A survey and interviews with 372 youth aged 9-16 in rural Northhamptonshire (England) explored children's experiences of rural life. Challenging the image of the idyllic rural childhood, many youth, especially the least affluent and teenagers, felt detached from village life, powerless, and unable to find autonomous social space away from adult…

In considering literacy, we take a step back to ask: literacy in which language? And what is the purpose and measure of achievement? Although not in disagreement with the Bialostok and Whitman article in this issue, we place English literacy as a part of the continuing drive to colonize and assimilate indigenous peoples. Local indigenous control…

Scholars and practitioners have recently asked whether large comprehensive high schools contribute to student alienation. At the same time, some school administrators have stressed the importance of school spirit to create a powerful sense of community and as a way to mitigate feelings of student detachment and anonymity. This paper considers a…

In this article, the author writes from the vantage point of a teacher-educator who has been engaged in the process of formal education all her life. While she has always loved the learning process itself, she has often felt a deep sense of alienation on many of the educational landscapes she has traveled. Her own alienating experience of…

This study explored the manner in which abused women cope with loneliness. Eighty women, victims of domestic abuse, were compared to 84 women from the general population who have had no history of abusive relationships. A 34-item yes/no loneliness questionnaire was utilized in order to compare the "beneficial" ways of coping with loneliness in the…

Aboard a train heading out of Minneapolis toward frontier North Dakota, Era Bell Thompson in her autobiography "American Daughter" (1946) describes a landscape that grows steadily bleaker with each mile farther west: "Suddenly there was snow--miles and miles of dull, white snow, stretching out to meet the heavy, gray sky; deep banks…

This phenomenological investigation highlights the experiences of evangelical Christian student leaders at two Midwestern public universities. These students perceived their public university environments not only as incongruent with, but also as antagonistic and oppressive toward, their values, beliefs, and behaviors. Besides detailing how these…

This document reports on a project to identify and analyze the desire for professional collegiality and concerns about increasing alienation among members of the Queensland Institute for Educational Administration (QIEA). From a 3-phase workshop involving over 500 participants, 7 major issues were identified: (1) complexity of teaching and…

Few schools provide an equitable environment for female and minority students. This paper examined the culture of a high school as it was perceived and experienced by female, at-risk students in grades 9-12. Interviews were conducted with 11 female at-risk students at a high school in the greater New York metropolitan area, their parents,…

Project PATHE (Positive Action Through Holistic Education) was a 3-year delinquency prevention program implemented in seven schools by the Charleston County, Maryland public school system between 1980 and 1983. An evaluation of the PATHE program was conducted which compared PATHE schools to two non-PATHE schools. Year-to-year differences in the…

This report is the result of taped interviews with 115 Alaskan teenage women who have dropped out of "regular" public school. Two results of the study stand out: first, the majority of the students wanted a diploma, but nonetheless felt compelled to drop out; second (the reason most girls gave for dropping out): no one cared. However,…

This study surveyed student views of their schools and attempted to determine the degree of student alienation in Western Australian high schools. One hundred students from each of twelve high schools participated in the study. Data were gathered from a questionnaire and follow-up interviews. Findings indicated that a majority of students felt a…

This report reviews the research on school and classroom environments, discusses the implications of such research for the design and evaluation of secondary school programs, and provides an annotated bibliography of the relevant literature. Topics discussed in the review include: (1) the semantics of school environment research; (2) the…

This guide is intended as a resource for educators who wish to use films on aging to teach humanistic values. There are three main divisions in the guide: (1) descriptive and analytical notes on 12 films about aging, (2) suggestions for instructional programming, and (3) an annotated filmography. The first section includes film-study questions on…

Research was done to determine the degree of acceptance of others exhibited by two groups of randomly selected preservice teachers in order to determine whether special workshop and field experience training modified their attitudes towards others' patterns of behavior and beliefs. The study was set within the context of a muti-ethnic neighborhood…