Discusses literature on student disengagement in school and efforts to improve student engagement in learning. Includes list of standards for engaged learning. (PKP)

Notes that African American literature has always had science fiction elements in its focus on narratives of the alienated and marginalized "other." Contends that Octavia Butler and Virginia Hamilton are two African American writers of science fiction who examine the connections between the stories of a culture and the genre of science…

Describes author's personal experience as young counselor-in-training with racially mixed (Black and Indian) 11-year-old boy who experienced rejection by his Indian mother, Whites, and Blacks and the effects this experience had on author's own professional growth and development. Expresses author's frustration at destructive results family and…

Presents assessment strategies, preventive methods, and clinical interventions to assist clinicians working with teenagers involved with deviant subcultures: Satanism, the neo-Nazi skinhead movement, and violent street gangs. Considers role of alienation as contributing factor in adolescents' participation in these subcultures. Advises therapists…

Reviews research about students' sense of acceptance within the school community. Findings suggest that students' experience of acceptance influences multiple dimensions of their behavior but that schools adopt organizational practices that neglect and may actually undermine students' experience of membership in a supportive community. (Author/SLD)

Makes the case for greater understanding and valuing of group affiliation and the formation of allegiances to groups during early adolescence. Proposes developmental processes that underlie the capacity for reflection about groups, four basic components of group identity, and six propositions about new capacities that emerge as young adolescents…

Researchers asked 17 participants in a job-training program to describe their personal struggles following an economic restructuring. Examined through a critical theoretical lens, findings indicate that the learners enrolled in the program to reclaim security, dignity, meaningful work, and caring relationships. Program planners at community…

A study of 805 4th through 7th graders used a model of motivational development to guide the investigation of the internal dynamics of 4 indicators of behavioral and emotional engagement and disaffection and the facilitative effects of teacher support and 3 student self-perceptions (competence, autonomy, and relatedness) on changes in these…

This book examines the thesis that teacher burnout and student dropout stem from the same source, a process of alienation causing students and teachers to "give up on school." The first chapter outlines the size of the problem and some of the specific conditions that contribute to it. The second chapter examines the context of cultural…

Outlines the process by which students at Lawrence Central High School in Indiana improved academically through the teaming of two teachers in a particular subject area, and hence reducing teacher isolation. (JC)

Studies on the effect of cooperative learning have demonstrated its efficacy in improving the cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of schooling. However, it remains unclear what forms of cooperation are especially effective in multilingual contexts. This research examines the connection between positive goal interdependence and positive resource…

In this article, the author reflects on his feelings as a working-class transplant into academic culture and the middle class. He draws on his feelings of alienation from the people who surround him and his observations of the cultural subordination necessary to succeed in the middle class world to explain his desire to do more to help other…

Of interest to instructors of first-year writing, this paper delineates the challenges faced by professors of first-year writing who lack formal graduate training in composition and rhetoric, and it explores the strategy that enables them to become excellent teachers despite such challenges. The authors present three personal anecdotes that are…

Reflections on the events of the last 10 years at Harvard include these changes in the Arts and Sciences Faculty -- a different attitude toward students; relaxation of the scholar's code, which specified silence about what one did not know; and a tradition of cowardice. (JH)