Discusses the importance of fostering conversation about difficult issues such as racism and injustice. Offers six guidelines for teacher facilitated group discussions in the classroom about sensitive issues that cover planning, goals, setting the stage, rules, and encouraging openness. (JB)

Discussion of the growth of technology in society focuses on political, economic, and ethical issues concerning technology in education. Highlights include technological needs of the economy; effects of technology on the job market and the labor force; the changing role of teachers; social imbalance and inequity; and social literacy. (31…

Maintains the contemporary political Soviet scene poses a major intellectual challenge to Western Sovietology. Analyzes reforms of the Gorbachev era and traces the development of change and the concepts of glasnost and perestroika. Discusses recent policies, problems, and strategies. Views revolution as a prolonged process. (NL)

An Asian Pacific American professor, D. T. Nakanishi, describes his decision to fight the University of California Los Angeles' initial denial of tenure, including the legal and tactical considerations involved, his sense of generational duty, the case's importance for other Asian Americans, and the personal pain and suffering involved. (JB)

Parents are being invited to step in to help improve public education, but they enter with neither resources nor power. Real parental involvement requires commitment to organizing parents and restructuring schools, as well as inventing rich versions of diverse educational democracies of difference. Schools must function like meaningful…

Reports on a 1988 survey of adolescents from two San Francisco Bay Area schools that tested an index of the frequency with which parents actively mediate children's interpretations of television messages. The predictive ability of the index for skepticism, media use, and involvement in public affairs was tested; and several family communication…

Focuses on interethnic interactions in which adolescents of Asian descent put on strong Indian English accents when addressing Anglo teachers and adults; discusses the extent to which these code switchings constitute acts of resistance within a racist society. Findings indicate that the term "resistance" is too crude to do justice to the…

Endorses U.S. political history as a colorful and interesting resource for teaching important historical and social science concepts: order and change, elitism and pluralism, creating structures, the Constitution, and the formation of political parties. Discusses these concepts and gives examples of each. (MJP)

Discusses language intolerance in the United States and its relation to the culture wars now emerging. Responses to nine questions raised by those who want English to be the official language of the United States are presented to untangle the issues and correct the misconceptions behind the question. (GR)

Dichotomy between students' attitudes and their actions is highlighted in data collected by Cooperative Institutional Research Program that shows students' interest in keeping up with politics is declining just as their participation in volunteerism is rising. Author interviews Paul Rogat Loeb, author of "Soul of the Citizen," about potential…

The general conversation today about the USA PATRIOT Act and its historical and legal significance must be contextualized with reference to a series of 1970s U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding the U.S. Border Patrol that directly undergird the PATRIOT Act. The Supreme Court long ago turned the U.S. borderlands adjoining Mexico into a permanent…

The German education system has recently come under fire with the publication of various international studies on student performance (OECD 2000; 2003). And in the first national "Education Report" (Bildungsbericht) published in October 2003 (Avenarius et al. 2003), the German ministers of education point out serious deficiencies in the…

This article describes two emerging technologies--Skype and podcasting. Both Skype and podcasting can be considered "disruptive technologies" in that they allow for new and different ways of doing familiar tasks, and in the process, may threaten traditional industries. Skype, the "people's telephone," is a free, Internet-based alternative to…

In this paper I suggest that as educators we need to understand that the spaces and cultures our students inhabit are to be found not so much in predefinitions of cultural background or in studies of classrooms as cultural spaces as in the transcultural flows with which our students engage. Thus, my argument is not only that, as Singh and Doherty…

Judging by the press coverage, it would seem that Europeans are the only ones concerned about conditions in Africa, but perhaps the media is not telling the whole story. According to Mark P. Fancher, chair of the National Conference of Black Lawyers' Section on International Affairs & World Peace and the author of "The Splintering of…