Team Of Writers Research Articles

Mindful Persistence: Literacies for Taking up and Sustaining Fermented-Food Projects

Almost by definition, resisting the insidious convenience of the mainstream food supply requires persistence. This is especially true for food projects requiring fermentation—projects that unfold over days or weeks and require day-to-day science in kitchens where variables can be hard to control and where some degree of periodic failure is almost inevitable. In this article, a team of writers—scholars and community members—dramatizes a joint inquiry from which emerged a composite portrait of what we have come to call mindful persistence —an existential yet collaborative engine that drives our food literacies. Dialogic text features highlight the situated insights of individual writers, indicating that while this team shares an interest in fermentation, this interest does not require or assume identical understandings of the science of fermentation or similar positions in the probiotic debate surrounding contemporary fermentation practices. Instead, what is shared is a mindful persistence that scaffolds reflective action in this dynamic problem space.

Implications for Earth and space in new K–12 science standards

New science standards for national K–12 science education are in the process of being written by a states‐led team of writers organized by Achieve, Inc., with important implications for teaching Earth and space sciences. The final version of these “Next Generation Science Standards” (NGSS) is scheduled to be released in early 2013, but a second draft of the standards will be made public in December 2012. Members of the Earth and space science (ESS) research communities can review this draft of NGSS and provide constructive feedback. Such feedback will help ensure that American students receive instruction that is accurate, relevant, and engaging.

Men's health in Europe

Background In 2011 the European Commission launched the report ‘ The State of Men's Health in Europe’ covering the health of 290 million men across 34 European countries. This is the first official statement on the health of men in Europe. The work was carried out by a team of writers from across Europe aided by a management advisory group, a reviewing group and a broader reference group. Methods Data from major international databases were used to compile a detailed analysis based on population data, lifestyle and preventable risk factors, use of health services and morbidity and mortality data based on the ICD-10, with the results focused on the “European shortlist” of 65 causes of death. Results Changes in male demographics are creating a reversal in the age distribution ratio, with a decreasing younger population but increasing numbers of elderly men. The data on morbidity and mortality are most striking in relation to the high levels of premature death in men across the disease spectrum with marked differences between countries. Conclusions The very large variations seen in the health of men across Europe demonstrates that much of men's higher risk of premature death is caused by socio-cultural factors and therefore avoidable. No country should be complacent about the health of its male population.

"Intimate" violence against women: when spouses, partners, or lovers attack

Every year, at least 1.8 million women in the United States are beaten by their intimate partners. And that is only the number reported physically abused. It does not include those who remain silent, or those for whom the abuse is psychological. In this concise work, a team of writers examines the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of women, the risk factors for becoming a target, medical and psychological consequences, legal issues and effective treatments for recovery. The book dispels myths about intimate violence, including the notion that one can identify a potential perpetrator. The most current research, theory and advocacy on this topic are presented so the reader will have the knowledge to help herself or others who are being abused. Every year, at least 1.8 million women in the United States are beaten by their intimate partners. And that is only the number reported physically abused. It does not include those who remain silent, or those for whom the abuse is psychological. In this concise work, a team of writers examines the emotional, physical and sexual abuse of women. They explain the risk factors for becoming a target of intimate abuse, including the effects of class and culture on this type of violence. They look at the potential legal issues, and explore effective treatments for recovery. Equally important, they dispel many myths about intimate violence, including the notion that one can identify a potential perpetrator. Most crucially, Intimate Violence against Women offers current research, theory and advocacy on this topic, arming the reader to with the knowledge to help herself or others who are being abused. The book presents specific safety recommendations for victims, as well as recommendations for teen-agers regarding dating violence. Legal and advocacy resources are included as well.

Bridging two worlds: special education and curriculum policy

In a report to the Aotearoa New Zealand Ministry of Education entitled Curriculum Policy and Special Education Support (2004), the team of writers noted the lack of collaboration between experts in these two fields. This paper explores the apparently separate worlds of special education and curriculum policy in order to develop an understanding of where are the intersections, near misses and black holes. The experiences of the present authors, as education professionals in the two fields, are used to illustrate these gradually merging worlds. Discourses in special education are explored along with the need for new directions in curriculum developments for children with disabilities that disrupt current boundaries. The authors see possibilities in policy aims and practices; they have found (and participated in) attempts to reach out across the divides.

Reconfiguring American Civil Religion: The Triumph of Values

Rick Santorum's target in his imagined battle for the American soul is Hillary Clinton, whose It Takes a Village (1996) was a bestselling vision of American society. These two public figures claim distinctive moral visions, each derived from sacred scriptures, American lore, and simple sociological understandings of a good society. However, Santorum's It Takes a Family is a radical vision for the common good--one that is not so easy to detect from the rather folksy and conciliatory tone of his writing. (It certainly helps to have a team of writers from an ideologically driven press, ISI Books, to help in the crafting of a book!) Santorum's good society starts with the family. However, the (the liberal elite who believe in Big Government) besiege the littles (local government, small businesses, local churches and schools, soccer teams) and tell them how to run their lives. Of course, these village elders are liberals like Hillary Clinton and other do-gooders who just don't understand that the natural family of father, mother, and children can manage on their own given their religious faith, a non-interfering government, and a free market. The littles can generate their own social, economic, moral, cultural, and intellectual capital if left unfettered. It Takes a Family is a fascinating read to understand the mind of a self-proclaimed compassionate conservative, Republican, and Roman Catholic. Knowing that Santorum is affiliated with both Opus Dei and the Jesuits, one would expect a more sophisticated excursion into the social doctrine of the

Locating Poliakoff: an Auteur in Contemporary TV Drama

Stephen Poliakoff has quietly, but consciously, worked his way into a position held by very few television playwrights in the UK historically, let alone today: that of a distinctive voice in the medium. Though Poliakoff is a very different writer from Dennis Potter, he is emerging as a figure of similar standing. He has recently been acclaimed internationally with an Emmy award (2005) for The Lost Prince and his national standing is evidenced by his invitation to deliver a masterclass to the assembled great and good of the British television industry at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in August, 2005. These are just the latest institutional markers of esteem accorded to him over and above his celebrity status, with a BBC television profile prior to the showing of Perfect Strangers (BBC1 2000) and as guest on Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4, 13 March 2005). Poliakoff is critically acclaimed as an author of ‘good’ TV drama but he is valorised from specific, if often unconscious, discursive positions within the industry and the academy. This first part of a triptych case study of ‘Poliakoff and “good” TV drama’ aims to place him in context and to unpack the particular values for which he, and his work as an auteur, stands. In the early years of television, as documented in George Brandt’s British Television Drama (1981), the authorial voice of the playwright was privileged. Brandt’s edited collection includes, amongst others, essays on Trevor Griffiths, David Mercer, Jeremy Sandford and Peter Watkins as well as Potter. TV drama was initially seen as the individual writer’s medium. Subsequently, as soaps and other serial drama forms have become the medium’s standard for small screen fictions, teams of writers have been required for an industrial process delivering, in some instances, several hours of drama week on week. Though it may not be the case, the output of a team of writers in an industrial process reminiscent of a production line has been regarded in Britain to be relatively low in quality. In the USA, in contrast, the teams of writers who

Soap Opera, Commercialisation and the Proletarianisation of Cultural Production

Irish television drama initially contained a number of prestigious producers and writers who could use their knowledge and reputation as forms of organisational power. Today, soap opera, the dominant genre, depends on quick turnovers, short-term contracts and teams of writers. It offers little hope of building prestige or recognition. This article looks inside the production of Fair City, Ireland's most popular soap opera. The show's success and survival depend on a level of rationalisation that is unprecedented in Irish television drama. This new form of organisation is a response to the pressures of an increasingly commercialised broadcasting environment. Constraints of time and finance have reduced the professional autonomy and creativity of Fair City's producers, writers and actors. This article offers the hypothesis that this is one example, among many, of how market influence may bring about a ‘proletarianisation’ of formerly autonomous and prestigious cultural work.

Guest-Editor Note

The present collection of essays on Algeria was conceived in 1998, after watching a program on W (alias WTN) in which Rachida spoke movingly about her family, most of whom were killed by the Islamicists and/or State police. Apart from extending a critical view of the unrest that is ripping post-independent Algeria apart to an English-reading public, Algeriad's principal objective was to reflect on what Wole Soyinka aptly called the other open sore of Africa. By no means all the issues are confronted and/or dealt with here, though the questions of colonialism, Islamism, terrorism are covered. Equally, the range of critical method, while not exhaustive, seeks to encompass politics, social criticism, critical method, deconstructive analysis, autobiography, and language. It is envisaged that the collection, given its multi-dimensional objective in poem, painting, and narrative, will extend our knowledge of the Algerian and introduce to both the general reader and student of culture a plurality of views of the current situation in that country and the world. This special issue Algeriad is about the rise of Islamism, that complex and dangerous process by means of which many people lost their innocent lives. Both narrative and poem explore and ultimately, I hope, deconstruct the binary notion of Islamism/terrorism, as they operate in a society still searching for a way out of the impasse. The collection examines the process by which, through shifts in positions, any given person can be de-authorized, eliminated, rendered invisible, and perceived as inconsequential, while others are valorized. The contributors, a team of writers, philosophers, feminists, poets, and painters, from different cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds and positions, have had a difficult task in defining what constitutes the process of crisis from the varied individual and collective points of view, and then writing in a manner which might suggest issues that stand beyond the specific ones addressed here. That they have done so is a tribute above all to their ability to care for and about Algeria. The approaches taken by these essays range from the social to the seductive, from the theoretical to the personal. In reading and re-reading them, I find myself witnessing a process of discovery. It is as though the civil war in Algeria was being converted into new concepts of the Self, of pain, of meaning, of validity, of life and death. The essays are densely interrelated. No introduction, short or long, can deal with the issues they raise. I wish, therefore, to let the reader discover for himself or herself the wide canvas these writers and artists paint. One thing is certain: the reader is made to rub his or her face in the dirt. And if writing cannot create for the writer a paradise or hell, it certainly makes survival possible. Writing is for these contributors a personal and public commitment and testimony to ethical and literary values. I am first and foremost grateful to Kostas Myrsiades for giving me the opportunity to undertake this complex and important task, and who kindly accepted my idea about editing a special issue of College Literature. Izmer Ahmad who, after reading the manuscript, fathered a painting which he aptly called Garden for the cover. (Ironically, under French occupation, there was in Algiers, which was known at the time as le petit Paris, a public park called Le jardin d'essai: une espece d'evasion avant d' arriver a la plage). …

The WPA Guides: Mapping America

In 1935 the FDR administration put 40,000 unemployed artists to work in four federal arts projects. The main contribution of one unit, the Federal Writers Project, was the American Guide Series, a collectively composed set of guidebooks to every state, most regions, and many cities, towns, and villages across the United States. The WPA arts projects were poised on the cusp of the modern bureaucratization of culture. They occurred at a moment when the federal government was extending its reach into citizens' daily lives. The 400 guidebooks the teams produced have been widely celebrated as icons of American democracy and diversity. Clumped together, they manifest a lofty role for the project and a heavy responsibility for its teams of writers. The guides assumed the authority of conceptualizing the national identity. In The WPA Guides: Mapping America Christine Bold closely examines this publicized view of the guides and reveals its flaws. Her research in archival materials reveals the negotiations and conflicts between the central editors in Washington and the local people in the states. Race, region, and gender are taken as important categories within which difference and conflict appear. She looks at the guidebook for each of five distinctively different locations -- Idaho, New York City, North Carolina, Missouri, and U.S. One and the Oregon Trail--to assess the editorial plotting of such issues as gender, race, ethnicity, and class. As regionalists jostled with federal officialdom, the faultlines of the project gaped open. Spotlighting the controversies between federal and state bureaucracies, Bold concludes that the image of America that the WPA fostered is closer to fabrication than to actuality. Christine Bold is director of the Centre for Cultural Studies and an associate professor of English at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.

Front Porch

frontporch The Confederate States of America once pinned its hopes on foreign recognition . Those were the days of "cotton diplomacy," when southern exports were deemed essential to the British economy, and Confederate leaders proudly boasted that the industrial nations of Europe could never survive without the South. "You dare not make war on cotton," vaunted James Henry Hammond, senator from South Carolina. "No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king." Needless to say, things didn'twork out the way the senator intended. As it happened , the outside world needed the South much less than the other way around, and moral and cultural isolation have seemed more typical ofDixie's history than the superpower status projected for the Cotton Kingdom. A good bit ofthis isolation has been self-imposed, as defeat, impoverishment, and immobility pushed the postbellum South into more than its share of self-absorption. above: Union Street in Plymouth, Devon, England,January 1961. Courtesy ofthe Plymouth City Museum. In a larger sense, however, the South has never lacked foreign recognition, and never more so than in the twentieth century. From J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in the eighteenth century to V. S. Naipaul in the present, foreign visitors have put us in their travel plans. Southern music, from jazz to blues to country and western, blasts out of boom boxes from Japan to Eastern Europe. Faulkner, Disneyland, and Elvis continue to fascinate, and for better or worse, the Confederate batde flag flies in many places as a multipurpose symbol ofrebellion. Nor is the South isolated from the rest of the world. With soccer fields and sushi bars all over its suburbs, and Mercedes under construction in Alabama, the outside world has come to us in a big way. Professor Michael O'Brien is uniquely well-placed to assess all of this. Born and brought up in Britain, he is an expert on southern intellectual history who divides his time between Miami University of Ohio and Cambridge University of England. O'Brien has served on the editorial board oíSouthern Cultures from the outset, and when he agreed to put together a special issue for us on the South and the world beyond America, we jumped at the chance. As guest editor, O'Brien has assembled an all-star team of writers. Most of them come from outside the United States or have extensive experience talking and teaching about the South to non-Americans. Collectively, they tell us that there is lively interest in the South out there, more perhaps than native southerners have realized. In his own essay, O'Brien reminds us that southerners are in the habit of thinking of themselves in binary opposition to northerners, but that the rest of the world is not so stricdy limited. On a planet where regionalism is increasingly ascendant, the South can relate to Scodand, Catalonia, Quebec, and Hong Kong as one subnational entity among many. And unlike some of our counterparts, our region lost its war for political independence long ago, without giving up its cultural identity. This is a message worth spreading. To join a world ofdisparate regions and provinces, the South has to remember that foreign recognition is a two-way street: we'll have to recognize the "foreign" to get the same in return. That's a complex process, and we may be out of practice , but the only way to get started is to plunge right in. The authors in this issue are an excellent group to start listening to, for they bring a wide variety of perspectives on why the South is interesting to many people the world over. A different editor and a different kind of topic may give this issue of Southern Cultures a slightiy different format and perhaps a slightiy different "feel" from the ones our readers are used to, but we hope you are as happy with the result as we are. As they say in Paris, Texas, vive la différence. harry watson, Coeditor Front Porch ...

Reader-Based Document Testing at VA

Reader-based document testing by writing teams in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has resulted in writers who now focus on their readers rather than on their supervisors. Document testing has enabled the writers to understand and anticipate the needs and the reading habits of their readers. This article focuses on the testing used by VA writing teams to guide and validate document revisions, presenting VA's goals for document testing, methods of testing, and results of testing. THE PROBLEM Officials of the Department of Veterans Affairs knew they had a problem with their form (boilerplate) letters. Lawyers had called to complain that they could not understand the complicated VA letters their clients brought in. A quick check of college-educated VA employees revealed that often even they could not understand letters sent out from other divisions of VA. When VA officials in the Jackson, Mississippi, office started considering a solution, they surveyed their files and then reviewed the Mississippi Literacy Assessment (Crosby, Howell, Carr, & Miller, 1991). These sources show that 50% or more of the target audience in Mississippi has a 9th grade education or less and can be expected to read at or below the 5th to 6th grade level. The national reading level is not much better than Mississippi's. The National Adult Literacy Survey (1993) by the Educational Testing Center reports that the literacy skills of 76% of those 65 and older are inadequate. The Educational Testing Center studied a representative VA letter and judged VA's letter to be so difficult that only about 5% of those 65 and older across the nation could read it. This 65-and-older age group includes the target audience for the most frequently written VA letters nationally as well as in Mississippi. As a communications consultant, I established the guidelines for revising VA letters and trained VA employees in regional offices across the country to produce these revisions. In order to accomplish this task, I have trained teams of writers in VA regional offices across the nation to revise letters collaboratively and to test them to ensure that very poor readers can read and respond appropriately. GOALS OF TESTING Early in the project to revise form letters, VA management agreed that the only way to assure readability of VA documents was to test them on the intended readers. Therefore, VA committed to reader-based testing and established these goals for early testing of revised form letters: * to verify the vocabulary level * to determine comprehension * to verify reader satisfaction Later, as the regional writing teams who were revising the form letters learned more about testing and became more reader-oriented, these goals were added: * to ensure that readers understand what the document tells them to do * to learn how readers use documents * to train the VA writing team METHODS OF TESTING VA writers used a variety of testing methods to meet their goals for the new-style documents, ranging from informal reader feedback to more formal cued-response reader testing combined with retrospective interviews. Informal Reader Feedback The Jackson, Mississippi, VA writing team (the prototype for other VA writing teams around the country) received informal feedback about or from the intended readers in several ways. The first feedback came from members of the writing team who worked as telephone counselors for veterans calling in with questions generated by form letters they had received. These counselors could anticipate the problems veterans would have with wording or procedures because they spent their normal workday on telephones answering veterans' questions about VA letters. In addition, the Jackson, Mississippi, writing team conducted two focus groups with veterans who were also members of veterans' support groups, which assist veterans in their contacts and negotiations with VA. …

Book reviews

This series by Churchill Livingstone is very good and could be said to have“captured” this market. By focusing on one clinical area, here the gastrointestinal tract, the team of writers can produce an up-to-date account which usually surpasses those found in comprehensive textbooks. The danger is that too many such books appear and this particular issue competes directly with Computed Tomography of the Gastrointestinal Tract, Including the Peritoneal Cavity and Mesentery edited by Morton Meyers.

Pre-Islamic Yemen in a recent publication

On 28 April 1987 an exhibition opened in Munich under the title “Jemen: 3000 Jahre Kunst und Kultur des Glucklichen Arabiens”. In connection with this, Werner Daum brought together a team of writers to supply background essays on all aspects of Yemeni culture covered by the exhibition; these were published in a sumptuously produced 492 page volume (with splendid illustrations), by Pinguin Verlag of Innsbruck under the simple title Jemen. There are in all 45 contributions, but the following remarks refer only to the 14 concerned with pre-Islamic Yemen.

Taking the Lid Off: Socialist Feminism in Oxfordshire

Th@ only living things I can see from my study window as I write this are sheep. The debate on socialist feminism seems metropolitan and far away. Yet how I write, think, practise politics and study history depends on a framework of beliefs about how people relate to each other and build their society that I identify as socialist feminism. Because there is not and has not been one socialist feminisma simple, single dogma accompanied by its catechism this article cannot begin with its definition. Rather, it attempts to address the issues of diversity and persistence raised in Feminist Review No. 23, 'Socialist Feminism Out of the Blue', and to arrive at a definition by working out how its theory and practice interrelate for me, ensconced in the rural wilds yet active in the labour movement and academic worlds of Oxfordshire. An example of the interrelationship of theory and practice is the work of the Oxford Feminist History Group, a loose collection of women historians who organize seminar series based on the principle that there is a feminist perspective to the study of history, as opposed to 'women's history' which would merely include women within the limits of the existing account. In the past there seemed a greater certainty, a clearer assumption of the issues to be addressed. Beyond the Fragments (Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright, 1979) perhaps marked the apogee of this more confident period. Hoping for a journey into the uncharted territories of socialist feminism, this team of writers argued that the organizational forms of socialism, expressed in Leninist or Labour Parties, was flawed and wasted the strength of grassroots support by ginng overriding priority to democratic centralism and electioneering respectively. Feminism could offer the experience of the women's movement which, without centralized leadership, developed consciousness and actinty amongst those previously rendered apathetic through oppression. The authors' benchmarks for an historical assessment of socialist feminism reflected this optimism and addressed whether women's groups organized separately, if they were encouraged by socialists who learnt from them and whose programme was thus

Programs, Materials and Techniques

The theme this month concerns pleasurable games and activities. This may seem to contradict the findings of the distinguished team of writers and investigators in the excellent report entitledNot All Little Wagons Are Red. Their main conclusion for successfully educating preschool exceptional children is to teach them exactly the academic subject you wish them to learn. However, there is no reason why straight academic content cannot sometimes be served more palatably in the form of games. Sentence Builders is an excellent game for older children which teaches parts of speech and syntax very effectively. Deal Me In suggests many ways of using playing cards in the classroom, whileTwo Hundred Plus Art Ideas for Teachers will prove valuable to teachers who consider the development of spatial skills to be as important as the verbal. Our own interest in the relationship of body image with communication was stimulated by the motor programLearning To Move and Moving To Learn. The idea of using the movements of aquatic animals is ingenious. Books and programs on mathematics are always welcome, especially ones which provide an entertaining format and a wealth of supplementary materials.Arithmetic Instructional Activities are designed to supplement basic math programs with additional practice in addition, subtraction, multiplication, divisional fractions. My own contribution this month proposes a new spatial hypothesis for the reversals of words (not the mirror imaging of graphemes). I hope it intrigues some research worker to test it out. — A.B.

On the Draft of a New Chemistry Syllabus for the Secondary School

The syllabus committees established by the USSR Academy of Sciences and Academy of Pedagogical Sciences have drafted proposed syllabi for all the subjects taught in school. As indicated in the joint resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the USSR Council of Ministers, On Measures for Further Improvement of the General Secondary School (Pravda, November 19. 1966), the recommendations of the academies have been taken as a basis for converting our schools, in the years immediately ahead, to new syllabi. The work presently in progress includes modification of syllabi and continuation of experimental verification of these syllabi in the schools, while teams of writers have begun the development of new textbooks. The proposed chemistry syllabus is published in the current issue of the journal for the information of teachers and discussion in methods groups.

ReviewRadiation Therapy. By MurphyWalter T., pp. xiii+1,041, illustrated, 1959 (London, W. B. Saunders Co.), £8 15s.

At the present time, when the fashion is for symposia by a team of writers, edited (some better than others) by one or two distinguished authorities, a text-book written by a single author is distinctly interesting, while one from the pen of Professor Murphy commands immediate and respectful attention. This book is an account of his experience at Roswell Park Memorial Institute and at the Veterans' Hospital, Buffalo, New York, supplemented by wide reading and including a bibliography which is comprehensive almost to the point of extravagance.