Reviews - Taylor & Francis Online

3 downloads 0 Views 92KB Size Report
rooms to dictionaries—stopping short of the kitchen sink ..... Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual. Arts in the ..... P. J. and ANDERSON, D. K. (1988). Cognitive ...
J. CURRICULUM STUDIES,

2003, VOL. 35,

NO.

4, 513–531

Reviews

After Literacy: Essays JOHN WILLINSKY, New York: Peter Lang (2001), vii + 296 pp., US$32.95 (pbk), ISBN 0-8204-5242-4. Willinsky’s After Literacy: Essays has 13 chapters, organized into four sections, all intended to focus on ‘forms of literacy that come after literacy’ (p. 279). In an era in which ‘literacy’ has become a metaphor for virtually every form of knowledge, it is relatively easy to include nearly anything in a collection on this topic. Alas, After Literacy does so—from computers to classrooms to dictionaries—stopping short of the kitchen sink. Reading it is like taking a first-class trip to various cities around the world. Each stop is interesting, rewarding, enriching, and loosely connected to the previous stops—but the student would have benefited from fewer destinations and a tighter itinerary. Since Heath (1983), Street (1984), and Scribner and Cole (1981) produced their influential ethnographic descriptions of localized literacy practices, many (although by no means most) literacy researchers have paid attention to ‘multi-literacies’ (Cope and Kalantzis 1999), ‘situated literacies’ (Barton et al. 2000), the ‘new literacy studies’ (Gee 1996), and so forth. Each orientation has its own spin, but all share the common belief that literacy must be studied and understood as a concrete social practice, as activities that people do. Like all human activity, literacy does not reside

only in the head, but in the interactions between and among people. Willinsky was an early player in this field. His The New Literacy Studies (1990) argued for shifting the control of literacy from the teacher to the student. He emphasized literacy as a social process and, inherently, a language process. However, the breadth of Willinsky’s work over the years has made him harder to categorize than others. It is that scope which makes this new publication simultaneously compelling yet overlong, contradictory, and occasionally self-serving. After Literacy contains Willinsky’s works published over the past 15 years, plus some that were set aside and reworked for this book. Selecting essays that remain thematically cohesive is a daunting task, one that is only occasionally successful. The difficulties with After Literacy are multiple and inter-related: (1) Chapters written for previous publications are either out of date, or—when written for this book—do not demonstrate current knowledge of the field; (2) The broad scope lacks thematic cohesion; and (3) The book displays a scholarly sloppiness in parts. Were it not for the quality of some of his other work, it would seem that Willinsky’s greatest expertise is his own opinion. One of these problems is amply demonstrated in the section entitled ‘Cultural’. The chapter from it entitled ‘Curriculum after culture, race, and nation’ is intended to ‘draw a few lessons for educators and students about how this concept has come to

Journal of Curriculum Studies ISSN 0022–0272 print/ISSN 1366–5839 online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0022027032000093000

514 organize pervasively how we see the world’ (p. 83). Willinsky hopes to help educators understand how traditional ideas of culture are used to ‘divide people and how they might overcome those divisions’ (p. 84). It is a daunting task, and the chapter divisions—‘Culture against race’, ‘Culture after race’, and ‘Culture after nation’—provide an helpful overview of several important concepts. In particular, the discussion within them of nationalism in relation to culture and race is particularly relevant after the surge of emotion, where many equated nationalism with patriotism immediately following the events of 11 September 2001. The chapter begins to falter, however, on any concrete ‘lessons’ on how to actually support classroom teachers. No ethnographic data is provided, nor even an outline to demonstrate how a teacher might implement any of the important concepts that Willinsky addresses. Utilitarian statements such as ‘Teachers can assist students in identifying the curriculum’s representation of both an inclusive and an exclusive nation’ so that ‘students can . . . gain a vision of where education adds to the history that it presents . . .’ (p. 101) provide interesting theoretical perspectives, but without a concrete strategy for achieving this goal, it is not particularly useful to classroom teachers. Readers would also have been better served by unpacking the semantics of the term ‘race’, rather than naming it as a critical source of broad cultural problems. Willinsky deserves credit for his attempts to raise consciousness about the divisions of culture, race, and nation, and how these concepts ‘have been constructed and maintained’, which seem ‘bound to weaken and reform their hold on us’ (p. 106). At the same time, however, his own unexamined use of the term assumes

REVIEWS

that ‘we all’ understand what ‘we all’ mean by ‘race’. Within the anthropological community, for example, the term is frequently used by archaeologists and by cultural, linguistic, and biological anthropologists in ways that carry very different connotations. Similarly, while the chapter carefully describes Franz Boas’ success in shifting the conversation within anthropology from ‘race’ to ‘culture’, and details some of anthropology’s continued efforts to make sense of the ambiguity of the term itself, Willinsky’s desire to ‘decentre culture’—like the category of race—’culture’ also needs more contemporary unpacking than it receives. The emergence of the concept of ‘culture’ at the end of the last century provided a counter-discourse and significant paradigmatic shift from the prevailing belief that racial differences were inherited and, therefore, immutable. Anthropologists, in fact, for the past 15 years or more, have been trying to escape culture’s bounds. While it is true, as Willinsky writes, that ‘the concept of culture too often does the distressing sort of work that race was once used to accomplish’ (p. 95), and that ‘forms of ethnic nationalism further divide people by coupling nation with culture and race’ (p. 101), there is no explicit indication in this book of how these terms might be clearly understood by classroom teachers, or anyone for that matter. Another chapter in this section entitled ‘The educational politics of identity and category’ demonstrates only a very cursory knowledge of the field of contemporary multicultural education in the US. Willinsky complements the discussion of culture, race, and nation by taking on the schools’ ‘mission’ of ‘multiculturalism’. To say the very least, the issue of multiculturalism and schools is a vastly

REVIEWS

complex arena, and Willinsky’s treatment of it—invoking the philosophers Charles Taylor and Simone Weil— demonstrates a desire to shift the conversation in directions that others generally have not. Weil—both a philosopher and political activist—is relatively unknown in educational circles, and I am very glad that Willinsky draws explicit attention to her work in his discussion of The Need for Roots (Weil 1952). Weil’s passion for the human need for ‘collectivity’ and her simultaneous disdain for cultural categorizations leads Willinsky to a fine summary of Taylor’s (1992) book on multiculturalism, which focuses on identity politics and a philosophy of recognition. For Taylor, the politics of recognition requires a semantic shift from ‘pre-modern’, inherently aristocratic, notions of ‘honour’ to the view of human nature derived from the Enlightenment that emphasized the equality of every human being. Honour is linked to inequalities; recognition, as Taylor realizes, requires the collapse of social hierarchies. However, it is uncertain what most readers will ultimately take from this chapter. The message is that essentializing culture in honour of recognition only reifies received categories that ultimately obscure our very humanness. Better, Willinsky argues, that children in schools should take on multiculturalism as a political issue, examining the ‘science of race that arose in the 19th century and continued through the 20th’ and examine the ‘immigration policies and the treatment of women in the media’ (pp. 128–129), as well as how knowledge of cultural categories are created. This perspective makes very good sense. It is, of course, shameful that US schools tend to avoid engaging children in virtually anything political other than

515 flying a flag. However, the comment ‘[I]f advocates of multiculturalism seek a politics of recognition based on respecting difference, they are not far removed from their best critics’ (p. 132) demonstrates a na¨ıvet´e about current writing in this field. Most multiculturalists have long since moved beyond this concept, just as anthropologists have moved beyond culture. While many (if not most) schools often continue to play out multiculturalism in silly ways, schools play out a large number of things in silly ways. James Banks is credited by Willinsky for some of the ideas in this chapter. However, Willinsky either ignores or is unaware of a litany of others who have spent their careers focusing on the sociopolitical context of multi-cultural education. Sleeter (1988), for example, describes five approaches that teachers ascribe to multi-culturalism. One of these approaches—‘education that is multicultural and social reconstructionist’— comes close to Willinsky’s desired goal. However, Sleeter provides clearer theorizing and supportive evidence, and her approach remains the orientation of many critical multicultural scholars. Educational anthropologists, too, have contributed to this knowledge-base, but have, admittedly, been too successful with efforts to dismantle the very concept of culture and schooling. As Gonz´ales (1999: 432) states, ‘we may be victims of our own success’. Gonz´ales (1999) is more convincing than Willinksy on this issue, by once again bringing language back into the study on culture. The relationship between language and culture is both constitutive as well as refractive. Language legitimates classroom productions and simultaneously constitutes ideologies through discursive practices (Gonz´ales 1999). Willinsky is appropriately concerned with language, but

516 falls short in his discussion on multiculturalism by not recognizing how it is through language that identities are created and social processes are enacted A chapter entitled ‘Qualities of student–adult electronic communication’ is another example of Willinsky’s missed opportunities, particularly as it relates to literacy. The chapter describes a 2-year study of computermediated communication between a group of high school students and another group of technology professionals. Willinsky asks, ‘How should educators think about how their students use the internet to communicate with the larger world?’ It is a good question, but Willinsky never acknowledges that, given the growth of the internet and its accessibility to the general public, many students may currently know how to do this far better than most teachers. Willinsky does include brief descriptions of computer-mediated power relations and identities as constructed through the interactions with professionals who students have met only ‘virtually’. These high school students’ ‘misinterpretation’ of the e-mail intentions of the technology professionals ‘called for a much greater effort at making explicit what was intended and in checking that this intention had been communicated’ (p. 49). This seems like an obvious spot to address literary theory, which asserts meaning as something not encoded and transmitted directly from one person to another, at least as encapsulated in the words of a text. How does the indeterminacy of language play out with the high-speed writing—resembling oral communication—occurring with e-mail and instant messaging? While Willinsky addresses the need for both the high school group and the professionals to learn how ‘to think about audience in a new way’ (p. 49),

REVIEWS

his solution seems more expedient rather than substantive, since both groups should learn to be ‘more explicit’ with each other. However, how does being ‘more explicit’ fit into his previous chapter—‘Post-modern literacy: a primer’—or just plain literary theory? For example, Willinsky hopes to assuage classroom teachers’ ‘Derridean doubts’ about post-modern literary deconstruction in the classroom. However, how would Derrida make sense of Willinsky’s statement that corporate employees took responsibility to communicate to the high school student audience explaining in the ‘simplest language possible the nature of their work . . .’ (p. 49)? Can even simple language ever represent the ‘real world’? Thinking about the ‘audience in a new way’, as Willinsky correctly asserts, requires the relationship between materiality and rhetoric, who we are, what we say and write. How is, if at all, the body effaced by technology? Argyle and Shields (1996) argue that physical ‘presence’ doesn’t simply vanish using computer-mediated technology, that technology mediates presence. ‘Within computer communication technology, there are ways that allow us to be present to each other, with our bodies, interacting in an holistic manner’ (p. 58). We are not merely electronic words. The greatest missed opportunity in this chapter comes when Willinsky describes students sending electronic notes to each other, as ‘less favourable’ results of this project—the ‘misuses of the e-mail system’. For example, two students were apprehended for smoking marijuana based on an instructor’s reading of the e-note, which had accidentally ended up in the research file. To me, these ‘aberrations’ were the most interesting aspect of this project. ‘Unofficial’

REVIEWS

forms of literacy, particularly those adopted by adolescents, provide perfect opportunities to examine nontraditional and subversive forms of writing to achieve interactions. ‘Hardcopy’ note-passing by adolescents is collaborative and brought together to ‘contest, negotiate, or manipulate adult authority . . .’ (Shuman 1993: 248). Such blurring of private and public spheres in the age of the internet is important, as are our understandings of everyday (and preferable) forms of literacy that are ignored and/or maginalized. It is reasonable, as Willinsky concludes, to remain ‘vigilant’ about subversive activity among students ‘in what amounts to an extended field trip in time and space’ (p. 53). However, I wish he had examined his own assumptions and not so easily dismissed as ‘illicit’ student writing actions to each other, which were, I suspect, far more meaningful for many of the high school students than the project itself. The third section, ‘Authoritative’, contains Willinsky’s three strongest and most cohesive chapters. The first begins with an inside story describing five different publishers methodologies for compiling dictionary words and definitions—what’s included, what’s excluded, and how some of these decisions are made. In ‘Learning the language of difference’, Willinsky describes how seemingly authoritative dictionary definitions are ideologically and historically constituted. The dictionary must be read as a ‘cultural artifact of its times’ (p. 181). Willinsky encourages classroom teachers to ‘critically explore with their students the dictionary’s hold on the language’ (p. 181). It is a chapter that should be read by every classroom teacher, and three times by those teachers who continue to deliver punishment to children by forcing them to copy dictionary words.

517 Willinsky’s final chapter in this section expands upon Wittgenstein’s theory of language as a form of life in what is a very accessible summary of this great philosopher of language. Willinsky connects the language philosophy of Wittgenstein, with his previous chapters describing the impossibility of a precise definition of a word, challenging simplistic classroom common-sense understandings that delete context from meaning The final section, ‘Personal’, is indeed a personal affair. Unfortunately, by the time I reached it, enough was enough. These four chapters (with no references) range from Willinsky’s deep respect for education critic and sociologist, Edgar Friedenberg, to the overlapping and parallel lives of immigrant Chinese and Jewish families, to an autobiographical essay about how Willinsky and a close friend broke their ties over Willinsky’s shifting passion from literary studies to technology entitled ‘Why Allen isn’t my friend anymore’. Willinsky’s fictional account (’Up the down escalator’) of a jaded academic attending a national educational conference was amusing, albeit a genre shift that isn’t quite as clever as Willinsky may think. Willinsky’s protagonist mocks the conference keynotes, paper critiques, the buzzwords, the large receptions, the posturing, the professional contacts and connections made at these enormous events, and the egotism that we all observe and participate in. I couldn’t help but wonder if this chapter was intended for those who wish Willinsky had used some of the buzzwords of the day in his writing. I also wondered how Willinsky (or, rather, the main character) positioned himself in relation to these annual events. I suspect that he plays the conference game as well as the rest of us. Nonetheless, in this fictional chapter, a jaded academic provides a fitting

518

REVIEWS

epitaph for the entire book. He asks, ‘Where do all these sweeping critiques lead?’. This reminded me of a comment in the introduction to After Literacy, where Willinsky claims to have devoted a ‘good deal of my research and teaching to the whole-language approach’: [W]ithout renouncing this interest in what is whole about language, I have come to respect the highly structured programmes that use phonics and other strategies to tackle the reading-score gap between white and black Americans that has been increasing over the last decade . . . (p. 4).

This is a point that Willinsky never picks up anywhere else. Although a seemingly minor point for Willinsky, in the context of the rest of the entire book it is a major distraction. While none of the essays in After Literacy, as Willinsky admits, directly involve literacy instruction, one need only take a look at Anyon’s (1980) work to understand how the means of instruction are the ends. For anyone to devote an entire chapter to principles of postmodern literacy, but simultaneously laud ‘respect’ for what amounts to reductionist reading programmes that sell themselves on guarantees to raise standardized test scores (particularly minority-group test scores) caused me to wonder where precisely Willinsky truly positions himself in relation to either a modernist or post-modern perspective of literacy. These reading programmes are the anti-thesis of everything Willinsky seems to believe or desire of teachers and schools. They claim the authority of the text; they privilege written language over oral, reifying the ‘great divide’. They demand that children know the precise meanings of words. These programmes are not about diversity. They intend to ‘tackl[le] the reading-score gap between white and black’ (p. 4) by creating white, middle-class[room] bootcamps. These programmes are

about controlling children and controlling classroom teachers, or as Willinsky says in his post-modern literacy chapter (invoking Foucault) ‘packaging of power in a regime of truth’ (p. 27). ‘Where do all these sweeping critiques lead?’ Nowhere, if academics maintain such profound contradictions. By not making sense of this kind of statement with his writings, Willinsky creates a profound credibility gap. And, sadly, now I understand why Allen isn’t his friend anymore. Steve Bialostok

References ANYON, J. (1980) Social class and the hidden curriculum at work. Journal of Education, 162 (1), 67–92. ARGYLE, K. and SHIELDS, R. (1996) Is there a body in the net? In R. Shields (ed.), Cultures of Internet: Virtual Space, Real Histories, Living Bodies (London: Sage), 58–69. BARTON, D., HAMILTON, M. and IVANIC, R. (2000) Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context (New York: Routledge). COPE, B. and KALANTZIS, M. (eds) (1999) Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures (New York: Routledge). GEE, J. (1996) Social Literacies: Ideology of Discourses, 2nd edn (London: Taylor & Francis). ´ GONZALES , N. (1999) What will we do when culture does not exist anymore? Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 30 (4), 431–435. HEATH, S. B. (1983) Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). SCRIBNER, S. and COLE, M. (1981) The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). SLEETER , C. E. AND GRANT, C. A. (1988) Making Choices for Multicultural Education: Five Approaches to Race, Class and Gender (Colombus, OH: Merrill). SHUMAN, A. (1993) Collaborative writing:

REVIEWS

appropriating power or reproducing authority. In B. Street (ed.), Crosscultural Approaches to Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 247–271. STREET, B. V. (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). TAYLOR, C. (1992) Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition: An Essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). WEIL, S. (1952) The Need for Roots: Prelude of a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind, trans A. Wills (New York: Putnam). WILLINKSY, J. (1990) The New Literacy: Redefining Reading and Writing in the Schools (New York: Routledge).

Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum ARTHUR D. EFLAND, New York: Teachers College Press and Reston, VA: National Art Education Association (2002), xii + 201 pp., US$47.00 (hbk), ISBN 0-8077-4219-8, US$21.95 (pbk), ISBN 0-8077-4218-X. I was a student of architecture long before I became a student of the visual arts. Last year, an exhibition entitled ‘Frank Gehry, Architect’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, offered welcome evidence that the two disciplines are not far afield from each other. I would argue—and so did this exhibition—that they are in fact contiguous practices within a shared domain of knowledge construction. Or, at the very least, they are aligned and correlated in my own mind and educational experience. Gehry has become internationally renowned because the combination of a unique architectural vocabulary, an iconoclastic use of materials, a penchant for collaborations with contemporary artists, and an idiosyncratic approach to the design process and the develop-

519 ment of form have all come together as an integrated aesthetic ‘sensibility that melds architecture and sculpture in exuberant buildings’ (from wall bio at Guggenheim exhibition, installed 18 May–26 August 2001). I have to admit that a large part of what drew me to this exhibition was the prospect of satisfying my yen for viewing maps and models, the inordinate fixation to know the underlying purpose beneath the façade which all former architecture students are invariably left with. (That, along with the incapacity to inhibit one’s use of unrelentingly legible block lettering.) Purposeful coherence is of course one of the goals of all maps and models. This is no less the case in Efland’s Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum. This new book sets for itself the admirable task of coherently mapping variously situated theories of cognition, and from an integration of those theories, modelling a rationale for the necessary integration of arts learning in the general education curriculum. As Efland builds his thesis, each chapter closes with a brief examination of the implications for education in the arts, aesthetics, or general education. Efland’s effort stems from his belief that works of art require a particular rigour of intellectual inquiry to make meaningful sense of them, and become of value to the learner first and foremost because they are contextbound creations. Consequently, works of art may be understood as personally relevant artifacts only when they are grasped holistically—in their interconnectedness within the social settings couching each individual’s personal experience. Through his definition of works of art as context-bound, Efland claims that the task before the learner is to resituate these domain-specific bodies of knowledge over to a position of personal relevance and interpreta-

520 tion, and to find a cognitive strategy for doing so. Or rather, it is the task of educators to facilitate such transferences from context-boundedness to personal utility, aiding the learner’s creation of newer bodies and boundaries of knowledge. Efland boldly takes us then to where the positivist bias in the human sciences will not allow us to go—toward the proposition that reductivist and scientific methodology is not ‘the only way to procure reliable knowledge’ (p. 5). Efland’s aim draws upon an architectural metaphor: to ‘build a foundation for lifelong learning inclusive of the arts’ (p. 6). According to Efland’s thesis, this all becomes possible, assuming that one pictures the mind as more than an hierarchical repository of logical-scientific symbolic structures, more than a socially situated field of enculturated symbols mediated by parents, peers, and knowledgeable adults. Rather, Efland portrays a mind flexible enough to employ different strategies appropriate to the mastery of understanding in pre-packaged, generalizable, and well-structured domains of knowledge as well as ill-structured, broad, and complexly fragmented arrays of knowledge—yet able to integrate the variety of knowledge domains and arrays into coherent and purposeful maps and models of the world. Ultimately, Art and Cognition purports the mind’s imagination to be the most flexible and integrative of all the symbol-processing tools at our disposal, powerfully formative and capable of ‘creating new ideas or images through the combination and reorganization of previous experiences’ (p. 133). The imagination can acquire other cultural tools such as language, mathematics, and works of art and then utilize them in continually reshaping an individual’s lifeworld in accommodation to the dispositions of the

REVIEWS

learner, also described as the learner’s ‘habits of mind’ (p. 118). Learning and the creation of new knowledge may, thus, be preceded by imaginative, even artistic, purpose and development. Efland begins to make his case for linking artistic development more closely with general cognitive development in Chapter 2, presenting an extensive account of research strands in cognitive developmental theory, as typified by the work of Jean Piaget and Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. Both, in differing ways, advanced 20th century psychological behaviourism and its basic stimulus-response cause-and-effect tenets. Behaviourism was itself the response of psychologists to positivist demands for purging metaphysical speculation from a more purely scientific study of the mind and its behaviours. The core of behavioural orthodoxy is that ‘[o]nly objects or events may function as stimuli, and learning is determined by responses to such stimuli’ (p. 18). Efland notes Bruner’s citation of the 1956 publication of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives as the ‘mythical birthday’ of the cognitive revolution (p. 15). Bloom’s Taxonomy established a cumulative hierarchy of cognitive domains descending from the cognitive, to the affective, to the psychomotor. In educational discourse since then, cognition has been associated with rational exercises in thinking, which have been researched far more extensively than affective subjects or psychomotor embodiments. Language arts, mathematical competence, and logical-scientific reasoning were viewed as the bailiwicks of the mind’s development. Piaget established an invariantlysequenced step-theory for cognitive developmental studies that eschewed the onset of artistic development as an object of research inquiry. According to Efland, whereas Piaget locates mind

REVIEWS

‘in the brain of the lone individual’ (p. 30) and in its ability to assimilate and accommodate emerging schemas, or structures, of knowledge, Vygotsky described cognitive development as part of an interactive process of social learning between a mind and its sociocultural environment. In Vygotskian theory, the brain internalizes the cultural influences that surround it; individual cognitive development begins in a proximal zone outside of the brain through symbol-driven tools, discursively mediated, serving as the stimulus for learning. Within Bloom’s taxonomic delineation and most of its subsequent elaborations throughout the course of the 20th century’s scientific and categorizing pre-disposition in developmental psychological discourse, artistic and aesthetic thinking became relegated to the ‘affective’, not quite at the level of cognitive activity. This relegation was conferred in spite of a range of arguments to the contrary, such as Rudolf Arnheim’s that ‘visual perception is visual thinking and art making is a kind of visual problem solving’ (Parsons 1998: 81), and Parsons’ (1998: 81) that the puzzle of how to recreate a perception as ‘an image in the particular terms of [an art] medium’ makes the artist or the child a ‘problem-solver’. In Chapter 3, Efland traces the related emergence of three major traditions in cognitive theory. The symbolprocessing tradition assumed an objective reality independent of the learner, negotiated by a mind that manifests itself in symbolizing cognitive activity that construes an objective version of reality through which to know the world outside of the mind’s operations, and processing that reality through logical symbols. The socio-cultural or situated tradition assumed a socially constructed reality including the learner, negotiated by a mind that manifests itself in

521 social and discursive interactions building conventionalized aspects of the world that simultaneously embed within the mind to shape perception and thinking. The constructivist tradition assumed a personally constructed reality idiosyncratic to the learner and negotiated by a mind that manifests itself in wholly personalized strategies and agency in making relevant meanings. In this chapter, Efland also lays the foundation for advancing his own modified constructivist theory of learning through the arts, integrating the assumptions of symbol processing and situatedness in development. Chapter 4 begins Efland’s exploration of a theory of cognitive flexibility that strategizes links between prior knowledge arrangements and new interpretable encounters largely by the overlapping of sets of information, an analogy Efland borrows from urban planning. Particularly useful is the discussion of learning and transfer drawing upon ‘ill-structured’ and irregular arrays of knowledge, versus that which draws upon ‘well-structured’ domains, such as those encountered in textbooks and lectures. Efland quotes the work of Spiro et al. (1988) on the flexibility and connectedness of knowledge-acquisition and -transfer in ill-structured learning contexts, said to be more complex a task than approaching knowledge-acquisition and -transfer from an over-reliance in the neatly compartmentalized ‘precompiled’ schemas of well-structured learning contexts (p. 97). Efland settles upon the ‘hub metaphor’ developed by Yang (2000) as likely to prove most influential for curriculum development when navigating ill-structured arrays of knowledge. Efland writes: If airlines scheduled direct flights between all of the cities they served, they would soon be overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the flight schedule they would have to

522

REVIEWS

maintain. If certain cities were instituted as hubs or transfer points, the scheduling system could be simplified and made less cumbersome by having several planes, flying relatively short distances, meet at the same terminal to exchange passengers. (p. 103)

Efland urges curriculum planners to adapt the hub metaphor toward integrating areas of study and helping students ‘construct possible linkages among ideas often isolated by arbitrary subject boundaries’ (p. 103). Moreover, Efland is now implying the utility of art educational models of curriculum planning to general educational practice. As Efland builds his own model of cognitive learning through the arts, Chapter 5 allots valuable square footage to a focus on the work of Judith Koroscik and her associates. Koroscik’s research has focused on learning problems in the transfer of knowledge from domain-specific contexts to coalesce within the framework of the learner’s prior knowledge-base. Throughout the book, Efland does due diligence to comparing and contrasting a crop of theories on learning in the arts, some historical, such as by Bruner, Lowenfeld, Read, and Arnheim— some more contemporary, such as those advanced by Gardner, Wolf, Parsons, Brent and Margary Wilson, Anna Kindler, and Bernard Darras. However, Chapter 5 belongs to Koroscik. The kernel that Efland seem to be after is in Koroscik’s (1993) research into the differing strategies novices and experts use in the expansion of their knowledge-base, and the suggestion that works of art offer the possibility of integrating knowledge ‘since their interpretations utilize knowledge about the social and cultural landscape from which they came’ (p. 167). Efland’s point is that, through the arts, learners discover that irregular and ad hoc transferences between a work of art

and one’s lifeworld are both conceivable and tenable as an extension of knowledge. The centrality of transfer to Efland’s thesis leads to a lengthy discussion in Chapter 6 on the importance of metaphoric and narrative constructions to the ‘higher end of the spectrum of human cognitive performance’ (p. 152). Efland ultimately believes that ‘metaphor is an essential component of imagination in such forms of cognition as abstract reason’ (p. 152), imbuing learners with a leaping flexible-mindedness and facility for the intussusception of both situated and embodied properties which, in their rapprochement, establish connectivity across widely diverse human experience. He presents a metaphoric imagination as a generator of strategies for the transfer of contextbound and domain-specific essentials into the maps of personal understanding constructed by a learner, thereby becoming a cognitive tool making possible the architecture of process models of reality and the enabling of abstract thought. Efland emphasizes that the relevance of such a rationale for cognitive learning in and through the arts is yielded in that, unlike in scientific discourse where the metaphors in use tend to remain hidden, ‘it is only in the arts where the processes and products of the imagination are encountered and explored in full consciousness’ and become the objects of inquiry (p. 153; emphasis in original). If one compares Efland’s integrationist thesis with Dorn’s (1999) developmental perspective in Mind in Art: Cognitive Foundations in Art Education, one comes away with the suspicion that Efland might find Dorn’s argument that art in the curriculum must start with the making of art just a tad myopic. This is not to denigrate Dorn’s argument, which is both valid and

REVIEWS

valuable. I simply note here that Efland is more far-sighted. To Efland, a worthwhile curriculum in the arts is not one that centres on the issue of transforming ideas into forms and images; to Efland, art curriculum is about the transfer of situated experience into abstract ideas. In other words, art is in the same business as science, though science understands it not. Gilmour (1986) has reached the conclusion that ‘our interpretive activities fall within a general human intention to understand the world’ (p. 152). Science interprets the natural world and parses out its general laws; art also interprets the world, but seeks to embody it as well, in visual-symbolic, musical, and material exemplars that narrate the human experience. However, art also embodies the void . . . the gaps in our knowledge, our measurements, and models. Coherence is vital to the well-being of human cognitive functioning; the alternative is not long viable—semiconscious awareness, nonsense, insanity, and the paranoia of a world disintegrating into the unknowable—falling away into the void. The metaphors of artistic endeavour draw upon these voids, making sense of them. At the onset of cognitive operation, when almost all is unknown or unknowable, metaphoric leaps of thought have always aided the development of mind and identity, proliferating whole mental landscapes from the barest encounters and engagements with the world. Repeated mining of this early cognitive real estate yields raw materials for knowledge structures that will be replicated and recycled in mind, migrating to and fro, in refittings and refurbishments from one knowledge enhancing event to another. Metaphors are vehicles for these refittings and refurbishments, ‘minor works of art’, each crafted of a keen utilitarian aesthetic

523 (Danto 1981: 189). A mind can, thus, be made, remade, unmade, and made over; it is never finished. It has no certain form. In an earlier exhibition catalogue, The Architecture of Frank Gehry (Gehry 1986), Gehry is quoted as insisting that he likes best the ‘poetic’ appearance of unfinished buildings and raw building materials, frameworks revealed. In an interview for American Architecture Now, Gehry champions ‘the quality that you find in paintings by Jackson Pollock, for instance, or de Kooning, or C´ezanne, that look like the paint was just applied’ (cited in Ragheb 2001: 311). Gehry believes in turning unfinished materials into works of art and architecture. He has practised the transformation of the humdrum mappings of topological surveys and square-footage requirements into a continuing lattice of freeassociative models derived of models, ‘free-play ideas’ culminating in a large-scale and inhabitable model or ‘sketch’ that remarkably retains the sense of being a work in progress. Not relying upon conventional architectural typology, Gehry seeks a freshness born not only of this process of vernacular proliferation, but also out of the practice of dialogue and collaboration, especially with other artists. In the process, Gehry has gone over to the use of new tools—first sculpting multiple solutions out of sensuously provocative materials as eclectic as wood, paper, adhesive tape, waxinfused velvet, glass, metal, plaster, chain link, mylar, and epoxy-resin fibre-glass—and then three-dimensionally digitizing and rapidly prototyping fluid projections of these process models through powerful computer-aided design (CAD) technology. Gehry’s strategies produce sculpted architectural frameworks that are, as a body of work, extraordinarily

524

REVIEWS

uncertain. It is the kind of learning Efland has in mind. Not relying upon conventional curriculum architecture, Efland seeks a fresh approach to general education born of a process melding conventional learning exercises with the sculptural sensibilities, the dialogic engagement of the senses and materials that is inherent to aesthetic experience. Efland’s suggestions that educators utilize key works of art as landmarks for cross-disciplinary and cross-social learning, that we recognize the role of metaphor and narrative in providing the basis for ‘an imaginative reality’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 193), and that we understand the purpose of the arts as contributive to the embodiment of ‘the myths that bind human social systems together’ (p. 171), all rise together to form new curricular indications implying ineffables vital to the furtherance of the exercise of human development. It is the kind of bold integration Gehry would be most happy to construct.

London: The University of Chicago Press). PARSONS, M. (1998) Review of Child Development in Art. Studies in Art Education, 40 (1), 80–91. RAGHEB, J. F. (ed.) (2001) Frank Gehry, Architect (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications). SPIRO, R. J., COULSON, R. L., FELTOVICH, P. J. and ANDERSON, D. K. (1988) Cognitive Flexibility Theory: Advanced Knowledge Acquisition in Ill-structured Domains. CSR Technical Report No. 441 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Center for the Study of Reading), ERIC ED 302 821. YANG, G. (2000) Exploration of Chinese Art Using a Multimedia CD-ROM: Design, Mediated Experience, and Knowledge Construction. Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University.

Civic Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Case Studies Across Six Societies J. J. COGAN, P. MORRIS and M. PRINT, New York: RoutledgeFalmer (2002), xi + 201 pp., US$85.00 (hbk), ISBN 0-415-93213-0.

James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

References DANTO, A. C. (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). DORN, C. M. (1999) Mind in Art: Cognitive Foundations in Art Education (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). GEHRRY, F. O. (1986) The Architecture of Frank Gehry (New York: Rizzoli International Publications). GILMOUR, J. C. (1986) Picturing the World (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). KOROSCIK, J. S. (1993) Learning in the visual arts: implications for preparing art teachers. Arts Education Policy Review, 94 (5), 20–25. LAKOFF, G. and JOHNSON, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and

As the chapters in Civic Education in the Asia-Pacific Region make clear, civic education is a priority for the governments in the Asia-Pacific region, or at least for those countries included in this book. However, it is also a priority internationally; whether it is the countries in the EU or Eastern Europe, Malaysia, Singapore, or China, civic education is on the agenda for education in one form or another. This book thus makes a timely contribution to the discussion, and perhaps it is timelier than the authors were able to recognize. 11 September 2001 and the Bali bombing in 2002 have made the issue of civic education even more relevant than it was before these incidents. It is interesting to speculate how the book might have

REVIEWS

differed had it been written after these events. I shall return to this point later in the review. There are three salient issues highlighted by this book: the significance of context in shaping civic education; the role of values; and the policy and practice environments in which civic education takes place. I shall address each of these in turn. By context, I mean the broad cultural and geopolitical influences that help to shape civic education. Thus, in Thailand it is Buddhism, the monarchy, and a commitment to democracy. In Australia and the US, it is a commitment to liberal democracy, its history, and institutions. In Taiwan, it is a renewed interest in the local Taiwanese history and culture rather than a broader interest in Mainland China. In Japan, there is a commitment to understanding the nation’s history, while at the same time developing personal values. In Hong Kong, there is a renewed emphasis on developing Chinese values as well as personal values and moral qualities. It could be argued that, in each of these cases, history, political realities, and cultural values are the key determinants of the form that civic education will take. While liberal democracy may be the driving force in western countries, such as the two represented in this study, it does not necessarily play the same role in Asian countries. This is an important point. In Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan, the institutions of liberal democracy operate more or less effectively, but these institutions are not the focus of civic education in the same way that they are in the US and Australia. In Hong Kong, as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, there is neither a tradition of liberal democracy nor its institutions. The government of the Hong

525 Kong SAR today uses basically the institutions it inherited from the British colonial regime, with the key change being that now the line of reporting is to Beijing rather than London. Yet, there is a lively debate about civic education, it is firmly embedded in the new curriculum reforms, and it takes a distinctive turn in relation to Chinese values and personal morality. Cultural and geopolitical contexts appear to be the main determiners of the form that civic education will take. On the issue of values, the message is clear. In the Asian countries represented here, values are explicit and teachable. Civic education in these contexts is expected to produce citizens who behave in a certain way. The Thai concept of the ‘good citizen’, influenced by Buddhist principles, or the Confucian values found in Hong Kong’s civic education are good examples of the way value-systems are not separated from, but are integral to, civic education in many Asian countries. Again, the US and Australia stand apart. This is not because their civic education is value-free, far from it. Rather, it is because the values are more secular in nature, stemming from liberal democratic principles, including those of the market economy. Thus, values are imbued in the civic education curriculum of each of the countries, but they are not the same values—values and culture go together to determine the stance that will be taken in different jurisdictions. Finally, there is the issue of the policy and practice contexts. Civic education is not always a discrete subject, it is not always compulsory, and while little has been said about this, it is not always assessed. Strangely, it is countries like Australia and the US that seem to adopt the least

526 stringent approach to civic education, although this might be accounted for by their federal systems of government. The studies in this book have focused on national jurisdictions, whereas in policy terms education is much more of a local issue in both Australia and the US. In all jurisdictions, however, it is schools and teachers that have the last say. This seems to be particularly so in Australia and the US, but also in countries where a much more centralized approach to civic education is adopted. With these three issues, contexts, values, and the policy/practice divide, this book makes an important contribution to the literature. The comparative perspective is a very useful one in gaining some insight into civic education across countries—it highlights the differences in the concept and its meaning, even when using a common terminology. In another sense, it also helps to ‘cluster’ western and Asian countries in useful ways, although this does not mean that there is a common ‘Asian’ perspective on civic education. There is not, as the cases of Thailand and Hong Kong show so clearly. Nevertheless, there is more commonality within the different Asian societies represented here than there is between those societies and the Western countries represented here. It would be interesting to see how that ‘clustering’ might develop with more countries added to the mix. However, what of 11 September and the Bali bombings? How might these tragic events have influenced this book? I think the influence would have been in the conclusion where two key issues are highlighted: globalization and multiculturalism. In my view, multiculturalism is now the key issue for civic educators, and the authors have identified this correctly. Yet, we are now looking at the kind of

REVIEWS

multiculturalism that is dictated by what is in reality ‘a clash of civilizations’. In countries like the US and Australia, there is now a fear of cultural difference that is almost unprecedented. There are political contexts that feed this fear in ways that would not have been tolerated prior to 11 September 2001. This is a crucial area to be addressed by civic education, not because it can resolve the whole problem but because it should in no way exacerbate it. On the issue of globalization, I think a different perspective is now needed. There is little doubt that globalization will continue to exert a significant effect on all societies. Yet, 11 September has ironically strengthened the hand of the nation-state. One has only to look at the security legislation implemented and proposed in the US, Australia, and Hong Kong to be aware of this point. To protect the nation-state from perceived eternal threats, the liberties and freedoms of citizens are being curtailed. This is so, even in those societies where the traditions of liberal democracy are strongest. How does civic education handle this phenomenon? The nationstate is undermining its own commitment to personal freedom and, at the same time, seeking to promote civic education. Should we assume that the civic education of the future will be used to support the state’s encroachment on personal freedoms? This must surely be one of the key issues for the future, and it is certainly not one that could have been foreseen by the authors. Yet, they have done the groundwork in a highly satisfactory way, and it remains now for others to extend their work in an environment that makes their subject matter more important than ever. Kerry J. Kennedy

REVIEWS

New Perspectives on Teaching and Learning Modern Languages SIMON GREEN (ed.), Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters (2000), x + 194 pp., £49.95 (hbk), ISBN 185359-472-5, £19.95 (pbk), ISBN 185359-471-7. New Perspectives on Teaching and Learning Modern Languages, edited by Simon Green, asks where the field of modern foreign language (MFL) education is now, where it could be in the immediate future, and how it could get there. As the chapters answer these questions, they explore the kind of language teaching appropriate for the new millennium, what skills learners will need to cope with both linguistic and technological demands, and how MFL educators can help to integrate these concerns. Each chapter has an overview of the important issues in learning and teaching MFL, i.e. ‘the very essence of our activity and the core function of the task in hand’ rather than ‘urgent’ issues, such as ‘government requirements, inspection demands, assessment criteria, curriculum change’ (p. vii). The important issues have, of course, been widely addressed in the field of MFL education and, as such, many of the themes discussed in this book do not seem particularly original. However, New Perspectives on Teaching and Learning Modern Languages does provide the indispensable information that language educators, programme developers working in MFL, and languagerelated researchers should be aware of, particularly those working within the context of the UK. Moreover, in that the book assumes no particular knowledge of language teaching and learning, it provides a good introduction to the issues surrounding current best practice in MFL education for those outside MFL education.

527 Part I, ‘Research-based critical analysis’, consists of three chapters. In Chapter 1, ‘Learning and teaching strategies’, Michael Grenfell reviews standard practice in contemporary language classrooms from the perspectives of student attainment. The focus is on communicative language teaching, intended to foster the capability to understand others in conversation and to be understood by interlocutors. This chapter helps to reshuffle the MFL field’s assumptions and practices towards a new methodology. By focusing on learning strategies, Grenfell addresses the ways in which the notions of language teaching in the MFL field can be strategically shaped for the new century. His discussion of learning strategies is based on the notion of information processing. This cognitive psychological approach contends that learners are far from passive in their learning; rather, they are actively involved in figuring out the tasks or the problem situations with which they are faced in order to enhance their learning. A discussion of a language-learner’s strategy-use seems to be an appropriate vehicle for addressing the new approaches to teaching and learning MFL. Grenfell’s chapter links well with the subsequent chapter, ‘Learner autonomy: why foreign languages should occupy a central role in the curriculum’, in which David Little discusses learner autonomy as an approach to pedagogical goals which take account of the natural tendency in human behaviour to seek to become autonomous within one’s ability. This chapter takes on two tasks: first, to help readers gain an overview of the trends of thought which have led to current understanding of what learner autonomy in language learning and teaching might mean; and, secondly, to help MFL teachers find their way

528 through the sometimes confusing thicket of terms and concepts they are likely to encounter in the literature to their central implications for pedagogical practice. As such, this chapter is a useful discussion of the today’s expanded notion of valuing both individual and contextual differences in pedagogical decision-making in MFL curriculum development. In Chapter 3, ‘Motivation and the learners of modern languages’, Gary Chambers examines what experience 11–13-year-old students learning German as a foreign language in the UK bring to the secondary school, what factors influence their views of what goes on in the classroom, what their likes and dislikes are, and how they feel their in-school experience could be enhanced. However, it must be noted that the chapter’s literature review is not up-to-date, and the concluding remarks resort to the citation of published articles which include no empirical evidence supporting Chambers’ advocacy of the relevance of motivational concepts for MFL learning. The empirical study described in the chapter is also relatively unsophisticated. Part I, with the title of ‘Researchbased critical analysis’, focuses on the context of much of MFL education, although only Chapter 3 is based on empirical research, while the other two chapters draw on literature reviews. However, the three chapters in Part I are complementary in the sense that they account for three different themes: ‘learning and teaching strategies’, ‘learner autonomy’, and ‘motivation and learner of modern languages’ (p. v). As they explore these themes, the chapters seek to channel stakeholders’ enhanced knowledge into enhanced MFL curriculum development. Part II, the ‘Current educational context’, discusses the context of MFL learning and teaching, particularly at

REVIEWS

the primary and university levels in the UK. Ann Gregory, in Chapter 4, argues that, as MFL is introduced at the primary level, questions such as the starting age, aims, structure, the language to be taught, the content of the course, continuity, liaison and progression, specific goals and objectives, etc., must first be addressed in order to establish what might be achieved by the early start, and to figure out what repercussions an early start might have for MFL teaching and organization in the secondary school. In Chapter 5, Christopher Brumfit reminds us of the need for more specific theoretical principles and wellgrounded concrete measures toward a national-level MFL practice. He introduces the intriguing idea of a ‘Language Charter’, a statement of commitment to its students made by a school, for all language learners, including those whose mother tongue is not English and those ‘learning’ English as a mother tongue and/or the language of their home community. His argument is that, if MFL is to flourish in the multilingual/multicultural environment of contemporary Britain, schools must make the following commitments to all students: (i)

to develop their own mother tongue or dialect to maximum confident and effective use; (ii) to develop competence in a range of styles of English for educational, work-based, social, and public-life purposes; (iii) to develop their knowledge of how language operates in a multilingual society; and (iv) to develop as extensive as possible a practical competence in at least one foreign language (p. 100). Brumfit effectively links these four headings of the Language Charter to their implications for a language

REVIEWS

curriculum that can be tailored to a range of activities with different purposes. In Chapter 6, ‘Higher education’, Anthony Lodge examines the tension that has emerged at the university level between language as an ‘instrument’ and language as a ‘discipline’. He is concerned that the two functions of language will become differentiated organizationally, with the implication that language will be taught in language centres with little or no cultural context, and cultures will be taught in other departments with little reference to the relevant languages. He contends that we can relieve the tension between the notions of MFL as an ‘instrument’ and a ‘discipline’, and instill coherence and distinctiveness into MFL education, by reaffirming the centrality of language, that is by re-introducing an informed understanding of how languages work and how influential they are in our daily lives. Such a discipline could strengthen and revitalize language teaching, and embrace every kind of cultural and socio-political issue. He suggests, furthermore, that raising the level of theoretical awareness about language could revitalize MFL education in all its aspects. Part 3, entitled ‘Classroom practice’, addresses the MFL classroom employing information and communication technology (ICT) and vocational MFL. In Chapter 7, ‘Logging on to learning: ICT, modern languages and real communicative classrooms?’, Philip Hood explores the emergence of ICT, particularly multi-media computer-assisted language learning (CALL), and examines its impact on both the teaching and learning of modern languages. His exploration starts with the questions, ‘Where is MFL education now? What developments can MFL educators see in the immediate future?’ In order to elaborate

529 a methodology that will help achieve these objectives within the framework of the current provision for classrooms, Hood applies Chapelle’s (1998) principles for evaluating the potential of multi-media materials for the enhancement of learning: input saliency; opportunities for interaction; and learner focus on communication. Finally, he does not neglect the preparation of the teachers who will guide MFL students’ personal interests, even within a technology-enhanced MFL environment. This point reflects MFL teaching in the UK, with its emphasis on the teachers’ role in the overall intellectual development and emotional upbringing of the learner, not just in their L2 learning. In Chapter 8, ‘Vocational languages: an analysis of current practice and suggestions for a way forward’, John Thorogood evaluates current practice in vocationally-oriented language learning (VOLL) together with business language-training provision. Although he acknowledges the tendency to distinguish MFL courses as ‘vocational’ on the one hand and ‘generic’ or ‘academic’ on the other, he stresses ‘convergence’ rather than ‘divergence’ between the VOLL and academic language-learning pathways. His claims derive from the notion that little difference can be found in linguistic content between conversation and written messages in social settings. As he admits the possibility of the variation of programme design, he addresses the (1) context, accompanying aims and objectives, target tasks, essential language, teaching, learning and assessment activities, and resources, (2) modes of delivery, (3) linguistic competence, and (4) vocational language training in the future by presenting both worst-case and bestcase scenarios. In Chapter 9, ‘Meeting the challenge: developing the 3Cs (content,

530 context, and communication) curriculum’, Do Coyle explores the implications of adopting a broader and more flexible approach to MFL. She advocates breaking traditional curricular boundaries, arguing that seeing MFL education as a cross-curricular activity will give a more relevant focus to MFL study than an MFL curriculum alone, and in particular emphasize ends over means. This reasoning can be traced back to Prabhu’s (1987) suggestion that tasks in the MFL classroom should be authentic, purposeful, and challenging—so that the tasks themselves can provide the learners with meaningfulness in L2 learning. Prabhu contended that language form can best be learned when students are concentrating on meaning rather than form. He rejected the linguistic syllabus, advocating instead a task-based ‘procedural’ syllabus where students have to solve problems through reasoning and self-reliance. Coyle suggests the need for the re-conceptualization of the MFL curriculum to link the subject matter, or content, of the language classroom to relevant thinking processes. Her focus is on the implementation of such an approach through an MFL thinking-skills programme, where classroom practice and the student outcomes are successfully linked. Kim Brown’s concluding chapter reaffirms the need to reassess MFL teaching methodologies, and calls for a fundamental re-exploration and reevaluation of the rationale for an informed change in teachers’ practices. The chapter offers a cogent and practical demonstration of how this ambition can be achieved within existing constraints. The development of new perspectives on teaching and learning modern languages should be based on both an informed knowledge and a craft. Both

REVIEWS

craft and knowledge should be accessible and doable, not only by a few experts in the teaching of MFL, but also by the many other people involved in MFL education. In this compact and timely book, Green offers a practical overview of the different phases and activities involved in developing and implementing a sound, rational, and effective MFL programme. However, some issues are not explored. Authentic assessment in educational measurement, and its operationalization in MFL assessment in particular, have significant relevance to measuring the effects of instruction in MFL classrooms. Assessment is an important area for further research and exploration that will lead to further new understandings around MFL teaching and learning and a different (and hopefully better) practice. Hyeong-Jong Lee

References CHAPELLE, C. A. (1998) Multimedia CALL: lessons to be learned from research on instructed SLA. Language Learning and Technology, 2 (1), 22–34. PRABHU, N. S. (1987) Second Language Pedagogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Reviewers Steve Bialostok is an assistant professor of language and literacy in the Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education in the College of Education at the University of Wyoming, USA. Kerry J. Kennedy is Professor and Head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at The Hong Kong Institute

REVIEWS

of Education. His research interests are in the areas of curriculum policy and civic education. Hyeong-Jong Lee is a doctoral student specializing in second-language acquisition and teacher education at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA. His research interests include research methodology in studies of second-language acquisition, applied linguistics, and the teaching of English to the speakers of other languages.

531 James Haywood Rolling, Jr. is a doctoral student in art education and director of academic administration in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA. His research focuses on post-structuralist interrogations of the certainties and norms of modernity, examining the archaeologies underlying the (re)constitution of social identities from the previous interpretations ensconced in visual culture.