Aging and identity politics

In this essay, I reflect on multiple identities—woman, lesbian, old—as they interconnect at different life stages. I raise an issue of identity politics (Is “old” as fundamental an identity as “woman”?) and suggest that critical gerontology offers a lens through which to interpret my personal journey from a core feminist identity to a questioning and ambivalent identity as an old woman.     

Queer Christian: The Catholic Homosexual Apologia and Lesbian/Gay Practice

This essay concerns recent positions on homosexuality taken by the Roman Catholic Church and places them with respect to historical documents engaging same-sex desire. Analyzing Aelred of Rievaulx's twelfth-century Spiritual Friendship, John Bloxam's 1894 The Priest and the Acolyte, and Marc-André Raffalovich's 1896 Uranisme et Unisexualité, this essay offers perspectives on contemporary lay and ecclesiastical apologias, defenses, and critiques of homosexual behavior. The relationship between past and present locates the Christian churches' response to the modern homosexual as a historically developed—rather than permanently fixed—model of identity and action.     

中学教师职业压力及提高生命质量的健康促进策略研究

探讨中学教师生命质量、职业压力和体育锻炼特点,为健康促进策略研究提供科学依据。通过对河北省廊坊市1183(男598,女585)名中学教师的体育锻炼与生命质量和职业压力因素间的关系进行研究,结果显示中学教师生命质量各维度得分普遍较低,男教师相对较好;中学教师职业压力各维度得分普遍较高,女教师相对较低;对中学男教师生命质量有显著影响作用的是锻炼次数、考试考评、学生因素、待遇环境、工作责任和锻炼时间等;对女教师生命质量有显著影响的是考试考评、工作责任、外部期望、角色任务和待遇环境。由此得出结论:体育锻炼在中学男教师生命质量与职业压力之间起到显著的调节作用,但在女教师中却未能表现出来。     

Engaging families through observation and reflection: a collaborative approach to making learning visible

Early childhood education is based on the assertion that young children are better prepared for school and life when educators and parents work together on their behalf. Family engagement is a central force in the education of young children, yet research suggests that parents and teachers often do not collaborate, and this can have an adverse impact on young children’s learning outcomes. This brief explores a new observation approach, referred to as Journey of Discoveries, to examine its influence on family engagement and its potential use as a collaborative tool for educators and parents to gauge children’s learning and development. Journey of Discoveries was tested with volunteer families and teachers in three select Early Head Start programs in California in 2014–2015. Responses from participants illustrated seven themes or potential pathways emerging from the approach that support family engagement, including: (a) teachers’ and parents’ celebration of children’s learning, (b) emotional responses to children’s learning, (c) importance of sharing learning as stories, (d) process of reflection, (e) holistic viewing of children’s learning, (f) the honoring of diverse voices, and (g) parents’ roles as leaders. The practical and policy implications of the Journey of Discoveries approach are also discussed.     

COMPETITION AND TEACHER PAY

Competition‐based school reform could have a significant impact on teacher earnings. If school districts behave as typical oligopsonists, then increased competition could lead to higher salaries. However, if teachers receive a share of the economic rents generated by the monopoly power of school districts, then increased competition could lower teacher salaries. This study uses panel data from 670 Texas school districts and more than 335,000 teachers to examine the relationship between school competition and teacher pay. The analysis suggests that an increase in competition results in higher wages for most teachers but lower wages for teachers in relatively concentrated markets. (JEL I2, J3)     

“Am I My Brother's Keeper?” (Genesis IV:9): Violence and the Making of Society

The question behind this essay is whether an account of the making of social life—and it is as such that I read Genesis—also posits a thesis about the making of violence.     

“Falling into a Place”: Reading for Renewal as Queer Pedagogy

This essay explores reading for renewal as queer pedagogy. Within the context of lesbian and gay literature courses, professors can teach students and themselves how to pull stories—beautiful, celebratory stories—out of the bits and pieces of stones of self-hatred and of suffering. If readers of gay and lesbian texts are to resist homophobic discourse, then they must not only train themselves to recognize signs of queerness within even the most oppressive of narratives, but also seek out those texts whose discussions of narrative theory and identity politics promote queer visibility. Reading for renewal—that is, locating a place of transformative possibility either within the text or within the experience of reading the text within the classroom—is, the author argues, integral to practicing a queer pedagogy.     

中职学校应加强班主任队伍建设

从中职学校的班主任队伍现状、加强中职学校班主任建设的重要意义和加强班主任队伍的途径等方面论述了加强中职班主任队伍建设对中职德育教育的重要影响。     

浅议提高高职师范类院校教师的素质

高等职业教育与大学本科院校的研究性教育不同,它属于技能型教育,所培养的学生是第一线的技术应用型人才。高职院校师范类学生毕业之后即将踏上讲台,这个特殊性要求高职师范专业的教师必须具有特殊的教师素质,才能够很好地引导、教育学生,使他们成为新一代合格的教师。     

Broadening the scope: Gender and international economic development

The central claim of this essay is that gender is a key term for understanding economic development insofar as it reveals fundamental aspects in the organization of production and labor. Following a cursory review of influential approaches to development and their relationship to the parallel theorization of gender, I compare two recent modalities of industrial restructuring: the expansion of export-processing plants (maquiladoras) along the U.S.-Mexico border and the survival strategies of electronics firms in Southern California. My theoretical focus is on the specification of gender as a process that allows for the maintenance of a substratum of labor, predominantly female, outside of market exchanges. That labor is recurrently tapped by employers seeking competitive edges in domestic and international markets. The same mechanism enables the replication of patterns of unequal exchange through the articulation of two interdependent models of production — one domestic and one market oriented — by which capitalist accumulation is fulfilled.     

Reinventing religious land as urban open space: The case of kuang in Chiang Mai (Thailand)

Urban open spaces are highly valued for their contribution to the quality of life in the cities [Tenkel (1963). Cities and space: The future use of urban land. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Press; Burgess, Harrison and Limb (1998). Urban Studies, 25, 455–473; Madanipour (1999). Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 26, 879–891]. Third world cities, for example, Chiang Mai (Thailand), are no exception with regard to the role of urban open space in achieving such a goal [Tantayanusorn (2003). Unpublished doctoral thesis. Melbourne:Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology]. However, the provision of urban open space as a social public facility is coming low in priority in comparison to other market-demanded facilities in the form of roads, car parks, clean water, electricity and the like. Such a fact was corroborated by a study conceived by Thailand's Social Research Institute (1996) which reveals that 73% of Chiang Mai population wanted more public open space.This paper aims at exploring the revitalization of existing traditional open spaces (kuang)—which is usually categorized as ‘religious land’, hence it is a religious property—in Chiang Mai as an intermediate strategy in providing the much needed public open space. In doing so, the physical and cultural characteristics of kuang have to be elaborated, while at the same time the local aspirations on urban open space were canvassed. The combined analysis of those two inquiries resulted in a proposal of kuang wat—a variance of kuang—utilization as an agent of urban open space provision in the project of achieving quality of urban life in Thai city of Chiang Mai.     

A theory of prudential values and a rule utilitarian theory of morality

Ethics can be divided into a theory of prudential values and a theory of morality in a narrower sense. My paper proposes a utilitarian — a rule-utilitarian — theory of morality. But it deviates from most of the utilitarian tradition by rejecting the hedonistic and subjectivistic accounts of prudential values favored by many utilitarian writers. While economists tend to define people's utility levels in terms of their actual preferences, ethics must define them in terms of their informed preferences. To prefer A over B does not mean to have a stronger desire for A than for B. Rather, it means to regard one's access to A as being more important than one's access to B. Even though different people often have quite different preferences, their basic desires seem to be much the same. We must choose our moral rules, and our society's moral code as a whole, by their social utility. An important factor in determining their social utility are their expectation effects. Unlike the rule — utilitarian more code, the act — utilitarian moral code would be unable to give proper weight to these expectation effects. It would also unduly restrict our individual freedom. Finally, I shall argue against Kant that morality is primarily a servant of many other human values rather than itself the highest value of human life.     

Identity transformation of Chinese secondary school teachers during educational reform

Secondary school teachers’ professional identities have often been overlooked despite that they have experienced ongoing and dramatic identity negotiations, conflicts, and even crisis in new Gaokao (university entrance examination). Starting off from this notable research gap, the present study employed a qualitative approach to examine the changes in teacher professional identity cognitively, socially, and emotionally after they had gone through the reform over a period of 3 years since 2014. Nine participants’ interview data and reflective journals were collected and analyzed. The findings demonstrated that there was a sharp transformation of teachers’ cognitive engagement, social interactions, and emotional experiences in terms of school management, teaching beliefs and practices, teacher professionalism and teacher training programmes, revealing the complexities of identity development through which teachers had to adjust themselves to meet the new demands of the reform. The implications for secondary school teachers were also offered.     

DOES RAISING THE SCHOOL LEAVING AGE REDUCE TEACHER EFFORT? EVIDENCE FROM A POLICY EXPERIMENT

This paper examines the effect of an increase in the compulsory school leaving age on a measure of high school teachers' effort. Differences‐in‐Differences estimates using count data methods demonstrate that the policy led to teachers increasing their hours of sickness absence by roughly 15%. This result implies that raising the compulsory school leaving age reduces teaching inputs, and hence schooling quality. A policy implication is that these laws should be coupled with measures to compensate teachers for the additional disutility. This also suggests that instrumental variable estimates of returns to education that utilize these changes for identification may be downwardly biased. (JEL J22, J38)     

Voices of Courage and Hope: Gay and Lesbian Catholic Elementary School Teachers

This essay presents the stories of gay and lesbian Catholic elementary school teachers. Through interviews and dialogues, these teachers shared their fears, hopes, and the strategies they used in order to survive in the context of the Catholic elementary school. Results indicated that the teachers had come to accept the oppression, and they were working with the system, as opposed to against the system, to create a more inclusive school environment that truly echoed the gospel message of loving one another. Participants acknowledged that they continually experienced a conflict between their religion and their sexual identity. They did not feel safe to come out to their students, though they acknowledged there would be some benefits in doing so. They believed that they had to work harder than their heterosexual colleagues so it would be more difficult for the administration to dismiss them.     

The Psychodynamics of a Clinician's Hope: A Delicate Balance

A clinician's sense of hope is not easily maintained in the therapeutic situation. Exploring the psychodynamics of hope in two interviews—one focusing on a community mental health psychotherapist and the other on a school social worker—this paper proposes that maintaining hope requires an intense affect state, an active blend of emotional and intellectual reflections in the mind of the clinician. Ongoing hope is the product of a delicate balance between a clinician's tolerance for the tragic in life and the expectations of positive treatment outcome. These reflections occur in an intrapsychic space, a point of juncture between the clinician's primary process longings/fears and secondary process thoughts. Hope is constructed in this space. It gains its language, form, and substance from the integration of personal experience, client observation and clinical theory. Reflective activity helps a clinician avoid disabling transference to a client and promotes identifications that lead to realistic treatment goals.     

Is there still a frontier? The 1890 US census and the modern American West

An omnibus section in the 1890 Census, ‘Progress of the Nation’, analyzed the course of US settlement since the first Census in 1790. The essay concluded that the American frontier was fast diminishing as the post-Civil War settlement of the West expanded; and that the frontier was thus no longer worth measuring. Frederick Jackson Turner made the document the starting point for his famous 1893 essay on the significance of the frontier. Turner invoked ‘Progress of the Nation’ to declare that the frontier was gone.Researchers have neglected ‘Progress of the Nation’ as a primary source, exploring it mostly as it influenced Turner. Yet its main approach — tracking the distribution of population densities at decade intervals — yields a precise method for understanding low-density frontier settlement.We use the 1890 Census's density-based method to chart the frontier's historical and contemporary evolution. We show that a vast frontier endures. The frontier never closed; instead it changed. After spending nearly the entire 19th century shifting quickly west, the frontier gradually moved east, to the point where large stretches of the Great Plains have now reverted to frontier.We also demonstrate that the modern-day West owes its distinctive form to land-use and urbanization patterns that appeared as early as the 1840s and were evident in ‘Progress of the Nation’. The region, with its big cities enveloped by a huge frontier, embodies its own 150-year-old settlement tradition.     

Social Support Networks and School Outcomes: The Centrality of the Teacher

This investigation compares school outcomes for students who differ in the extent to which they perceive their parents, friends, and teachers—each alone and in combination—as important sources of social support. Findings indicate that middle and high school students who perceive high supportiveness from all three sources of support, as opposed to none, one, or two, have better attendance; spend more hours studying; avoid problem behavior more; have higher school satisfaction, engagement, and self-efficacy; and obtain better grades. Positive school outcomes are promoted when teacher support is perceived in combination with perceived support from parents and friends. Implications of the results for human service providers are presented.     

Reconsidering Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class(es)

This paper focuses on the early goals, past educational experiences, familial support, and current career goals of a sample of 80 White middle-class and working-class parents in a medium-sized northeastern city in the United States. The research will help determine whether members of the working class have lived in or still live in worlds of pain. Middle-class parents overwhelmingly report having had high goals and aspirations in high school, positive experiences in school, and supportive parents and role models in their families. Moreover, they report being satisfied in their current occupational positions. The working-class parents present a more complex pattern: For each of the areas studied—early goals, schooling, familial support, and job satisfaction and future goals—some of the working-class respondents report better experiences than the others. A more inclusive sampling strategy proved useful in this study in documenting the varied life experiences and attitudes found among members of the working class. These findings provide support for and modification of Rubin's (1976, 1994) portraits of the working class.     

The influence of a multicultural teacher education program on teachers’ multicultural practices

This study examined the multicultural classroom practices of two novice secondary English teachers employed by the same US school district that serves a diverse student population. Findings indicated a high level of consistency between the teachers’ intended multicultural practices and their implemented practices. Based on classroom observations, both teachers implemented the general multicultural practices of critical pedagogy, real life application, student choice, multicultural literature, individual student attention, cultural physical adaptation, active learning and cooperative grouping. The factors supporting multicultural infusion were the teachers’ previous experiences with diverse populations, the teachers’ own previous meaningful high school experiences and the teachers’ backgrounds that were similar to their students. The impeding factors were the structure of the school, time constraints, racism and tracking.