Coburn provides a fresh and careful translation from the Sanskrit of this fifteen-hundred-year-old text. Drawing on field work and literary evidence, he illuminates the process by which the Devi-Mahatmya has attracted a vast number of commentaries and has become the best known Goddess-text in modern India, deeply embedded in the ritual of Goddess worship (especially in Tantra). Coburn answers the following questions among others: Is this document "scripture?" How is it that this text mediates the presence of the Goddess? What can we make of contemporary emphasis on oral recitation of the text...

This translation of Lyotard's first book, La Phenomenologie, supplies an important link to Lyotard's more recent works. Phenomenology presents a commentary on the phenomenological movement. From the dual perspectives of a work on, and of, phenomenology, Lyotard's text profiles the different aspects of phenomenology, focusing particularly on the writings of Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Tran Duc Thao. Phenomenology marks a particular episode in Lyotard's reflections on the "philosophical project" and is emblematic of his critical reflections on philosophy's involvements in routine, daily...

This book examines the way in which elementary schooling can be used as a means to encourage critical democracy in the United States. It focuses primarily on the dialectical tensions and issues that emerge from the conflicting values of individuality and community through a portrayal of an independent elementary school committed to democratic education.

This is the first scholarly examination of the use of dialogic theory and pedagogy by scholars and teachers of writing. Dialogic methods have become extremely important to many different approaches to pedagogy. However, no one has yet noted that such pedagogies are being espoused by scholars and teachers who have vastly differing theoretical and ideological orientations from one another. Given the fact that the same kind of pedagogy is being proposed by people from such widely differing perspectives, it is time for a substantial reassessment of the use of dialogic pedagogies in literacy...

Presents a critical, Neo-Marxist philosophy of education.

Bilingual Education: A Dialogue with the Bakhtin Circle is the first book to make a connection between bilingual education and the theories of the Bakhtin circle. The analysis is focused on language as a social entity from the perspective of Bakhtinian dialogic existence. The author includes a discussion of critical/radical pedagogy connected to Paulo Freire's dialogic pedagogy. Also addressed are the major laws and policies of bilingual education in the U. S. and the current debate involving English-only versus English-plus instruction.

Briton challenges the dominant depoliticized vision of adult education, calling into question the modernist tenets and moral integrity of contemporary adult education practice. By examining his own struggle to escape the confines of modernist thought, the author delivers a succinct yet decisive critique of modern educational practice and challenges educators to reconceptualize their field of endeavor as a postmodern pedagogy of engagement.

In refusing to deny its conjectural foundations, to mask its tenuous structure, or to defend its precarious integrity, the book assumes a form that...