American Classrooms Research Articles

Motivation and Classroom Climate: Promoting Creativity in Gifted Children

Creativity does not come about in a vacuum. Empirical work carried out by investigators trained in psychology tells us that there is a direct link between the motivational orientation brought by a student to a task and the likelihood of her being creative at that task, and it is the environment that in large part shapes that motivational orientation. There are many important parallels between work being done in the field of gifted and talented education and the social psychology of creativity, yet the two research traditions have remained fairly separate. One commonality involves the empliasis placed by investigators representing both areas of inquiry on the interface between person and context. Taken together, these two research paths lead to the conclusion that close attention must be paid to school climate if gifted students’ motivation, creativity and special talents are to be developed. In fact, the influential effects of classroom environment on motivation and creativity of performance are staggering. The argument is made that an appreciation of classroom environmental effects is particularly important in the gifted and talented classroom or “pull-out” program in which the promotion of students’ interest and creativity of performance is a top priority. Research is reviewed which reveals that the typical American classroom is fraught with killers of intrinsic motivation and creativity, and suggestions for future research directions are offered.

Life on the Margins

One puzzle about the politics of teacher education in the United States is that teacher educators exert so little influence in this arena. (1) On the face of it, you would think that we would take a leading role in setting policy for teacher education and informing the public alike about the issues in this field. After all, we are the ones who run the programs that prepare teachers and who carry out the research that informs these programs. But things have not worked out the way we would have liked. We offer a lot of advice about teaching, learning, and learning to teach, but most of it is easily shrugged off. During the past 100 years, our most consistent piece of advice has been that teaching should become more progressive. Drawing inspiration from John Dewey and William H. Kilpatrick, we have argued relentlessly for a kind of teaching that is child centered; that fosters learning to learn instead of acquiring a fixed body of knowledge; that engages the interests of the whole child in a process of personal discovery; that marshals the activity of the child in self-directed, cross-disciplinary projects; and that promotes a democratic community in the classroom. In one way, at least, we have been quite successful in pushing this progressive agenda, because our vision has come to provide the language with which Americans talk about education. As Lawrence Cremin (1961, p. 328) pointed out in his classic history of progressive education, by the 1950s, American educators in general came to talk about their field using phrases such as the whole child, social and emotional growth, intrinsic motivation, teaching children not subjects, and real life experiences. And today we find that teacher educators, teachers, administrators, and educational policy makers continue to use this kind of progressive language. However, although progressive rhetoric is everywhere, progressive practice is much harder to find. Ellen Lagemann (1989) has argued this point with admirable precision: In the contest during the 20th century regarding who would have the greatest impact on the practice of teachers in schools, Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost (p. 145). Others agree. In his extensive study of 1,000 American classrooms, John Goodlad (1983) found that in most of these classrooms pedagogy was teacher centered, learning was passive, and control was centralized. Larry Cuban's (1993) historical examination of How Teachers Taught during the early and middle parts of the century finds that teaching practices at best displayed a hybrid of progressive and traditional practices, that these hybrids drew primarily on the more formalistic and easily adapted elements of progressivism, and that they were largely confined to the lower grades. Although many critics--such as Jeanne Chall (2000), the Fordham Foundation (Public Agenda, 1997), and the Manhattan Institute (Barnes, 2002)--have argued that the progressivism of teacher educators has succeeded in ruining American schools, the actual evidence they present shows the dominance of progressivism over teacher talk rather than teacher practice. These days, we in teacher education are more likely to use the term constructivism instead of progressivism (Richardson, 2003), but we mean the same thing. However, although we are as committed to the progressive agenda as we were in the past, educational policy is moving in the opposite direction. Instead of reforms that promote child centeredness and inquiry learning, we have the standards movement, with its stress on strict curriculum guidelines and teaching to the test. Instead of efforts that would reinforce teacher education programs for inquiry learning (as urged by pro-teacher education organizations such as National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, and National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education), we have reforms that sidestep these programs by encouraging alternative routes into teaching. …

Classroom Management for Teachers of Japanese and Other Foreign Languages

Abstract: This article describes the classroom management component of the Professional Development of Japanese of Texas (PDJT), a certification program for teachers of Japanese. In addition, it offers suggestions in classroom management for teachers of Japanese and other foreign languages as well as guidance for teacher trainers to help new teachers develop classroom management skills. Although a classroom management class is required for teacher certification, a generic course would not have met the needs of these teachers. The course needed to build on the maturity, classroom experience, and cultural orientation of the participants. Class time utilized many small-group activities based on the participants' classroom experiences and emphasized the realities of American classrooms. This approach can serve as a model for training programs serving varied groups of teacher-certification candidates. Introduction: A Personal Perspective When I was a college senior taking my foreign language methods class just prior to student teaching, there was no material directed toward classroom management. When another student asked the instructor for some classroom management guidelines, he replied that foreign language teachers did not need to be concerned with classroom management as only good kids took foreign languages. When pressed, he stated matter-of-factly that classroom management was all in the presentation of audiolingual drills; a brisk pace accompanied by a drill-sergeant manner would stop all classroom management problems before they got started. As my first teaching job was in an urban junior high in the midst of court-ordered busing, I soon realized that classroom management was indeed central to my job as a foreign language teacher. In many cases, I could hardly get my classes seated, let alone present briskly paced drills. At this early point in my teaching career, I received two additional pieces of classroom management advice which proved infinitely more useful than my methods instructor's perfunctory words. These were: Be firm, fair, and consistent, and You don't need any 13-year old friends. The first piece of advice came from a colleague, a veteran urban teacher. He believed that of the three conditions, consistency was the most important. Students, he felt, would prefer an unfair policy that was enforced consistently over a more fair one applied sporadically with the possibility of seeming preferential. The advice about friendships with students came from an eighth-grade girl who was not even one of my students. At the age of 21, this piece of advice was the more important one to me. Although I had not intended to establish peer relationships with students, the student's advice reminded me that I was, and had to be, the adult in any interactions with students. By being the adult, I would not always be popular with students, but I understood that the teacher's task was more complex than that of maintaining popularity. Later in my teaching career, I came across Frances Fuller's research on teachers' stages of concern and learned that many if not all beginning teachers are concerned with being liked by their students. Being overly concerned with student acceptance often leads to classroom management problems (Fuller & Bown, 1975). When I moved to a very different teaching environment-a laboratory school for the gifted-I learned quickly that students labeled as talented and motivated could be as much of a classroom management challenge as the students I had previously encountered. At this time, I picked up another important piece of management advice from a veteran teacher educator who was my instructor in a graduate course in classroom observation: Teachers create their own hells. Through a series of films of actual lessons in a variety of subject matters, I came to see how teachers' lack of consistency, fairness, and firmness, in addition to their lack of alertness and adequate lesson planning contributed in large measure to their classroom management problems. …

A cross-cultural comparison of instructor communication in American and French classrooms

This study addressed patterns and influence of instructor communication in American (US) and in French classrooms. Significant differences were found for instructor use of power bases, affinity-seeking strategies, and nonverbal immediacy. Significant differences were found in student affective learning, cognitive learning, affect toward instructor, and ratings of instruction between the two cultures. In both cultures, however, student affect toward instructor, cognitive learning, and rating of instruction were significantly correlated with instructor affinity-seeking and instructor nonverbal immediacy. Likewise, instructor use of expert power was significantly correlated with student cognitive learning and ratings of instruction in both cultures.

Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice

It s no secret that, in most American classrooms, students are expected to master standardized American English and the conventions of Edited American English if they wish to succeed. Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice works to realign these conceptions through a series of provocative yet evenhanded essays that explore the ways we have enacted and continue to enact our beliefs in the integrity of the many languages and Englishes that arise both in the classroom and in professional communities.Edited by Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva, the collection was motivated by a survey project on language awareness commissioned by the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication.All actively involved in supporting diversity in education, the contributors address the major issues inherent in linguistically diverse classrooms: language and racism, language and nationalism, and the challenges in teaching writing while respecting and celebrating students own languages. Offering historical and pedagogical perspectives on language awareness and language diversity, the essays reveal the nationalism implicit in the concept of a standard English, advocate alternative training and teaching practices for instructors at all levels, and promote the respect and importance of the country s diverse dialects, languages, and literatures. Contributors include Geneva Smitherman, Victor Villanueva, Elaine Richardson, Victoria Cliett, Arnetha F. Ball, Rashidah Jammi Muhammad, Kim Brian Lovejoy, Gail Y. Okawa, Jan Swearingen, and Dave Pruett.The volume also includes a foreword by Suresh Canagarajah and a substantial bibliography of resources about bilingualism and language diversity.

Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice , and: Hemingway's Theaters of Masculinity (review)

REVIEWS Broer, Lawrence R. and Gloria Holland, eds. Hemingwayand Women: Female Critics and die Female Voice. Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 2002. xiv + 353 pp. Cloth: $39.95. Paper: $24.95. Strychacz, Thomas. Hemingway's Theaters ofMasculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2003. vii + 284 pp. Cloth: $59.95. Paper: $24.95. If by some strange miracle the late, venerable Hemingway scholar Carlos Baker (1909-1987) were resurrected and transported to a presentday Hemingway conference, or able to leaf through a recent batch of Hemingway criticism, how well would he recognize the "new" Ernest Hemingway? Well enough, I suppose—for Baker surely knew a great deal more about the man than he could say in his authorized biography (1969) or imply in his authorized edition of letters (1981)—but any more casual student of Hemingway educated entirely before 1986 might be much harder pressed to recognize in recent scholarship the familiar literary macho man of modern American mythology (even if this mythic Hemingway, however obsolete, lives on in popular culture and in far too many American classrooms). Seldom has a major writer been as thoroughly reconstructed as Hemingway has been since the 1986 posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden. The revolution in Hemingway studies—which has overhauled, most importantly, our understanding of gender and sexuality in Hemingway's work—is now nearly two decades old, and it shows little sign of waning. After biographical , psychological, semiotic, historical, feminist, queer theory, and literary historical reconsiderations of Hemingway and gender, the surprising thing may be that the revolution still has such vitality. The two books under review here, Hemingway and Women and Hemingway's Theaters ofMasculinity, both advance the revolution and demonstrate that it is still inspiring excellent work. These volumes not only help us to see further beyond the Hemingway myth, they more importantly help us to see how attention to gender has led to a much closer reading of Hemingway's texts. In Hemingway's Theaters ofMasculinity, Thomas Strychacz forgoes consideration of Hemingway the man in favor of an engaging and rigorous close reading of those places in Hemingway's texts—and they appear everywhere—where we can see gender being rhetorically or theatricallyperformed. Drawing on the work ofJudith Butler, Strychacz argues that the insistent theatricality of gender performance in Hemingway's texts undermines the sort of essentialist notions of stable, self-identical gender identity that until relatively recently character- 242Reviews ized most Hemingway criticism. Strychacz convincingly demonstrates "that Hemingway's narrative art constantly represents masculinity as temporary and subject to abrupt change rather than stable and permanent; as relational and contingent rather than self-determined; as the function of insubstantial codes and evaluating audiences rather than the sole possession of code heroes; as negotiated and constructed rather than constitutive of an essential identity" (8). Strychacz augments the ideas of Butler with Bertold Brecht's principle of the alienation effect, or Verfremdungseffekt, to suggest that the theatricality of gender performance in Hemingway's work "hollows out" or denaturalizes for audiences traditional essentialist notions of masculinity: "As Brecht and Butler recognize in various ways, the staging of mundane obvious- and natural-seeming social practices within a defamiliarizing context has the effect of unraveling them, showing that their obviousness is a result of repetitive performances rather than some universal essence. Hemingway's staging calls a masculine self into being and calls it into question with the same gesture" (48). Strychacz begins with an astute and liberating reading of a particularly clear instance of this, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," demonstrating how the story forces an audience of both characters and readers to judge the manhood of Macomber while simultaneously denying them any grounds beyond performance upon which to found their judgments. "The codes of manhood Hemingway articulates [here] are defined not by taciturn heroes but by taciturn watchers who stand quietly, invisibly off-stage, unconcerned with their participatory or evaluatory role precisely because that role is so fundamentally constitutive ofthe process ofmanhood-fashioning" (52). Strychacz then elaborates these themes in considerations of The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time before turning to the "theater of war" in a strong reading of A Farewell to Arms and a...

Revisiting the Relation Between Teacher Immediacy and Student Learning in African American College Classrooms

This article represents an early, successful, partial replication and extension of Neuliep's (1995) immediacy study in the African American college classroom. Results show that African American students perceive their African American instructors to be more immediate than their European American instructors. Significant positive correlations between immediacy and cognitive and affective learning measures were found in classes taught by both African American and European American instructors, but the correlations between immediacy and affective learning were significantly greater for the African American instructor sample than for the European American instructor sample.

Performing for Yourself and Others: The Paideia Coached Project

Teachers seeking ways to motivate their students and to make the curriculum more relevant have found an answer in the Paideia Coached Project. When students know that their project or performance will be presented to an audience outside the classroom, are inspired to produce work of the highest quality. DURING THE past decade, the staff at the National Paideia Center has done an increasing amount of survey and interview research with the individuals and schools that have chosen to implement the Paideia Programs. This work often involves asking teachers what frustrates them most about their dealings with students. Across the country, teachers almost universally cite the lack of student motivation for learning as the single most serious issue face. Simply put, said one honest teacher, they don't find what we have to offer all that relevant to their lives. How do you present a sterile, standardized curriculum in a way that students can care about it? Our attempts to answer that question have led us to create the Paideia Coached Project. A coached project is a unit of study that leads to a student production or performance that demonstrates mastery of a subject to an audience outside the classroom. It is designed to provide students with a strong, experiential connection to the curriculum, thereby making the curriculum both more relevant and more interesting. Ideally, the coached project provides both teachers and students the opportunity to produce rigorous, relevant work and to measure the quality of that work against authentic standards. For teachers who are used to a more traditional approach to teaching and learning, it can be challenging to rethink the many aspects of how deliver their curriculum. For those who do, however, the rewards can be amazing. The Origin of the Paideia Coached Project Paideia, as its derivation (from the Greek pais, paidos, the nurturing of a child) suggests, has to do with the proper upbringing of a child. It has strong connotations of a holistic education that leads to physical, emotional, and spiritual health as well as intellectual health. The Paideia Program is a systemic, whole-school transformation project based on the work of philosopher Mortimer Adler, who argued that American classrooms could be made simultaneously more rigorous and more inclusive.1 In other words, we could raise intellectual standards while at the same time engaging more students. In order to do this, Adler described three types of teaching and learning: didactic instruction to transmit information, coaching in academic skills, and seminar discussion of ideas and values.2 Adler believed that didactic, teacher-centered instruction dominated American classrooms at the expense of the other types of teaching and learning. As a result of this belief, he and his colleagues in the original Paideia Group focused their efforts on defining the Paideia seminar. They were so successful that there still exists a common misconception that the Paideia Program is solely concerned with the use of the seminar. In fact, the seminar takes up only 10% to 20% of teaching time in a Paideia classroom, while the rest is devoted to high-quality didactic instruction and coaching.3 In the mid-1990s, when the staff of the National Paideia Center began to work extensively with whole school communities, it became obvious that we needed to develop a much clearer picture of intellectual coaching and that we needed to show teachers how the three types of instruction could work in concert. The result of our efforts was the Paideia Coached Project, an organized unit that employs all three instructional approaches. As mentioned above, the coached project results in a student production or performance that has authentic value to an audience outside the classroom.4 While designing the Paideia Coached Project, we studied the extensive body of research on learning as well as the work then going on in a number of instructional reform movements. …

Advancing Excellence in Technological Literacy

The Technology for All Americans Project has published two documents that present standards, benchmarks, and guidelines for the reform of technology education. Here, the project staff members summarize the standards and comment on how they support the goal of enabling all students to attain technological literacy. WE LIVE IN a technological world. Life in the 21st century requires much more from every individual than simply the basic skills of reading, writing, and performing simple mathematics. Today, technology affects virtually every aspect of our lives, from enabling citizens to perform routine tasks to requiring them to be able to make responsible, informed decisions that affect individuals, society, and the environment. Citizens of today must have a basic understanding of how technology affects their world and how they coexist with technology. Attaining technological literacy is as fundamentally important to students as developing knowledge and abilities in the traditional core subject areas. Students need and deserve the opportunity to attain technological literacy through the educational process. In 2000 the International Technology Education Association (ITEA), through its Technology for All Americans Project (TfAAP), released Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology (STL).1 STL provides a significant foundation for the study of technology in terms of content, but STL alone is not sufficient to make the reform of technology education happen in American classrooms. Advancing Excellence in Technological Literacy: Student Assessment, Professional Development, and Program Standards (AETL) is a vital addition because this document provides the means for implementing STL in K-12 laboratory-classrooms.2 The new publication is based on STL, and each set of standards in AETL requires users to incorporate the content identified in STL into their practices. Components Affecting Student Learning The vision behind both STL and AETL calls on teachers, administrators, and policy makers to foster interchange between all the elements of the educational program in all areas of learning. In order to facilitate such interchange, the standards in AETL are overlapping. AETL identifies six components of educational programs that affect student learning: * content, * curricula, * instruction, * learning environment, * student assessment, and * professional development. Within programs for the study of technology, these six components must be coordinated if students are to successfully acquire technological literacy.3 Content. The 20 standards outlined in STL provide the content basis on which the study of technology may be built. In other words, STL specifies what every student should know and be able to do in order to be technologically literate, and it provides criteria by which to judge progress toward that goal. The standards should be met through articulated experiences that are coordinated by grade-band levels (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12). Benchmarks provide the fundamental content elements for these broadly stated standards. The goal is to reach all of the standards through the benchmarks. Curricula. The standards and benchmarks in STL are not the curriculum. The curriculum is the way the content of the STL standards is delivered. It includes the structure, organization, balance, and presentation of the content, and it provides a plan for the teacher to follow. The curriculum should be derived from the content standards and can be thought of as a blueprint for learning.4 Curricula should enable all students to attain technological literacy and should be designed across grade levels and disciplines. Instruction. Instruction is the actual process by which the content of the standards is delivered. It should be consistent with research on how students learn technology, should be coordinated with curricula, should enable all students to attain technological literacy, should incorporate educational technology, and should make use of student assessment. …

Discourse Options and the Development of Pragmatic Competence by Classroom Learners of German: The Case of Address Forms

This study examines the microgenetic development of second‐person pronoun use in a German‐American telecollaborative partnership. We discuss the sociopragmatic ambiguity of informal (T) and formal (V) pronouns of address (realised asduandSiein German), and the precise issues that these pronouns present for American classroom learners of European languages. Tracing the history of particular learners’ pronoun use over time, the study demonstrates that (a) electronically enabled interaction with expert‐speaking German peers is a context in which learners experience both explicit assistance and opportunities to observe appropriate pronoun use, and (b) pragmatic awareness in this domain is reflected in learner performance that develops toward approximation of the expert norm for interaction among peers.

Learning to Think: An American Third Grader Discovers Mathematics in Holland

A student's mathematics instruction in the Netherlands using the Dutch philosophy of Realistic Mathematics Education is compared to his prior mathematical instruction in an American classroom.

Changing Relationships, Changing Values in the American Classroom

AbstractAlthough administrators describe the use of adjunct faculty as allowing their institutions to teach more for less, it has instead become a way to earn more in tuition revenue while providing less in education.

Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms

Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms

"Black Thunder's" Call for a Conjure Response to "American Negro Slavery"

In American classrooms in first half of twentieth century, students using popular history textbook Growth of American Republic were taught that slaves suffered less than any other class in South from its 'peculiar institution.' ... There was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization. The negro learned his master's language, and accepted in some degree his moral and religious standards (Morrison and Commager 415). This idea of slavery stems directly from U. B. Phillips's massive history American Negro Slavery (1918), which dominated historiography of slavery well into 1950s. In Phillips's words, the plantations were best schools yet invented for mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which bulk of American negroes represented, and Phillips emphasizes that process of transition from barbarism to civilization was essentially slow (343). White plantation owners, in this metaphor, instill order and attempt to teach methods of rationality to superstitious and ignorant slaves. It is not surprising then to find that Arna Bontemps, when researching slave narratives before writing his historical novel of slavery, Black Thunder (1936), rejected Nat Turner's rebellion as basis for his novel because he was uneasy about the business of Nat's 'visions' and 'dreams' (Introduction xii). Instead, he chose Gabriel Prosser and his attempt to capture Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, because Prosser had not depended on trance-like mumbo-jumbo, and he emphasizes that Prosser had not been possessed, not even overly optimistic (xiii). Bontemps appears to have valued Prosser's logical planning and organization, his strategy, and his dignity. It would be easy to read this as revealing Bontemps's desire to counter dominant image of slaves as superstitious and ignorant, except for fact that Bontemps depicts in his novel slaves who fear and bad hands, who visit conjurers for protection, and who see ghost of slave Bundy, who was beaten to death by his master. It is true that Gabriel himself dismisses other slaves' superstitions, and this has led Eric Sundquist to note that, although conjure has undeniable power in slave world recreated in Black Thunder, it is set in contrast to decidedly foundation provided for Gabriel's bid to be free (97); Sundquist argues that conjure remains ambivalent in this novel, since it both causes a disabling fear of 'stars,' 'signs,' and 'bad hands' that dooms rebellion, and ultimately becomes a mechanism for power and revenge within community (121-22). While I find Sundquist's insightful and comprehensive in relation to slaves themselves, my own draws on Houston Baker's theory of conjure as narrative and William Covino's theory of magic rhetoric to explore how this conflict between rationality and conjure within novel's plot is mirrored at level of novel's discourse, inviting reader to participate actively in choosing conjure over type of rationality that Phillips's text presents. Many of slaves in Black Thunder are caught in an epistemological dilemma between trusting rational word that comes to them from masters and books, and trusting a conjure epistemology that they themselves often dismiss as superstition. Ben, slave who confesses and thus reveals Gabriel's plot to overthrow Richmond, is haunted by ghost of Bundy, a slave beaten to death by his master, and yet rejects ghost's call for retribution. Gabriel himself, at more than one crucial juncture, faces choice between reading world according to an empiricist mode and reading events in natural world as signs or symbols that would reveal a conjure knowledge based on assumption of an animate and interconnected world. By revealing Ben and Gabriel as tragic misreaders, and by providing reader with opportunities to interpret text through a conjure epistemology, Bontemps argues not only for a revised history of slavery that acknowledges slaves as sources, but also for a way of knowing both past and contemporary reality that does not rely on objectivist discourse. …

Linda Symcox. Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002. 228pp. Paper $21.95.

Linda Symcox. Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American Classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002. 228pp. Paper $21.95.

The testing trap: how state writing assessments control learning

Hardly a day goes by in America without talk of testing students to higher standards as a means to improve our education system. In The Testing Trap, George Hillocks puts this logic to the test. Through interviews with over three hundred teachers and administrators, Hillocks examines whether state writing tests in Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon, New York, and Texas do what they are supposed to do: Improve education. Ultimately, Hillocks argues that the majority of existing tests actually have a harmful effect on the way students are taught to write. In The Testing Trap, Hillocks demonstrates how the structure of assessment is actually responsible for the low level of thinking encouraged and reinforced in American classrooms. It is his contention that although politicians call for excellence, the tests that they create, and the formulaic writing they accept as passing, actually point to mediocrity as their true aim. In this way, political objectives are easily achieved but our children suffer the consequences. The Testing Trap is a provocative and essential read for administrators, teachers, parents, policymakers, legislators, voters, and all who care about the education of our children.

Whose history?: the struggle for national standards in American classrooms

In the 1990s the debate over what history - and more importantly whose history - should be taught in American schools resonated through the halls of Congress, the national press, and the nation's schools. Politicians such as Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and Senator Slade Gorton, and pundits such as Rush Limbaugh, John Leo, and Charles Krauthammer fiercely denounced the findings of the National Standards for History which, subsequently, became a major battleground in the nation's ongoing struggle to define its historical identity. To help us understand what happened, Linda Symcox traces the genealogy of the National History Standards Project from its origins as a neo-conservative reform movement, through the 18 months of controversy and debate that ensued, and the aftermath - a fascinating account of a crucial moment in U.S. history. Broad in scope, this case study includes debates on social history, world history, multiculturalism, established canons, national identity, cultural history, and liberal education. This is ultimately the story of how a debate about our children's education became a struggle between competing political forces.

Jamaican Students of Color in the American Classroom: Problems and possibilities in education

With the influx of almost 400,000 Jamaicans of color to the US, American educators are increasingly concerned about whether learning communities are preparing teachers and students for the increasing diversity of the American classroom. Problems arise when Jamaican students of color with excellent English skills are placed in special reading classes or in classes of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). Additional problems occur with teachers perceiving Jamaican students of color as simply a black child among other black children in America, regardless of their English language skills, nationality or immigrant status. To compound these problems, Jamaican students of color also lack knowledge about their own heritage, resulting in loss of self-esteem and national identity. To assist their adaptation to a new society, teachers must possess the attitudes and skills necessary to be able to differentiate between the various nationalities of children of color and possess knowledge about the rich historical and cultural contributions of Jamaica.

Demographics, Diversity, and K-12 Accountability

The achievement gap persists within American classrooms. Although teachers do make a difference in terms of what and how much students achieve, educational practitioners and policy makers would be well served to consider social inequities created by demographic realities, instructional practices that engender broad student participation, and accountability measures that compare districts fairly.

Negotiating Silence in American Classrooms: Three Chinese Cases

A common observation about Chinese students in American classrooms is their silence, which has been speculated on by many second-language acquisition researchers as the result of the students' lacking communicative competence compatible to their native-English-speaking counterparts. By focusing on three students from mainland China as part of a larger investigation of Asian students' classroom communication patterns in US universities, this paper explores in depth the complexities of silence, and the cultural interpretations of silence in various social contexts. Multiple functions of silence in terms of linkage, affecting, revelational, judgemental, and activating functions are explored across the three cases. This paper further investigates how Chinese students construct their identities through silence, and how they can reconstruct their identities by negotiating silence in American classrooms and by developing adaptive cultural transformation competence in the target culture.