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  Leadership Preparation and Development in North America

  Michelle D. Young and Margaret Grogan

  "Canada, Mexico and the United States are increasingly tied together in a complex and trinational relationship… And while increased integration of these three nations seems inevitable, they currently have quite distinct traditions, politics, economies and education systems. In this chapter we review one aspect of North American education systems, the development of educational leaders."

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  Paulo Freire

  Jean Ryoo, Dianna Moreno, Jennifer Crawford, and Peter McLaren

  "Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and critical theorist who influenced the formation of critical pedagogy and educational theory worldwide, while engaging in literacy campaigns and school reform in Latin America and Africa."

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  Rethinking Critical Pedagogy: Socialismo Nepantla and the Specter of Che

  Nathalia Jaramillo and Peter McLaren

  "It is difficult to imagine a more ominous time to be addressing the importance of indigenous knowledges and the struggle against imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, and what Peruvian scholar Anibal Quijano (I 998) describes as the "coloniality of power.” We are challenged into believing that we live in anything but a racist state when anti-immigration zealots are sporting "Kill a Mexican today?" shirts…when the quiet Pennsylvania town of Hazleton, infamous for its "Illegal Immigrant Relief Act” that imposes penalties on businesses and landlords to deter them from hiring or renting rooms to undocumented immigrants, declares that as part of a citizen-organized public awareness program to demonstrate the town's "zero·tolerance'' policy toward undocumented immigrants, it is banning Santa Claus this Christmas; and when more than 30 other towns are considering similar laws to the Illegal Immigrant Relief Act to drive out undocumented workers. These are more than rnalapropos. foot-in-the-mouth actions fired off in the heat of the moment; they are egregious hate-filled racist acts."

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  Best Practices in Writing Assessment

  Robert C. Calfee and Roxanne Greitz Miller

  Our assignment in this chapter is to discuss best practices in writing assessment, a task that poses a twofold challenge for teachers-first, the task of providing authentic opportunities for students to acquire skill in writing while covering an ever-increasing array of other curriculum demands; second, the overriding pressures to ensure that students perform well on the standardized tests that have become the primary accountability index. As we complete this chapter, few state testing systems rely to any significant degree on performance tests for measuring student achievement. Multiple-choice tests dominate, and on-demand writing tests (including the SAT) generally contravene the counsel provided by the College Board. Our purpose is to survey assessment concepts and techniques supported by research and practical experience and to suggest ways to fit these ideas into the realities of policies that, although well intended, often conflict with best practices. The advice from the College Board illustrates this point; it captures many facets of best practices, but the real SAT assessment permits none of these elements. We have limited space for presenting how-to details, but we will provide selected references to help apply the ideas. The chapter is organized around three topics. First, we describe the concept of embedded classroom writing assessments designed to inform instruction and provide evidence about learning. The bottom line here is the recommendation that writing tasks (instruction and assessment) be designed to support the learning of significant academic topics (Urquhart & Mclver, 2005). Next, we present several contrasts that emerge from this perspective: process versus product, formative versus summative evaluation, and assessment versus testing. Finally, we review a set of building blocks that is essential to all writing assessments, especially those that are classroom-based: the prompt, the procedures, and the rubrics. As you have probably realized from the scenarios and the discussion thus far, our focus will be on composing more than mechanics. Attention to spelling and grammar is eventually important, but it helps if the writer has something to say and has learned how to organize his or her ideas.

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  Response to Intervention: Research for Practice

  Amy-Jane Griffiths, Lorien B. Parson, Matthew K. Burns, Amanda VanDerHeyden, and W. David Tilly

  "This publication is a compilation of research regarding traditional LD diagnostic practices and RtI. The authors sought to identify the most important 25 articles for each topic and to provide the specific references for them. In addition, the most seminal five articles for each topic are annotated to summarize findings in an easily accessible manner. Although we attempted to provide a comprehensive resource for both traditional approaches and RtI, the primary objective was to respond to concerns about a lack of a research base for RtI."

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  Critical Theory Perspective on Social Class, Race, Gender, and Classroom Management

  Ellen Brantlinger and Scot Danforth

  "This chapter takes a critical theory perspective to address how students and teachers' social class, race, and gender influence the dynamics of classroom life."

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  Ghosts in the Procedure

  Noah De Lissovoy and Peter McLaren

  This article discusses teaching as a space of material, ideological and subjective struggle and transformation, in which the political and spiritual commitment of the educator must contest the intensified control and domination of current educational processes in the context of a newly energized and exploitative contemporary global capitalism. The authors argue that educators need to challenge the hyper-racism of official schooling, as well as their own ideological construction as pacified citizen subjects, and the enforcement of this construction through fear and fatalism. In this regard, contemporary changes in the material conditions in public schools are examined, including the effects of recent conservative reforms, and it is suggested that these changes necessitate a corresponding modification in the subjective and political strategy of critical pedagogy. This pedagogy should bring together a greater attention to global political struggles, a collective resistance to the alienation enforced by professional educational identities, a more decisive break with official school culture in the practice of oppositional teaching, as well as a more sophisticated awareness of the complexity of student agency and participation.

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  Global Culture of Terror: A Marxist Riposte

  Peter McLaren

  "The world is becoming more attuned to what it views as the perversely obstinate and irredeemably pernicious exercise of US double standards, to what, in the words of Ahmad could be termed "a new pathology of power". American concepts of justice appear 10 be riven with a perfidiously stage-managed spin. How else can you explain how the US can celebrate democracy within its own borders and lay waste to it outside of them? How can the US justify its economical, logistical, and military support of undemocratic regimes - some of which are involved in acts of genocide? And how can the US government pillory those critics who raise these questions for the public record?"

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  Learning to Do Educational Research

  Robert C. Calfee, Roxanne Greitz Miller, Kim Norman, Kathy Wilson, and Guy Trainin

  In this chapter, we present an account of selected research and development programs in the literacy arena conducted over the last decade under the direction of R. C. Calfee in collaboration with his coauthors. Three specific projects provide context and empirical findings for approaching the issue of translation of research into practice. Following are brief sketches of each project, laying out the framework and research strategy along with goals for practice. All three projects explore professional development strategies designed to promote fundamental change in teachers' knowledge, beliefs, and practices consistent with current sociocognitive learning theories. A concomitant concept has emerged during the work: the influence of organizational and contextual factors in generalizing the initiation and sustainability of the core concept. Following brief sketches of the three projects, we explore three themes emerging from our experiences in translating research into practice and then address the four questions posed by the editors.

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  Moral Panic, Schooling, and Gay Identity: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance

  Peter McLaren

  "This decidedly postmodern combination of extreme wakefulness and forgetfulness has helped to create the contemporary moral panic surrounding sexuality. We rely as a society on perceptions that have been filtered through constellations of historical commentaries rooted in xenophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, the commodification of everyday life, and the reproduction of race, class, and gender relations. Schools both mirror and motivate such perceptions, reproducing a culture of fear that contributes to a wider justification for vigilance surrounding sexual practices through polar definitions of youth as morally upright/sexually deviant, and approvingly decent/unrepentantly corrupt. This Manichaean perspective on youth further supports a paternalistic and authoritarian politics and policing of the unconscious by limiting access to more progressive and liberatory vocabularies and practices of knowing."

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  Motivational Challenges Experienced in Highly Complex Learning Environments

  Richard E. Clark, Keith Howard, and Sean Early

  "One of the greatest challenges facing education today is to find more effective and efficient ways to support the learning of highly complex knowledge...Our discussion begins with a definition of complexity and a description of current motivation theory. We then go on to describe five different research areas where task complexity may interfere with the motivational processes that support learning. Where possible, we will also describe the evidence for ways to overcome motivational problems."

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  Preface: A Pedagogy for Life

  Peter McLaren

  "At this moment in history, Paulo Freire remains critical pedagogy's conscience-in-exile. Especially today, Freire's corpus of work threatens to explode the culture of silence that informs our everyday life as educators in the so-called world's greatest capitalist democracy."

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  Preface: Fashion a Bulwark Against Barbarism

  Peter McLaren

  "It is evident everywhere that progressive educators around the world are harboring an anticipatory regret at what the world will surely be like if unbridled capitalism has its way. Great swathes of the globe are imploding from the expansion of the world capitalist system… Increasingly youth have been forced to sacrifice their futures in order to fund the endless wars on terror, to fund a crisis response program of bailing out the banks and to bolster the extravagant lifestyles of the financial elite. This calls for a revolutionary upsurge on the part of youth, with teachers playing a vital role in educating for socialism as state officials consistently refuse to consider increasing taxes on corporations and the rich to prevent public service and wage cuts."

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  Preface to Learning and Social Difference

  Peter McLaren

  "Critical pedagogy has been developed over the past several decades as a counterweight to right-wing ideologues whose fustian (and Faustian) proclamations darkly denouncing liberal educators as enemies of civilization only add to the mawkish legacy of the neoliberal state's assault on public schooling. In addition, critical pedagogy has shed important light on the limited advances of liberal reformism, exposing its conspiracy of good intentions as little more than readjusting capitalism while at the same time readjusting to its readjustments."

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  Who Will Educate the Educators? Critical Pedagogy in the Age of Globalization

  Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur

  "The globalization of capital and its profane partnership with neoliberal politics pose unique and urgent challenges to today's progressive educators. The central questions that were raised by George Counts in the 1930s and by Henry Giroux in the 1980s need to be raised again: Dare schools build a new social order? What purpose do schools serve and in whose interest? … The time could not be more ripe for exploring how the business of schooling is linked to the 'businessification' and the environmental destruction of the wider society, for unraveling how the idea of citizenship has been sutured to a fascist aesthetics, and for demanding how education can be transformed in the interests of social justice."

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  Alternative Globalizations: Critical Globalization Studies

  Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo

  “The central antagonism of the current historical moment is one that we can now unhesitatingly call empire… As market fundamentalism unleashes its vicious assault against humanity under the auspices of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Washington Consensus, and as it accords itself the sacerdotal status necessary to divine a future of human dignity, prosperity, and democracy, the transnational ruling elite are being afforded a rite of passage to scourge the earth of its natural resources while besieging the working-class, women, children, and people of color… Critical educators today are struggling assiduously to defend the public sphere from its further integration into the neoliberal and imperialist practices of the state and the behemoth of globalized capitalism (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2005). Still others are seeking a socialist alternative.”

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  Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire

  Peter McLaren

  Capitalists and Conquerors is a series of path-breaking essays in the political sociology of education on topics hotly debated within the educational community. In this volume Peter McLaren addresses some of the most daunting political challenges of the current times, including the globalization of capitalism, the United States' drive towards world domination, strategies, tactics and models of resistance to neoliberalism and the ravages of empire-building, the role of the educator as a social agent and public citizen, the purposes and possibilities of public schooling, and the struggle for socialism. As a Marxist-humanist philosopher and social theorist, McLaren is able to offer new philosophical premises and socialist principles for building an alternative to capitalism.

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  Comprehending Through Composing: Reflections on Reading Assessment Strategies

  Robert C. Calfee and Roxanne Greitz Miller

  The assignment to comment on the four chapters in this section, which present interestingly distinctive perspectives on the conference topic, is both engaging and challenging. The engagement springs from the depth of the ideas, the challenge from the task of molding the ideas into a coherent image. To address this task, we rely on three relatively standard lenses, and introduce a fourth that is less typical. Three constructs spring from the conference focus and the recent history of comprehension assessment: comprehension, (re)construction, and assessment. The fourth theme, composition, reflects our recent research, but, somewhat to our surprise, also emerged during the conference. Toward the end of the conference, for instance, Dick Anderson suggested that researchers might consider shifting attention from reading comprehension to literacy comprehension. Such a move is consonant with our thinking about the issues, and meshes with the increasingly important concept of academic language. Our chapter begins with brief reflections on the four lenses, continues with comments on the four chapters, and concludes by illustrating our recent efforts to engineer the reading-writing connection.

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  Engaging Troubling Students: A Constructivist Approach

  Scot Danforth and Terry Jo Smith

  Filled with rich narrative and designed for educators working with troubling students each day, this insightful, practical guide leads you in developing helpful, trusting student-teacher relationships.

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  From Giving Service to Being of Service

  Philip M. Ferguson and Patricia O'Brien

  This chapter focuses on the place of those with intellectual disabilities in the Western world.

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  God’s Cowboy Warrior: Christianity, Globalization, and the False Prophets of Imperialism

  Peter McLaren and Nathalia E. Jaramillo

  "At this particular historical moment democracy seems acutely perishable. Its contradictions have become as difficult to ignore as sand rubbed in the eyes. While dressed up as a promise, democracy has functioned more as a threat. Spurred on by feelings of 'righteous victimhood' and by a 'wounded and vengeful nationalism' (Lieven, 2003) that has arisen in the wake of the attacks of September 11, and pushing its war on terrorism to the far reaches of the globe, the United States is shamelessly defining its global empire as an extension of its democratic project. The US National Security Strategy of 2002 states quite dearly that the US will not hesitate to act alone and will "preemptively" attack against "terrorists" that threaten its national interests at home or abroad. And one of its national interests is to bring free market democracy to the rest of the world."

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  IQ

  Scot Danforth

  An encyclopedia entry about the IQ or "intelligence quotient", "a numerical score derived by combining a person's chronological age with his or her 'mental age' as determined by the person's performance on a standardized intelligence test."

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  Neoliberal Citizenship and Federal Education Policy: A Critical Analysis of the No Child Left Behind Act

  Peter McLaren and Nathalia Jaramillo

  This article is a discussion of U.S. neoliberal ideology of imperialism in light of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a major political initiative that has been extolled by the Bush administration as the most significant educational reform package in the history of the nation.The authors argue that NCLB is implicated in the historically extant categories and practices of neo-liberalism and the globalization of capital. Through a historical materialist analysis, this article will explore the tensions and contradictions between official U.S. transcript of educational policy--to expand opportunity--and the U.S. drive for global economic hegemony. While the authors claim that NCLB is an historical apparatus that serves to exert control over the largest segments of the population to serve the needs of capitalist consumption and the reproduction of the law of value, there is also an important counterpoint to this imperial momentum rooted in grassroots education."

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  Place, Profession and Program in the History of Special Education Curriculum

  Scot Danforth, Steve Taff, and Philip M. Ferguson

  "This chapter explores how three topical threads: place, professionalism, and program, have woven their way through the history of special education. The authors argue that these themes have played out over the last 200 years in the United States in a way that provides a helpful explanatory narrative for the evolution of policies and practices for children with disabilities. The authors' narrative looks at three key eras. First, they look at the influence of the French Enlightenment on American social activists in the middle of the 19th century. This was a time when the theme of place held sway as the dominant narrative thread. Next the authors move to the Progressive era and the dominance of the theme of a bureaucratic professionalism and rampant specialization of expertise. Finally, the authors look briefly at the period running roughly from 1975 to 2000, and review how the final thematic strand (program) of our triad gained prominence. The authors want to emphasize throughout their discussion of all three eras that their three themes--where children with disabilities should be taught, who should teach them, and what they should be taught--may be seen as interweaving threads in the history of special education."

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  Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy

  Peter McLaren

  This book will address a number of urgent themes in education today that include multiculturalism, the politics of whiteness, the globalization of capital, neoliberalism, postmodernism, imperialism, and current debates in Marxist social theory. The above themes will be linked to critical educational praxis, particularly to teaching activities within urban schools. Finally, the book will develop the basis for a wider political project directed at resisting and transforming economic exploitation, cultural homogenization, political repression, and gender inequality.