Policymakers, educators, and the public continuously cry for the wholesale reform of teacher education. This book responds by issuing a call for reform from within each individual methods classroom. Teacher educators are challenged to use the learning theories of Jerome Bruner as a catalyst for constructing their own narrative concerning teacher education. This book provides practical applications of theory in order to improve pedagogical techniques. It challenges teacher educators and their students to become individuals who won t be afraid to take risks, make generalizations, search their...

Re/Constructing Elementary Science seeks to improve the way science is taught in the elementary school. There are three main contradictions that make it difficult for teachers and students to engage in meaningful activities from which understandings result. The central issues in this book are framed in terms of three dichotomies that lead to tensions arising from the dialectic of opposing aspects of teaching and learning. First, there is a tension between learning as an individual process (cultural production) and as a cultural process (cultural reproduction). Second, there is a...

What is school violence? How do we prevent it? How do we react to tragedies when they occur? Education and crime are at the top of the list of concerns that parents and community members share. School violence is the issue and policy problem that joins these two priorities. In the wake of such incidents as the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, Americans are clamoring for action. Yet, there is little sense of a well-reasoned approach being taken by the federal government, states, and local schools and districts. Learning about School Violence provides readers with an...

This collection of essays tackles what comes of learning to read and write after literacy has been achieved. These essays take up notable gaps in all that has been said and written about literacy in the schools, moving beyond the idea that learning to read and write is an end in itself. They are about the power that reading and writing has over the world. These essays deal with what the young are to make of the world while reading in a postmodern era and how they respond to the way new technologies can narrow the gap between school and work worlds. Others confront the authorities, whether of...

The Testimonium Flavianum, a brief passage in Jewish Antiquities by Flavius Josephus (37 - ca. 100 AD), is widely considered the only extant evidence besides the Bible of the historicity of Jesus Christ. In the sixteenth century the authenticity of this passage was challenged by scholars, launching a controversy that has still not been resolved. Josephus on Jesus: The Testimonium Flavianum Controversy from Late Antiquity to Modern Times is a history of this passage and the long-standing debate over its authenticity. Because it may be the most quoted ancient text next to the...

In Perpetual Motion is an -historical choreography- of power, pedagogy, and the child from the 1600s to the early 1900s. It breaks new ground by historicizing the analytics of power and motion that have interpenetrated renditions of the young. Through a detailed examination of the works of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Herbart, and G. Stanley Hall, this book maps the discursive shifts through which the child was given a unique nature, inscribed in relation to reason, imbued with an effectible interiority, and subjected to theories of power and motion. The book illustrates...

In Southern Hospitality, an ethnography of Holly Springs, Mississippi (1964-1972), schools play an important part in the formation of black identity during desegregation in the South. The civil rights movement left a leadership void as the public space of black leaders the segregated schools disappeared as did the identification with the -Southern Negro- collective of the segregated South. This transformation occurs against the backdrop of the psychological struggle between the individual s role as a member of that black collective, and the opportunity, secured from the federal...