Fascinating study:People who are bicultural and speak two languages may actually shift their personalities when they switch from one language to another, according to new research. . . .The authors studied groups of Hispanic women, all of whom were bilingual, but with varying degrees of cultural identification. They found significant levels of "frame-shifting" (changes in self perception) in bicultural participants--those who participate in both Latino and Anglo culture. . . .In one of the studies, a group of bilingual U.S. Hispanic women viewed ads that featured women in different scenarios....
Life purpose and "moral education"
This has been cross-posted at Smart and Good.The most recent issue of Education Week included a piece highlighting Bill Damon’s new book, The Path to Purpose: Helping our Children Find Their Calling in Life. Damon is a Stanford psychologist and long-time moral development researcher whose earlier work, The Moral Child, sets out a worthwhile vision of what makes a child good. Damon’s work is a hermeneutically-enriched form of survey research. He is asking large numbers of young people aged 12 through 26, through paper and pencil surveys and selected in-depth interviews, about their lack...
A different approach to schools - what we can learn from Minnesota
This is also posted at Daily KosAs the Federal government has delayed reauthorization of the basic law affecting public schools, the Elementary And Secondary Education Act, the most recent version of which is (unfortunately and inaccurately) as No Child Left Behind, perhaps now might be a good time to explore alternative approaches to public education. Since public education is primarily the responsibility of the states, and since the Federal government provides less than 8% of the cost of public education, perhaps rather than Federally imposed mandates we can explore what states have done to...
Getting to Class
For June's monthly forum, I'm interested in conversation about ways in which we might complicate questions of class and social mobility in teacher education, in part by complicating teacher ed students' understanding of their own class backgrounds.I’ve spent my 20+ years as a teacher educator on campuses that serve large numbers of students from working class backgrounds, so I’ve always done a bit of a mental lurch when hearing frequent references in the literature and in casual conversation among colleagues to the teaching force being “white and middle class”.I’ve nodded in agreement at the...
Good News for the National Board
The National Research Council released a report today--a meta-analysis of the research on National Board Certification and teacher effectiveness: WASHINGTON -- Advanced certification through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) is an effective way to identify highly skilled teachers, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council. Students taught by NBPTS-certified teachers make greater gains on achievement tests than students taught by teachers who are not board-certified, says the report. However, it is unclear whether the certification...
Post-Fordist Education
'Pedagogy of Human Capital': Stewart Martin on the post-Fordist crisis of progressive education.Post-Fordism’s appetite for self-directed activity is bringing about a crisis in progressive education. No longer perceived as threatening, a work force trained to think for itself has become highly desirable. So what should an emancipatory education entail today?I tried to get at this question from the opposite side in "Rethinking Domination and Resistance, where I argued that the worries about the oppression of progressive forms of education are problems for people who don't really have problems....
How The Mind Works
From the New York Review of Books, Reviews of:The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge, by Jean-Pierre Changeux, translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors: From Molecular Biology to Cognition, by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Stuart J. Edelstein Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics, by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes, translated from the French by M.B. DeBevoise What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about...
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