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  Towards a More Complex Understanding of Power to Better Grasp the Challenges of the Contemporary Superintendency

  Sheldon Watson and Margaret Grogan

  "This chapter suggests that the notion of power in educational research has been conceptually limited and laced with normative biases. In the case of the superintendent and school board relationship, this has resulted in a truncated understanding of the power relations that influence school district operations. In addition, a narrow view of power diminishes the capacity of leadership preparation programst to develop leaders who can navigate the contested terrain of district politics, particularly if the goal of such leaders is school reform. A reappraisal of the concept as it relates to educational research is necessary. Specifically, we suggest that a feminist poststructuralist (Brunner, 2002a; Grogan, 2000a) perspective on power offers a useful lens for examining the contemporary superintendency. This being said, our aim is not to supplant existing theoretical convention, but rather to argue for an expanded multi-paradigmatic perspective (Capper, 1993)."

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  Women Superintendents and Role Conceptions: (Un)Troubling the Norms

  Margaret Grogan and C. Cryss Brunner

  "The dearth of national-level research on women superintendants draws attention to the need for further study focused only on women. We hope that these findings, which give us an indication of how women conceive of the role of superintendent, will prompt others to focus on the question in further large studies. Our assertions in this chapter are grounded in our findings about superintendents from the AASA-funded Study of Women Superintendents and Central Office Administrators (Brunner & Grogan, 2003). This study is the first in history to include all women superintendents in the United States."

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  Assessment and Evaluation of Students’ Behavior and Intervention Outcomes: The Utility of Rating Scale Methods

  Stephen N. Elliott and Randy T. Busse

  "In this chapter, we discuss validity issues commonly related to rating scales, describe several frequently used behavior rating scales, and examine some useful rating scales applications and analytical methods that may advance research and practice. Before discussing the rationale and technical aspects of behavior rating scale assessment, we present six fundamental assumptions that should be kept in mind when using and interpreting behavior rating scales."

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  Foreword to Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity

  Peter McLaren

  "I am very pleased to have been invited to write the Foreword for Performance Theories in Education, an important and innovative volume that creatively advances the language and discourse of educational theory and opens a number of causeways for progressive educational analysis. I am equally pleased to see my work engaged by various contributors, although, to be honest, my work has shifted discernibly over the last decade from a left postmodernism to a Marxist humanism. Marxism for some might seem an outdated theory as there has been no end over the last half century to scholarly commentators bidding farewell to Marx. But if Marx were really so dated, why has the need persisted to repeat obsessively those farewells?"

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  A Critical Perspective on Culture in the Second Language Classroom

  Linda M. Crawford and Peter McLaren

  "This paper challenges the neoconservative agenda by rethinking culture from a postmodernist perspective. Implications for the second language curriculum and classroom are explored in the context of each selected aspect of a postmodernist and post-colonialist definition of culture."

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  Critical Pedagogy and Marxism: Rethinking Revolutionary Praxis in Education

  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? … [E]ducators need to unthink their current relation to pedagogical practice as decoupled from the infrastructure of capitalism's deep value system and ruling moral syntax. "

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  Winks, Blinks, Squints and Twitches: Looking for Disability and Culture Through My Son’s Left Eye

  Philip M. Ferguson

  This chapter focuses on the culture and human experience of having an intellectual disability.

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  Breaking Signifying Chains: A Marxist Position on Postmodernism

  Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur

  "This chapter attempts to address some fundamental problems with postmodern theory, as it currently informs the field of educational research. Our position is that postmodern theory has overwhelmingly debauched the field of Leftist criticism. However, we have not undertaken an analysis of specific postmodern educationalists (this being achieved by many of the other chapters in this book). Rather, we set forth counterpositions to claims put forth in the literature by postmodern theorists. We give a positive appraisal of postmodern theory in certain instances where we feel it has contributed to the field of Leftist critique. In the main, however, our position remains unwaveringly critical. This is largely a result of our contention that postmodern theorists advocate an expansion of existing bourgeois forms of democratic social life into wider arenas of society, by means of a reformist politics in the tradition of Western liberalism. Such a politics views culture as partially independent of the state. Such a move only makes sense, however, within a larger politics of anticapitalist struggle. Yet postmodemists fail to challenge existing social relations of production and the larger social totality of capitalist social relations. As a result, their work has very little to contribute to the uprooting of the contradictions between capital and labor."

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  Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts

  Peter McLaren

  "In practice, critical pedagogy is as diverse as its many adherents, yet common themes and constructs run through many of their writings. I have talked about general characteristics in the previous pare. In the part that follows, I will outline in more detail the major categories within chis tradition. A category is simply a concept, question, issue, hypothesis, or idea chat is central to critical theory. These categories are intended to provide a theoretical framework within which you may reread my journal entries and perhaps better understand the theories generated by critical educational research. The categories are useful for the purposes of clarification and illustration, although some critical theorists will undoubtedly argue chat additional concepts should have been included, or that some concepts have not been given the emphasis they deserve."

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  Ethnography

  Peter McLaren and Amanda Datnow

  "At one time ethnography referred to the field methods of anthropologists in studying "exotic" cultures. It is now used by sociologists, educational researchers, cultural anthropologists, and other social science researchers to study any bounded group of people in virtually any context, urban or rural, global or local."

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  Mentoring Women in Educational Leadership

  Ernestine Enomoto, Mary E. Gardiner, and Margaret Grogan

  "In this chapter, we examine mentoring as a means by which women leaders can enter and redefine educational management and leadership."

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  Recentering Class: Wither Postmodernism? Towards a Contraband Pedagogy

  Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur

  "As we lean into the gusty winds of the new millennium, squaring our shoulders and lowering our heads against an icy unknown, we discover much to our surprise that the future has already arrived; that it has silently imploded into the singularity of the present. We are lost in a crevice in the 'wrong side' of history, in a furious calm at the end of a century-old breath, doing solitary confinement in the future anterior. Time has inhaled so hard that it has lodged us in its lungs, compressing us into shadowy, ovaloid spectres out of the horror classic, Nosferatu. Capitalism has authored this moment, synchronizing the heartbeat of the globe with the autocopulatory rhythms of the marketplace; deregulating history; downsizing eternity."

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  Richard Rorty’s Self-Help Liberalism: A Marxist Critique of America’s Most Wanted Ironist

  Peter McLaren, Ramin Farahmandpur, and Juha Suoranta

  "Enter philosopher Richard Rorty, a staunch defender of neoliberalism and free-market democracy. Despite the abundance of evidence that capitalist democracies, guided by a neoliberal politics, are condemning the world's laboring class to a life sentence of poverty not only for themselves but for generations to follow, Rorty continues to clings to a Malthusian conviction that the forces that foster equality and political freedom within liberal social democracies far outweigh chose that foster inequality and restrict political freedom. True to his staunch and steadfast antiempiricism, Rorty offers no convincing evidence that this is indeed the case."

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  Red Chalk: On Schooling, Capitalism and Politics

  Mike Cole, Dave Hill, Peter McLaren, and Glenn Rikowksi

  Marxist theory and critique of post modern, neo-liberal, conservative and Third Way educational theory and policy.

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  Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution

  Peter McLaren

  Forcefully argued and eloquently written, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution is a clarion call for building a new social order premised on the ideas and philosophy of two of the most important revolutionary figures of this century. It is an indispensable reference point for building transnational alliances between the North American and Latin America.

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  Critical Ethnography for the Study of Immigrants

  Enrique (Henry) T. Trueba and Peter McLaren

  "We can argue that, in a strictly historical sense, the first critical ethnographies were constructed by the oppressed… In a strict and more technical sense, critical ethnography has deep roots in psychological anthropology, and it was later relined in sociology and philosophy with the seminal work of Paulo Freire. The ideas of early anthropologists to improve the schooling and overall human development of all children were revealed in a conference held at Stanford University on 9- 14 June 1954, organized by George Spindler. Renowned scholars such as Solorn T. Kimball, Alfred L. Kroeber, Dorothy Lee, Margaret Mead, Felix M. Keesing, John Gillin, and Cora DuBois shared their concerns relating to the overall development of all children, the preparation of ethnically diverse children, and the need to pursue pedagogically appropriate methods of teaching (Spindler 1955)."

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  Informant Reports: Conceptual and Research Bases of Interviews with Parents and Teachers

  Barbara Rybski Beaver and Randy T. Busse

  "In this chapter we briefly expore the historical and theoretical premises of interviewing parents and teachers, followed by an overview of interview methods and formats. We then turn to an analysis of the current state of research on behavioral interviews, and suggestions for future directions toward advancing knowledge and use of behavioral interviews."

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  Introduction to Immigrant Voices: In Search of Pedagogical Reform

  Peter McLaren

  "If we were to write the real history of the United States, the centerpiece of such a history would be inescapable-it would be the implacably brutal story of violence and the fundamental role that it has played in creating and preserving the "American way of life." Although the immigrants to this country most assuredly would be relegated to minor supporting roles among the cast of world-historical characters and events, theirs would be the real story of the United States, in the epochal shaping of social, cultural, and economic life. Immigration has a varied history, not all of it ending in the Panglossian fable known as the "American Dream." Among the earliest that made their way to these shores were European settlers. "Settlerism" in this case turned out to be little more than a form of decaffeinated imperialism. This is not to mention unspeakable acts of genocide whose haunting memories still cause the earth to groan beneath our feet. Regrettably, the legacy of colonialism lives on today, with wealthy elites-the "minority of the opulent"-still extracting surplus labor from workers, still armed by the weapons of white supremacy and all-consuming self-interest, still bent on reproducing colonialist formations, and still reaping the benefits of belonging to the capitalist class."

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  Space, Violence and Pedagogy

  Peter McLaren, Zeus Lombardo, and Ricky Lee Allen

  "In recent years, violence in U.S. schools has taken on increasing importance as parents, educators, and students experience unparalleled structures, if not the physical threat, of daily assaults. Gun control in schools has inspired a bunker mentality as urban campuses throughout the country institute weapon checkpoints when students enter their site of learning. Real, physical violence has become a possibility in the daily lives of many students, especially those whose schools represent a symptom of structural inequalities at the local level. However, and without downplaying the painful reality of physical violence, we want to focus on the invidious and infectious consequences of discursive violence, to construct a language of critique that unseams the representation of violence and the violence of representation. That is, we want to explore the ways in which schools propagate violence at the level of the sign and at spaces of struggle over meaning."

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  The Experience of Disability in Families: A Synthesis of Research and Parent Narratives

  Philip M. Ferguson, Alan Gartner, and Dorothy K. Lipsky

  This chapter focuses on the difficulties parents of those with intellectual disabilities face.

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  Racism and Multicultural Education : Rethinking 'Race' and 'Whiteness' in Late Capitalism

  Peter McLaren and Rodolfo Torres

  "There has been a remarkable tendency in current appraisals of multiculturalism to neglect or ignore profound changes in the structural dynamics and modes of capital accumulation worldwide. This is most evident in the commentaries of multiculturalist scholars whose theoretical orientations could be described as "postmodernist' or 'post-Marxist'. The emergence of the post-Fordist socio-economic landscape and the reconfiguration of racialized social relations in cities such as Los Angeles, where we live, in our mind mandates a re-examination of contemporary perspectives on multicultural education in the United States. At this precipitous historical juncture, when an analysis of and challenge to capitalism is so urgently needed, perhaps more than in previous decades, many leftist social theorists have largely conceptualized the very idea of capitalism out of existence. In addition to promoting the strange disappearance of capitalism in the education literature on multiculturalism, contemporary responses to recent structural changes in the United States' political economy have made the issues of 'race' and racism much more complex than ever before."

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  The Politics of Multicultural Research

  Peter McLaren

  "As educational researchers we can no longer count on the future and past to provide us with the necessary perspective to help guide our activity as social agents. We are even made to wonder whether history has ever taken place - anywhere. We are continually being displaced from our historical location and relocated into a subjectivized world without history or possible landscapes - we are, in other words, being reinvented by the retroaction of history for a world of instantaneity, of interminable repetition."

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  Preface to Pedagogy and the Politics of the Body: A Critical Praxis

  Peter McLaren

  "The field of education needs impertinent and irreverent scholars like Sherry Shapiro. Her act of scholarship is both a reflective practice of resistance and a tactical engagement in transformation."

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  Whiteness is…The Struggle for Postcolonial Hybridity

  Peter McLaren

  "The educational Left has failed to address the issue of whiteness and the insecurities that young Whites harbor regarding their future during times of diminishing economic expectations. With their "racially coded and divisive rhetoric, neoconscrvatives may be able to enjoy tremendous success in helping insecure young white populations develop white identity along racist lines."

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  Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture

  Peter McLaren

  This chapter deals with youth, schooling, taboos, apathy, postmodernism, and what pedagogy can do in this predatory age. Some of the key elements of predatory culture are pursuit of naked power, crisis mentality, stalkers and victims, social divisiveness, and dominance of capital and its concerns over democracy. Media culture pictures a mean and scary world, thanks to fearmongering in our media presentations. Any new world order must first involve parents and educators in creating a new moral order in school and at home. A new critical pedagogy is needed to counterbalance the New Right as well as to create schools, schooling, and school systems which can respond adequately to postmodern challenges, including overcoming youth's apathy.