learning program provided by the state to the teacher with goals, objectives, essential skills and knowledge clearly delineated? Is the curriculum everything that happens to a child from the time he or she leaves home in the morning until the time they return? Students of curriculum learn about the formal curriculum, the explicit curriculum, the latent curriculum, the para-curriculum, the co-curriculum, the extra-curriculum, the hidden curriculum, and the null curriculum. But, until I read The holistic curriculum I had not run across the concept of holistic curriculum as defined and explained by John P. Miller. In this text, Miller sets out first the context and then the practice of holistic curriculum centering it within the holistic education movement that he describes as both grassroots and global. (p. vii) What Miller is seeking is to “bring education into alignment with the fundamental realities of nature.” (p. 3) This means curriculum that is interrelated and dynamic and includes a spiritual dimension. Like many authors before him, Miller traces modern problems back to the Industrial Revolution (e.g., Emerson, Whitman, the Frontier Thinkers of the 1920s-30s, etc). The first chapter echoes these authors by discussing the fragmentation that modern life contains: compartmentalization, standardization and a separation of people from their natural world. Miller believes this fragmentation moves beyond just the world of work to the daily activities of people in their communities citing substance abuse, increasing amounts of violence, and a general lack of connectedness of people to their lives. He also cites an internal lack of connectedness in a spiritual sense including a lack of shared meaning and values. (p. 4) Miller then links this fragmentation with our educational system stating: “We divide knowledge into subjects, units, and lessons. Yet students can often not see the relationship between these subjects, the relationship between facts within a subject, or the relevance of the subject to their own lives.” (p. 4) He goes on to discuss the tremendous transitions we are undergoing as a society: social and political. Although he does not mention it at this point, I would certainly add economic transitions to his explanation of change. The answer to this fragmentation will be holistic education which contains three basic principles: balance, inclusion and connection. (p.6) By using the familiar yin and yang diagram, Miller describes what would bring balance to the classroom by working with pairs of concepts: individual/group; content/process; knowledge/imagination; rational/intuitive; quantitative/qualitative assessment; technique/vision; assessment/learning; and technology/program. (pp 6-9) Each of these pairs represents the yin and the yang. As he describes what each pair of terms represents, the middle way would be the way to find balance in the curriculum That is, since Western education frequently focuses on the individual, content, knowledge, rational, quantitative, technique, assessment and technology side of the scale, this book focuses on adding the group, process, imagination, qualitative, vision, learning and program. Further clarification of holistic education is illustrated through circle diagrams that categorize education as transmission, transaction or transformation. (pp. 10-13) Transmission is the most traditional with knowledge broken down and presented in a behavioral format. Transaction focuses on dialogue with presentation as problem-solving or inquiry approach. The scientific method is the way the student would approach acquisition of knowledge. The holistic educator seeks the third category, the transformation position. The focus is not only on the acquisition of content and skills, but also on the development of the whole person. Methodology includes creative problem solving, cooperative learning and integrating the arts seeking deeper connections that “make learning more personally and socially meaningful to the student.” (p. 12) The learner needs to make connections/relationships in multiple areas such as: linear thinking and intuition; mind and body; domains of knowledge; self and community; self and the earth; self and the soul. (pp. 13-14) Part I continues with chapters 2-4, where the definition of holistic curriculum is deepened by exploring the philosophic, psychological, and social context. First, the perennial philosophy provides the foundation for holistic curriculum. This is not only based on Western philosophy traced back to the Ancient Greeks but also includes Eastern thought including the Upanishads, the Tao te Ching and the teachings of Buddha. (p. 16) Miller sums up his beliefs about the perennial philosophy with five statements: There is an interconnectedness of reality and a mysterious unity (e.g., Huxley’s divine reality) in the universe. There is an intimate connection between the individual’s inner self, or soul, and this mysterious unity. Knowledge of this mysterious unity can be developed through various contemplative practices. Values are derived from seeing and realizing the interconnectedness of reality. This realization can lead to social activity designed to counter injustice and human suffering. (pp 17-18) These statements are crucial to understanding holistic curriculum as they underlie the rest of the book. It is important to note that as part of these beliefs, it is impossible to separate religion from politics as people live out their beliefs through their actions. Thus, you cannot separate spirituality from education. That moves the reader to the psychological context. Following the three positions described above, transmission is behavioral, located in the body and focused on behavior. Transaction is cognitive, located in the mind and focused on intelligence. Transformation is transpersonal, located in the soul and focused on wisdom. (p. 25) Miller then moves to a discussion of conceptions of the soul in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Indigenous Religions. (pp. 26-34) This is followed by a discussion of Jungian psychology and an introduction to psychosynthesis as a way of finding our “transpersonal self.” (p. 35) Chapter 4 on the social context labels the transmission position as laissez-faire economics, the transaction position as rational planning, and the transformation position as an interdependent position. (pp. 47-53) This interdependence is ecological, geographical (bioregions), human scale, committed to non-violent change, and androgynous. This chapter concludes that holistic education “attempts to facilitate the development of the whole person including the ego. One way of seeing life is a dance between our ego and our soul.” (p. 45) By the time I had gotten this far in the book I had many questions. The first were philosophical and related to Miller’s explanation of perennial philosophy. While I appreciate Miller’s definition as it enabled me to know exactly how he was using the philosophy, I have not seen any standard books on perennialism that would delineate the philosophy in this fashion. Surely perennialsim includes a belief in universal truth, but I am unsure that values are always revealed either through contemplation or by seeing and realizing the interconnectedness of reality in this world view. Traditionally these values are revealed through dialogue (Plato) and Socratic questioning. My second question has to do with the choice to put religious explanations in the psychology rather than the philosophy chapter. I found that an interesting and somewhat controversial placement as many religions define themselves as philosophical belief systems. Then, I read Miller’s discussion of the soul in Judaism and alarm bells went off in my head—it just did not sound correct or like anything I had ever encountered in my religious education. Thus, I called a rabbi and I asked if the explanation given about Moses and the burning bush made sense. (p. 28) The answer I received was that while the rest of the material in the Judaism section—about the Kabbalah—could be acceptable, the material on Moses was not a plausible explanation for anyone who is Jewish. My third question concerns the confounding of social context with economics by labeling the transmission position as laissez-faire and the transactive position as rational planning. While Marxists would not separate the social, political and economic, I found these section headings passed off as social context problematic. This was followed by my question about the statement “It was the Roman empire’s lack of ecological sense that was mainly responsible for the Sahara Desert." (p. 50) So I headed for Google and quickly found that scientists now believe that the earth’s axis tilted causing the appearance of the Sahara desert around the time of the Roman Empire. Additionally I found articles that indicated that the Romans were aware of conservation issues and did not seriously degrade their environment in Africa. I also found that the broad statements by which ideas are categorized raised further questions. Are we to believe that only transformative education believes in social justice, non-violent change, or the importance of the environment? Or, that androgyny is simply a metaphor for wholeness. The chart on pages 62 & 63 delineating the concepts underlying the three positions (transmission, transaction and transformation) was so oversimplified that while I appreciated the need to separate (fragment) the concepts to promote understanding, the balance the author says he is seeking is clearly missing. And, while none of these concerns directly hinged on my broad focus with the concept of the holistic curriculum, I did start to become far more skeptical about what I was reading. Chapter 5 ends this Part I with a discussion of the historical background of holistic education. This chapter was particularly interesting in its choice of educators who were included and those who were omitted. To a reader unfamiliar with several of the educators discussed, their inclusion was welcome and interesting, e.g., rarely is either Leo Tolstoy listed as an educator or is Bronson Alcott studied in this manner. In summing up Part One, I could not help but think about other educators whom I have been studying, including Harold Rugg and Donald Oliver. Oliver would be a prime example of someone who moved from the transactive position (Harvard Social Studies Project/Public Issues Series) into systems thinking, process philosophy, and the work of Alfred Whitehead. Oliver’s Education and community: A radical critique of innovative schooling (1976) focused on many of the same issues that Miller sees as so crucial to understanding the current state of humankind and what will be needed to heal and move forward. Oliver's work would agree wholeheartedly with the transformation position described by Miller but not mentioned in this chapter. Part Two focuses on curriculum practice by returning to the connections/relationships described in Chapter 1 and completing a chapter on each. These chapters provide teachers with concrete instructional strategies and ideas that would enable them to enact a holistic curriculum or to integrate parts of holistic education into their classrooms. The relationships are explored in more depth by focusing on the side of the relationships that traditional classrooms often de-emphasize or ignore. Thus Chapter 6 explains intuition by describing levels of intuition and then delving into the creative process. Techniques that are suggested include visualization and metaphor. The discussion of metaphor cites Gordon but does not really describe the three instructional models of synectics—making the strange familiar, making the familiar strange and creative problem solving—steps usually associated with Gordon. Again I took issue with the either/or approach in a book that says it is about balance when a diagram (see p. 104) illustrates the traditional relationship between eggs and seeds as nonexistent and the metaphorical approach diagrams overlapping circles. It seems to this educator that most good teachers would help students make this link even if they were very traditional in their approach to education. The chapter ends with discussions of adding a critical perspective and considering multiple intelligences as part of learning to make intuitive connections. Again these are not radically new ideas, even for more traditional teachers. Other chapters look at body/mind connections calling for more instruction in the arts and teaching mindfulness (yoga, breathing). In the chapter on subject connection, Miller differentiates among multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and trans-disciplinary approaches to subject matter. While I would not use the same definitions he uses, the discussion and chart (pp. 134-134) are useful for teachers in understanding the goal. That is also true of the discussion of uncertainty/ambiguity. This latter connection is one which I believe more teachers need to focus on as students constantly want the right answer instead of seeking “best” solutions to murkier problems or unresolved situations. Steps for more creative problem solving beyond just application of the scientific method are a welcome instructional strategy for teachers as is the story model to enhance integrated learning with a focus on global, cultural, and personal change. (p. 142) The end of this chapter or the next chapter might be strengthened if under the discussion of subject and community the Foxfire approach had been mentioned as that really highlights the educational values that this chapter and this book espouse. As the book develops, the usefulness of strategies such as service learning or the planting of gardens by young children are well explained. The discussion of the importance of teaching world religions is explained. I did not find any of these strategies either new or groundbreaking. I began teaching in 1971 and teaching about world religions was part of the world history curriculum at that time. Service learning, while not always called by that name and often referred to as co-curricular, has been a part of high school for decades. The specific examples of an integrated curriculum (e.g., The World Core Curriculum (see p. 160)) supply helpful concrete examples for teachers who might want to undertake a holistic approach to learning in their classrooms. The book continues delineating the relationships including a chapter on soul connections. As in earlier parts of the book I had issues with statements that are opinions put forth as factual, such as a statement about Dante’s Divine Comedy: “the journey is really a metaphorical journey from egotism to the highest form of connectedness-love. . ..” (p. 187) Another quick Google search led me to understand that this is a Jungian psychological interpretation—one of many possible interpretations of this text which is commonly thought to be more about the Middle Ages and its politics. Given the accountability craze that is sweeping education, Miller does devote a chapter in this second edition to implementing and evaluating the holistic curriculum. I truly believe that any curriculum where students are engaged, learning, and active will yield the desired results on the standardized tests that are really anathema to holistic education. Thus, the idea that holistic curriculum would be incompatible with holistic education should not intimidate teachers, and the chapter does explain that while focusing on more authentic and qualitative forms of assessment. My larger concern is that many of the instructional strategies or techniques suggested in the book will be off-putting or upsetting to stakeholders like parents. I can remember back to the mid 1990s when the Lake County School Board in Florida passed a rule against using visualization as a relaxation technique prior to test-taking. And, while yoga and meditation are increasingly accepted in Physical Education classes, many parents, especially those who are from fundamentalist or evangelical branches of their religions, have deep and loud objections to integrating these practices in our schools. Moreover, while I fully agree with Miller in seeking wisdom from all sources, the move to maintain the Western philosophical foundation of North American education is increasingly strong. In summary, The Holistic Curriculum has positives and negatives. The underlying idea and message is positive. And, many classrooms as well as our entire educational system could stand a least some transformational approaches and strategies. The philosophical underpinnings to holistic curriculum contain the inevitable tension between beliefs that there are universal truths and that the world is a dynamic, ever evolving place which education must respond to appropriately. I am less sure than the author about the former but I surely agree with the latter. I just wish that in the need to simplify a complex philosophy Miller had not drawn such definitive lines separating the ideas and positions of approaches that frequently overlap. About the Reviewer Barbara Slater Stern is an Associate Professor in the Department of Middle, Secondary and Math Education at James Madison University. She teaches courses in curriculum, foundations and methods of teaching middle and secondary social studies. She is the editor of Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, the journal of the American Association of Teaching and Curriculum.

Robertson, Judith P. & McConaghy, Cathryn. (Eds) (2006). Provocations: Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Excitability in Education Reviewed by Joy Jarvis and Kit Thomas, University of Hertfordshire,

Robertson, Judith P. & McConaghy, Cathryn. (Eds) (2006). Provocations: Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Excitability in Education New York: Peter Lang Publishing. 214 pp.         ISBN 10-0820478776 Reviewed by Joy Jarvis and Kit Thomas University of Hertfordshire, UK December 13, 2007 This edited book explores the influence of Sylvia Ashton-Warner on the chapter authors and within the wider personal, professional, educational and social contexts about which they write. Reading the book evokes an image of a staff room in a women’s college at an established university: panelled walls, tea and a heated discussion about the legacy of the person who is the subject of this book. The women, for the chapter authors are all women, draw on a range of personal knowledge of Sylvia as a friend or teacher, on her writing and on a range of secondary sources to support their views. Some see her as a heroine, whilst others believe that her influence has been overrated. The argument is passionate, energetic; no one is neutral. Within this debate we sense the "excitability" identified in the book’s title and begin, already, to sense the ‘provocations’ of Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Who then, is the text about? The cover picture presents Sylvia as a statuesque, somewhat androgynous yet elegant figure with hairstyle and clothes locating her within the middle of the twentieth century. Why does she appear to speak so strongly to the authors of this text and what provocations have been brought about by her life and work? Sylvia Ashton-Warner was a New Zealand teacher and writer on education. She started teaching between the first and second world wars in a Maori school in a remote area. Working with very young children she developed an approach to teaching that built on understanding the needs of individuals in a particular cultural context. Using children’s emotions and understanding of their world as a basis for their literacy development, she developed reading materials and approaches to writing within her classroom that proved effective where prescribed western texts had failed. She presented her ideas in texts including Teacher (1963) and an earlier novel Spinster (1958) in which she appears in fictional form. In these books she positioned herself as resisting the orthodoxy of teaching imposed by male policy makers and inspectors. She wrote about ‘organic teaching’ based on the ‘volcanic’ nature of children that could be both destructive and creative. In her writing she presents the classroom as vibrant, emotional and full of learning opportunities to be developed by the teacher, who also has her own emotional needs within the context. What do the authors of the edited text see as her provocations? For some she is a feminist voice, at a time when female thinkers and writers in the field of education were few. For others the focus is on work in challenging schools, with children who are not from the dominant culture, while for others it is her demonstration of the development of educational theory from experience. The vision of a teacher as an actor on the educational stage, as a creator of new ideas rather than a passive receiver of prescribed orthodoxy is what leads to new visions. What will a reader gain from this book? If he or she has never heard of Sylvia Ashton-Warner then perhaps a desire to find out more about her and to read her original work. For those of us who are familiar with some of her writing there will be insights into both her work and her personality. This may not be a comfortable experience. As the editors write, ‘When our idealized subjects fail to materialize – that is, when Sylvia turns out not to be as she seemed – disillusionment and antipathy may foreclose what began as a love affair.’ (p. 3). What is clear is that Sylvia was a complex person, passionate, creative, sometimes depressed, often extreme, and never passive. What is perhaps most important is what her work leads us to do. For this book is not just about the life and legacy of Sylvia Ashton-Warner it is also a challenge to be provoked. At the beginning of one of the chapters Anne-Louise Brookes writes, ‘Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s work changed the way I see the world and the way I understand teaching’ (p. 141). This is a big claim and yet others in this book would agree that her impact remains strong today. What are her provocations for the book reviewers? What does she say to us as teacher educations in the UK in the twenty-first century? One of us has used Sylvia’s work with teachers of children with special educational needs, who see in her an ally in their attempt to resist the notion of a prescribed teaching approach that suits all children. She helps to give them the courage to resist, to develop their own approach to teaching that meets the needs of their children. The other reviewer is unable to teach at any level without using this seminal quotation from ‘Spinster’ which sums up all of the provocation and excitability of teaching: "What a dangerous activity reading is; teaching is. All this plastering on of foreign stuff. Why plaster on at all when there’s so much inside already? So much locked in. If only I could get it out and use it as a working material. And not draw it out either. If I had a light enough touch it would come out under its own volcanic power.” So readers of this book may be encouraged to explore in more depth their own response to Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s work and through these provocations reflect upon, and develop, their own educational practice. References Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1958) Spinster. London: Secker and Warburg. Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1963) Teacher. New York: Simon and Schuster. About the Reviewers Joy Jarvis Principal Lecturer in Education School of Education, University of Hertfordshire, UK Joy Jarvis is a teacher of the deaf and is currently responsible for training teachers of the deaf at UH. She is also interested in other areas of Special Educational Needs, particularly speech and language difficulties. She has taught in a range of educational contexts and has previously worked as an advisory teacher. Kit Thomas Associate Head of School (Academic) Principal Lecturer in Education School of Education University of Hertfordshire, UK Kit Thomas taught English in multilingual schools for thirteen years before moving to the University of Hertfordshire where he was the PGCE secondary English course leader and Programme Tutor. He currently teaches on all programmes across the School of Education which informs his Academic Quality role. His research interests are in the overlapping areas of initial teacher training, masculinities and the subject of English.

Carlson, Jerry S. & Levin, Joel R. (Eds.) (2007). Educating the evolved mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology. Reviewed by Keith S. Taber, University of Cambridge, U.K

Carlson, Jerry S. & Levin, Joel R. (Eds.) (2007). Educating the evolved mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc. 216 pp.     $39.99 (paper cover)     ISBN 978-1-59311-612-5 Reviewed by Keith S. Taber University of Cambridge, U.K December 14, 2007 This book, edited by Jerry S. Carlson and Joel R. Levin, is a volume in a series on Psychological Perspectives on Contemporary Educational Issues (that itself follows in book form an earlier series Issues in Education: Contributions from Educational Psychology). The format is a focal essay, a series of commentaries, and then a response from the author of the focal piece. The eponymous lead essay, making up over half of the volume, is by David Geary (Geary, 2007a). This is a fascinating essay and it is not possible to do justice to the full argument here, but the crux is a distinction between two types of learning events that are considered primary or secondary, depending upon their relationship to the evolution of human cognition, I make a distinction between biologically primary folk knowledge and abilities, that is, competencies that are components of evolved cognitive domains, and biologically secondary knowledge and abilities, that is competencies acquired through formal or informal training. (Geary, 2007a, p. 3) The argument is that humans have, through the process of evolution, developed certain cognitive traits through natural selection. Humans, and earlier hominid ancestors, have been subject to selection pressure in environments where certain types of learning are advantageous. Humans are therefore very good at learning, at least in those contexts where the evolved traits are the effective ways of learning! The current school curriculum however is a relatively novel cultural invention and so there has been no significant selection for cognitive competencies that specifically operate to allow us to do well in academic studies. That is not to say that our evolved learning skills cannot be put to use in this context, but that the match of learning processes and material to be studied may not be close to optimum. This way of thinking to leads to a number of consequences. These include the idea that some learning that people undertake in modern industrial societies will be more readily achieved (being well-served by the cognitive traits we have evolved than others) than other learning (which does not fit as well). Geary’s evolutionary approach goes beyond that general notion to suggest that it is possible to identify areas where there will be a better or weaker fit, and to argue that instructional design can be informed by research that explores human learning from an evolutionary perspective. Of course, the latter principle would seem to have much in common with well-established attempts to develop instructional approaches that building upon research into human cognition that do not depend upon a psychological perspective. The question of how much ‘value is added’ by taking an evolutionary perspective is one that is raised by some of the commentaries in this volume, and on which readers may take different views. Geary argues that an evolutionary perspective offers the possibility of viable, testable hypotheses that may ‘narrow the problem space’ (Geary, 2007b), and so help focus work in potentially fertile directions. Geary connects his argument with notions that the widespread occurrence of domains of ‘folk knowledge’ (D’Andrade, 1995; Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994) in psychology, biology and physics can be understood in evolutionary terms (Mithen, 1998): i.e. in these ‘evolutionary-significant content areas’ (Geary, 2007a), there are understandable selection pressures for humans to be able to learn - about human behaviour, about local fauna and flora, and about the ways in which objects behave when thrown, dropped, chipped etc. Similarly, it is widely accepted that the human brain has evolved to readily learn a spoken language (Chomsky, 1999), but - as Geary points out - learning to read and write (something that is novel on an evolutionary timescale) is recognised to be a source of difficulty for many learners – and has led to much argument about the best instructional methods (e.g. Wyse, 2003). Through this approach Geary is able to offer a definition of this field: Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between folk knowledge and abilities and accompanying inferential and attributional biases as these influence academic learning in evolutionary novel cultural contexts, such as schools and the industrial workplace. (Geary, 2007a, p. 34) This all seems very reasonable, as far as it goes, and this approach seems to fit well with arguments about the extent to which scientific thinking is just an extension of common sense (as Einstein seemed to think) or something quite different (Wolpert, 1992). This topic is explored in another of the contributions (Klahr, 2007). Certainly the distinction Geary draws between the systems of knowledge learnt through primary biological mechanisms and the formally taught knowledge of the academic discipline resonates well with the account produced in the context of physics education by Joan Solomon (Solomon, 1992) based on what might be termed a social constructivist approach. There is a substantial literature on learners’ ideas in scientific topics (Duit, 2007), much based around the constructivist premise that learners informal ideas have consequences for learning the accepted models presented in the science curriculum science (Taber, 2006), and Geary’s work offers a strong theoretical framework for considering the ongoing debates in this field about the extent to which such ideas may act as barriers to, or starting points for, learning. This is a particularly pertinent point in view of the commentaries (Berch, 2007; Sweller, 2007) that refer to research suggesting that ‘constructivist’ teaching approaches do not work. I am aware that such labels are not used consistently by different authors, but this finding would be rather serious for those education systems (e.g. NZ, UK etc.) where basic constructivist principles are considered to be good practice! Of course a constructivist approach does not imply completely open-ended discovery learning, which clearly has severe limitations in the context of formal education. However, to this reader the wide-spread constructivist approach commonly adopted internationally in science education (e.g. Fensham, 2004; Jenkins, 2000) is very much based upon developing “an understanding of both how to take advantage of evolved abilities and how to circumvent other evolved biases that may make some types of modern learning more difficult” as one of the commentators here summarises the evolutionary approach (Bjorklund, 2007: 120). Indeed, the importance of intuitive learning mechanisms is well-recognised in science education (diSessa, 1993), and informs thinking about science instruction (Hammer, 2004). Such considerations are perfectly compatible with constructivist models of teaching and learning (Taber, 2007/2008). This is just one area touched upon by this wide-ranging perspective, and illustrates how even readers who are sympathetic to the general approach may not entirely agree with how Geary develops his arguments. As one example, Geary links his argument to a particular model of intelligence – something discussed by other contributors to the book (e.g., Ackerman, 2007) - and which may suggest some reinterpretation would be appropriate for those who understand intelligence in somewhat different terms. Geary’s commentators point out that at the moment there is not enough known to widely apply an evolutionary approach to educational problems, so that often evolutionary arguments can be put that support various position. However it is clear that there is much potential here for developing testable models that link to important educational questions – such as the best age to start formal schooling (Bjorklund, 2007). Another contentious issue is highlighted by Geary’s own inclination is to consider that the evolutionary educational perspective supports special attention being paid to the intellectual elite who cope well with academic learning (Geary, 2007a). This is arguable, but it is a deduction that may well be considered to be premature until the field is better developed, and indeed could seem to be somewhat undermined in Geary’s own (Geary, 2007b) response to his commentators, where he discusses how apparent dramatic increases in intelligence in recent decades may be related to changing environmental conditions that have allowed more of the population to come close to their intellectual potential. As always in evolutionary matters, it is possible to construct ‘just so’ stories, which are currently underdetermined by the available evidence. That is not, of course, a reason to criticize attempts to develop theory and suggest testable ideas. All of the contributions to the book are of interest, and indeed some seemed rather brief and could have been usefully extended. I thought Sweller’s (Sweller, 2007) discussion of the evolutionary strategy of limiting variation (as large changes are usually disadvantageous) offered an interesting perspective on the limitations of working memory. From an evolutionary perspective, the severe limitations on how much new information can be held in working memory may seem odd: surely there would be selection pressure for increasing working memory capacity? Could this indicate some evolutionary trade-off, like the one that selects against humans losing the appendix? (As we do not base our diet on grass and the like, the appendix is of little value, a waste of resources, and potentially a source of trouble. However, the appendix has now shrunk to a size where any further reductions significantly increase the likelihood of material getting trapped and leading to appendicitis.) However, I thought that Sweller’s perspective on how working memory works differently for new input and already organised (i.e. ‘chunked’) knowledge structures was quite insightful in making a restricted capacity working memory seem adaptive. Overall then, this is a fascinating and thought-provoking book, about a potentially valuable perspective, if one that is currently in its early stages. Geary sets out the premises and principles that can form the hard core of a fascinating and potentially valuable research programme (Lakatos, 1970). One annoying omission (possibly a vestige of the evolution of the series into book format) is the absence of an index. I imagine many readers who buy this book will want to return to it and re-visit points in both the focal essay and the commentaries. Had the publishers invested in an index they would have made this a much more valuable book. Such an omission seems short-sighted, as human nature being what it is, surely books that do not allow the reader to readily locate key ideas and discussions are less likely to be cited, and so in the long-term will ultimately sell less under the selection pressure operating in the competitive world of academic scholarship? This particular niggle aside, the book is highly recommended. Anyone interested in learning, and in the development of a science of teaching, would do well to consider the central argument. There is much to think about here, much to admire, and potentially much to disagree with - but this is a contribution that should not be ignored. A highly recommended read. References Ackerman, P. L. (2007). Knowledge, abilities and will. In J. R. Levin & J. S. Carlson (Eds.), Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology (pp. 101-108). Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing. Berch, D. B. (2007). Instructing evolved minds: pedagogically primary strategies for promoting biologically secondary learning. In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology (pp. 109-118). Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing. Bjorklund, D. F. (2007). The most educable of animals. In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology (pp. 119-129). Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing. Carlson, J. S., & Levin, J. R. (2007). Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing. Chomsky, N. (1999). Form and meaning in natural languages. In M. Baghramian (Ed.), Modern Philosophy of Language (pp. 294-308). Washington D C: Counterpoint. D’Andrade, R. (1995). The development of cognitive anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. diSessa, A. A. (1993). Towards an epistemology of physics. Cognition and Instruction, 10( 2&3), 105-225. Duit, R. (2007). Bibliography - Students' and Teachers' Conceptions and Science Education. from http://www.ipn.uni-kiel.de/aktuell/stcse/stcse.html Fensham, P. J. (2004). Defining an Identity: The evolution of science education as a field of research. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Geary, D. C. (2007a). Educating the evolved mind: conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology. In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology (pp. 1-99). Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing. Geary, D. C. (2007b). Educating the evolved mind: reflections and refinements. In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology (pp. 177-203). Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing. Hammer, D. (2004). The variability of student reasoning, Lecture 3: Manifold cognitive resources,. In E. F. Redish & M. Vicentini (Eds.), Research on Physics Education. Bologna/Amsterdam: Italian Physical Society/IOS Press. Hirschfeld, L., & Gelman, S., A. (1994). Towards a topography of mind: an introduction to domain specificity. In L. Hirschfeld & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture (pp. 3-35). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, E. W. (2000). Research in science education: time for a health check? Studies in Science Education, 35, 1-25. Klahr, D. (2007). Evolution of scientific thinking: comments on Geary's 'Education the Evolved Mind". In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology (pp. 155-164). Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing. Lakatos, I. (1970). Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes. In I. Lakatos & A. Musgrove (Eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (pp. 91-196). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mithen, S. (1998). The Prehistory of the Mind: a search for the origins of art, religion and science. London: Phoenix. Solomon, J. (1992). Getting to Know about Energy - in School and Society. London: Falmer Press. Sweller, J. (2007). Evolutionary biology and educational psychology. In J. S. Carlson & J. R. Levin (Eds.), Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual foundations for an evolutionary educational psychology (pp. 165-175). Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing. Taber, K. S. (2006). Beyond Constructivism: the Progressive Research Programme into Learning Science. Studies in Science Education, 42, 125-184. Taber, K. S. (2007/2008). Conceptual resources for learning science: Issues of transience and grain-size in cognition and cognitive structure. International Journal of Science Education, iFirst Article (paper publication due 2008). Wolpert, L. (1992). The Unnatural Nature of Science. London: Faber & Faber. Wyse, D. (2003). The National Literacy Strategy: A critical review of empirical evidence. British Educational Research Journal, 29(6), 903-916. About the Reviewer Keith S. Taber Keith S. Taber is Senior Lecturer in Science Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, U.K. He works with trainee teachers, teachers, and research students, and he is currently convenor of the Science Education Academic Group and Programme Manager for the part-time PhD in Education.

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. Harry Potter's World: Magic, technoculture, and becoming human. In Harry Potter's World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives Elizabeth Heilman (ed). NY: Routledge. Appelbaum, Peter. 2007. Children’s books for grown-up teachers: reading and writing curriculum theory. NY: Routledge. Badmington, Neil. 2001. Pod almighty!; or, humanism, posthumanism, and the strange case of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Textual Practice. 15 (1): 5-22. Barab, Sasha, Zuiker, Steve, Warren, Scott, Hickey, Dan, Ingram-Goble, Adam, Kwon, Eun-Ju, Kouper, Inna, Herring, Susan. 2007. Situationally embodied curriculum: Related formalisms and contexts. Science Education. 91(5): 750-82. Bell, Mebbie. 2004. There’s something about Barbie. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 53-64. Black, Catherine. 1999. Dramatisation et gestuelle: découvrir la culture-cible. Canadian Modern Language Review. 55(4): 548-55. Brittan, David. 1996. Talking hands. Technology Review. 99: 10-12. Britzman, Deborah. 1995. Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight. Educational Theory. 45 (2): 151-66. Cook, Susan Wagner; & Goldin-Meadow, Susan. 2006. The role of gesture in learning: Do children use their hands to change their minds? Journal of Cognition and Development 7 (2): 211-232. Daniels, Harvey, Zemelman, Steve, and Bizar, Marilyn. 1999. Whole language works: Sixty years of research. Educational Leadership. 57 (2): 32-7. Elbaz-Luwisch, Freema. 2004. How is education possible when there's a body in the middle of the room? Curriculum Inquiry. 34 (1): 9-27. Fabrizio, Lucy. 2004. Transgressing the curricular body. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 3-7. Field, James, and Olafson, Lori. 1999. Understanding resistance in students at risk. Canadian Journal of Education. 24 (1): 70-5. Friedman, Doron and Gilles, Marco. 2005. Teaching virtual characters how to use body language Source. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 3661: 205-214. Hodges, Brian. 2004. 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London and NY: Routledge. Hedegaard, Mariane. 1998. Situated learning and cognition: Theoretical learning and cognition. Mind, Culture, and Activity. 5 (2): 114-126. Hoogland, Reneé. 2002. Fact and fantasy: the body of desire in the age of posthumanism. Journal of Gender Studies. 11 (3): 213-231. Jagadinski, Jan. 2004. Fallen bodies: On perversion and sex-scandals in school and the academy. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 99-113. Leggo, Carl. 2004. The poet’s corpus: Nine speculations. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 65-85. Murphy, Carol. 2007. The constructive role of the conceptual metaphor in children’s arithmetic: A comparison and contrast of Piagetian and embodied learning perspectives. Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal. 22. http://www.people.ex.ac.uk/PErnest/pome22/ Oberg, A., and L. McElroy. 1994. "If a Body Meet a Body...." Curriculum Inquiry. 24 (2):229. Oliver, Kimberly, Lalik, Rosary. 2001. The body as curriculum: learning with adolescent girls. Journal of Curriculum Studies. 33 (3): 303-333. Osborn, Susan. 1997. Teaching: What we can learn from the actor. Learn how certain acting techniques and exercises can improve your posture, body language and speaking voice in the studio or classroom. The American Music Teacher. 46 (6): 26. Moore, Beverly. 1998. Situated cognition versus traditional cognitive theories of learning. Education. 119 (1): 161-71. Pinar, William. 2004. Rocket man. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 7-13. Pitri, Eliza. 2004. Situated learning in a classroom community. Art Education. 57 (6): 6-12. Plant, Sadie. 1997. Zeroes + ones: Digital women and the new technoculture. NY: Doubleday. Rosenberg, Sharon. 2004. Que(e)r(y)ing the teacher's body: Femme corporeality, vulnerability, and play. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing. 20 (2): 87-96. Roth, Wolff-Michael. 2001. Gestures: Their role in teaching and learning. 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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.