education-theory

...The problem is that this books seems like it was written for high school students. The first chapter opens with a self-diagnosis: "I clarify the group's goals and ensure that the goals are formulated so members 'sink or swim' together and are committed to achieve them." Or how about, "I advocate my views and challenge the views of others in order to create high-quality and creative decions."

It never gets better. On page 231, for example, in the chapter "Using Power," the authors state, "Even though we sometimes do not like to admit it, power is a basic aspect of social life. It can be seized or given up, increased or lost. It can be used for good, evil, or trivial purposes. All relationships -- with family, friends, lovers, co-workers -- involve power and influence. Yet many person are unaware of the influence they exert on others, and many people are unaware of how necessary and constructive mutual influence is in building effective groups and collaborative relationships among members. Being skillful in influencing other group members and taking responsibility for such influences are important parts of being a member of a group."

Ya think?

The book goes on to identify "the process by which group members mobilize their power in order to accomplish their goals..." Each "action item" is followed by a paragraph of fluff just in case the heading isn't clear enough (not included here):

1. Determining Your Goals.
2. Assessing Your Relevant Resources.
3. Determining Your Needed Coalitions.
4. Negotiating a Mutual Support Agreement.
5. Implementing the Contracts.

I was really disappointed with this book because I was hoping for a book that analyzed the psychology of group behavior and offered practical rules based on that analysis. This book, however, is just too shallow to accomplish that. I imagine it was written for undergraduates, but I would think that even a sophmore would feel insulted.

I read this book as an assignment in a university sociology course. It is a great resouce to have on hand if you work with teams or are intersted in organizational/group behavior. Some of the activities have been used in my "Effective Social Relations" class and we found them not only fun, but educational. I have not read the 1999 edition, but am hoping to get it for a graduation present this April!

Less than halfway through the book, I found (to my disappointment) that there was not much new here. I slogged through the rest of it, but didn't care for it very much.

My purpose in writing this book was to demonstrate the accomplishemnts of West Point graduates in the growth and development of the United States. While much has been written about the battlefield achievements of West Point's military leaders, little has been provided to mark the remarkable impact graduates have made upon many other phases of America's rich history. It occurred to me that the Bicentennial of West Point's founding was an ideal time to correct this deficiency. The contributions of graduates I have included in these chapters may surprise you, and though some of the names will be familiar, many will not. Illustrations will introduce you to a number of those whose stories are included. It is particularly hoped young Americans will read this book, for the Other Leaders and Other Heroes who had had their stories told can well serve as role models for today's youth. To those who have read the book, I welcome your any criticism, both good and bad, you feel this volume warrants.

I've not read this particular book, but I recommend Bandura for anyone who really wants to give her/his cerebral cortex a workout. At times his writing is very dense and obtuse in translation (I find him only a little easier to follow in his native Spanish), but the connexions he makes are always worthy of full consideration.

Contrary to what "Reader from California" says, Bandura's native language is not Spanish, though much of his work has been translated into Spanish and other languages. He was born and grew up in northern Manitoba.

"The Having of Wonderful Ideas", by Eleanor Duckworth, was not quite what I expected. Although I learned from some aspects of the book I expected more"ideas" that could be easily understood and incoporated into classroom activities. I felt that the essays on the many experiments conducted by the author and Piaget were far too lengthy, almost drowning out any real "wonderful ideas". This book is not easy to read, and may leave the reader struggling to read to the end. However, as I stated previously I did learn a few things, but they came too far and few between the lengthy essays.

This book is excellent. It is an important read for teachers today. As an educator it is extremely disheartening to see the direction of education being driven today by politicians, rather than parents and teachers. Ms. Duckworth redirects are attention where it belongs, on the students & how they learn. This book gets us (teachers) thinking about the kind of classroom culture we want to create for our children. It is about what we value as educators. Don't mistake it for a quick reference, how-to book. This is not meant to be a outline of various lesson plans to try out with your class. It is more thoughtful than that and more important

For me, the real strength of this book is the way the presence of Eleanor Duckworth shines through her writing. I liken it more to the beacon provided by a lighthouse than to a how-to manual that describes rowing techniques. The clear direction that shown through for me was that learning is complex, and that teacher behaviors must be equally complex, but the guiding light is simple: Listen to and respect the learner and respond with your whole person, and the learning that needs to happen will occur, for both partners in the process.

I suppose this review won't say much, but not much needs to be said.

Two words: sheer drivel.

This book might be preaching to the converted. The sort of people who need to read it are so invested in the dominant culture that they dismiss it out of hand. Its outsider perspective will appeal to anyone who felt alienated by their education but didn't know why. Macedo puts his finger on the techniques and manipulations that the American education system uses to make sure we all end up as competent workers but not thinkers, obediant, if not satisfied. His academic prose might put some readers off. I recommend reading Dumbing Us Down by John Gatto for more concrete examples of how institutional learning facilities work.

This book opened my eyes and my mind to things I never questioned before.
It taught me how to ask critical questions of why I do the things I do and how to change them.
I also enjoyed reading about his conversations with Paolo Freire.

I would buy this book to give to my friends, who dare to know the truth.

If you want to learn about forms and modulations, and aren't really concerned about anything else then this book is great. Concise, accurate and well organized. If you don't think that form is more important than content, or if you're looking for an in depth discussion of how musical forms operate (instead of just descriptions) then this book misses the point entierly. Prepare for tedious and ultimately misguided generalizations. Music is much more interesting than this.

While I applaud the analysis method, based on Jan la Rue's "Five Parameters of Music" (here expanded to nine phenomena), this text poses several problems for the standard college classroom. An anthology is mandatory, though no one anthology seems to work with it. The analysis method itself yields a very densely marked score, with code observations which are more confusing than helpful. As to the standard terminology regarding binary, ternary, and compound forms, the wording is off-putting, requiring a good bit of translation from the professor. While form is a difficult bird for some, I was willing to take time to translate and go the extra mile. I also made use of the examples in the text at the keyboard. I have a doctorate in performance. Heaven help a clarinetist-professor.Very difficult excertps.Three years and out it goes.

With Spencer and Temko's focused approach to musical analysis, this intimidating discipline is made interesting and accessible. It does require knowledge of music theory, but even those students who regard theory as anathema can be put at ease within the first twenty pages of this succinct book.

The magic formula (which is an expansion of Jan La Rue's "musical parameters" view of analysis) is found in a chart of what are called musical "phenomena". "Observations" would have done as nicely, since the student is asked simply to state what he sees or hears in a score, using a three letter code. For example, a change in dynamics from loud to soft, signalling perhaps a new theme or key is marked IN THE SCORE with "dyn". This orderly process, indicated above the score in tabular fashion, allows the student to use the composer's own indications to assist in finding those defining points in the myriad of notes which, taken as a whole, can be overwhelming to a college junior. This makes analysis obvious and (in the words of my students) fun.

I use an anthology with this, plus the students' own scores. Later in the course, we meet in the music library, selecting unknown scores to analyze for form, period, and composer, using the same 3-letter codes. Recommended.

I was a little disappointed with the content of division unplugged. Learning how to count by 2's and 5's is all that I learned from listening to the CD. Each song sounded exactly the same. There was a plus to this purchase though, the brain teasers at the end of the booklet were helpful.

I recently purchased and tried Division Unplugged as a remedial resource for my grade five students. I found it to be thoughtfully constructed and that the songs were quite musically done. Each song not only teaches division facts, but reviews them by reminding the student of the multiplication tables. The choruses of each of the songs also incorporate skip counting, so even the slowest of students is able to make the connection between multiplication facts and division questions. Great job. I would recommend it to anyone.

Another one of those feminist and postmodernist professors is trying to infuse in her readership her bland ideas.
By using abstract language, Ms. Lather goes on to convert readers into her feminist ideas. Only radical feminists and gender-concerned individuals would enjoy this work.

In "Getting Smart", Patti Lather focuses on critical social science, liberatory education and how post-modernisms, neo-Marxisms and various feminisms make overt the ways in which power permeates the construction and legitimization of knowledge. Lather locates spaces for theorizing emancipatory practice necessitating a re-examination of those sites problematized by the postmodern, including subjectivity, agency, the production of knowledge and praxis. Lather creates a "multi-voiced" text weaving meanings that are more evocative than descriptive. She offers an example of her own research into women's studies students' resistance and demonstrates how meaning is constructed within different discourses of inquiry. She writes against the "authoritative voices" of foundational academic discourse while being aware that she is complicit in that which she critiques. Lather emphasizes that regardless of philosophical debates, the question is "What is to be done?". As a way to salvage emancipatory discourse and praxis she speaks in a "willful contradiction" of "theoretic fictions" (cultural Marxism and postmodernism) remaining committed to the open-endedness of the struggle over truth and reality. She refuses to accept the totality of the "radical negation of Enlightenment" and describes her refusal as a strategy of displacement which she grounds in her use of deconstructive theory.

As Lather traces her way through the contradictory discourses of feminism, neo-Marxism and poststructuralism she identifies the hallmark of a liberatory praxis as the ability to act "within an uncertain framework" at a time "marked by the dissolution of authoritative foundations of knowledge". She suggests that above all, emancipatory action requires reflexivity and the ability to attend to the politics of what we do. She recommends a "Foucauldian awareness" of the oppressive role of ostensibly liberatory forms of discourse."

Lather looks to pedagogy as a site for learning about strategies for a "postmodern praxis". She uses Lusted's definition of pedagogy that concludes that knowledge is produced at the intersection of three agencies, the teacher, the learner and the knowledge they produce. She concludes that it has been the practice of "transmissive" rather than "interactively productive" pedagogy that has been the "root of the failure of emancipatory objectives".

I applaud Patti Lather's project as a feminist, a critical theorist and as someone who appreciates the postmodern turn to a consideration of reality as constructed rather than found. As a teacher, a researcher and an activist, Patti Lather has created a dense, rich text that expands our understanding of what and how we can know and how emancipatory practice might be conducted.

As I waded through this textbook I at first felt that I had selected the wrong book for my teaching needs. The book is generally a review of current literature in the field of Health that would be an excellent resource for a graduate student who is about to tackle their thesis or dissertation. Contained within the chapters of this book is an extensive overview of what already exists in the field and certainly would be useful in helping a graduate student begin his or her research. This book would also be useful in helping a student who may be searching for a topic to study and research that may have been previously studied but then was found to be needing further work or follow-up. Upon completing the book I realized that although not necessarily perfect for my current needs of working with middle and high school students, it did provide support for things I am doing with them in my classes and broadened my scope as a health educator by making me think in terms of my role in school health education as compared to the roles of other health researchers and practitioners.

This text is a comprehensive review of health related theories. It provides the reader with anlayses of several health behavior theories and extensive bibliographies. To the student who is interested in health behavior research, this text is an important first step because it gives many examples of how specific theories, concepts and constructs are used in research studies.

I could not agree more that this is "shrill, unconvincing screed." I might also add that for a Professor who teaches psychoanalytic theory, Ms. Gallop doesn't seem to have a clue about the mechanisms of DENIAL, RATIONALIZATION and NEGATION. The unconscious is speaking very clearly through all this nonsense, if anyone cares to find it where it is, all on the surface. My condolences go out to her poor students, past and present, who have to put up with this psychotic pretentiousness.

Jane Gallop's 1997 tract, "Feminist Accused of Sexual Harrassment," is not meant to be an apology for her run in with academic and legal bureaucracies. The tract is not criticism nor critical theory as such. Instead, Gallop gives us an intensely personal overview and examination of her involvement in feminism, culturally and scholastically, since her exposure to the movement in the early 1970s. Gallop's writing is casual, even colloquial, and addresses the various socio-sexual facets of the student-professor relationship, and how they have changed between the early 70s and to-day.

In 1992, Gallop was served notice that she had been accused by two former students of hers of sexually harrassing them. As a feminist, Gallop discusses the initial strangeness in perception that this may generally cause: the fact that most harrassment cases are normally male to female, not female to male, or female to female. She looks at the history of the feminist movement and sexual harrassment as its legacy from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gallop talks about her explicitly sexual relationships with her own professors as a student, and with students as a professor herself. Making clear that since she began dating her eventual husband, she has completely stopped having these explicit relationships with students, Gallop details the important ways that relationships between students and professors can yet be erotically-charged.

Gallop's defiance of the academic and professional establishment may come off looking like willing ignorance or wistful naivete, but an undercurrent of anger and disappointment runs throughout the tract. Gallop laments the apparent cold distance and rigid formality being fostered in the current environment of academia. She asks if it should be the province of decor and propriety to decide how professors influence students and how students (especially graduate students) select and respond to the professors who guide their development.

While there is in the tract some longing for the days of yore and this is, above all, the personal and intimate reflections of one person, it is important to remember that Gallop does not ask every reader to agree with her assessments or abide by her conclusions. Gallop makes quite clear at the outset that her goal in placing this work before the public is simply to encourage its readers to reexamine the erotics of education - for feminists to reconsider the initial projects of feminism - and for each reader to decide if and how they will allow their every move to be overdetermined by needlessly oversensitive bureaucratic and legal manipulations. "Feminist Accused of Sexual Harrassment" is meant to provoke thought and discussion - those who would levy judgments against Gallop without pondering her arguments or talking about them in some kind of community risk missing the point entirely.

This is a fascinating, jolting, unsettling book. Gallop makes a disturbingly persuasive (and entertaining) case for the essential harmlessness of sexual relationships between professors and students. Ultimately, I disagree with her thesis for reasons similar to those cited by the other reviewers -- despite her feminist credentials (which are first-rate), Gallop fails to see how the erotic nature of the power differential is a destructive one. It's not that she doesn't acknowledge the power imbalance between teachers and students -- she does -- but she suggests that the imbalance can be easily overcome by entering into consensual amorous relations. (As if once a student and a professor sleep together, all the elements of power are suddenly, uh, "stripped" away!) I am a young male college professor, and I see all too well the temptations in such relationships. But I believe sexual relationships with my students to be fundamentally unethical because if I do sleep with my students (as Gallop slept with hers), I am "trading on" my power, and viscerally reinforcing the notion that for young women sexuality is an appropriate means of getting what you want.

I am glad that most professors are not like Jane Gallop. I am grateful, however, that we HAVE Jane Gallop -- and I sense, whatever her ethics, that she truly must be a marvelous teacher. I reject her thesis, but I applaud her daring and recommend this book enthusiastically, especially to graduate students and younger faculty!