GSE Publications

Concepts and Methods for Using Narrative in Teacher Education

Betsy R. Rymes et al. — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:32:29 PST

Someone tells you a story. It seems wrong. It misrepresents someone you care about. But it has been told by someone you do not want to offend or contradict. What do you do? You feel you must say something—set the record straight, absolve your friend, clarify your relationship to her, assert your view on what is right and wrong. How do stories provoke this sense of urgency? When a story is told and interpreted, nothing less than truth, power, morality, and individual agency can be at stake, and these stakes are too high to ignore. The stories analyzed in this book illustrate that narratives bring into play those elements that bring meaning to life . . .

Exit Rights and Entrance Paths: Accommodating Cultural Diversity in a Liberal Democracy

Sigal R. Ben-Porath — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:01:11 PST

The debate over the accommodation of culture in liberal democracies tends to emphasize exit rights. Autonomy is typically taken as a pre-condition for exit, and public schools are often charged with promoting or facilitating it. I argue that diversity liberals have a more justifiable viewthan that of autonomy liberals on cultural accommodation, but diversity liberalism too should reframe its view of exit rights. Narrow exit rights that protect basic human rights should be maintained and augmented with entrance paths into general society. I further suggest that for exit rights along with entrance paths to provide the morally required conditions for accommodating culture while respecting freedom, policies in this realm should be designed to address adults rather than children. I consider the effect of this dual change of perspective on the accommodation of culture in democratic institutions, including schools.

Youth Cultures and Education

Stanton Wortham — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:46:57 PST

Homies in the New Latino Diaspora

Stanton Wortham et al. — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:46:51 PST

“Homies” are a series of over two hundred 1¾ inch figurines created by a California artist, with the images also available on clothing, in comics, in videogames, on stickers and on the internet. The artist claims that his creations represent the whole range of people one finds in “the barrio.” As the images circulate, however, different audiences interpret them differently - some decrying their glorification of gangsters, for instance, with others lauding the portrayal of less commonly represented social types. This paper traces the uptake of Homies images in one suburban American town, a town with no previous history of Mexican settlement that has become home to thousands of Mexican immigrants over the past 15 years. In this location, Homies images are taken up in various identity projects as Anglos use them to make sense of the rapidly growing immigrant community and as Mexican youth use them to identify themselves. The role that Homies play in social identification cannot be understood by examining discrete events of media “reception,” however. Analysts must also take into account ongoing local struggles over identity through which the mass mediated images come to have meaning and in which these images sometimes play central roles. The recontextualization of these mass mediated images among different groups in town sometimes results in the homogenization of identities - with the signs used to construe Mexican youth in unflattering ways drawn from nationally circulating stereotypes - while at other times the images are taken up in less familiar identity projects.

Interviews as Interactional Data

Stanton Wortham et al. — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:18:59 PST

Interviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often yield useful propositional information, and interviewers must guard against the sometimes-corrupting influence of interactional factors. But we argue that the interactional aspects of interview events can also be valuable data. Interview subjects sometimes position themselves in ways that reveal something about the habitual positioning that characterizes them or their groups. We illustrate the potential value of this interactional information by describing “payday mugging” stories told by interviewees in one New Latino Diaspora town.

Racialization in Payday Mugging Narratives

Stanton Wortham et al. — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:18:52 PST

As Mexican immigrants move to areas of the United States that have not been home to Latinos, both longstanding residents and newcomers must make sense of their new neighbors. In one East Coast suburb relevant models of identity are sometimes communicated through “payday mugging” stories about African American criminals mugging undocumented Mexican victims. These narratives racialize African Americans and Mexicans in different ways. As payday mugging stories move across narrators from different communities, the racialized characterizations shift.

The Religification of Pakistani-American Youth

Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:05:04 PST

This article describes a cultural production process called religification, in which religious affiliation, rather than race or ethnicity, has become the core category of identity for working-class Pakistani-American youth in the United States. In this dialectical process, triggered by political changes following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Muslim identity is both thrust upon Pakistani-American youth by those who question their citizenship and embraced by the youth themselves. Specifically, the article examines the ways in which schools are sites where citizenship is both constructed and contested and the roles that peers, school personnel, families, and the youth themselves play in this construction/contestation of citizenship.

Recruitment, Retention and the Minority Teacher Shortage

Richard Ingersoll et al. — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:31:11 PDT

This study examines and compares the recruitment and retention of minority and White elementary and secondary teachers and attempts to empirically ground the debate over minority teacher shortages. The data we analyze are from the National Center for Education Statistics’ nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey and its longitudinal supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey.

Our data analyses show that a gap continues to persist between the percentage of minority students and the percentage of minority teachers in the U.S. school system. But this gap is not due to a failure to recruit new minority teachers. Over the past two decades, the number of minority teachers has almost doubled, outpacing growth in both the number of White teachers and the number of minority students. Minority teachers are also overwhelmingly employed in public schools serving high-poverty, high-minority and urban communities. Hence, the data suggest that widespread efforts over the past several decades to recruit more minority teachers and employ them in hard-to-staff and disadvantaged schools have been very successful.

This increase in the proportion of teachers who are minority is remarkable because the data also show that over the past two decades, turnover rates among minority teachers have been significantly higher than among White teachers. Moreover, though schools’ demographic characteristics appear to be highly important to minority teachers’ initial employment decisions, this does not appear to be the case for their later decisions to stay or depart. Neither a school’s poverty-level student enrollment, a school’s minority student enrollment, a school’s proportion of minority teachers, nor whether the school was in an urban or suburban community was consistently or significantly related to the likelihood that minority teachers would stay or depart, after controlling for other background factors.

In contrast, organizational conditions in schools were strongly related to minority teacher departures. Indeed, once organizational conditions are held constant, there was no significant difference in the rates of minority and White teacher turnover. The schools in which minority teachers have disproportionately been employed have had, on average, less positive organizational conditions than the schools where White teachers are more likely to work, resulting in disproportionate losses of minority teachers. The organizational conditions most strongly related to minority teacher turnover were the level of collective faculty decision-making influence and the degree of individual classroom autonomy held by teachers; these factors were more significant than were salary, professional development or classroom resources. Schools allowing more autonomy for teachers in regard to classroom issues and schools with higher levels of faculty input into school-wide decisions had far lower levels of turnover.

Suppression of the aggressive impulse: Conceptual difficulties in anti-violence programs

Joan F. Goodman et al. — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:10:53 PDT

School anti-violence programs are united in their radical condemnation of aggression, generally equated with violence. The programs advocate its elimination by priming children's emotional and cognitive controls. What goes unrecognized is the embeddedness of aggression in human beings, as well its positive psychological and moral functions. In attempting to eradicate aggression, schools increase the risk of student disaffection while stifling the goods associated with it: status, power, dominance, agency, mastery, pride, social-affiliation, social-approval, loyalty, self-respect, and self-confidence. It is argued that the distribution to students of power and authority, plausible substitutes for aggression, would enable them to express aggression in a legitimated manner and simultaneously encourage their attachment to school. A vibrant anti-violence program that attracts children will find a way for caring, amiability, sympathy, and kindness to live in tandem with competition, power, assertiveness, and anger tamed by institutional constraints.

Is the Supply of Mathematics and Science Teachers Sufficient?

Richard Ingersoll et al. — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:56:42 PDT

This study seeks to empirically ground the debate over mathematics/science teacher shortages, and evaluate the extent to which there is, or is not, a sufficient supply of teachers in these fields. Our analyses of nationally representative data from multiple sources show that mathematics and science are the most difficult-to-staff fields, but the factors behind these problems are complex. There are multiple sources of new teachers; those with education degrees are a minor source compared to those with degrees in mathematics and science, and the reserve pool. Over the past two decades, graduation requirements, student course taking, and teacher retirements have all increased for mathematics and science, yet the new supply has more than kept pace. However, when preretirement teacher attrition is factored in, there is a much tighter balance between supply and demand. Unlike fields such as English, for mathematics/science there is not a large cushion of new supply relative to losses—resulting in staffing problems in schools with higher turnover.

Safeguarding Play in Virtual Worlds: Designs and Perspectives on Tween Player Participation in Community Management

Yasmin B. Kafal et al. — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:58:54 PDT

Managing problematic interactions in online communities has been a challenge since the days of early text-based, multi-user environments. Research in this area has mostly focused on adults and older teens. In this article, we examine the interactions and commentaries of tween players in Whyville.net, a virtual world with (at the time of the study) more than 1.5 million registered players ages 8–16. To understand how tween players define problematic behavior and what they observe in their own community, we draw from an archive of online postings to Whyville’s newspaper. The postings cover the period from 2000 to 2009 and consist almost entirely of player-generated content. Complementing these tween writings are observations of an after school gaming club in which, over a period of three months, about 20 youth players ages 9–12 met almost daily to play for an hour on Whyville.net. We highlight one particular incident observed in the gaming club because it illustrates how club members dealt with problematic behavior experienced online. Finally, we address the challenges and opportunities that tween player participation in community management presents for managing online behavior and player safety.

Gaming Fluencies: Pathways into Participatory Culture in a Community Design Studio

Kylie A. Peppler et al. — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:58:49 PDT

Many recent efforts to promote new literacies involve the promotion of creative media production as a way to foster youth’s literate engagement with digital media. Those interested in gaming literacies view game design as a way to engage youth in reflective and critical reading of the gaming culture. In this paper, we propose the concept of “gaming fluencies” to promote game design as a context in which youth not only learn to read but also to produce digital media in creative ways. Gaming fluencies also present the added benefit of addressing equity issues of participation in the new media literacy landscape. We report on an ethnographic study that documented urban youth producing digital games in a community technology center. Our analyses focus on an archive of 643 game designs collected over a 24-month period, selecting a random sample to identify evidence of creative and technical dimensions in game designs. In addition, we highlight three case studies of game designs to identify different pathways into the participatory culture. Our goal is to illustrate how gaming fluencies allow for a wide range of designs, provide low thresholds and high ceilings for complex projects, and make room for creative expression. In our discussion, we address how gaming fluencies represent a complementary pathway for learning and participation in today’s media culture.

The Status of Teaching as a Profession

Richard Ingersoll et al. — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:15:33 PDT

Citizenship and Belonging in an Age of Insecurity: Pakistani Immigrant Youth in New York City

Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:20:35 PDT

Helping Immigrants Identify as "University-Bound Students": Unexpected Difficulties in Teaching the Hidden Curriculum

Stanton Wortham — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:48:24 PST

Globalization has brought rapid migration to many regions previously unfamiliar with immigration. In these changing landscapes long-time residents must make sense of their new neighbors, and immigrants must adjust to hosts’ ideas about them and develop their own accounts of a new social context. How immigrants are viewed and how they view themselves have important implications for their future prospects-especially in schools, where students are measured against normative models of success. Yet as members of cultural and linguistic minority groups, and often as people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, immigrant students may not be aware of these models that are typically part of the implicit or hidden curriculum. Realizing this, secondary school educators in one American town tried to help immigrant students adopt a normative model of identity, the «university-bound student,» by teaching them explicitly how such a person should behave. Their well-intentioned efforts at teaching the hidden curriculum did not work, however. Immigrant students recognized and valued the identity, but neither they nor their teachers believed that the students could adopt it themselves. Using ethnographic data and discourse analyses of curricular materials and classroom interaction, we describe how this program failed to work. We argue that this occurred in part because the intervention was based upon a conception of culture and identity as static and homogenous. We show how a more complex account of culture and identity –as circulatory, multiple, and heterogeneously evaluated– explains this failure and suggests how such an intervention could be more successful.

Review of "Teacher Layoffs: Rethinking 'Last Hired, First Fired' Policies"

Richard Ingersoll et al. — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 09:37:03 PST

The Magnitude, Destinations, and Determinants of Mathematics and Science Teacher Turnover

Richard Ingersoll et al. — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 09:36:49 PST

Listening for Identity Beyond the Speech Event

Stanton Wortham — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 07:54:30 PST

Background
A typical account of listening focuses on cognition, describing how a listener understands and reacts to the cognitive contents of a speaker’s utterance. The articles in this issue move beyond a cognitive view, arguing that listening also involves moral, aesthetic and political aspects.

Focus of Study
This article attends to all four dimensions, but focuses on the political. I argue that listening requires attention to the social identities inevitably communicated through speech. My account of “listening for identity” moves beyond typical approaches by construing listening as a collective, public process, not one located in an individual listener’s mental states. To listen is to respond sensibly to others such that participants can build a coherent interaction. Once we adopt this pragmatic account of listening, we must acknowledge that listening requires attention to patterns beyond the event of listening itself. Some of the signs and behaviors that cohere to form an instance of listening depend for their meaning on patterns from outside the event of listening. In addition to arguing that we listen for identity, then, I also argue that we must “listen beyond the speech event.”

Setting
The case study presented in this article comes from a year long study of a ninth grade English and history class in an urban American school that served ethnically diverse working class children.

Research Design
The research involved three years of ethnographic research in an urban American high school, one year of intensive ethnographic research in the classroom described, as well as discourse analyses of 50 hours of recorded conversation from this classroom.

Conclusions
Speakers inevitably identify themselves and others when they talk, and this identification can only be successful if people listen and respond in appropriate ways. We certainly listen for the cognitive contents communicated by speech, but we also listen for the identities established through speech. The two central claims made in this article and illustrated by the case study are that we inevitably listen for identity and that listening requires attention to patterns beyond the speech event.

Redefining Psychology Methodologically, Metatheoretically, Pedagogically and Ethically

Stanton Wortham — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:54:10 PST

Moments of Enduring Struggle

Stanton Wortham — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:54:06 PST