Faculty members at a large state university engaged in discussions of 21st century communication, new media, and the demands for new communication skills as they elected to establish a Communication across the Curriculum (CxC) program in 2005. Faculty leaders reviewed communication theory (e.g., from McLuhan to Kress), best practices from other…

This book provides new ways of thinking about educational processes, using quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Concrete examples of research techniques are provided for those conducting research with marginalized populations or about marginalized ideas. This volume asserts theoretical models related to research methods and the study of…

No trend in education has been more exalted than "whole language," which has a following of teachers, researchers, and specialists who are almost fanatical in their observance of this teaching method. The debate is between two types of direct instruction: the "atomistic" approach encourages teachers to break down reading into…

This paper describes the preliminary research, developmental process, pilot program, and midpoint evaluation of the restructured Educational Leadership Academy for entry-level school administrators and other school leaders at Pepperdine University. Twenty years ago, Los Angeles Unified School District and Pepperdine University established the…

Contact zone theory--spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other--helps writing program administrators to situate themselves. Writing programs and composition courses seem most troubled where the viewpoint of the most powerful faction is assumed as "the" viewpoint. One way to defuse tension is to recognize that writing…

The current literature on school restructuring emphasizes cooperative learning, collaborative planning, teacher empowerment, and participative policy making. This literature tends to set aside client and technical perspectives and to exhibit a professional view, which deems accountability to be a politically incorrect issue. The literature on…

Traditional organizational theory mandates that organizations predict and stay in control in order to avoid chaos. This book proposes that members of organizations work at developing a new frame of reference for understanding organizational life. The book combines insights from the new science of complexity with insights from psychoanalysis and…

Responsive therapy is an integrative model that uses a variety of intervention models, each in its own theory-pure context. This article addresses some major misdirections in the counseling profession and discusses ways that responsive therapy can help correct these misdirections. For at least two generations, counseling has professed that the…

Investigating the nature and value of dance drama as an expressive idiom for elementary school children, this paper discusses foundational concerns about the nature of dance drama, aesthetic content, learnings in dance drama, and the organization of these learnings. Noting that the ideas of dance drama presented have largely emerged from a content…

American schools have recently been exposed to a grave cycle of educational distress advanced by both internal and external constituencies for a variety of reasons, which range from political correctness to vouchers. Responses by educational administrators appeared to have found solace in the overt practice of deliberate inaction rather than…

This paper describes the writing of teaching cases by students to help them understand and use multiple theoretical frames for practical decision making. It describes a doctoral level course called "Theoretical Perspectives" and the doctoral program at Temple University's Department of Educational Leadership. Students are required to study the…

Among the defining features of the whole language philosophy are: an emphasis on reading comprehension and extracting meaning from text; reading and writing across the curriculum; and the use of phonics instruction, subordinate to other methods (cues) of extracting meaning from text. Controversy between professional educators involved in…

Intended for students and for researchers who conduct interviews as part of case studies or as ethnography, this book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the theory and practice of qualitative interviewing. It shows researchers how to design research based on interview data; to stimulate conversation; to absorb what is being said;…

This paper presents findings from a 4-year ethnographic research study into school leadership relating to how a particular principal with a well-informed adult development perspective actually employed it through her practices in support of teacher development in a school. This work focuses on leadership, adult development, and teacher development…

This paper discusses "Doing Theory in the Methods Class: Focused Reflection," a chapter from the book "Whole Language Voices in Teacher Education" edited by Kathryn F. Whitmore and Yetta Goodman. The book chapter focuses on guided classroom reflection as a key element in the education of preservice teachers, exploring whether…