Barbara Stengel

Looks at "pedagogical knowing" as one facet of a larger conceptual framework that grounds a teacher's self-knowledge as a person and as a teacher. With the help of two middle school English teachers, the paper argues for a view of subject matter knowledge that is dynamic, relational, practice-oriented, and useful. (SM)

... Barbara S. Stengel, Millersville University1 Any attempt to conceptualize the knowledge of good teachers should be grounded in the practice of teaching, for ... out puzzles of our practice; however, it clearly does matter in the long run as we attempt to institution-alize results of our ...

Few published studies have explored the impact of smoking prevention programs among elementary-school children. This study describes a qualitative, cross-sectional evaluation of the Tar Wars tobacco prevention program among 5th-grade students (n = 888), along with impressions from classroom teachers and program presenters. Results from this evaluation reveal that all constituencies involved with the Tar Wars program--5th-grade students, classroom teachers, and program presenters--indicated high satisfaction with this youth tobacco education program. Students enjoyed the program and indicated understanding of key themes, classroom teachers stated that the program was worthwhile in presenting unique information, and presenters were enthusiastic about the ease of presentation and opportunities for future presentations.

Lurking just beneath the surface of much discussion of education/teacher education reform is a conceptual distinction of such taken-for-granted acceptability that educators virtually never take time to analyse it: the distinction between the academic discipline and the school ...

ABSTRACT We humans laugh often and it is not always because something is funny. We laugh in the face of the pathetic or the powerless; sometimes we laugh at our own powerlessness or pathos.In short, we laugh at both the comical and the difficult. Here I am especially interested in the laughter that is sparked by what is difficult and how that laughter—and all laughter—breaks through to mark a range of emotional states: fear, nervousness, shame, confusion and others not viewed as positive, as well as joy, delight, interest, relief and other states that are viewed as positive. I also am interested in understanding what and how laughter reveals and what and how it conceals. As I explore both interests in this article, I make a compound point about laughter in educational settings: that laughter marks a breakdown of experience and that same laughter creates space for reflective listening and thinking, for diffusion of difficult affect, and for the disruption of habit that makes growth possible (and even likely) if that laughter is taken seriously.

ABSTRACT John Dewey calls Ralph Waldo Emerson "The Philosopher of Democracy" in an essay of the same title (1903/1977). In making his case that Emerson is a philosopher, Dewey acknowledges that some (including Emerson himself) might be inclined to see him as a poet rather than a philosopher. Dewey goes on to discuss the difference between the poet and the philosopher. The poet is maker rather than reflector. The poet discerns and uncovers rather than analyzes and classifies. The poet evidences a "natural attitude" where the philosopher relies on reasons for believing. However, the distinction is not hard and fast; in Emerson's case at least, one can be both poet and philosopher. Dewey's description of Emerson as poet and philosopher of democracy holds, I suggest, for Jane Addams as well, but it is, perhaps ironically, as poet that Addams impacted the philosophy of John Dewey. Addams is unquestionably a maker of democratic community and pragmatic education; Dewey is just as unquestionably a reflector. Through her work at Hull House, Addams discerned the shape of democracy as a mode of associated living and uncovered the outlines of an experimental approach to knowledge and understanding; Dewey analyzed and classified the social, psychological and educational processes Addams lived. As I will demonstrate below, Addams's "natural attitude" brought Dewey up short in a situation in which he could, by his own admission, only rely on reason. In this essay, I claim that Dewey became Dewey in the last decade of the nineteenth century and that Jane Addams was present as poet to his philosopher. When I say that Dewey became Dewey, I mean that he let go of religious practice and theological language, focused a conception of democracy as a mode of associated living, shifted from Hegelian dialectic to pragmatic experimentalism, acknowledged the relational nature of the self and found a way to think about thinking rooted in human action, thus acknowledging the unity of human experience. Dewey's interaction with Addams, again by his own admission, forced a reconsideration of his thinking, a reconstruction that led to the very elements (noted above) that have rendered Deweyan thought useful to us in the early twenty-first century. I make my case by focusing here on just one significant instance documented in Dewey's correspondence and described—in various ways—in contemporary Dewey biographies. Jane Addams was not, of course, the only one who shaped Dewey's thinking in this period. His wife Alice, his colleague George Herbert Mead, the idealist T. H. Green, the antidemocratic political theorist Sir Henry Maines, and "weirdo" Franklin Ford headline a list of others whose relations with Dewey were influential, positively or negatively. What seems clear to me, however, is that Dewey was searching for a way to instantiate his thinking about democracy, about Christianity and about experimentalism. His involvement in the ill-advised Thought News episode can be read as part of this search. But it was at Hull House in the company of Jane Addams that Dewey found what he was looking for. My "text" for this essay comes from two letters John Dewey sent to his wife Alice in October, 1894 describing a conversation he had with Jane Addams after she participated in a program at the University of Chicago regarding the proposed University Settlement House. In what follows, I offer a detailed rendering of that correspondence, analyze the way this incident is represented in the biographies penned by Robert Westbrook (1991), Steven Rockefeller (1991), Alan Ryan (1995) and Jay Martin (2003), and then claim a "poetic" role for Jane Addams in influencing Dewey's philosophy. On Sunday, October 7, 1894, a meeting was held at the University of Chicago to promote the University Settlement House. Jane Addams spoke regarding the point of philanthropy as practiced in the settlement house. John Dewey was present (Levine 2005). On Tuesday, October 9, 1894, Dewey noted in a letter to wife Alice that he had just finished preparing a talk on Epictetus to be delivered at Hull House that evening. He went on to describe the meeting at the University two days prior: I came near forgetting the chief thing that's happened since I wrote...

Published online: 24 September 2008 © Springer Science+Business Media BV 2008 ... We would like to thank the following people for their assistance with reviewing manuscripts for the journal in 2008. ... Julie Allan David Beckett Johannes Bellmann Barry Bull Eamonn Callan Craig Cunningham Stefaan Cuypers Mark Davies Andrea R. English Paul Farber David Granger Paul Hager Geoff Hinchliffe Pádraig Hogan Liz Jackson Gerard Lum Michael Luntley Thaddeus Metz ... Thomas Mueller Alven Neiman Linda Jeanne O'Neill Leif Ostman Francis Schrag Inna ...

Here I shine light on the concept of and call for safe space and on the implicit
argument that seems to undergird both the concept and the call, complicating and problematizing
the taken for granted view of this issue with the goal of revealing a more
complex dynamic worthy of interpretive attention when determining educational response.
I maintain that the usual justification for safe space covers rather than clarifies the logic of
safe space and makes it difficult for an educator to respond to harassment in a constructive
and fitting way. I also claim that calls for safe space can only be properly interpreted—
and responded to—when the link between fear and safety is uncovered and deconstructed.
In the process, I note that the assumption of ‘‘safety’’ as a ‘‘positive condition’’ for education
is problematic and warrants careful consideration.