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Social Influences

• "Talking Race" in the College Classroom: The Role of Social Structures and Social Factors in Race Pedagogy
  This article examines the role of race in the college classroom. Two types of college institutions in which the author has had personal teaching experience are examined.
• Assessing Dispositions toward Cultural Diversity among Preservice Teachers
  Assessed preservice teachers' attitudes toward cultural diversity prior to entering into multicultural education courses at an urban university. Respondents indicated strong support for implementing diversity issues in the classroom and high levels of agreement with equity beliefs and the social value of diversity.
• Between the World and the Village: The Role of Education in Sustaining and Developing an Eritrean Cultural Identity
  The role of education in the development of an Eritrean cultural identity is explored against the background of a review of relevant educational provisions in pluralist societies. Multicultural education in Eritrea offers access to a common culture and also to a variety of specific cultures.
• Boal's Mirror: Reflections for Teacher Education
  This study investigated the use of Augusto Boal's model of participatory theater to analyze complex social issues within the context of teacher education coursework. Augusto Boal was the originator of the Theatre of the Oppressed.
• Classroom Multiculturalism: A Closer Look
  Uses field data gathered in two school districts to explore multicultural activity in social studies classrooms. The focus is on the source, treatment, and incorporation of multiculturalism into the lessons.
• Constructing Multiple Subjectivities in Classroom Literacy Contexts
  Demonstrates ways in which three students in a multi-age, literature-based grade 3/4 classroom constructed and reconstructed their subjectivities based on demands of the social setting. Notes that each student's participation was influenced by gender, social class, ethnicity, and the task.
• Cultivating Hybrid Texts in Multicultural Classrooms: Promise and Challenge
  Explores the potential of hybridity for supporting critical pedagogies that seek to transform the knowledge, texts, and identities of the school curriculum. Draws on microanalyses of oral and written texts constructed by a Latina student perceived to be struggling academically.
• Culturally Relevant Teacher Education: A Canadian Inner-City Case
  This case study of an inner-city teacher education program in Canada documents the tensions at work on a social reconstructionist academic staff attempting to produce a culturally relevant teacher education program. Staff members acknowledge the social and educational contexts in which they work while working for the long-term interests of their students.
• Diversity, Differences and Leisure Services. Research Update
  Summarizes recent research on diversity, examining similarities and differences between diverse groups and noting the implications for recreation professionals. Presents several common principles that recreation professionals must consider in programming for diverse populations (training and education about diversity, cooperation and advocacy, social inclusion and choices, personal and psychological safety, and involving participants in planning).
• Eurocentrism, Ethnic Studies, and the New World Order: Toward a Critical Paradigm
  Summarizes the general history and progress of what has been accomplished in the areas of ethnic studies and multicultural education. The article argues that ethnic studies programs are actively concerned with developing a paradigm that is anti-Eurocentric and antiracist in content and application.
• For Knowledge: Tradition, Progressivism and Progress in Education--Reconstructing the Curriculum Debate
  Draws on realist theories of knowledge and epistemologies in the philosophy of science in order to argue that databases around the English school curriculum would benefit from such approaches. Reviews ways that knowledge has been conceived as social in educational thinking.
• Identity Formation and the Processes of "Othering": Unraveling Sexual Threads
  Discusses the extent to which the processes of "othering" (marking and naming those considered different from oneself) fall into the physical and sexual realm. The paper examines three studies, highlighting the extent to which othering is sexual, naming and exploring what it means for current school practice in multicultural environments.
• Multiculturalism and Music Re-attached to Music Education
  Suggests that the role of music and music education in supporting culture is very powerful. Focuses on students learning about music as opposed to performance.
• On Knowing the Place: Reflections on Understanding Quality Child Care
  Reflects upon experiences with the First Nations' Partnerships and the European Commission Child Care Network to argue that efforts to understand quality care have been insufficiently sensitive to socioecological and cultural factors related to defining and assessing quality. Argues for a reconceptualization of early childhood care, and presents reactions of professionals, academics, First Nations communities, and Africa Institute participants.
• Religion and Multiculturalism in Education
  Provides a concise historical overview of theological thinking concerning fundamentalism, absolutism, and relativism. Considers corresponding responses to issues regarding multiculturalism.
• Target Practice: Some Equality Implications of Current Educational Reforms
  Discusses the social and political contexts of proposed British educational reforms designed to address social justice and summarizes the discussion at the Association of Local Education Advisory Officers in Multicultual Education (ALAOME) March 1998 meeting. The ALAOME has drawn up a list of characteristics of effective schools in a multicultural context.
• The International Baccalaureate: International Education and Cultural Preservation
  Examines how well the International Baccalaureate (IB) achieves its aims of inculcating international attitudes while maintaining students' cultural identities. Finds that international attitudes may be more affected by the social environment of IB programs than by the curriculum; success at cultural maintenance varies by culture, with Western cultures being better supported.
• The Schoolyard as a Stage: Missing Cultural Clues in Symbolic Fighting
  Investigates how social conflict was enacted at one racially diverse, urban middle school. Discusses symbolic fighting, the use of body language, the location of symbolic fighting, and symbolic fighting as a source of transformation, proposing to redefine the socializing role of social conflict in the lives of students and adults in schools.
• Training Counselors To Work with Native American Clients
  This paper discusses the history and the impact that current social conditions of Native American people has upon their education, careers, relationships, and physical and mental health, and offers suggestions about how counselors can help Native Americans improve their lives. The structure of the paper includes a brief history of some of the critical incidents in Native American history, current challenges among the Native American population, counseling implications associated with these challenges, and suggestions counselors can use to increase their cross-cultural skills in counseling, consulting, and agency development.
• Understanding Multicultural Perspectives: A Project Approach
  Illustrates how the transformation approach can be used to enhance the social studies curriculum. Describes a project where elementary students analyze primary documents and firsthand accounts of a shared, class experience in order to help them understand the role that cultural perspective plays in the recording of history.
• What are schools for
  Problems of schooling in the United States are explored in the monograph. Major educational problems are grouped in two categories--confusion over educational objectives and a rush to solve vaguely understood educational problems with ill-conceived action.