Vision Of Reform Research Articles

Beyond Comparisons of Online Versus Face-to-Face PD

With adoption of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English Language Arts (ELA) and math and release and beginning adoptions of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), teachers, schools, and districts are clamoring for professional learning opportunities to refine and re-tool teaching to bring it in line with reform visions in these documents. This increased need for professional development (PD) raises question of capacity of current systems of PD as well as effectiveness of most commonly used approaches. The nature of new demands of these reforms and scale of need means that PD will have to use innovative approaches to handle type of complex learning called for in these reforms, and will have to do so at scale (Wilson, 2013). Many may see online learning environments as part of a solution to address scale issues, because of ability to use this technology to reach broad audiences across a wide range of timeframes. There is interest in online or technology-mediated environments that promise certain kinds of functionality to support in complex work they are being asked to do (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Wilson (2013) identifies need to harness new technologies and social media to make high-quality science PD available to all teachers as one of grand challenges in science education. We argue as part of our response to Fishman et al. that a corollary to challenge of access is challenge of developing research-based design principles to guide ongoing development, implementation, and evaluation efforts in online PD to meet these new, complex demands in teacher learning. Others share this concern. Dede, Ketelhut, Whitehouse, Breit, and McCloskey (2009) lay out case for growing importance of online delivery of PD. At same time, they convey unease about scarcity of nuanced empirical work to guide design and implementation of online PD models. Dede et al. make a twofold clarion call to funders and field to (a) conduct empirical research to tease apart not only what works but why and (b) focus on theory building that articulates design principles that can guide effective PD, disseminated in ways helpful to practitioners and researchers alike. In their recent Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) article, Comparing Impact of Online and Face-to-Face Professional Development in Context of Curriculum Implementation, Fishman et al. (2013) contribute important findings to this empirical work by comparing different modalities of PD. The Fishman et al. randomized study of secondary teacher learning to support adoption of a new science curriculum makes a welcome contribution to a high need area of research. Their comparison of three critical measures of across two different PD modalities--face-to-face and online--affirm growing importance of studies, as Fishman et al. state, measuring the impact of PD on teacher beliefs and practice and student learning as opposed to teacher self-report of change (p. 2) in two different learning contexts. The finding that online PD could produce same impact on measures of teacher beliefs, practice, and student learning as face-to-face PD is an important step forward. For community designing, implementing, and researching PD environments, this finding encourages design and study of online PD and provides a solid foundation on which to build. Yet, important research questions remain unanswered. While focus of study was a comparison of two formats for delivery of PD, design of PD itself was somewhat underspecified. For example, there is not enough information in their article about specific design assumptions guiding PD learning goals, nor is there much detail about specific nature of their evaluation measures. This is not intended to be critical, but to suggest that to take their findings as applicable to all online PD would be an overreach. …

A century of rural self-governance reforms: reimagining rural Chinese society in the post-taxation era

In 2006, the Chinese central government abolished the agricultural tax. This came after several years of intense focus on the growing rural crisis, sparking a new debate on the shape of rural society. Putting these contemporary debates in the context of 100 years of rural governance reforms, this paper argues that contemporary rural advocates find themselves in a situation similar to that of the first half of the twentieth century, and their reimagination of rural governance draws on the ideas of that time as well. It focuses on the contemporary visions for rural reform of Xu Yong, Dang Guoying, Yu Jianrong, Wu Licai, Li Changping, Cao Jinqing and He Xuefeng.

Beyond the Shadow of the Law: Firm Insolvency, State-Building, and the New Policy Bankruptcy Reform in Late Qing Chongqing

This paper modifies the historical assessment of the 1906 Qing Bankruptcy Code by proposing a new approach to the history of commercial dispute resolution. It argues that the Qing bankruptcy reform cannot be understood by evaluating only published sources, and that a thorough understanding of dispute mediation techniques must serve as a foundation for assessing the historical importance of the law. It offers a description of Qing insolvency dispute practices by providing an analysis of cases from the Ba county archives. The results of that analysis suggest that, although the Qing Bankruptcy Code was repealed soon after its introduction, the reform ambitions behind the new legislation were realized through the implementation of another New Policy reform, which allowed chambers of commerce to resolve bankruptcy disputes differently. This conclusion suggests that the basic vision of the Qing economic reforms of the New Policy movement had more of a lasting impact than has been assumed to date.

Applying the Triple Aim to the Quality Agenda for Anticoagulation Care

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement's Triple Aim Framework has been gaining ground since its launch in 2008 as an innovative vision for health system reform. The framework articulates a set of goals in which health system costs and healthcare quality must be balanced against the needs of the

Teacher and Administrator Responses to Standards-Based Reform

Background Since the onset of standards-based reform and its continuation in the form of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and now Race to the Top, debates have continued about whether such policies foster desirable change in states, districts, schools and classrooms. Research Question The study asks: How do state and district administrators, principals, and teachers describe their responses to standards-based reform, in terms of beliefs, understanding, and attitudes, as well as behavior? Participants The analysis uses interview data from 32 schools in 10 districts in 5 states. Data are from 60 fourth- and seventh-grade mathematics teachers, 32 principals, 14 district administrators, and 7 state officials. Research Design The overarching five-state study identified a representative probability sample of districts for each state. From those districts, two in each state were chosen for the case study, based on size and poverty. Data Collection and Analysis Interviews were transcribed, then coded both inductively and deductively to identify patterns and elicit major themes. Findings This study provides evidence that standards-based reform has elicited positive change in four areas: attention to struggling learners, teaching to the test, responsibility for student learning, and classroom content and pedagogy. Respondents said that as a result of standards-based reform policies, they focused more on struggling students, trying new approaches to reach them, and increasing their expectations for them. Respondents also reported increasing their personal and group responsibility for student learning, while at the same time feeling stress and pressure from the testing regime. Respondents reported worrying that teaching to the test was narrowing the curriculum, but they also praised the system for eliciting needed improvements in the curriculum. Some teachers said the new state standards required them only to change the order of topics they taught, but other teachers said the standards required them to cover different content and to focus more on student understanding and knowledge retention. Conclusions The findings here of constructive and positive responses stand in stark contrast to a substantial literature that documents negative reactions to NCLB. One explanation might be that earlier attempts at standards-based reform and accountability, such as those documented in this analysis, were much more closely aligned with the theoretical vision of standards-based reform than were later manifestations as codified under NCLB, which have (a) moved away from local discretion, (b) emphasized rewards and sanctions rather than authority (buy-in), and (c) changed the target from standards to focusing on test results, often exclusively.

Art from the Gutter: Heinrich Zille's Berlin

The quintessential Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, while remaining almost unrecognized outside Germany and certainly neglected in art historical circles on both sides of the Atlantic, nonetheless offers an important way to understand the modern city in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Zille, I argue, represents a proletarian modernism, a way of viewing and embracing a vibrant working-class domesticity—a milieu—that theGroßstadtitself had created. In so doing, he offered intimate representations of Berlin for Berliners; he was decidedly grounded in the local and telescoped Berlin from its districts to its neighborhoods to its streets. What reemerged at this insider level, however, were glimpses of the wider world into which Berliners had been cast. Zille thus blurred distinctions between public and private spaces that marked the social boundaries of the city and drew from both the local and the global in ways that have gone unrecognized in his work. His perspective on the new capital, in other words, was accomplished by embracing the liminal, and he ultimately offered a kind of palatable social protest—a vision of reform without socialism—that was itself quite remarkable.

George Gissing’s Demos : Public Discourse and the “Many-Headed Monster” of Socialism

George Gissing’s Demos: Public Discourse and the “Many-Headed Monster” of Socialism Inna Volkova (bio) When, in 1888, Edith Sichel wrote an article in Murray’s Magazine about George Gissing’s pessimistic outlook on the working classes, she stated that Gissing was one of the writers whose attention was now turned to “that many-headed monster Demos” (506). Although nowhere does Gissing’s novel Demos contain such a colourful metaphor to describe the masses of New Wanley, Sichel’s phrase is clearly suggested by the tone of the novel. The article in Murray’s puts Gissing’s social “pessimism” side by side with Walter Besant’s philanthropic “optimism” (516). It is commonplace to consider Gissing’s novels as a break from mid-Victorian social and political commitments. As a turn-of-the-century novelist, Gissing casts doubt on mid-Victorian eagerness to offer ready solutions to social evils. Representing a “new style of realism” (DeVine, Class 41), Gissing’s Demos does not share Besant’s optimism and hence is not the mainstream Victorian novel embedded in a middle-class vision of social reform. Demos dismisses the idea of cultivating middle-class values in the poor as a comforting fantasy. Gissing’s case study of socialism(s) suggests that the public sphere is best represented as a fragmented kaleidoscopic canvas of political causes, styles, and self-identifications. In doing so, Demos marks a shift in Victorian conceptions of the public sphere and reformulates the means and the ends of political discussion therein. This novel enters into the late-Victorian debate around “that many-headed monster Demos” to question the premises of philanthropic projects and to suggest that perhaps the notion of truly transformative action lies not in the clamorous arena of the public discourse but elsewhere. I suggest that a central aspect of Gissing’s break from Victorian legacy lies in his revision and rejection of the Victorian imaginings of the public sphere. I focus on the novel’s preoccupation with the question of agency in the public sphere as it imagines two main alternatives: large-scale political movement versus individual pursuit of art. Gissing, in the end, is skeptical about both. The novel shows that any idea, however benevolent, would gain resonance in the public sphere only to dissolve under the centrifugal forces of selfish ambitions, plural interpretations, or even mutations into its very opposite (as is the case with Richard Mutimer’s socialism turned into “Democratic Capitalism” [416]). The kinds of socialisms that we see in [End Page 141] Demos—from Westlake’s intellectualism and Mutimer’s moderate agitation to Daniel Dabbs’s zeal for “stamping and shouting” (35), Roodhouse’s violent revolutionism, and even a Russian variety with a “nihilistic” flair—point to the limits of a unified social action or the impossibility of large multitudes articulating a political argument. Such diversity and incommensurability of political ideas and movements make a shared discussion forum unfeasible. The illusory voice of the people inevitably splinters into many styles and agendas. Therefore, the novel suggests that the practical aspect of participating in the public sphere entails a loss of pristine political notions, the impossibility of a shared dialogue, and an inability on the part of multitudes to exert a concerted collective action. As if by a law of entropy, collective action loses its momentum before it even begins. Another alternative is embodied in the aristocrat Hubert Eldon’s individualistic pursuit of art, which includes preserving Wanley in its pre-industrial, pastoral condition. The socio-political and the aesthetic planes do not intersect in the novel, as evidenced by Eldon’s rhetorical question, “What has a hungry Demos to do with the beautiful?” (77). While Hubert’s individual pursuit of art dangerously withdraws him from social concerns in the public sphere, Mutimer’s political agitation for a mass movement is compromised even more. Although Gissing wrote Demos “from a very Conservative point of view” (Mattheisen et al. Letters 2: 363) and Eldon’s eco-preservation and taste for the beautiful are presented favourably, Gissing does not intend to imply that Eldon’s aesthetic conservatism presents a solution to late-Victorian social anxieties. Demos does not seek a solution or prescribe a...

Promoting fundamental change in mathematics teaching: a theoretical, methodological, and empirical approach to the problem

Mathematics education reform, as conceptualized in the United States and a number of other countries, represents a fundamental change in the teaching of mathematics and the results it would produce for students. Whereas there are data that suggest some progress is being made in the direction of reform, teacher education and professional development during the last two decades have been largely unsuccessful in preparing teachers to enact the reform vision. In this article, I present a theoretical construct, major assimilatory structures, that can contribute to explaining the difficulty of promoting change in mathematics teaching. I describe a methodology—accounts of practice—for identifying major assimilatory structures of teachers and present an example of a major assimilatory structure, perception-based perspective, that emerged from our empirical work.

Farm Workers and Farm Dwellers inLimpopo Province,SouthAfrica

One of the less studied legacies of settler colonialism and agrarian dualism inSouthAfrica is the substantial population of people living and working on (still mostly) white‐owned commercial farms – a feature distinct from most other countries inSouthernAfrica. Many farm workers and farm dwellers inSouthAfrica experience precarious tenure, and poor housing and labour conditions. This paper explores what is happening to farm labour and to agricultural capital inLimpopo province. Findings from field research on four horticultural and livestock/game farms illustrate how economic pressures, combined with land restitution and labour migration, have produced new and contested trajectories of agrarian change – largely cementing a historical shift from independent land tenure to wage labour but also prompting diversification of livelihoods. We explore the ways in which actors on farms – workers, dwellers, owners and managers – have responded with regard to three spheres of contestation: ownership, production and employment; tenure and livelihoods; and family, gender and children. We argue that, contrary to official visions of reform, long‐term processes of agrarian change predating political transition – proletarianization, casualization and the externalization of farm labour – are being accelerated. These processes, and the ways in which they are producing new contours of social differentiation, are illustrated at farm level.

Lesson study as an instrument for school reform

This article describes the case of a Japanese junior high school that experienced a turn-around in three years from one of the worst schools to one of the best by utilizing lesson study for learning community (LSLC) as a managerial tool. It will focus on how the principal: (i) established a vision of reform, (ii) organized LSLC to involve the entire school and (iii) overcame problems in the process of implementing school reform based on LSLC. The principal placed top priority on making learning more collaborative and on including not only cognitive but also social and ethical aspects. He subsequently implemented LSLC beyond subject boundaries with special attention to joint observation of and reflection on lessons. Further, the principal interacted with the teachers individually and developed both collegiality among the teachers and the capacities of middle-level leaders.

“The Odds and Ends of Things”: Dorothy Day's 1930s Catholic Worker Columns and the Prudent Translation of Catholic Social Teachings

This essay argues that Dorothy Day's 1930s Catholic Worker columns prudently translated Catholic social teachings in order to articulate a vision for radical Catholic social reform. Day's columns interpreted dogmatic Church texts in response to public outcries for social change during a period of economic and social collapse, specifically the doctrinal principles of human dignity, hospitality to laborers, and Catholic action. As a translator, Day balanced arguments for the relevance of traditional religious values with circumstances requiring innovative solutions. She used prudence in order to carve out a “middle way” between the two extremes of dogmatic fidelity to the views of established Church leaders and pandering to revolutionary sentiments that urged the working class to eschew traditional religion. Day's case illustrates an important relationship between translation and prudence—how prudent translation enables rhetors to craft innovations from within traditional belief systems in order to rework cultural norms and advance social change.

Beware the Lens of Low-Wage Labor

against corruption is a prime mover of the Arab Spring. If the Occupy Wall Street movement reaches critical mass, there will be a need for a clear understanding of the origins of crisis and practical proposals for reform. The essays in these volumes, taken together, provide a coherent history and offer visions of reform. If we do not yet know how to attain the ideals the authors of some of these essays proclaim, they do offer frameworks to begin that analysis. If knowledge were power, these volumes would suffice to animate

Exploring principal capacity to lead reform of teaching and learning quality in Thailand

In 1999 Thailand passed an ambitious national educational law that paved the way for major reforms in teaching, learning and school management. Despite the ambitious vision of reform embedded in this law, recent studies suggest that implementation progress has been slow, uneven, and lacking deep penetration onto classrooms. Carried out ten years after the launch of the reform law, the current research sought to expand on these earlier studies by examining the capacity of Thailand's principals to lead reforms in teaching and learning. The study developed a national profile of principal instructional leadership using a Thai Form of the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (Hallinger, 1994). The overall profile of 1195 primary and secondary school principals suggested a moderate level of engagement in two dimensions (Creating a School Mission and Developing a Positive School Learning Climate) and a lower level of activity on the dimension, Managing the Instructional Program. The results provide preliminary evidence which suggests that a more systematic human resource strategy is needed in order to ensure that Thailand's key school leaders have the knowledge, skills and motivation needed to support changes in teaching and learning envisioned in the nation's education reforms.

A Conversation with Donald Berwick on Implementing National Health Reform

Michael Birnbaum interviews Donald Berwick shortly after his departure from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services about the national health care landscape. Berwick discusses the strategic vision, policy levers, operational challenges, and political significance of federal health care reform. He rejects the notion that the Affordable Care Act represents a government takeover of health care financing or service delivery but says the law's Medicaid expansion and its creation of health benefit exchanges present a "watershed moment for American federalism." Berwick argues that the solution to Medicare's cost-containment challenge lies in quality improvement. He is optimistic that accountable care organizations can deliver savings and suggests that shifting risk downstream to providers throws the health insurance model into question. Finally, looking to the future, Berwick sees a race against time to make American health care more affordable.

Making the developmental system work better for children: lessons learned implementing an innovative programme

ABSTRACTPathways to Prevention is an early prevention project founded on developmental systems theory operating through a schools‐community agency‐university partnership in a socially disadvantaged area of Brisbane. Circles of Care is a Pathways programme also implemented on a small scale by the same agency in a regional city. The Circles programme is designed to strengthen connections between schools, families and community services, and harmonize activities in these settings by surrounding children with identified needs with a supportive group of adults. A Circle, which includes at least the child, parent(s), teacher and agency staff, sets goals, mobilizes resources for the child, family and school, and monitors progress. The client is conceptualized not as the child but as a dysfunctional developmental system, with better outcomes for children as the ultimate goal. Qualitative evaluation at the two sites showed that while Circles worked well at the level of practical support and relationship building and did achieve good child outcomes, its capacity to achieve collaborative practice and strengthen system relations was limited by entrenched organizational structures and cultures. However, one site, with more support for collaboration across organizational boundaries, suggested that system alignment is achievable on a larger scale with vision and leadership for organizational reform.

From the Editor

From the Editor Lee Cassanelli In this issue, NEAS features contributions from scholars who examine the roots—some recent, some much older—of institutional practices and intellectual discourses that continue to inform northeast African politics and society in our own time. William Berridge's study of policing in colonial Sudan reveals the limited ability (and willingness) of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium administration to regulate its own police forces, thereby enabling some of those local forces to pursue their own personal and sectarian agendas at several critical moments in the country's modern history. The absence of impartiality in the state's pursuit of law and order is clearly a phenomenon that continues to plague state-society relations in many parts of contemporary northeast Africa. Joseph Venosa's examination of the Muslim intelligentsia's role in the debates over Eritrea's future following World War II suggests that modern nationalism in northeast Africa had multiple intellectual and associational roots. While early efforts to unite Muslim and Christian nationalists in Eritrea foundered in the face of local, regional, and international pressures for union or federation with Ethiopia, Islamic sentiments in favor of self-determination continued to inform Eritreans' subsequent struggle for independence. There and elsewhere in the region, Islamic schooling continues to provide new generations with a widely shared vision and vocabulary for political reform that both complements and challenges secular models of governance. [End Page vii] The Somali Manifesto of 1990 was a last-ditch attempt by Somalia's civilian elites to persuade the beleaguered dictator Mohamed Siad Barre to resign so as to avoid a violent overthrow of the regime. Mohamed Haji Ingiriis explains why their attempt failed, drawing on the memories of some of the surviving signatories. Like many "roads not taken," the aborted Manifesto initiative points up the possibilities and the limits of political persuasion, both domestically and internationally, under conditions of intrastate conflict. Finally, Maimire Mennasemay takes a new and provocative look at the fifteenth-century Ethiopian Chronicles of Lalibela and finds evidence of a social utopian vision, couched in myth and legend, that is uniquely Ethiopian and at the same time resonant with more universal utopian discourses. The author argues that modern intellectuals and Ethiopianists have ignored the social aspirations and reformist impulses concealed in the chronicles, opting instead for Western models of modernization derived from the outside rather than from within Ethiopian tradition. The book reviews included in this issue give an indication of the range and vitality of scholarship that northeast African studies continue to generate. The genres range from village studies to broad regional histories of violence, from Italian colonial culture to local biography. Our reviewers have taken their work seriously, and their reviews constitute important scholarly reflections and commentaries in their own right. We call upon our readers to continue to recommend new and significant books to review. Readers can look forward to two special issues in 2013: "Images of Art, Culture, and Philosophy: Perspectives on Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism," guest edited by Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis, Addis Ababa University; and "Muslims and Christians in Northeast Africa: Juxtaposed Stories, Intertwined Destinies," guest edited by Eloi Fiquet, French Center for Ethiopian Studies (CFEE), Addis Ababa. We invite suggestions for future thematic issues and guest editors, and we always welcome individual submissions for consideration. [End Page viii] Copyright © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees

Localizing Archival Memories of Spanish Language Education in California, Engaging with the Multilingual Histories of the Present

uccllt_l2_11991 Abstract: Focusing on Spanish in California, this article offers language educators a critical perspective into how the languages we teach have histories constructed in shifting memories of language,speakership, and education. This article builds upon the 2007 MLA report's vision for curricular reform that situates language study in cultural, historical, geographic, and cross- cultural frameswithin the context of humanistic learning. Cultural narratives and frames are connected to localized archives of histories and memories surrounding the learning and teaching of Spanish.Examining key texts and contexts, this article explores European and American imperial discourses surrounding language in education in connection to indigenous memories by the colonized or reduced Indians who were the among the first learners of Spanish in early multilingual California. This article advocates understanding archival texts as a step toward articulating an explicitly critical and historical component to recent reform movements in foreign language education. It is suggested that critical archival perspectives offer possibilities for rethinking and expanding the curricular space of history and memory in undergraduate and graduate Spanish programs, as well asin teacher education programs.

DISCOURSE OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT - A BASE OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN SERBIA

Education in Serbia faces challenges of reforms and rapid adaptation to demands of global, developed environment, intensive changes in science, technology, economy, entrepreneurship and social relations in general, as well as to high standards and expectations. On the way to global integrations, education that wants to have a marker - sustainable incorporates principles of sustainable development in its base: the principle of reconcilability with nature, economic sustainability, social justice, cultural identity, global joint work. After all the reforms and wandering around, the school recognizes that environmental, sustainable education forms a new way and style of life with relationships organized among adults and children at school and outside the school in the local community. Finally, a sustainable vision of education reform in Serbia has been focused on creation of a system that will able to get together and engage relevant factors and respond to their actual needs. The education system that wants to have an indicator of sustainability decentralized, efficient, effective, qualitative, and transparent; it employs highly professional, reflective, creative and motivated teaching staff; it has been focused on learning and it a standard-based; it offers a high-quality program, promotes the culture of evaluation, self-evaluation and development of the school; it fosters fairness, ethics, tolerance, constructive communications-it able to meet special educational needs, it has included the perspective of the lifelong learning, and it has a support of educational technologies. In essence it a reengineering of the human spirit by mental transformations inspired by the principles of ecology and ecological engineering that needs to implemented through sustainable environmental education. This paper will analyze whether all the opportunities offered in Serbia by environmental education are used, and what the obstacles are that need to overcome in terms of normative principles and reduction of the gap between what is and what should be when considering the discourse of sustainable development in Serbia.

Vietnamese Visions of Reform in the Charterization of New Orleans Schools

This essay examines the role of charter schools for promoting the interests of diasporic communities. It focuses on the opening of a charter school in a Vietnamese neighborhood in post-disaster New Orleans. While the school's opening testified to the Vietnamese community's increasing visibility in the recovery process of post-disaster New Orleans, the charter school as a vehicle for addressing the specific needs was still fraught with problems. Through this case, this essay ask how much influence diasporic communities have in shaping educational policy and reframing Asian American experiences when the vehicles promoting their interests are associated with neoliberal initiatives.

The Vanishing Mexicana/o

This article complements the existing body of Ruiz de Burton scholarship by providing the first sustained examination of her literary representations of American Indians in both Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885), and by exploring how these representations serve her broader aims of social and political reform. The presence of American Indians in the novels, however marginal, and Ruiz de Burton’s rendering of them as savage, powerless, and justly shut out from the social and political life of the nation are critical to the author’s aims. Accounting for the absence and strategic appearance of American Indians in the novels reveals the complexities of Ruiz de Burton’s manipulations of racial hierarchies as well as the ways in which she connects racial identity to rightful land ownership and social status. Ruiz de Burton reframes popular accounts of American Indians—including the captivity narrative and the myth of the Vanishing Indian—as a means of advancing her political aims. Ultimately, attending to the role of American Indians in the two novels allows for a better appreciation of just how interconnected Ruiz de Burton’s two novelistic projects are and of how each serves her larger vision of social reform.